Dr. Harry Kenmore
– 1960s , Guruprasad, Poona, India – coutesy of Meher Nazar collection –
The personality says, “I want. I must have, for me.” I’ll never forget what Meher Baba said in the personal P.S. of a letter He sent to me when he gave instructions to those who had been to the 1958 Sahavas here in America. He said, “You are one of the Intimate Mandali. I expect everything from the Mandali. The Mandali expect nothing from Me.”
That’s the deal when you go to God. When you go to Meher Baba you don’t want anything from Meher Baba. You don’t want His Love, His Compassion; you want nothing from Him. You just want Him and Him alone. You want the Beloved with a capital B. The Real McCoy. You don’t want anything from Him. You just want Him. And you want you to be accepted by Him. His acceptance can only be had through His Grace, and His Grace can be had through your full surrender. That’s the deal. You expect nothing from Him, but he expects everything from you.
Now, that is the deal. There’s no other deal. You want Him. You don’t want something or anything from Him. You just want the Real Beloved, and surrender to Meher Baba because He’s your Real Father, your Real Mother, the one and only Real Creator. He’s the one that made you. And you owe even the privilege of this little drop-self to Him and to live in it, to experience animation, activity, so that you can eventually know who you really are as your Real Self, the One Self, as Almighty God, which one actually becomes when one has fully surrendered to Almighty God.
Because when the moth, who has this unavoidable and irresistible attraction to the flame of a candle, is drawn to that flame, and has this one glorious experience where it’s burned up. It’s burned up in this fire. That’s how you must burn in the remembrance of the Real Beloved. The moth has this experience in a second. It has such a short life.
Unless this experience of burning take place in you, you haven’t surrendered. The longing becomes deeper and deeper, but it can never happen until you suffer. You must know pain and discontent, disheartening and disappointment. You must have the hard knocks of life. You must be rejected. You must have your nose flattened, you head flattened, your face pushed in. You’ve got to get kicked around. All of that is a golden opportunity to remember the Name of Meher Baba and to surrender to Him, because He alone can deliver you from the ignorance of where your attention ought to be.
So go out and practice it and put it to use. If you don’t put the principle into practice, you’ll never acquire what’s in store for you. As Tolstoi said, “It’s far easier to write ten huge volumes of philosophy than to put just one principle into practice.”
So you go out and just want Him, Meher Baba. Surrender to Him. And then you’ll see wonderful things will be in store for you because the Real Beloved never neglects His real lover. But it’s got to be for real — no monkey business. You can’t play around with the Real Beloved. So let His Will be done in your life, and then your life will really become happy in His Love, in loving Him and serving Him, in full surrender to Him.
MEHER BABA — THE WAY AND THE GOAL, Vol. 2, No. 3, March 25, 1971, p. 3
Harry Kenmore
– Meherazad, October 1959 –
Harry: The Story of Dr. Harry L. Kenmore and His Life with His Beloved Pop, Meher Baba
by Larry and Rita Karrasch