QUALITY OF THE PHILOSOPHER'S STONE

 
Although William [Donkin] would not pen these words until a few years later when he began writing The Wayfarers, it's a fair guess that they capture his mood as he prepared to enter military service. His feelings about and ties to his Spiritual Master were also given in the early pages of the book:

"A subtle quintessence of love ... pervades everything that Baba does. His physical presence and the brilliance of his leadership have that impossible quality of the philosopher's stone, that by their magic touch, they transmute the base metal of the most commonplace routine into a treasure of loving service.

"This is perhaps an ornate way of describing something that is at once so real that one might think it easy to describe quite simply, and so transcendental that the spirit of it eludes the grasp of words.

"But this magic, this imponderable something, weaves itself like a golden thread into the fabric of everything that Baba does, and when the factual details of a phase of Baba's life are buried so deep in the ashes of one's mind to be almost forgotten, the memory of this splendid thing is still there."