To see something from far away is one thing, and to become that thing is totally another. A glimpse of love is just like a breeze that passes within seconds; a glimpse of silence is just like the fragrance of a rose flower that you felt for a moment, and now you don’t know where it has gone.
When I say, “Crystallize your experience,” I mean it is not enough to have beautiful glimpses. It is good, but not good enough. You should become the fragrance of the rose itself; the glimpse was only an arrow pointing towards the possibility – it did its work, but you remain there. In the past life also, many times you have come across many beautiful experiences and right now you don’t know even that there have been past lives.
Only once in a while you see somebody, and you have a very strange feeling, almost weird, as if you have seen this man before – and certainly not in this life. You come to a place, and suddenly you are startled, as if you had come to this place before too – although certainly not in this life. Everything seems to be known, but has been dormant in your unconscious.
Life has a mechanism that whenever a person dies, unless he is enlightened, he becomes almost unconscious; he goes into a coma before death, actual death, happens. So he knows nothing about the death, and he remains in a state of coma till he is born again. All those nine months in the mother’s womb are a state of coma; the child is fast asleep twenty-four hours a day for nine months.
It rarely happens that somebody dies consciously. It happens only to great meditators, who know well the path death will be coming on because in their meditations they have traveled on the path again and again – it is the same path. As they go deep in their meditation the body is left far away, mind is left far away, the heart is left far away; only a beautiful silence – fully alert and conscious – remains.
The same happens when you die. If you have been meditating, then death is not a new experience. You will be surprised that in your meditation you have been dying every day, and you have been coming back to life every day. Such a person dies very consciously, so he knows what death is – and such a person remains conscious in the mother’s womb. He is also born consciously. From his very first moment on the earth, he knows all that has passed before in the past life, and he remembers it.
I have come across many children…. And this happens most particularly in India, because outside India – where Christianity is prominent or Judaism is prominent or Mohammedanism is prominent – they have conditioned the mind that there is only one life. They don’t know anything about meditation. They have substituted meditation with prayer, and prayer is praising a fictitious god; it is very childish.
Meditation needs no god – you are enough. You are a reality, and you explore your reality to the deepest core.