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him sit in meditation until, in the ecstasy of samadhi, he left his body. Such living examples convinced. Gurudev that old age and sickness are only concepts; they are not certainties.
If one leads a healthy life, takes the right kind of nutrition for body and mind, where is there room for decrepitude and old age? These two are not inevitable after all. And I have seen with my own eyes men who did not believe in death, who transcended and transformed, whose last breath gave a profound sense of the continuity of life and consciousness.
It was good that he had these occasions to witness firsthand living examples of what he had glimpsed in his own meditations. He had a new admiration for the simple villagers themselves who, at someone's departure, never used the words "loss," "gone," or "died," but instead, used the Gujarati expression pachothayo which means "become again." Thanks to their intuition and trust, the people believed in continuity. Instead of feeling someone's disappearance, they had the certainty that the person had gone on to another state.
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In the year 1956, when Gurudev and his father and a few other main disciples of Acharya Anand Sagarsuriji were staying in Bhavnagar, they were informed that their guru who was at Surat was preparing for final departure. He had stopped taking food, and was accepting only a certain amount of liquids each day. For three days, they were told, he was sitting in the same lotus posture, in deep meditation.
Gurudev felt his vibrant presence continually. No matter how clear he was in his mind that his guru's present mission was over, upon hearing the news of his final departure, Gurudev felt in his heart a kind of void, a deep inner pain. His soul knew the truth, but his heart missed his guru's physical presence. He meditated and saw that though there was never a moment of discontinuity of spiritual presence, still, on a physical and emotional level, he felt absence. At the same time, he watched himself feeling his feeling. Through this process, he came back to himself.
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He realized, too, that it was a loss not only to him but also to all those who had been seeking his light. In his embodiment
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