I recently discovered the earliest of three visa photos taken ten years apart over a 20 year period and noted the changes, not only in my appearance, of course, but more illuminating, in my spiritual awareness during those twenty years. Describing each time period, I have added concurrent excerpts from my writings in A Flower for God and Purely Prema.*
The first excerpt is taken from “Pilgrimage” in A Flower for God where I detail my journey alone to the home of Meher Baba* in India in November 1997—one I had decided to make only three months earlier. I was innocent and scared of what I would find—not conscious of the depth of my bravery nor the strength of my determination to be independent nor the expansive flowering of spirituality that would begin. What I did know was that my husband Stephen had passed a year earlier and the time had come to take a new and major step.
On my final flight, Mumbai appeared welcoming, as out the window vast orchards of lights appeared indicating its size in the dark. The stern-faced armed guards at Immigration and Customs were scary, and emerging beyond them, I looked apprehensively at a small, dirty, poorly lit waiting room, hoping as I walked that my memory of my new friend’s face would return as it was he who would meet me with a driver for the six-hour ride to Meherabad.*
At the time of this second excerpt, I had already completed a first intensive five-month period of writing my book that had begun by inner voice in 2003, then had halted, again by inner voice, in 2004. I was now in a second intense writing period beginning in late 2006 that would last four months. From my initial frustration of not knowing how to write a book, as the early chapters had come in a rush, I had now determined a procedure, and from then on until the writing again stopped, I lived in an exhilaration of recollecting my spiritual journey.
It was a dark morning at 5:30 on Meherabad Hill, when I was preparing to clean glass plaques while many others surrounded me, completing preparations for the largest pilgrim-attended three days of the year. Amartithi was the remembrance of Meher Baba dropping His physical form. An Indian man of medium build and height, his thick hair, the color of snow at dusk, brushed back, and his eyes noticeably focused on me, approached and offered to help. I directed him toward Samadhi thinking he wanted to help clean the shrine, but he said no, that he wanted to help me. Carrying my buckets and cloths, he followed me down the hill toward my other plaques, and in my silence, he began to talk. At the end of an hour, I turned to him saying, “You’ve been my father in many lifetimes.” He smiled and replied that he’d been looking for me for three days. Later, at my home, when I handed him A Flower for God, he tapped the cover, and said, “This is about a leap of faith, and others will need to read it.”*
This final excerpt from Purely Prema occurred in 2017. For seven years, I have lived in my home situated at the back of a field where there are few other families. I have learned how to live at a distance from the main grounds and buildings of Meherabad—as is shown in the following simple cooking chore. Done in silence, when finished, I felt wiser and comfortingly not alone but instead in the presence of a carrot.
My hand lifts an older vegetable peeler to scrape a straight peel that reveals brighter orange skin to the tip of the carrot that rests on the white, plastic cutting board. … I’m not bored, yet my mind resists one-pointedness. In an unanticipated moment, my mind becomes centered and a profound, new thought appears. In this sudden, heightened state of awareness, I understand that the carrot has consciousness, and my hand pauses. Meher Baba, in His writing on evolution, states that consciousness, in a form of very least awareness, exists in a stone.* I go deeper into thought. As it is in a stone, it is in higher forms. My education is occurring not from a book but in a moment of thoughts.*
My realization is, “Looking back at select times years apart can deepen our sense of accomplishment of a life that has grown more freshly visible and brings a new appreciation to the wonder of life.”
*Prema Jasmine Camp, A Flower for God, in the publication process for 2018.
* Meher Baba, Merwan Sheriar Irani, was born in Poona, India in 1984, to Persian parents. His father was a Zoroastrian spiritual seeker. In 1921, Merwan had his first disciples who named him Meher Baba, meaning “Compassionate Father.” He dropped His body on January 31, 1997. From a pamphlet. (North Myrtle Beach, SC: Meher Spiritual Center, Inc.).
**Prema Jasmine Camp, A Flower for God.
*Ibid.
* Meherabad, the home of Avatar Meher Baba, now in spirit, is in Arangaon Village, near
Ahmednagar in the central area of Maharashstra State located on the Deccan Plateau.
* Purely Prema, www.purelyprema.blogspot.com/in.
