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cause I can't feel any change when you sit down and close your eyes?" They said that yes, they were working in the forest, all the time thinking about themselves, about how they felt, and I do not know what else. I said, "This is not meditation, this is introversion. Don't bother about your energy, about how you feel or whether you have digested your food or not."
Actually my definition of a yogi (and I know that it is Gandhi's definition too, he just says it in a slightly different way) is a person who does not care how he or she feels, he has other things to do. It is not that he is lacking awareness. So I told the group, and I was fortunate (as a teacher you know that you are fortunate when your students hear what you say) that they picked it up, and they stopped meditating all day. So the next day when we sat down for meditation, I just felt that everybody was there and we had the most wonderful meditation, because they did it at one time during the day.
Later on, when they have learned the art of meditation and are able to get the full benefit, it will automatically spread outward and they will become witnesses to their daily lives in a marvellous way. As it is said in one of the tantric books, "When you are angry, be angry with great awareness; when you are sad, be sad with great awareness." But this should be learned in meditation, as meditation is different from the ordinary state.
This morning we heard a speaker talking about the 'relaxation response'. This phrase has been publicized by an American, Dr. Benson. He says, "It 's easy to be angry: it's easy to be afraid." We all know that our sympathetic nervous system is very easily agitated. We call it the fight or flight response. However, to sit down and relax, just like that, and to think that you can use your will to relax, that is almost impossible. Dr. Benson gets people into his laboratory and tests their blood pressure. He says that you can ask a person to relax, but if he is stressed his blood pressure will not drop and also his brain will not relax very much. You can say, "Ah, I'm relaxing. I am relaxing." You may try to hypnotize yourself like that, but it does not work.
Therefore, it is very important in understanding all these aspects that we have heard from this platform already in these first few days, that we do not forget that the technique of
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