One day during a darshan programme in North India, Meher Baba said, "I have come once again in your midst as the same Ancient One. Time and again, I come in your midst with the same message, 'Love Me, love God.'"

Then someone from the crowd called out, "Baba, how shall we love you?"

Baba replied, "When you got married, did you ask Me how you should love your wife? You saw her and you fell in love with her, but when you see Me you really do not see Me as I truly am for this body is only a coat that I put on. When you see Me as I really am, then you will fall in love with Me."

Baba continued, "The question then is: 'How will you be able to see Me as I really am?' In the world, men and women fall in love with one another but in order for this experience to happen, the man or woman must first see the other. Don't you believe that?"

"Yes!" the man answered.

"What happens after that," explained Baba, "is that the mind goes crazy with the desire to please each other. Each one wants to put the best front forward in order to please the other for the entire world now revolves around the person you love. This in turn means that you remember your beloved all the time, you think only of possessing the one you love and you think of ways and means of being with that person all the time.

"But in loving Me, it is just the opposite. Whereas in your world you can see and fall in love, you cannot see Me as I really am. So in order to love Me, you must start with remembering Me all the time, then you will see Me as I really am and only then will you truly fall in love with Me."

"Then how can we remember You, Baba?" asked the man.

"Now that you have seen Me in this coat, this form, keep My photographs or whatever will remind you of Me and help you to continue remembering Me. Keep My picture in your house and in your toilet also, so that even there you can remember Me all the time. Before you start your day, remember Me.

"Remembering Me now becomes a mechanical process but mind wants variety. So you can then read all the books that have been published and read the magazines too which narrate My life and My work. This is another way of remembering Me.

"But still the mind craves for something different and prompts the seeker to go on a pilgrimage to all the places where the Master has visited and spent time. The pilgrim is happy in the thought that he is able to spend time at all those places which have been blessed by the Master's presence, and thus he remembers the Master more and more as he goes from place to place.

"Next, the seeker meets people who lived with the Master or spent time with Him and he craves to know all about the Master. Soon the mind gives place to the heart and as the heart begins to yearn for the Master a faint trace of love for Him is born.

"This is a message to the seeker to love Me and the creation serves as that constant reminder to remember Me. Then his mind satiated with all the memories of the Master, the seeker goes back to the routine of his daily life with a heart awakened to love for the Master and each day and in every act the seeker finds some trace of the Master and thoughts of Him fill his waking hours.

"Just as you see this creation around you to help you to think of God, similarly every act of yours will help you to think of Me. Likewise, when the heart opens more and more by remembering Me, eventually the heart will glorify the Master in anything and in everything. Finally a stage will come when you will be overwhelmed by the glory of the Master that is the time when I will give you the gift of Love.

"And what is that gift? That gift is the moment when you see Me as I really am. You see My effulgence, you see Me and you stop seeing anything else. That is the experience of the sixth plane of consciousness and when you see Me as I really am, then for the first time you fall in love with Me. At last you begin your life of love for which you were created, and the more you love the more you will want to please Me, just as when a man falls in love with a woman he makes every effort to please her in more intensive ways.

"Eventually a momentous event takes place. Seeing the lover love the Beloved to such a degree, the Beloved falls in love with the lover and the lover is raised to the pedestal of the Beloved while the Beloved comes down to the level of the lover. The mind is annihilated, the lover and Beloved are merged in each other and that union is God-Realization."