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Master, why do you take such pains to come down to our level?


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Master, why do you take such pains

to come down to our level?

 

MAN TREADS THE PATH TO HIS OWN LIBERATION

 

“The disciples ask me: why, you Master, do you take such pains to come down to our level?” What they meant is that he was so modest he seemed to be one of us. But he was not like other people, even if he was exceedingly modest. He said that Christ had to shrink a million times in order to come down to earth.

 

“What a charismatic person, what an extraordinarily intelligent man!” These were the thoughts of people who happened to wander into the salon. He talked about all things as if they were living beings — the trees, the clouds, yes, he could tell events by looking at the clouds. He would tell his disciples that if they were not disposed to listen or if they had told a lie the heavens changed their colour. He taught them to carry the truth within themselves so that the sky above us would be clean. Outsiders found his gait exceptionally beautiful and harmonious. Clairvoyants considered that he walked on air, that his feet did not touch the ground. The young people were surprised at the speed with which The Master moved, when everybody was gathering firewood in the Rila mountains for the evening campfire (old, dry pieces of wood, not living trees, for their lives should not be cut off short), they remarked that he walked up the slopes so swiftly that there seemed to be no gradient at all and he did not appear to be carrying a load. He was nearly eighty then. When Doctor Furtounov, who was in attendance at the palace, examined him, he said to the disciple who had brought him: “In the whole of my medical practice I have never seen a more youthful body than this.” The Master was then eighty years and six months old...

 

In everyday life he was out of the ordinary in comparison with all others, although he was exceedingly modest. Those who are able to see the radiance and the spirit in him, the unusual light and strength, say: “It is as if we are seeing Christ.” Painters who visited Sunrise would also say: “He would make a wonderful model for a picture of Christ!”

 

The Master had an unusually expressive and handsome face. His eyes were dark brown, as are those of most Bulgarians, but all colours were to be seen in their depths. A poetess compared them with precious stones in them shimmered the living strength of the entire universe.

 

That was no exaggeration, for his eyes could caress, they could flash, they could warm and they could speak, too. Above all else they contained sweetness.

 

His hair was white, and fell freely. His disciples said that each hair was a ray of light.

 

When he walked, dressed in white or dove-grey, he moved in such a way that the whole harmony of the world was reflected in his steps. A great dancer saw how he climbed the short flight of steps to the dais and exclaimed in wonder: “He is the greatest dancer who every came to earth!”

 

Harmony should be sought everywhere. The Master would stop by mountain streams and move the pebbles in them around until the sound of the waters became clear. He even purified the tones of water... “For,” as he said, “without music and harmony man cannot think. And if he cannot think correctly, he cannot achieve anything. First of all we shall study the music of nature, the pure tones that are not corrupted. In all the songs I have given you till now the most important thing are pure tones: they liberate man from his past life.”

 

The Universal Master was as one with Nature and lived with the laws of harmony that rule the universe.

 

All that happened at ‘ lzgreva”, the hill overlooking Sofia by the pine forest, a place of meadows, fields and gardens chosen by him. From that point one could watch the sun rising over the distant mountains. From here one could see the mountain referred to as Mount Ida by the ancient Thracians, which towers above Sofia. A sacred mountain. The Master honoured it with his presence. In the twilight of early dawn, a procession of disciples, led by the Master, could be seen wending their way towards that mountain... They became accustomed to living with the mountain. He chose a sunny spot near a pyramid of stones and this became the Brotherhood’s camp. It was here that a campfire burned and the brothers drank tea made of fragrant wild thyme. It was here that the Master sat next to a great grey stone and sang his last song. His disciples wrote down the words but the melody was lost in space, for it did not correspond to the familiar human musical tones...

 

Did he work miracles, though? Yes, constantly. Little, everyday miracles. People could see them all around him. As the sister who greeted visitors in the rose garden in front of the hall watched him descend the stairs from his room, she would suddenly see him in the glade and would wonder how and when he got there!

 

Miracles were not his aim. He did not want to attract people with them. All he needed was a little dais from which he could preach the Teaching, the New Teaching of Love, Wisdom and Truth.

 

In any case, the Master’s followers at Sunrise lived in small wooden huts consisting of one room with a table, chair and stove — frequently without a stove. In the mornings, the young people who lived in a little hostel there would have to break the ice in the pitcher to wash their faces before they went off to classes in the main hall. In spite of this they were healthy, amazingly healthy, nobody became ill. If, however, somebody happened to fall sick, the Master cured them by simple, invisible means. He would give them some fruit and say: “Go now, you will get better.” He cured them by means of a simple life in accordance with nature, with pure food, selected fruits, with wheat and water, with the bringing of pure spring water, and by pouring water that had been warmed in the sun over the patient, and this was done mainly in the mountains. It was something wondrous, but modest and invisible. Sometimes he would say: “Place this cloth upon the face of that incurably sick child,” and the child would recover, much as if the miracles in the Promised Land were being repeated. People had not seen him even, they had only heard about him. He knew why illnesses come. There was a young man suffering from tuberculosis. The Master looked deeply into his eyes for a long time, thought for a moment and then said: “Are you prepared to change your way of life?” And he cured him.

 

The Master lived in the Upstairs Room, where the blue light of his lamp burned almost all night long. He worked and watched over mankind. He found solutions to world problems and listened to suffering people. Everything on earth passed through his mind. At lunchtime, when lunch had been prepared in the little hall downstairs by the sisters on duty, he would trip lightly down the stairs and sit down at the table with everybody else. He would praise the food and then ate with such natural and harmonious movements that his gestures seemed like music, both elegant and simple at the same time.

 

When he climbed the outside spiral staircase to his room in the evening he would encounter somebody who was troubled, somebody who was worried, somebody who wanted to ask him something on each stair, and on each stair he would give an answer as if this were the endless staircase of mankind ...

 

He was very strict, however. As one of his disciples put it: “He was open to everything that came from above, but refused to look at anything that came from below.”

 

It was to people like this that he came and spoke these words: “Even if you are silent, the stones shall speak! “

 

The stones and boulders on the mountains, wrapped in the patina of time, contain those words like sacred tablets. They echo his voice and that laughter. What wonderful laughter! The Master laughed a lot, so much that he had to wipe his eyes with a handkerchief. What children they were, how small their troubles were! One day he had this to say to a disciple who was standing among the pine trees: “I wouldn’t give a hair of your beard for your personal affairs. For me the important thing is God’s work!”

 

He was a very patient listener, though. What patience he had! “I’ve always wondered at this endless patience,” the man who published his Talks would say. He would listen to people who told him seemingly endless stories for hours on end.

 

It was not only his disciples who visited him. people came from the outside world. There was one of the leading intellectuals, a translator and a very rich woman who was one of the first car-owners in Sofia. She drove her own car. A woman friend was sitting by her side and they were going to visit the young woman’s Fiance, who was later to become a professor of sculpture. Suddenly a child ran out of a side-street, holding up his hands as if to stop the car. The woman who was driving could not react quickly enough. She stopped, but seemed to feel the car pass over the child’s body. The two women got out. The child was safe and sound, he had managed to jump back at the last second, but the woman had experienced the horror of having killed a child. She herself yearned to have children. She fainted, and then she could not stop crying for days. She shed a constant stream of tears and went into convulsions of horror. Her wealthy husband sought the aid of the most eminent specialists. Nothing helped. Then somebody said: “Why don’t you go to Sunrise?” She went. Everybody was just coming back from the glade after the Paneurhythmia. There was a small room on the lower floor of the building where the Master received visitors. She was invited in. She entered and saw how exceedingly modest the room was. Everything was white, from ‘the curtains to the tablecloth, from the bedspread to the whitewashed walls. And the meditative man with the white beard and gleaming hair was dressed in white, too. This was Doctor Dunov. He was wearing white woollen socks and a suit of thick woollen cloth, also white. Even the potted plant on the windowsill, which was in bloom in those early spring days, was a white hyacinth. A smell of roses and hyacinths filled the room. The clever intellectual was crying, she could not hold back her tears. The Master had closed his eyes; he was silent, lost in meditation as if she weren’t there at all. That is how most people remember him during conversations, when he wandered in other spaces and dimensions in search of the reasons for things. She tried to tell him something, but not a sound came out of her mouth. Then he opened his eyes and spoke.

 

“Well, you didn’t run over the child, did you?”

 

How did he know about it? The Master continued: “It is a terrible thing to kill a person’s body, but it is far worse to trample upon his soul...” A very unusual conversation ensued. She could not remember it or repeat it afterwards because its level and awareness were unusual. She was amazed, however, to Find that her tears and convulsions had stopped. She felt renewed, cleansed of all her troubles. Then she asked him about what was troubling her most: “Mr Dunov, why am I childless?”

 

He looked at her in mild surprise. “Are you childless? Am I childless, too? Everyone, all the people who come here to see me are my children...”

 

She understood. Childlessness was not a physical phenomenon. “Show me a miracle,” she said to him.

 

“You want to see a miracle? We are surrounded by miracles! There is the miracle of seeing, of looking, is that not a miracle? Even that little flower is a miracle.” Such was his greatness that he saw a miracle in the white hyacinth on the windowsill... The woman left, having come to the greatest fountainhead of all.

 

One of his young disciples was walking through the outskirts of the city towards Sunrise, thinking about the questions he would put to the Master. Such important questions! And as he stood in front of the Master before he had said anything at all, he received an inner answer to his questions, and there was nothing left to ask about.

 

There was another friend of his (they had been at school together). The two of them had decided years before to go to America to earn money and then go to India to study the spiritual sciences, to find their Guru. In fact their Guru was in Sofia, right under their noses. They discovered him and everything in their lives changed, just like the coming of the Light. One of them continued to dream about America. He bought a ticket and was set to go off to study at Eddison University. The Master listened to him and said: “That’s fine, say I.”

 

That was how our Master expressed himself. He did not want to burden other people, to force his opinion on anybody. He wanted to leave the spirit of his interlocutor free. So when he made a recommendation and emphasised something, he would use the expression “say I”; Just as they did in the gospels and the parables ...

 

“That’s just fine, I say.   You’ll go to this famous university. But what you will hear and learn here in the Teaching, you won’t hear or learn anywhere else in the world.”

 

In Master’s circle there was a holy purity and air of sacredness. Everybody could feel it, whether they were educated or not, intelligent or simple.

 

What does “uneducated” mean? Were his disciples from the villages, those who lived in the old lands of the Bogomils, “uneducated”? They wore their national costumes of rough cloth with a broad, red cummerbund, but they were philosophers, they played the violin and sang the songs of our Master as well as the best singers. Their rough fingers moved precisely over the strings. They had developed their gifts because that was how they served God. They lived fraternally, ploughed their fields together, ploughed the fields of the poor and the widowed. And, surprisingly enough, they did not eat meat. Instead of pork and poultry these peasants ate wheat, homemade bread with an apple or pear, they drank hot water and got up before sunrise in order to greet the sun’s light on some mountain or hilltop. They were so different, so out of the ordinary, these simple, uneducated peasants.

 

“Think correctly, adopt only pure thoughts in order to sing and play well, that is, to live well.”

 

Did his students remain uneducated? No, they all learned sooner or later. They were excellent students but they were not always occupied with science, they preferred the simple crafts and work in the fields, and they were all on an equal footing with the uneducated in our Master’s school. One of them, a blacksmith, was given a task by the Master -to write down the intensive growth phases of the grapevine, at which hours of the day the climbing vines were filled with the sap of sunshine and “bled” when you cut them. He understood the task, researched it scientifically; it was when the birds were singing most of all, before sunrise. The vines grew while the nightingales were still trilling, their flexible sterns curling upwards.

 

One of his friends, who heard about this event, had the following to say: “I have never heard any man on earth pray more beautifully than that simple, uneducated blacksmith.”

 

Such meetings were part of his everyday life. In the mountains, however, the Master had other encounters. He spoke of the little blade of grass, for man was the little blade of grass. He told parables about the new human being:

 

“Man treads the path to his own Liberation.”

 

 

 

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