So if you eat less, the nourishment will be less so you will be thin. You will not be a Mohammed Ali, you will not be able to do boxing – but you can live long because your digestive system will remain young, fresh, almost clean, because so much work has been dropped so the digestive system can work that much longer. The digestive system working longer, and gravitation having the least effect on you, can easily make your life one hundred and fifty, sixty years long. And the requirement for living long was not lust for life but because they had chosen a very slow vehicle of transformation: the body.
But through the body people have reached to enlightenment. They have not done anything except changing body postures. In a certain posture the mind functions in a certain way, in a certain posture it stops functioning, in a certain posture you become very alert – and you know it, but you have never cared to go more deeply into it.
When you go to sleep why do you lie down? – that is simply changing the posture. Sitting and sleeping is difficult, standing and sleeping is more difficult, standing on your head and sleeping is almost impossible. If you are standing on your head and you try to sleep…you can make arrangements, you can tie your feet to something and have every protection that even if you fall asleep you will not fall down on the earth – then too you will not sleep, because so much blood is rushing into your head. To sleep we need that the blood should not be going into the head with great speed, in great amounts – it should be going in less.
That’s why everybody uses a pillow. It is a yoga posture. Yoga has been thinking into every detail. Why do you want a pillow? Without a pillow it is difficult to sleep because the flood of blood remains equal in the feet and in the head. But with a pillow the head automatically receives less blood and the activity in the head slows down. Intellectuals need two pillows so that that big quantity of blood is cut completely; otherwise they cannot sleep!
In ordinary life also you can see this happening. With every mood, emotion, thought, your body takes a certain posture. If you are just watchful you will see that there is a relationship, and the relationship is such that you cannot change it. For example a person like me: if you tie both my hands down I cannot speak, I simply cannot speak. I will simply be at a loss for what to do, because my hands are so deeply connected with my expressions.
And you must know that your one hand is connected to one hemisphere of the mind: the left hand with the right hemisphere, the right hand with the left hemisphere. They are extensions of your mind. So whatever I am speaking, I am speaking through two mediums: through words and through hands, and each gesture of the hand helps me to give an expression to a certain idea. If my hands are tied down, it is impossible for me to say anything. I have tried it, and I suddenly find speaking absolutely difficult – and I want to say something, and I say something else. The whole thing is that the rhythm with my hands is disturbed.
I have heard about two Jews walking on a beach on a cold winter morning. One was talking great business, offering things at half price. But the other man said, “Whatever you do, I cannot speak.”
The man asked, “Why can’t you speak? I am offering you things because I want to get out of this business. I can give you even more of a discount.”