Osho,
Since I have been here with you and listening to you so closely, I see my body – and the feelings I have toward it – changing a lot. The way I walk, the way I look at myself when taking a shower, the way I feel in my body – everything seems so different to me that I can only recognize it with an astonished face.
Does the body follow the mind, and is my mind being influenced by my heart?

Man is not a machine but an organism, and the difference between the two is very significant to understand. The machine has parts, the organism has members. You can take the parts apart; nothing dies. You can put the parts together again and the machine starts functioning. But in an organism if you take the members apart, something dies. You can put them together again, but the organism will not be alive again. The organism is a living unity; everything is connected with everything else.

Whatever happens to you, either in the body or in the mind or in the heart or in your awareness, is going to change everything in the whole organism. You are going to be affected as a whole. The members of the organic unity are not just parts put together, there is something more.

A machine is simply a sum total of its parts. An organism is something more than the sum total of its parts – and that “more” is your soul which penetrates everything in you. So every change, wherever it happens, is going to ring bells all over your being.

That’s why there are different systems. For example, yoga is one of the most prominent systems for those who are working for self-realization. But almost its whole function is with the body, the body postures. It is a tremendous research – the people who have done it, have done an almost impossible job. They have found in what postures your mind takes a certain attitude, your heart takes a certain rhythm, your awareness becomes more acute or less acute. They have developed all the body postures in such a way that just working on the body, not touching anything else, they will change your total being.

It is long work, tedious; it is also too difficult because the body is an absolutely unconscious part of your being. To train it, and in strange postures which are not natural, is bound to be a difficult job.

You will be surprised to know that because the yoga system found that this life is short to work with all the postures of the body, to change the whole inner being, they were the first in the world to think of lengthening life so that they can accomplish the task in this life. Because the difficulty with the body is, you may have worked your whole life – sixty years, seventy years – and you may have come to a certain state, but this body will die. And when you get a new body, you will have to start from scratch; you cannot start from where you had stopped in the past life. This was such a great difficulty for the yoga system that they started looking at how to lengthen the body’s life span and they found exact ways, which are now confirmed by science from other investigations.