According to Albert Einstein, a very strange conclusion…of course, it has not yet been tested, but it seems possible. If the passengers of both the rockets don’t feel any movement, they will become very still and very silent. Not only in their minds, but even in their body cells the silence of no-movement will penetrate. It will be so enormous, so overwhelming, that when they return – you will be surprised – all their friends, their old colleagues, will have grown ten years older and they will not have aged at all. Those ten years they have missed. They have not moved a single inch, either in their body or in their mind, because movement has stopped being their experience.
Einstein was absolutely certain – and I agree with him. It seems absurd that a traveler will come back and find that his own generation is finished and a new generation has taken over, because he has been long away, traveling in the sky. But when there is no movement around you, slowly, slowly that non-movement stops everything moving within you: the mind, the body – everything.
Even he was shocked when he proposed the theory. It will still take a few years for us to be absolutely certain of what he was saying, because even to reach to the nearest star takes four years; and the return journey means eight years – and this is the nearest star. We don’t have yet any vehicle to move – without continuous fuel stations on the way – for four years.
Secondly, the moment you are out of the grip of gravitation…. You don’t feel gravitation because you are born in gravitation. Otherwise the earth is pulling you down so forcibly…most of your aging is because of the pull of the earth. The area of gravitation is two hundred miles around the earth. Once you are out of the gravitation area, there is nothing to pull you down; you simply remain the same. The same gravitation that is killing you also keeps you rooted, because without gravitation you will be simply gone – just saying good-bye to each other and moving into the eternal, never to meet again. It is so vast…and the speed will be such that you will be burned by the speed.
There are practical problems; that’s why Albert Einstein could not persuade anybody to take the risk. The speed has to be exactly the speed of light – that is the ultimate speed. One hundred and eighty-six thousand miles per second – at that speed everything stops. You can go around the universe for thousands of years and you will come back to the earth the same, as young as you had left. But it is just theoretical and hypothetical; it is difficult, for the simple, pragmatic reason that at the speed of light no metal can remain unmelted. The heat is so much that the vehicle in which you are moving will melt down, burning you with it.