Science is still not involved in looking at what yoga has found, but working on different things. Psychologists have come to know that if you eat less, you live long. You will be thin, you won’t look so beautiful, but your life will be lengthened. If you eat more, you may look good, but your life will be shortened.
Even today there are people who are eating so little that you cannot conceive how they survive – but they are surviving longer than anybody else. I used to know one man who died in his one hundred and fortieth year, and the whole process was just to take as little food as possible. And the reason is not that they want to live long; the reason is the system that they have developed is such…it is concerned with the body, and the body is our most unconscious part: it does not change easily. It changes but it takes a long time.
I have found people who have almost done miracles just by body postures which look irrelevant, because consciousness is such a faraway thing. But just sitting in a certain posture you will be surprised: you can watch how you change. Everybody knows about the lotus posture in which you see Buddha sitting. That is the most famous posture. It has been found now that gravitation has the least effect on you if sit in the lotus posture with your spine absolutely straight and the whole body relaxed. And it is gravitation that kills you; the more you are affected by gravitation, the more you are pulled toward the grave.
It became perfectly clear when Einstein declared that if we can find vehicles moving with the same velocity, the same speed, as light, then the people who are moving in those vehicles will not age – not at all. If they leave the earth and come back after fifty years, all their contemporaries will be dead. Perhaps one or two may still be alive – on their deathbeds – but they will come back exactly the same age as when they left.
His idea was that at the speed of light, aging stops. But that is only a hypothesis, there is no experiment to prove it, because it is difficult to find a vehicle which will move with the speed of light, because at that speed everything will burn up. There is no metal, there is no material, from which you can make the vehicle, so it seems to be impossible.
But Einstein was not aware of the yoga explanation. The yoga explanation is that the person can return back to the earth at the same age. Because he has been out of the field of gravitation he cannot age – and that seems to be far more practical, far more scientific. Thousands of yogis have lived longer than anybody else. Just sitting in that posture, gravitation has the least effect on them.
And why does eating less or fasting help to lengthen life? The yoga system has found that when you eat, your food is doing two things. One, it is giving you nourishment. That we know; first that we eat. Second – of which we are not aware – is that eating is tiring your digestive system; it is becoming older. The more it has to digest the less young it is, and your life depends on your digestive system.