Those Eyes!: Lagoon Cabin Stories

When Meher Baba visited Meher Center, He often met with individuals and small groups in the little intimate cabin that would become known as the Lagoon Cabin. While each person’s first meeting with Meher Baba in 1952 was unique, a common pattern emerges from the written and recorded experiences of those who were there: many instantly felt Baba’s divine love, at home in His warm embrace and being lost and found in His amazingly beautiful brown eyes. Here are just a few accounts of those who met Meher Baba that year.

When Filis Frederick and Adele Wolkin entered the Lagoon cabin, FIlis wondered how Baba would appear. “…At my first glimpse of Baba the thought flashed through my head, ‘He looks Egyptian!’ The long eyebrows, dark almond eyes, the golden skin. He embraced me and my heart beat fast, ‘He is mine. He is mine.’ He gestured to a chair beside Him. Baba ‘asked’ through Adi, ’How do I look?’ I said to Adi (because someone had misinformed me we could not speak directly to Him in the New Life), ‘He looks ill.’ As soon as I said it, I felt, ‘No! He looks beautiful.’

“Eyes like black diamonds looked lovingly into mine. I felt my heart overflow with His Love. He seemed so familiar, so intimate, so close.”[I]

Francis Brabazon had his first meeting with Baba on May 9. Francis, who was to become one of Meher Baba’s mandali members and to whom Baba would say in 1959, “Your Stay With God is also an unparalleled composition. You do not know how, in the future, it will influence the hearts of humanity.”  [II]

Francis recalled that first glimpse of his Master, “He looked as I had imagined a Sadguru would look—a man who is nothing and everything, a man who is dead and alive, a man who has gone through everything. He is quite small, short and slight. His eyes are the most remarkable thing about Him; very large eyes, and they are constantly moving. In an ordinary person we would call it restlessness, but not Him. He did not convey that at all, but conveyed activity.”[III]

On May 10, 1952, Fred and Ella Winterfeldt were called for their much awaited meeting with Meher Baba. Fred noted, “Baba looked at me over Ella’s shoulder, winked and grinned from ear to ear. And at that moment, reason—four years of reasoning—like a burst balloon went out the door. It was replaced by instantaneous knowledge, recognition and conviction of the absolute truth of that with whom I was faced. That feeling sustained me for the rest of my life.”[IV]

Evelyn Blackshaw saw Baba as Krishna, a divine teenage boy, with beautiful curls, floating on a pink cloud. She wrote, “I knew I was seeing Baba as I really knew him, such love flooded my heart that I almost burst with it. I know Baba had me sit near him and patted me and drew me close but he still remained that beautiful young man on his pink cloud. I never really saw what Baba looked like physically until I saw him again in New York, then I saw him in his physical body.”[V]

Darwin and Jeanne Shaw, who had not seen Baba since 1934, were delighted to introduce their children to Baba. Their daughter Leatrice wrote, “He didn’t really look like any of His pictures. He looked different every time we saw Him and also from moment to moment. His eyes were so large and luminous and they would flash. He was so dynamic and there was such a radiance and beauty about Him that he was completely absorbing. One couldn’t take the eyes off Him but my sister and I had to because we were taking shorthand notes of what was being said since we didn’t want to lose a record of all this.”[VI]

Four-year-old Larry Karrasch captured the moment through the wondrous eyes of a child. Upon meeting Baba, he remarked: “Look mommy, there’s God!”[VII]

Bal Natu chronicled the beauty and depth of those meetings, “When Baba gestured, ‘How are you?’ to any of them, it was not a surface inquiry, but something much, much deeper—a compassionate concern for the person’s physical and spiritual wellbeing. As they looked at Him, their smiles often turned into sobs of rare delight, for the dream had become incredibly alive. When they came out of the Lagoon Cabin, it seemed that something sublime had flowed into them and its outer expression was the tears that coursed down their cheeks. A great change and an awakening!”[VIII] [I] “Memories of ‘52,” by Filis Frederick, Awakener Magazine Online, Vol. 14, No. 2, p. 6
[II] Lord Meher, Online Edition, by Bhau Kalchuri, p.4378
[III] Francis Brabazon, Poet of the Silent Word, by Ross Keating, p. 85
[IV] Lord Meher, Online Edition, by Bhau Kalchuri, p. 3063
[V] “Meetings With Meher Baba,Inner and Outer,” by Evelyn Blackshaw, The Glow, August 1973, p. 16
[VI] “Living Meher Baba’s Life,” by Leatrice Johnston, Glow International, Nov 1984, p.6
[VII] Talk by Larry Karrasch, Meher Center Meeting Place, April 21, 2022, Meher Spiritual Center, Inc. Archives
[VIII] Glimpses of the God Man, by Bal Natu, Vol 3, Part I, p. 42