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Reminiscences
Part II *

 

(continued from Volume 8 Number 4 Page 33)

 

December, 1936 - July, 1937

 

By Kitty L. Davy

 

Shortly after our arrival in Nasik, a reporter from the Evening News of India asked if he might visit the Nasik Ashram. His primary interest was not in the spiritual aspect of the Ashram, as can be discerned from a few of his preliminary remarks in his interview with Baba and the Mandali, and which appeared in the Evening News of January 7th, 1937: "What Nasik needs is a live municipality—not another place of pilgrimage . . .not another dose of philosophy. The material lot of India has to be improved." He put this squarely to Meher Baba, saying, "What we need in India is a holiday from things of the spirit." Baba answered with a smile that "he would not give a holiday, but permanently retire the forms and rituals of different religions on which India blames half her troubles."

 

"What then is your philosophy about?" "I have no philosophy." "If you have no new philosophy to preach, what is your job?" "My job," Baba answered, without wincing at the word, "is to awaken the feeling of Godliness in humanity."

 

"The truth we do not want to be led into forgetting," the reporter retorted, "is the poverty of our country and the fact that we, with our human and material wealth, rank so low in the comity of nations." Again, with his disarming smile, Meher Baba's fingers flew deftly on the cardboard with the alphabet painted on it: "Our miseries are the product of man's selfishness and greed; and if we live the life of God, these economical adjustments will vanish. If all men decide to help each other, sacrifices will become easier and inequalities of wealth and opportunity will vanish."

 

"Why does not Meher Baba break his self-imposed Silence and preach in the market place?"

 

Baba answered, "Every great change must be carefully timed. How else would it be with the greatest revolution in the history of the world . . . the revolution in the mind of man. The time to preach in the market place will come," Baba continued, "only after the world has been humbled and purified by a carnage greater than the world has yet seen."

 

*Part I—see Vol. VIII. No. 4 p.12

 

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