made it difficult to function as helpfully as we wished. So much of the time and energy and attention that should have gone to helping other people with their problems had to be used in solving ours. I wondered about it, one morning, as my bus approached the street on which The North Node was located and I came out of my accustomed meditation.-

"Why," I found myself asking God, -- "Why, when we are trying to do your work, should we have such difficulties?"

"You must learn to know me in want, as well as in abundance; in chaos, as well as in order; in disgrace, as well as in honor; in weakness, as well as in strength."

With this answer, which came at once, and was completely understood and completely satisfying, came tremendous love, which pervaded me completely and remained with me for days. Of course this was true. God was everywhere, in everything. If we wished to know Him, we could not isolate Him. We must accept Him -- in fact, welcome Him -- as He chose to come.

And so, now, again, this principle of acceptance was stressed. Get beyond like and dislike. Know and love God everywhere. Then only can we enjoy His constant companionship. Then only can we be free.

I would increase my watchfulness. But what was there in me, I began to wonder, that was so perverse that I had to be so constantly reminded, only, ultimately, to forget, or to relapse? What was the use of revelation unless one had the power to practice the truths revealed? Why did I, who had received so much in the way of inspiration, show so little in the way of permanently beneficial results? What right had I to feel impatient with others, when God could be so patient with me?

Curiously enough, Baba arrived at Nasik that evening, a day earlier than we had anticipated. The next morning he gathered us around him and gave us a long and valuable discourse on the subject of eliminating desire, which he termed the cause of all suffering. My inner revelation had come just about the time he had started for Nasik! If I needed any outer confirmation, here it was. Needless to say, I started to apply it at once.

As is always the case in the life of the spirit, when one decides to follow a certain course of action, the quality of one's resolution is at once tested. Obstacles arise which afford ample opportunity to measure one's strength of purpose. One may be given the power to surmount the obstacles -- if one is sincere, one generally is -- but the way is never made easy.

Nor was it now. My renewed watchfulness met with sufficient success to encourage me to continue, but not with enough to make me feel that I could completely succeed alone. So I wrote to Baba, telling him how unworthy I felt to have so little in the way of permanent results to show for all the grace which had been showered on me, and asking him to help me constantly to live what I aspired to be.

A few days later it was time for one of our periodic visits to Meherabad, Baba's retreat near Ahmednagar, where his Eastern disciples lived. On the way, still disgusted with myself because of the gap which existed between what I was and what I knew I should be, I wondered why I was so austere, and what I could do to overcome my tendencies in that direction. As I wondered, I suddenly remembered what one of my invisible preceptors in the early North Node days, in 1923, had said to me about the same problem, and how he had handled it.

"What you need," he had said, "is more poetry and less preaching!"

From that moment, the flood-gates of inspiration had opened, and poetry had poured through. And some of its beauty and grace had communicated itself to me, and had made me more genial.

I had deliberately stopped this poetic flow many years later, in 1932, when I was trying, during a period of silence, fasting and meditation, to realize union with God. Nearly every time I meditated, I would come out of meditation with a beautiful poem.