The chief disciple, “the Mother” of the Sri Aurobindo ashram, finally found a solution to it. She said, “He is not dead, he has gone into deep samadhi, the deepest that anyone has ever gone. He will wake up again – he is simply asleep.”

So they made a marble grave for him, with all the comforts, because he was just sleeping and one day he was going to wake up; this was his last experiment in physical immortality. Then years passed, but he did not knock from the grave. People started suspecting, but the mother was over ninety, and she was still preaching physical immortality.

Then one day she died. It was very difficult for the believers, because the believers had some investment; their investment was their own immortality. If both the leaders were dead, then there was no hope for them. And they had not yet told them the real secret; they had been telling them that they were working on it.

Sri Aurobindo used to give an audience only once a year to his disciples. The rest of the year he was working constantly – that was the idea in the ashram – for physical immortality. Now both are lying in their graves, and there are still idiots living in the ashram, believing that they will awake one day.

Idiots are also miracles – they still believe. My friend who has been there, and still is there, is a doctor of philosophy, but he still believes. He had been coming to see me, but there is no way to convince him. I tried every possible way, but he said, “Patanjali himself says in the Yoga Sutras that samadhi and sushupti – samadhi and deep sleep – are exactly alike. They have gone into deep sleep to find out the secret of physical immortality.”

I said, “But how long will it take? By that time you will all be dead! Even if they come…. You just go and open the grave, and you will know that it is no longer sleep. There are only skeletons, stinking of death, not the fragrance of immortality.”

The believer is such that he goes on believing, because his belief is basically for a reason: he is afraid that perhaps they are dead, and then what about him? And that stops him…the idea that they are dead. Do you see the point? He cannot accept that Sri Aurobindo and the mother are dead because that means he will have to die – and he does not want to die. That’s why he has come and lived there for years, waiting for the secret to be revealed. He will wait: “They are asleep and working.”

Desperate efforts…and they happen only when something is really gone and you don’t have it. Then you get into a frenzy of creating some way that you can continue to believe in it. For example, the Bible believes that God created the world four thousand and four years before Jesus Christ, which is only six thousand years ago. Now, that is disproved so abundantly that it is absolutely wrong.