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that which he had absorbed and studied up to that moment. Just as sweet creamy butter emerges out of the churning of milk, so a subtle and exquisite feeling began to well up from his depths. It gave him the sweet taste of lightheartedness and joy.
As he attuned himself to this liberating feeling, he went out from the upasray into the dew-kissed air of pre-dawn. He stood in open-eyed meditation watching the mist paint a light veil over the distant mountains of Satruñjaya. Behind the mist, he could see the glow of the coming dawn. All of a sudden, mist vanished and all was nothing but a pinkish orange glow. In close touch with his inner response, he felt in perfect harmony with the macrocosm. The subtle joy grew brighter and clearer. As the sun arose triumphant out of the mountains, inner glow became more and more intense, bathing him within and without in a blazing clarity. And wordlessly he knew he had at last torn away the last veil covering the mystery of death.
It was only the beginning. By the time he and his father set out on their walking journey to the next village, the blissfulness he had been incubating burst forth. All his limbs were dancing. Ecstasy flowed through his body and he sailed through the motions of walking. The thrill of joy was so intense that his body could hardly bear it. Under the impact of that kind of spiritual explosion, some people lose balance, but Munishree Chandraprabh Sagarji did not. For the unprepared person, it might have been like going from midnight to the noonday sun without first adjusting the eyes gradually and readying oneself to see it. For such a person, this experience would have been too powerful, blinding.
But for Munishree, this was the fruit of his austerity, the maturation of his silence, the ripening of his seasoned soul. All his meditations, investigations, and flashes of insight had prepared him for this. Like the cool wetness of earth which corrodes the hull of a seed so that it can open its heart and grow toward the sun, in the same way, the teachings, trainings, and years in the inspired presence of his Master and loving father had little by little thinned out the shell of his ego so that his reality could emerge and reveal itself. In this way, he had prepared body and mind to bear the power and joy of his
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