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216 SPIRIT AND THE MIND
experience directing a program and developing a community for mentally disabled people who would attend up to five days a week for 7 or 8 hours a day for a structured, enriching, educational and therapeutic experience. And I got the job.
I wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice. I said to myself, “Sam, you don’t have to talk about the Lord incarnating, you needn’t tell everyone about your experiences with Baba. If you can just live his message, be kind and nice—do it that way. Don’t rock the boat. You’ve got a nice job here—now just watch yourself.” So with that resolve I started the program. They respected and liked me—and I liked them. We were getting along just fine.
One day about a month and a half after 1 started, the staff and I went to visit a board and care home—a structured living setting for people too disabled to live independently. We wanted to offer our services and to provide some enrichment. As we walked into the parking lot someone asked, ”Whose car should we use—Sam how about using your car?”
I said, “Fine,” before I realized what I was doing. I had a little beat-up Jeep, not too bad looking from the outside—but inside it was plastered with Sai Baba pictures—and incense sticks protruding from everywhere. It was a wild, new-age traveling temple in there. So I started to worry, “How about—I mean we could take somebody else’s car?”
“Come on, Sam , let’s take yours,” because they wanted to see what a wealthy psychiatrist’s car looked like. Little did they know that I’m not wealthy—but when they met my car, they learned. And when I opened the door—BOOM! I mean it was a fantastic shock. Silence. As if nobody saw anything. Then one brave person said, “Who’s he?”
“Oh, he’s a friend,” I said.
Sai Baba’s mystery is really something. What he puts us poor souls through! You can, of course, say this is all a mirage; it’s all a dream and I’m not reacting and they’re not reacting and they’re not really feeling uncomfortable—I’m just the “1”, the eternal witness. But you know, as long as we’re in this body we react a little bit and so I was feeling badly. One person politely tried to muster up a question: “Do you ever take the Jeep up into the mountains?”


































































































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