Students of the Meher Ashram school outside the East Room, late 1927   (Photo courtesy MN Publications)

[In later years, while showing sahavasis about Meherabad Hill, Baba often told stories of the Meher Ashram and the Prem Ashram days (1927-1929). - ed.]

Many years later, Meher Baba explained:

At that time, in addition to continuing my silence, I also gave up writing [January, 1927]. Shortly thereafter I started to communicate by spelling out words on an English alphabet board, which I discarded recently [October, 1954].

My first aim was to arrange for teaching the boys English through their various vernaculars, by standards set up in the University of Bombay. Having accomplished this, I began to spend all of my time, day and night, on the general welfare and spiritual upliftment of the boys. Even though I had entrusted several mandali with the job of keeping watch over the boys round the clock, still I would frequently appear in the dormitory in the dead of night to see if they were well wrapped and sleeping all right.

This was also the period when I carried out one of my longest continuous fasts, which lasted five and one-half months (November, 1927-April, 1928). Once during this period I took nothing but a few sips of water for more than twenty-eight days. The remainder of the time I lived on cocoa in milk taken once in twenty-four hours.

Baba wearing patched and worn Kamli Coat. Aurangabad 1927 (Photo courtesy MN Publications)

Even this was in scant supply as it happened. Lahu (Baba's favorite among the untouchable boys) used to carry my supply to me every day, and on the way he would drink half of it and then pass on the other half to me. I found out about this at the end of my seclusion when the women mandali assured me that they had sent Lahu regularly, as I had originally instructed them, with the thermos bottle full of cocoa. When I questioned Lahu about his, he readily confessed pilfering half my cocoa every day. I pardoned the little fellow as readily as he had acknowledged the guilt.

During part of this period I remained continuously indoors for more than three months (November, 1927 - February,1928) at the spot where my future tomb is located. I did not step out of the crypt (the underground part of Baba's future tomb) and the temporary small structure placed over it. The temporary hut has now been replaced by the present domed building.

Meher Baba with Ashram Boys

In the daytime I spent most of the time in the upper room, which had two windows level with the floor, and at night I would retire into the crypt. One of the two windows in the upper room faced the Meher Ashram on the east and was in line with a raised platform before the ashram. The boys and the mandali would sit on this, near me but outside my room, and I would give them discourses and carry on discussions with them with the help of my alphabet board.

Through the west window I could see the sadhak-ashram (hermitage), which consisted of a string of small rooms standing at that time near my place of seclusion. Some of the mandali were also in seclusion in these small rooms, fasting under my directions on a small quantity of milk taken once or twice a day....

At a later stage (March, 1928) Meher Ashram was divided into two sections. The new portion was called "Prem Ashram" (Shelter of Love). In it were housed the boys most awakened to love. They were given some freedom from the daily school routine to allow for their preoccupation with meditation and the spiritual experiences that most of them periodically had.

 Heroines of the Path

By Filis Frederick

Meher Baba and Nadine - Courtesy of MN Collection

Filis continues her account of the lives of notable Western women disciples of Meher Baba:

One may doubt it now, but the Russians have a long history of mystical and spiritual aspiration. One of the world's most famous spiritual treatises, The Way of a Pilgrim, describes the wanderings of a Russian saint, who focused on a single prayer, or mantra, the repetition of the Holy Name of Jesus. And Count Leo Tolstoy, the great writer, expressed his deep religious feelings in Resurrection, What Men Live By, etc., and inspired Gandhi very deeply. Once Baba told Nadine Tolstoy that she would receive what her father-in-law, Leo Tolstoy, had longed for: oneness with God.

Count Ilya Tolstoy as "The Old Philsopher" in the film Resurrection (1927), based on the book of the same name by his father, Count Leo Tolstoy

Nadia had married Count Ilya, his son. It was a love match that endured to the end. She was his second wife. Both had been deep metaphysical students in search of truth, and undoubtedly this is what drew them together. Actually, Nadia had seen Ilya in a dream before meeting him in person.

Previous even to this inner encounter, she had had a remarkable dream in which she found herself on her knees in a deep cave, searching in the dark. There she came upon Leo Tolstoy, whom she had never met personally. Suddenly he solemnly handed her a rolled up parchment scroll. Greatly amazed, she unrolled it and in large gold letters it said, "High Truth is written". She never forgot the dream or its ambiance of deep feeling. It foreshadowed her connection with the Tolstoy family.

She and her husband were white Russians of course, who had moved to America. There were financial and health problems and the loneliness of the displaced émigré. Nadia plunged into the spiritual search to dispel the darkness. She avidly studied the Gita. Occasionally there were spiritual glimpses, consoling experiences of inundating bliss.  

She took up the study of meditation and kriya yoga with Swami Yogananda and, "Inexperienced, I took the Higher Initiations," she says. But as the result of not having a perfected guide, she began to have some bad effects. "I prayed as never in my life to lift the dark shadows. I asked, I prayed constantly for help, for a true Master, a real guide". Several years passed in such struggles, until the day when an invitation arrived from their friend, Malcolm Schloss, to meet the "Perfect Master, Shri Meher Baba." She responded immediately. "My intuition was unquestioning and sure," She records. She went to Harmon on the Hudson, in 1931, to see Him.   

Here is how she describes it: " I saw Christ before me, as He was seated on the couch, in the expression of all His figure and His divinely lit-up face, in His eyes beaming love . . . It was the fulfillment of a long-awaited meeting, the climax of my life . . . I declared as loud as I could: 'Jesus Christ!' with all the solemnity of those great words. Something within me recognized in this dear shape of Meher Baba, the incarnation of Jesus Christ of Nazareth. So the unbelievable became a revealed fact. . . . I gave my will to His Will, my life to His cause of truth and love, knowing that to love the truth means to live it. . . . "

The following day, Ilya decided to come and meet Baba also. He asked Baba a question that had troubled him much of his life: "How can one love when there is so much evil in this world?" The Master, eyes beaming with that very love, answered on His alphabet board: "You have to take love in your heart." And He added, "Fine man." Ilya said of Baba, "This is the first time that I have met a man who really has Divine Love."

Ilya Lvovich Tolstoy in 1916 (from Wikipedia)

Unfortunately the Count developed a fatal illness which lasted two years. Following Baba's wish, Nadine nursed him faithfully. "I owe my Master all the superhuman help which enabled me to go through the greatest trials -- at the same time He removed certain obstacles from my life." Ilya became a changed man, and amazed her with his "real surrender and a most divine patience and serenity." He told her once, when he was ready to go, All is gone, all has crumbled, only my love is unshakeable." Some days, in a positive mood, he would say "If I have to live, we will live only to make others happy." He once told a group of visitors, "The most important thing is that my wife and myself have a perfect spiritual understanding. This is of greatest importance!"  

Once, when Nadine entered quietly, thinking he was asleep, he opened his eyes, and with deep love, said "0, it is you, Dinochka ... me, asleep when you are here?! No, even if I die, I will be watching you from there and I shall always guard you from mistakes, because we always have to pay for them such a terrible price." Nadine attests that this son of Leo Tolstoy died a true follower of Meher Baba.   

Photo courtesy: Lord Meher

On her first meeting with Him, Baba had told Nadia to give up yoga, as it had already injured her. "Yoga is not for the West," He said, an interesting comment. Perhaps these kriya yoga exercises, whose purpose is to raise the kundalini energy up through the chakras, led to her final, incurable illness (Lou Gehrig's disease) in which her throat muscles atrophied. It is interesting that Nadia (rechristened Nadine, to distinguish her from Baba's cousin Nadia) was put on a year's silence by Baba when in India.

On the day they met, the "Compassionate Father" spelt out her future on the board with the unforgettable words: ''I will repay you for all your suffering!

Glow mag. February, 2001 p.5

I will give you permanent bliss. You will see things as they are, as you can see things now, here, in this incarnation. You are a beautiful soul."

Her own sufferings and her days of nursing Ilya must have prepared her for the spiritual role she played in the Nasik days in India, for Baba put her in charge of the dispensary there in 1937. It was a free hospital for the poor, women and children. Baba told her: "There are thousands of hospitals in the world, I could have here thousands of nurses to work. If I have given this work in the hospital to you, it is because I want you to learn serving in real spirit, selfless service." She describes the scene: "To the hospital came mostly the poorest elements of the country, wrapped in their rags and worn-out saris...the real destitute . . . when the medicines and injections given by the professional doctors could not bring its due relief, Baba's appearance and loving embrace acted as the "holy wine," reviving their hopes and giving them the lasting impetus of recovery. The joy of seeing Baba and the faith that He alone can really help, acted within their hearts as a sure remedy," she says in an article in The Meher Baba Journal .

I met Nadine in 1943. Of the three women disciples living together in New York, it was Nadine who first met the newcomer privately. Her room was filled with photos of Baba, and it was one small picture of Him by her door in which He looked exactly like my inner vision of Jesus, which convinced me at once of His Avatarhood. I had not seen any photos of Him before this moment. Nadine's warm welcome and her amazing blue eyes also "clicked" - she was the woman who had said to me, in a dream, "Attendez le maitre parfait" - wait for the Perfect Master.

By this time, she was a widow and was living wholly on the providence of Elizabeth. One of the three "spiritual troubadours" sent West by Baba to do His work, Nadine quietly did her share. Her devotion to Baba, her down-to-earth warmth and humor, her perfect surrender to His will, especially as the dread disease took it silent toll, touched the heart. There was very little left of the Russian aristocrat. But there was that incredible depth of courage and stoicism that I do associate with Russian character. 

To be continued with part 2... 

The Awakener Magazine online, Vol. 20, No. 2 (1983), pp. 31-35, 

used by permission.