And the scientists have come to discover a tremendously meaningful thing: the moment the remote controller releases the center it rewinds itself immediately. For example, your speech center, the remote control can force you to speak. There is no audience, you will feel awkward, but you cannot do anything, you have to speak. It is just like a recording. When the remote controller releases the button, the pressure on the electrode, you become silent. Press the button again…and the strange thing is, you start your speech again from the very beginning!

When I was reading about the scientific investigations into these centers, I was reminded of my student days. I was a competitor in an inter-university debate; all the universities of the country were participating. The Sanskrit University of Varanasi was also participating, but naturally the students from the Sanskrit University were feeling a little inferior compared with competitors from other universities. They knew ancient scriptures, they knew Sanskrit poetry, drama, but they were not familiar with the contemporary world of art, literature, philosophy or logic. And the inferiority complex works in very strange ways.

Just after I had spoken, the next person was the representative from the Sanskrit University. And just to impress the audience and to hide his inferiority complex he started his speech with a quotation from Bertrand Russell – he had crammed it, and Sanskrit students are more capable of cramming things than anybody else. But his stage fright… He knew nothing about Bertrand Russell, he knew nothing about what he was quoting. It would have been better to have quoted something from Sanskrit, because he would have been more at ease. In the middle he stopped – just in the middle of a sentence. And I was sitting by his side, because I had just finished. There was silence, and he was perspiring. And just to help him, I said, “Start again” – because what else to do? He was simply stuck. “And if you cannot go ahead, you start again; perhaps it may come back to you.”

So he started again: “Brothers and sisters…” And at exactly the same point he got stuck again. Now it became a joke. The whole hall was shouting, “Again!” And he was in such a difficult situation: neither could he go ahead nor could he keep standing there, silent; it looked very idiotic. So he had to start again. But he would start again, “Brothers and sisters…” For a whole fifteen minutes we heard only that portion: “Brothers and sisters” up to the point where he got stuck, again and again.

When his time was finished he came and sat next to me. He said, “You destroyed my whole thing.”

I said, “I was trying to help you.”

He said, “This is help?”

I said, “You were going to be in difficulty anyway. This way at least everybody enjoyed it except you – that I can understand, but you should rejoice that you made so many people happy. And why did you choose that quotation? When I was saying to you, ‘Start again’ there was no need to start over – you could have dropped that quotation, there was no need to begin again from the very beginning.”