Edgar Cayce, the famous American seer, said that he saw many people in his lifetime who had been with Jesus. For all of them, even those who didn't have close contact, that single experience shaped all of their subsequent incarnations.

I arrived in Los Angeles on the morning of Saturday, September 11, 1948, exhausted from my long journey. There I took advantage of the first opportunity I'd had in four days to shave and bathe, then continued by bus one hundred miles south to Encinitas, the little coastal town where, as I had read, Yogananda had his hermitage. In the fervor of first reading it had somehow eluded me that he had founded a world-wide organization.

The Master summoned Clifford Frederick, a disciple at Mount Washington, to his desert retreat. Clifford came, but was privately worried about the duties he was neglecting by his absence.

We're here this evening to pay homage to the life of one of God's children—an enlightened being with the humility of a child who was one we call "Master." We use this word not in the sense of our being his servants, but because he was master of himself.

One of the most urgent needs in the world today is for the major religions to be presented from a perspective of the truths they have in common, and not of the teachings which, their proponents insist, make them unique.

"Master once taught me a good lesson on the attitude we should hold toward our work." Mrs. Vera Brown (now Meera Mata), an advanced older disciple whom Master had made responsible for training some of the newer ones, was sharing with me a few of her experiences with our guru.