And when we saw him in bed he said with charm, "Baba is dreaming that I am suffering."

And that night, he was also dreaming that I was suffering mentally! We ate a ten o'clock dinner; they had awaited the late arrival of our train. Before, during and after dinner, I continued to drink water. We were so exhausted from our continuous travel that I could hardly wait to go to bed. But to my overwhelming dismay, I found I had gone beyond the possibility of sleep in my physical and psychic exhaustion. Hour after hour I lay hoping to sleep, thinking of Baba and listening to myriads of crickets, the tireless howling of dogs, and after they were silent, to the incessant droning of the ceiling fan. In my desperation I tried not to think of Baba, for as I approached the threshold of sleep, I would think of him and Baba would wake me every time with a terrible jolt of electricity through my whole being. His name had literally become my agony. I wandered around the room in the dark fearing that I would lose my mind altogether; I felt Baba wanted me to surrender my mind, but not this way, not by going insane! I wanted to pray for help but the Listener to my prayer was nearer than ever before and in fact was the very cause of my suffering.

That night really happened in eternity; it was equal in gravity to my whole life, perhaps to all of my lives, back into the remotest, darkest primeval antiquity of evolutionary consciousness. I think now that I may have had the faintest glimmer that night, of how the burden of the whole cosmic universe presses upon Meher Baba. If that is so, we may be assured that Baba can take it like nobody that ever lived.

At one moment in that night of eternity I was thrown upright by this sudden illumination: "I have obedience without resignation." I am not sure what that means, even less now than at that moment, when it seemed like a truth from above. But it did not help me to sleep nor even pacify my misery.

There is such a thing as obedience without resignation, and in that obedience there is not love for God. Was that my kind of obedience? Perhaps. Was not my lack of resignation the very cause of my suffering? Who can say? It seems more as if the lack of resignation and my suffering were one and the same. It seems it can not be fathomed by the mind. Truly the aim and hope of Baba's lovers is to give obedience from love and nothing but love, and let duty rest.

Should I ask him to let up? I could not do that; so I had to be brave; towards dawn I think I may have gotten a little sleep—I am not sure.

In the morning we arose, Phyllis with that calm and efficient energy with which she is so often possessed, but I like a zombie.