Prabhaker

If you are a searcher after knowledge then you lose your roots in being; or if you search in your being you lose your roots in the world, in the scientific world, in the scientific realm. Both are half of the reality. Religion is half; science is half. Something has to happen to bring religions and science together to a greater whole, where science does not deny religion and where religion does not condemn science. We can find solutions to suffering, even if find solutions , it will not make us calm, contented and blissful.

The mystics in the East have never bothered too much about the mind; they have only developed methods to bypass the mind. Those methods are the techniques of meditation – they are just to bypass the mind. Once you have bypassed the mind, once you can have a bird’s-eye view of your own mind, things start settling. It is your energy that disturbs the mind, that gives it the power to be violent, to be sad, to be angry, to be hateful, to be jealous. Now you are no longer giving it any energy. It won’t take a long time. The mind withers almost like a cloud – it was there and it is no more. The moment mind disperses; your meditation has come to maturity. Now your meditation will be the medium, not the mind. The mind will be used as a mechanism by your meditative forces, but mind is put aside; it is no longer the master. And it is one of the strangest stories that for ten thousand years in the East we have worked on meditation and we have been absolutely successful, not only in becoming meditative, but also in dissolving all the problems of the mind. There is only one way to solve the mind and its problems, and that is to get out of it.

Every ‘new’ formula for success based on positive thinking is always a hit – after all, who wouldn’t want an easy way to get rich? It appeals perfectly to the greedy, lazy age we live in. In the rush to get on the band wagon however, very few stop to wonder, if it were so easy, how come everyone is not living out their dream? And anyway, how would the world function if everyone lived their dream – who would do the kind of work that no one else wanted to do? And would it really be so much fun if everyone else were also living in a big house and driving a luxury car? If our conscious desire fitted with our unconscious ideas, there would actually be no problem. Then the ‘Law of Attraction’ would work automatically – no need to do anything to create it. But most of our unconscious ideas, are negative and destructive, not what we would consciously want! And as that is what is running our life, you can see why any attempt at conscious positive thinking is doomed to failure. It means that we may consciously think we want more money, and focus on the visualization of a nice fat bank account of a few million, but if there is a belief in our unconscious mind that we don’t deserve to be rich, that we will never win the lottery, that it is something for other people not me, then guess what – no matter how much and for how long you visualize those millions, you will never get them! First, clean your unconscious , grow into a meditator.

@rrodriguez11 Ramakrishna paramhansa died of cancer, Maharishi Raman died of cancer, J. Krishnamurti suffered for forty years continuously with a terrific migraine. Gautam Buddha died of food poisoning; Mahavira died of diarrhoea; Jesus Christ died on the cross, existence did not come to help him. An enlightened person becomes a witness of all pains and pleasures. The moment you become identified with your suffering you want to discard it, you want to get rid of it, it is so painful. But if you are a witness then suffering loses all thorns, all stings. Then there is suffering, and you are a witness to it. You are just a mirror; it has nothing to do with you. Happiness comes and goes, unhappiness comes and goes, it is a passing show; you are just there, a mirror reflecting it. Life comes and goes, death comes and goes; the mirror is not affected by either. The mirror reflects but remains unaffected; the mirror is not imprinted by either.

It’s perfectly beautiful, this experience – because you are not your body, you are not your face. Your body is just like your clothes, it is just your garment. Go on looking; the feeling will become more and more clear and loud. One day you will suddenly see that whatsoever you are seeing in the mirror is not you at all, and that will be a great insight. It is not you! People think that they are seeing themselves in the mirror because they are identified with their bodies. Something is changing inside: the identification is breaking It is a beautiful sign.... It should not be thought of as a trouble but as a blessing. Yes, when you look in the mirror and you feel this is not you, it is very disorienting. Nothing to be worried about – enjoy it! This is how it should be; this is truth. If you think you are mirrored in the mirror, that is a lie... although an accepted lie and everybody believes in it. You will feel at ease with it, because everybody also thinks that way. Otherwise this is a lie we have agreed upon. The experience is something beautiful, very significant. Disorienting, I understand, but if once you understand that this is right, the disorientation will disappear and it can become a meditation for you. Make it a meditation: whenever you have time, just look at the mirror and see that it is not you. Now see it consciously; don’t avoid it. In fact, make it a meditation: sit before the mirror for as long as you can, continuously seeing that this is not you. And this can give you a great satori, a great insight, one day. Suddenly you will see that your body has disappeared: there is only consciousness, pure witness. Make a meditation out of it. It has been used in the past as a meditation.

Meditators can live without painkillers (allopathic medicines), he preferred cannabis over meditation !

It may be appropriate in western way of life. You can eat one time a day or two times a day; the body will adjust to that. There are tribes, many aboriginal tribes in India, in South Africa, in the Himalayas, who eat only once a day. Vegan Strongman Eats ONE Meal a Day!

@pluto Bruce Lee said, " If you want something beautiful, take modern dancing. What good it would do to a boxer to learn to meditate? He is a fighter, not a Monk. I always think, he missed something. Bruce Lee loved him some cannabis. Bruce Lee was an avid cannabis user and chewed the stuff for more than 10 years. In my opinion if Bruce Lee had chosen meditation over cannabis, he would have lived longer.

@Mondsee Mindfulness When the mind disappears, thoughts disappear. It is not that you become mindless; on the contrary you become mindful. Buddha uses these words “right mindfulness” millions of times. When the mind disappears and thoughts disappear you become mindful. You do things – you move, you work, you eat, you sleep, but you are always mindful. The mind is not there, but mindfulness is there. What is mindfulness? It is awareness. It is perfect awareness. Consciousness Consciousness is a quality of your mind, but it is not your total mind. Your mind can be both conscious and unconscious, but when you transcend your mind, there is no unconsciousness and no corresponding consciousness. There is awareness. Consciousness is a quality of the mind, awareness is the transcendence; it is going beyond the mind. Mind, as such, is the medium of duality, so consciousness can never transcend duality. It is always conscious of something, and there is always someone who is conscious. So consciousness is part and parcel of the mind, and mind, as such, is the source of all duality, of all divisions, whether they are between subject and object, activity or inactivity, consciousness or unconsciousness. Every type of duality is mental. Awareness is nondual, so awareness means the state of no mind. Awareness Awareness means that the total mind has become aware. Now the old mind is not there, but there is the quality of being conscious. Awareness has become the totality; the mind itself is now part of the awareness. We cannot say that the mind is aware; we can only meaningfully say that the mind is conscious. Awareness means transcendence of the mind, so it is not the mind that is aware. It is only through transcendence of the mind, through going beyond mind, that awareness becomes possible.

The meaning – the literal meaning – of the word Vipassana is “to look,” and the metaphorical meaning is “to watch, to witness.” Gautam Buddha has chosen a meditation that can be called the essential meditation. All other meditations are different forms of witnessing, but witnessing is present in every kind of meditation as an essential part; it cannot be avoided. Buddha has deleted everything else and kept only the essential part – to witness. When you have become perfectly watchful of your body, mind and heart, then you cannot do anything more, then you have to wait. When perfection is complete on these three steps, the fourth step happens on its own accord as a reward. Suddenly your life force, your witnessing, enters into the very center of your being. You have come home. Vipassana can be done in three ways. The first is: awareness of your actions, your body, your mind, your heart. Walking, you should walk with awareness. Moving your hand, you should move with awareness, knowing perfectly that you are moving the hand. You can move it without any consciousness, like a mechanical thing…you are on a morning walk; you can go on walking without being aware of your feet. Be alert of the movements of your body. While eating, be alert to the movements that are needed for eating. Taking a shower, be alert to the coolness that is coming to you, the water falling on you and the tremendous joy of it ― just be alert. It should not go on happening in an unconscious state. And the same about your mind. Whatever thought passes on the screen of your mind, just be a watcher. Whatever emotion passes on the screen of your heart, just remain a witness ― don’t get involved, don’t get identified, don’t evaluate what is good, what is bad; that is not part of your meditation. The second form is breathing, becoming aware of breathing. As the breath goes in, your belly starts rising up, and as the breath goes out, your belly starts settling down again. So the second method is to be aware of the belly: its rising and falling. Just the very awareness of the belly rising and falling…and the belly is very close to the life sources because the child is joined with the mother’s life through the navel. Behind the navel is his life’s source. So, when the belly rises up, it is really the life energy, the spring of life that is rising up and falling down with each breath. That too is not difficult and perhaps maybe even easier because it is a single technique. In the first, you have to be aware of the body, you have to be aware of the mind, you have to be aware of your emotions, moods. So it has three steps. The second approach has a single step: just the belly, moving up and down. And the result is the same. As you become more aware of the belly, the mind becomes silent, the heart becomes silent, the moods disappear. And the third is to be aware of the breath at the entrance, when the breath goes in through your nostrils. Feel it at that extreme ― the other polarity from the belly ― feel it from the nose. The breath going in gives a certain coolness to your nostrils. Then the breath going out…breath going in…breath going out.

When meditating, just meditate; the rest then happens by itself. The way to God does not lie in our hands, So leave yourself in his. Surrender, surrender, surrender! Remember always, surrender! Sleeping or waking, remember! Surrender is the only door to God. Emptiness is the only boat that sails to him.

Mind is not your intelligence. Intelligence means the capability to respond to new situations. It comes from your being - mind is only a vehicle It may sound strange but this is a truth, that mind is not your intelligence. Mind can be intellectual, which is a very poor substitute for intelligence. Intellectuality is mechanical. You can become a great scholar, a great professor, a great philosopher – just playing with words which are all borrowed, arranging and rearranging thoughts, none of which are your own. The mind is a mechanism, it has no intelligence. The mind is a bio-computer. How can it have any intelligence? It has skill, but it has no intelligence; it has a functional utility, but it has no awareness. It is a robot. Not a single thought in the mind is ever original, it is always a repetition. Watch: whenever mind says something, see that it is again putting you into a routine. Try to do something new and the mind will have less grip on you. Intelligence is the capacity to respond moment-to-moment to life as it happens, not according to a program. Intelligence is: to relate with reality, unprepared. An intelligent person does not function out of his past experience; he functions in the present. He does not react, he responds. Hence he is always unpredictable; one can never be certain what he is going to do. A Catholic, a Protestant and a Jew were talking to a friend who said he had just been given six months to live. "What would you do," he asked the Catholic, "if your doctor gave you six months to live?" "Ah!" said the Catholic. "I would give all my belongings to the Church, take communion every Sunday, and say my 'Hail Marys' regularly." "And you?" he asked the Protestant. "I would sell up everything and go on a world cruise and have a great time!" "And you?" he said to the Jew. "Me? I would see another doctor." That is intelligence! Machines can't be creative.

It will be easier if we understand few about the interval between the giving up of one body and the taking of another. First, the fact is that the experiences of that interval are like dreams. Whenever one experiences something, at that moment the experience is that of a real happening. But when one recalls it in memory, it becomes like a dream; it is dreamlike because there is no use of the senses. Your feeling and your conviction that a happening is real come through your senses and your body. After the giving up of one body and before the taking of another we do not have senses. The body itself is not there, so whatever you might experience in that state is like a dream, as if you are seeing a dream. When we see dreams, we do not doubt their reality. This is very interesting. After some time we come to doubt its reality, but we never doubt it while in the dream. The dream seems real. That which is real sometimes causes us to doubt whether what is seen is real or not, but in a dream such a doubt is never created. Why? Because a dream will not tolerate the slightest doubt; otherwise it will immediately break. Just similar to this condition is the interval between two bodies. Whatever happens during that period seems absolutely real – so real that we can never know such a reality with our eyes and senses. The heavenly damsels they encounter are so real to them – real such as no woman seen through our senses can ever be. That is also why there is no end to the miseries of spirits. Their miseries befall them so realistically, such as they never do in real life. So what we call heaven and hell are just deep dream lives. The intensity of the fire burning in hell can never be found in real life, though it is a very inconsistent fire. In scriptures, there are descriptions of the fires of hell, into which you are thrown without being burned. But one is never aware of this inconsistency – that if you were thrown into an intense fire you would not be able to withstand the heat; yet you are not in any way being burned. This inconsistency, that ”I am being burned in the fire,” that the fire is terrible, that the burning is unbearable and yet ”I am not burned at all,” is realized only after one is out of this dreamlike experience. In the interval between two births, there are two types of souls. One type is of evil souls. For them it is difficult to find a womb for another birth. The other type consists of good souls. For such souls also it is difficult to find suitable wombs for taking another birth. Between these two are the majority of souls in which there is no fundamental difference, but only a difference of character, personality and mental make-up. They are born immediately. During that interval, there is no clear awareness of the duration of time. Because of this, Christianity has said that there is hell forever. This is said on the basis of the memory of those who have seen a very long dream. It was such a long dream that when they returned they had no memory of any relationship between this body and the previous one. That is why they said that hell is eternal and it is very difficult to get out of it. Good souls see happy dreams and evil souls see unhappy dreams. Only because of their dreams are they feeling unhappy and miserable. Heaven and hell are also memories of a dream period. Descriptions can be given. It is only on such descriptions that concepts of heaven and hell have been evolved by all religions. The descriptions are different not because the places are different, but because the mental states of the individuals recalling the experiences are different. Therefore, when Christianity describes heaven, it will be different from what Hinduism will describe, because descriptions depend on different states of consciousness. Actually, every person will bring back a different story. It is more or less like when we all sleep in the same room and then get up and describe our dreams. We have slept in the same room; we are at the same place, but our dreams will be different. Everything depends upon the person.

Enlightenment is only the beginning. There is infinity…to go far. Enlightenment is only a door, and then there is an unending existence, an unending evolution, expansion. The people who are unconscious, for them enlightenment is the goal; but they are not aware of the fact that enlightenment is only a door. Once you have reached it, then a new kind of pilgrimage starts. Up to this door you were an entity; beyond this door you will not be an entity, you will be just pure consciousness without a body, without a mind. You will be just a fragrance which will go on spreading all over existence. And the fragrance is luminous. It is full of awareness. It knows itself and it knows the whole existence around it – not as separate but part, a kind of at-one-ment. It is the universe and the universe is it; there is no division, no duality. Now the observer becomes the observed, the seer becomes the seen. He is both. Just as you enter beyond enlightenment into nothingness, there must be a possibility of coming out of nothingness back into form, back into existence—renewed, refreshed, luminous—on a totally different plane. In the East we have a conception of circles of existence and non-existence, just like day and night. Creation is followed by de-creation, everything goes into nothingness, just as day is followed by night and everything goes into darkness. And the period is going to be the same: as long as the creation is, so is the resting period going to be; and again there will be a creation of a higher order. And this will go on from eternity to eternity — creation, de-creation, creation, again de-creation—but each time the morning is more beautiful. Each dawn is more colorful, more alive; the birds are singing better, the flowers are bigger, with more fragrance. And the East has a tremendous courage of accepting the idea that this will go on forever and forever. There has never been any beginning, and there will be no end. It can be out of body experience near death, death means connection between body and consciousness is broken, you can not enter in same body again after death, it no longer remains suitable.

The separation of the body and the consciousness is death. Because there is this separation, it is meaningless to call it death -- it is merely a loosening, a breaking of a connection. It is nothing more than changing clothes. So, one who dies with awareness never really dies, hence the question of death never arises for him. He won't even call death an illusion. He won't even say who dies and who does not die. He will simply state that what we called life up to yesterday was merely an association. That association has broken. Now a new life has begun which, in the former sense, is not an association. Perhaps it is a new connection, a new journey. When a man dies in perfect awareness, his next birth will be perfectly aware. If you can die in this life fully aware, not becoming unconscious when you die; you remain perfectly conscious, you see every phase of death, you hear every step and you remain perfectly aware that the body is dying; the mind is disappearing and you remain perfectly aware; then suddenly you see that you are not in the body and consciousness has left the body. You can see the dead body lying there and you are floating around the body. Whatsoever happens in death will happen in birth because death is nothing but death on this side -- on that side it is birth. It is the same door. If you enter the door consciously, you will get out of the door consciously. Death is this side of the door, birth is that side of the door. Your next life will have a totally different flavor. And a person can be born only once after he has died consciously -- only one more life. So the first and the most important thing in life is to prepare for death. And what is the way to prepare for death? Moment-to-moment awareness is the way... If you can remain moment to moment aware, you will become perfectly clear that there is something in you which is beyond death, which cannot be burned, cannot be destroyed, which is indestructible. And to know that rock of indestructibility within you is the beginning of a new life. When we die unconsciously we get reborn according to our tendencies/karma. When consciousness has dawned you act for the first time, you don’t react and that action is beyond the law of karma. The law of karma applies only to the unconscious being. The man of awareness has absolute freedom. No law binds him, no law defines him. He’s as vast as the sky, he’s as infinite as the sky. His freedom is absolute. If you are awakened, you have transcended your Karma.

Avoiding pleasure is not a virtue, remain alert , conscious in pleasures will help you to grow. Eating your delicious food in right quantity, consciously is better that stuffing too much with least delicious food unconsciously.

Death can bring full enlightenment , if a person dies consciously. Tibetans have done much work on art of dying consciously. The Bardo teachings are Tibet’s greatest contribution to humanity. There is no need to believe anything, as your meditation will ripen, you will know that entering into meditation is an experience of death, before death.

But people die unconsciously. When you die, you will not know, you will be unconscious – you will miss the opportunity of knowing death. Your life here should be the days of meditation, love, compassion, friendliness, playfulness, laughter; and if you can do that, you will be rewarded by a conscious death. That is the reward of a conscious life. An unconscious life comes to die unconsciously. You cannot manage to die consciously without a long, meditative, conscious life. Only a conscious life is rewarded with conscious death — it is a reward, but only to the conscious man.To the un conscious man, it is the end to all his efforts, ambitions, desires.There is only darkness ahead,not a single light and no possibilities left.Death simply takes away the whole future. Naturally, the unconscious man is immensely afraid and deeply trembling, knowing that death is coming closer every day.Since your birth, the only thing that has been certain is death;everything else is uncertain and accidental.Only death is not accidental; it is an absolute certainty. There is no way to avoid it or dodge it. Only a meditator is capable of passing through death as if it is a joke. He can pass through it laughing and singing, because he knows that fire cannot burn him and death cannot destroy him. There is no sword that can cut him. He belongs to eternal life. Once a small glimpse of eternity is achieved, no life can be destroyed by anything. It can be moved from one form to another, but death cannot do more than that — it is just the changing of the house. To the non-meditator, death is the end, to the meditator, death is a beginning, freed from the old rotten body, the old mind. It is a resurrection; every death is a resurrection. But if you don’t know it, you will die unconsciously without experiencing the beauty of resurrection. If you can die consciously, death is only a door into a new life on a higher plane. But to die consciously, one has to live consciously.

Don’t try to escape in any way from anything – work or family. One is to escape from nowhere – because the escapist mind can become peaceful, but it cannot become blissful; that’s the trouble. An escapist mind can become peaceful, because if you don’t work, if you avoid every situation where trouble can arise, where there is challenge, conflict, competition, then of course, naturally you become peaceful. But that peace is bogus and not worth having. The slightest disturbance, and it will be disturbed. I would like a peace that is attained amidst flames, a peace which is attained in the marketplace; a peace that is attained where there is no possibility of attaining it. Then you attain to an integration; a crystallization comes to you. Of course the way is long and hard, but the short-cut is just an escape.

‘I’m not here to take your beatings, Mohandas’ Extracted from The Secret Diary of Kasturba All my life I had looked upon the cleaning of toilet pots as the lowliest of jobs; a task that condemned those who did it as subhumans, unfit to even reside inside the city limits where decent folks lived. I knew that even their shadows were unclean and deemed you ritually impure if they were to fall upon you. These wretched cleaners were allowed into our homes only in the thick of the night, so that no one set sight on their ill-omened faces while they went about their jobs of removing night soil from the homes of the upper castes. And now Mohandas tells me to defile myself and clean my own toilet and if need be, other’s toilets as well! How dare he? I felt my unborn child kick hard at the walls of my womb. Another wave of nausea hit my throat and I ran out into the garden for a breath of fresh air. A rancid stench persisted in my breath and my heart raced uncontrollably. I sat on a low chair facing the sea, till the melody of the rising and falling waves lulled me to sleep. https://www.telegraphindia.com/1161002/jsp/7days/story_111346.jsp

Were you expecting such bitter truths in his biography ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harilal_Gandhi https://www.theguardian.com/film/2007/aug/10/india http://europe.newsweek.com/ghandi-father-troubled-son-99519?rm=eu

Meditation, as such, needs no technique at all. But techniques are needed to remove the obstacles in the way of meditation. So it has to be understood very clearly: meditation itself needs no techniques, it is a simple understanding, an alertness, an awareness. Neither alertness is a technique nor is awareness a technique. But on the way to being alert, there are so many obstacles. For centuries man has been gathering those obstacles — they need to be removed. Meditation itself cannot remove them, certain techniques are needed to remove them. So the work of the techniques is just to prepare the ground, is just to prepare the way, the passage. The techniques in themselves are not meditation. If you stop at the technique, you have missed the point. J. Krishnamurti was insisting his whole life that there is no technique for meditation. And the total result was not that millions of people attained to meditation; the total result was that millions of people became convinced that no technique is needed for meditation. But they forgot all about what they were going to do with the obstructions, the hindrances. So they remained intellectually convinced that no technique is needed. No technique is needed at all as far as meditation is concerned. But what are you going to do with your mind? Your mind will create a thousand and one difficulties. Those techniques are needed to remove the mind from the way, to create a space in which the mind becomes quiet, silent, almost absent. Then meditation happens on its own accord. Meditation is your nature, is your very potential. It is another name of alertness. Meditation is simply awareness without any effort, an effortless alertness; it does not need any technique. But your mind is so full of thoughts, so full of dreams, so much of the past, so much of the future ¯ it is not here now, and awareness has to be here now. The techniques are needed to help you to cut your roots from the past, to cut your dreams from the future, and to keep you in this moment as if only this moment exists. Then there is no need of any technique. Life is a complicated affair. There is good news, and there is bad news. The good news is that there is no need of any technique; but the bad news is, without any technique you are not going to get it.

Mahatma Gandhi. He observed, cultivated non-violence; but I have looked deeply into his life and he is one of the most violent men this century has known. But his violence is very polished; his violence is so sophisticated that it looks almost like non-violence. His eldest son, Haridas, escaped. Seeing the situation — "This man is going to destroy our lives completely" — he escaped, reached a relative’s family and told the whole story, what was happening, and that "I want to go to school." Just see the situation: the boy has to escape from the home to get into school. Boys escape from school, not to go there… and Haridas had to leave his home and ask some uncle, some faraway relative, "Please help me. At least I would like to be a matriculate; then I will see later on. But up to matriculation, that much education is absolutely necessary." Gandhi was very angry. The prophet of nonviolence was angry, violently angry. What he said was, "Now this home is closed for Haridas. He should not be allowed in and nobody from my family should meet with him. Even his mother, his brothers, his sisters — nobody should see him and meet him. If anybody meets with him, he also goes with him. He has failed me." You impose such stupid ideas…. Now, what Haridas was doing was perfectly right. This man had to be disobeyed. The other children did not escape; they were weaklings. Haridas had some guts. And he showed later on that he did have some guts. Gandhi used to say, "All religions are one." That was also a political gimmick: "All religions are one — Hindu, Mohammedan, Christian, Jaina, Buddhist, Sikh… all religions are one." But the basic politics was to capture all these people and their votes, and to keep the whole of India undivided, so that Gandhi’s party ruled over the whole of India, not only a part of India. In his prayer meetings every morning the Koran was recited, The Bible was read, and other holy books were also included. Just a few pieces read from The Bible, a few pieces read from the Torah, a few pieces read from the Koran…. And there too was great cunningness, because I have looked into those pieces that were read: they were the pieces which were synonymous with the Gita. Only those pieces were chosen from The Bible that were synonymous with Krishna, because Gandhi used to call the Gita his mother. He never called the Koran "my father" or The Bible "my uncle" at least… only the Gita his mother. And all these fragments that he had chosen were deceptive. They were simply translations, as if they were the same message so there was no problem. All that was against the Gita — or different from the Gita, not even against it — was not chosen. So he was deceiving Mohammedans, he was deceiving Christians, he was deceiving Jainas, he was deceiving Buddhists, he was deceiving Sikhs, everybody. And they all thought that this man is a super-sage — that is the meaning of mahatma: the great soul. As if souls are also small or great! Souls are simply souls, neither small nor great. But the great soul, mahatma, because he was so liberal, unprejudiced… and he was full of prejudice. Haridas knew it. So what he did was, he converted himself to Mohammedanism. He did well. I appreciate him. The doors of the home were closed. Gandhi had abandoned him, declared, "He is no longer my son. I am no longer his father. He has utterly failed me. If he had died it would have been better." And what sin had he committed? He had gone to school! But he was really an intelligent boy. As he left the school, he turned to Mohammedanism. And Mohammedans rejoiced. They enjoyed the idea that Gandhi’s eldest son found shelter in Mohammedanism. They started calling him "Mahatma Abdullah Gandhi." They kept ‘Mahatma’ and ‘Gandhi’ so people remembered who he was, and changed ‘Haridas’ into ‘Abdullah’ — which means literally ‘Haridas’. abd’allah — servant of God, and that is exactly the meaning of haridas: servant of God. It is the Arabic translation of Haridas, so it was exactly the same. But Gandhi was so shocked! You can imagine, if just his son’s going to school was enough for Gandhi to abandon him as a son, now he has become a Mohammedan! Gandhi wept. Now, this is the man who says all the religions are the same. So what is the difference? Whether he is Hindu or Mohammedan — what difference does it make? And even his name was nothing but an Arabic translation of the Sanskrit name — an exact translation. Just by coincidence, there was a meeting in Bombay. Just by coincidence, Gandhi was going into the same train from which Haridas was getting out. Kasturba, after all, was a mother; she wanted at least to have a look at her son. She knew that her husband wouldn’t allow them to talk, but Gandhi didn’t allow her even to see him. He said, "Remember, don’t look at him. He is dead for us. He has slapped me on my face by becoming a Mohammedan." He forgot all that synthesis of all the religions… and still the prayer continued the same way every day.

Postures in which you stay for longer periods comfortably. Meher Baba (Merwan Sheriar Irani was born in 1894 in Pune, India to Irani Zoroastrian parents.) for years together he was staring just at the ceiling of his room. For years together he was just lying dead on the floor, staring at the ceiling without moving an eyelash, without moving his eyes. He would lie down for hours together, just staring, not doing anything. Meher Baba stared and stared and stared. By and by thoughts ceased, movement ceased, and he became just a consciousness, he became just a staring.

I was not talking about Buddhism, I was talking about Buddha (Siddhartha Gautama).