One afternoon,
I just went and sat on a small hill,
Which was in a town where I grew up.
Till that moment I always thought this is me and that's somebody else.
I had no issue with that somebody else,
But that is somebody,
This is me.
For the first time I did not know which is me and which is not me.
What was me was just spread all over the place.
I thought this madness lasted for five,
Ten minutes,
But when I came back to my normal ways of being,
Four-and-a-half hours had passed.
I'm sitting right there,
Fully conscious,
Eyes open.
I sat there around three o'clock in the afternoon,
It's seven-thirty in the evening,
Sun has set and I thought it's only ten minutes,
But four-and-a-half hours had passed.
For the first time in my adult life,
Tears were flowing to a point where my shirt is completely wet.
Me and tears were impossible,
I'm like this.
I've always been happy,
That's never been an issue for me.
I was successful with what I was doing,
I was young and no problems.
I was fine,
But I'm bursting with another kind of ecstasy which is indescribable.
Every cell in my body is just bursting with ecstasy.
I had no words.
When I shook my head and tried to ask my skeptical mind,
Okay,
What's happening to me?
The only thing that my mind could tell me was,
Maybe you're going off your rocker.
I didn't care what it was,
But I didn't want to lose it because this is the most beautiful thing that I had ever touched and I had never imagined that a human being could ever feel like this within himself.
So when I went to my closest friends and said,
See,
Something is happening to me like this.
As I'm talking,
Tears would flow and people would say,
Did you drink something?
Did you pop something?
What did you do?
I knew there was no point in talking to anybody because if I just look at the sky,
Tears will come.
If I look at a tree,
Tears will come.
If I close my eyes,
Tears will come.
I'm just bursting.
In six weeks' time,
Everything about me changed so dramatically and I just lost the sense of time.
The next time this happened was very significant because there were people around me.
I went and sat with my family at the dinner table.
I actually thought it's two minutes,
But seven hours had gone by.
I'm sitting right there,
Fully alert,
But I have no sense of time.
This happened many times.
One day I'm just sitting in my farm and I thought I sat there for about twenty-five,
Thirty minutes,
But I have sat there for thirteen days.
By then a crowd has gathered,
India being what it is.
There are huge garlands all around me.
Somebody is asking how to run his business,
Somebody wants to know when his daughters will get married.
All the nonsense,
I hate it.
Just happening around me.
And I actually thought it's only twenty-five,
Thirty minutes,
But these people saying,
Thirteen days he's sitting,
He's in samadhi,
He's this,
That.
I had not even heard these words.
I grew up on,
You know,
European philosophy,
Camus,
Kafka,
Dostoevsky.
You read that stuff in America?
Hmm?
I'm being sixties,
You know,
Beatles and this and that.
I grew up like that.
Me and spirituality are another world.
There's no chance of me going there.
So I had none of these vocabularies,
Samadhi,
This,
That stuff in me.
People are saying,
Oh,
He's in this kind of samadhi,
He's in that kind of samadhi.
You touch him,
This will happen and people are trying to grab me.
So the only thing that I could do is leave the place and travel out,
Just to escape this,
Because I couldn't figure what's happening around me.
Why I'm telling you this story is,
This is possible for every human being.
It's my wish and my blessing,
This must happen to you.
Whether you climb Mount Everest or not,
Whether you become the richest man on this planet or not,
Your experience of life on this planet should be pleasant.
You must live blissfully and go.
That must happen to every human being.
Everybody deserves it and everybody is capable of it.
