Ascension

by JagmOHaN Singh Sekhon June 29, 2021

The fear of death has always made people do crazy things. For ages, whenever people become affluent, all the powerful people, the greatest emperors always looked for immortality. The mummies in Egypt are an example of this. When people became affluent, when they felt they had everything but life still had not happened to them — this is the experience of the affluent — naturally they sought immortality. Every king, every powerful person on the planet always sought to be immortal somehow. But that would be the worst curse for anyone. If you really want to curse someone, do not wish them death; wish them endless life. Just imagine, after ten thousand years, still walking the same planet, still trying to do the same stupid things, how would it be. What a curse it is!
There is a story about Alexander the Great. I don’t know why he is called “Great.” What is great about the man? From the age of sixteen till he was thirty-two when he died, for sixteen years non-stop, the man fought, killing thousands of people — people he never knew. He would just come to a new country, kill the people and say “I have conquered.” What has he done that is of any consequence or any good to any other human being? What has he done of any consequence or any good to himself? He lived an utterly idiotic life and died a miserable man. He is called “Alexander the Great” but they forgot his last name — it should be “Alexander the Great Idiot.”

Alexander and the Yogi

Alexander, as he sought many other idiotic things in his life, also sought immortality because he wanted to conquer the whole world with his might. In a most brutal way he has conquered half of the known world at that time and he was becoming desperate because now he saw that he needed much more time to fulfill his project. So he wanted to become immortal. In search of immortality, he naturally came towards India because so many stories had reached Greece and he had heard a lot about Indian yogis. People had told him that many of these yogis were immortal so he was eager to meet one.
He sent a team of soldiers ahead of the rest of the army and told them, “Get me a yogi.” After a search, they found a yogi sitting in meditation. The soldiers said, “Come with us. Our Emperor wants you.” The yogi replied, “I am not going anywhere. If your Emperor wants, let him come here. He is most welcome but I am not going anywhere.” When they heard this they pulled out their swords, “Either you come with us or we cut your head off and take it with us.” The yogi laughed and said, “Okay, take my head. What is he going to do with my head. Let him take it. Anyway I have reached a point in my life where I am finished with everything that I have to do. I am just waiting to go. You have come to assist me.”
The soldiers had never seen anything like this. These soldiers were deadly people. It was nothing for them to take a life. The moment they pull their swords out everyone trembled. But this man says, “Okay. Take it.” They did not know what to do. They went back to Alexander and told him, “We met a yogi.” “Where is he, where is he?” “He is not willing to come.” “Why didn’t you drag him and come?” “No, he is not that kind. He is not even afraid. We threatened to take his head but he says, ‘Take it.’”
Alexander thought, “If he said, ‘Take my head, I am not bothered,’ he must be immortal. I want to meet him.” Alexander went and asked the yogi, “Oh yogi, are you immortal?” The yogi said, “‘Yes, I am not only immortal, I am all-pervading. I have crossed the limitations of the physical. I am everything and nothing.” Alexander asked, “Can you teach me immortality? I will give you anything you want.” Alexander asked his soldiers to bring huge chests of all the looted jewels, pearls, diamonds and gold. He opened it and said, “The treasure of the world is here.” The yogi laughed and said, “You have been picking things from the earth. All these gems and stones and gold are just earth. Somehow you attached too much value to it. You did not attach value to the mud that you walk on, which feeds you every day. This stone and this metal are no good for anything. You cannot eat it, you cannot do anything with it, but you carry it as treasure. This is trash which you picked up from earth. Why are you seeking immortality? This is not for you.” Alexander replied, “Either you teach me immortality now or we are going to take off your head!”
The yogi looked at the man, very amused and said, “Okay, you want to know it so badly. There is a particular forest here.” He gave Alexander the directions as to how to go there. And the yogi told him, “If you go to this place, you will find a small cave. Enter the cave. There will be a small pool of water. Take a handful of water and drink it. You will become immortal.”
Alexander set up an expedition. With a group of his bravest soldiers, he went into the forest. As the yogi had indicated certain landmarks, accordingly he went and found the cave. He entered the cave and was about to put his hands into the water and drink. There was a crow sitting on the other side of the pool. The crow said, “Wait! Stop!” Alexander looked surprised. A crow speaking Greek, not “Caw!”
The crow said “A long, long time ago I made the mistake of drinking from this pool, and I have been sitting here for I don’t know how long. My problem is I cannot die. I am finished with life in every way but I cannot die.” Can you imagine the predicament? “And I will sit here forever. Do you want to do this?” Alexander had his hands in the water. He was about to drink. All his life he wanted to become immortal. Now this crow put such a question and suddenly his life was in a different perspective. Conquering the world is a big thing for the next fifty years or so. But after five million years of sitting here, what would it mean? And you still cannot die.
Alexander just stood there, trembling. Sense dawned on him. Slowly he walked back and never drank from the pool. Otherwise we would have had to suffer Alexander even today. Aren’t we glad all the dead people are dead? Maybe you think, “No, but my father was such a wonderful man!” If he lives too long, he will become insufferable. He should live his normal course of life and go. Only then it is good.

Life & Death in One Breath

The greatest calamity of the human mind is that it is against death because the moment you reject death, you also reject life. Every moment of living here, we can either refer to this process that you are going through as life, or we can refer to it as death. Death is not something that is going to happen to you. Death is not in the future. The moment you are born, one half of death occurred. Your inhalation is life, your exhalation is death. When a child is born, the first thing the child does is one gasp of an inhalation. And if you look at your life, the last thing you will do is an exhalation.
Between life and death — life needs a certain tension; otherwise you cannot keep it going. Death is utter relaxation. Right now, you can experiment and see, if you take one big exhalation and one big inhalation and see how your body and your mind is, you will find the exhalation to be more relaxing. In fact, whenever you get tense, when things build up too much in you, the natural mechanism in the body wants to exhale. This is what you call as a sigh. It relaxes you a little bit. If in the very process of life, you know the relaxation of death, then life is an utterly effortless process.
This is how it would have naturally been if human beings’ minds had not banished death as evil. If traditions and cultures had not taught you that death is evil — that it should be avoided — you would breathe in a completely different way. If you observe, for almost 99% of people, because their mind has rejected death, they will inhale, but exhalation does not happen totally. This is one of the reasons why, over a period of time, you build up so much tension within the system that mentally and physiologically, it reaches a point of snapping.

A Reminder of Your Mortality

Right now, it takes a lifetime for people to understand that they are mortal. When you are young you think you are immortal. As the body starts creaking a little bit, you start to realize that the earth is calling. This body is a loan from this planet. The very body that you are is just the food that you have eaten. The food that you ate is just the earth. So you are just a piece of earth. The earth is calling you all the time but when you are old, you hear it very clearly.
You need to celebrate and enjoy every moment of your life because the goddamn thing is ticking away; it does not wait for you for a moment. Especially because you are mortal, it is extremely important that you make this into a joyful and fantastic process. If you were immortal, you could enjoy a hundred years each of depression, anxiety, madness and misery, and then on the 500th anniversary, you could become joyful. But it is not so; you are mortal and life is ticking away. There is no time for frustration, depression, anxiety or anger; there is no time for any unpleasantness in this life.
If you are constantly reminded that you are mortal, this whole life process will want to experience everything; it will become super alert. If you know you are going to die in the next one hour, you would notice every little bit of life. You will not miss anything. If every human being structures their psychological and emotional framework around the most fundamental fact of their life — their mortality, if you accept death as a process of life — constantly, moment to moment — your values of life would be completely different. Like a flower which blooms in the morning and dies in the evening, if you knew that you are also very much the same process — right now you are blooming, tomorrow morning you may be dead — then you would not miss a single flower on the road. You would become extremely life-oriented and your life will unhinge itself from the physicality and look for something beyond, naturally. The spiritual process will become a natural process of growth for you.

Meditation of HyperCube of Space Time

Sit comfortably on the floor in an erect position.
Take your time and visually build a Hypercube all around you.
Imagine the corners with three, four, five and six in front of you, and with one, two, seven and zero behind you. (Cubes have eight corner points; four below and four above.)
You are sitting right in the middle and your heart is in the center of the cube, the point where all four diagonals intersect (shown in white circle above).
Focus you attention on the center, the inner Self.
Then visualize the 0 point — Awareness behind and to the right going up.
Then go there mentally while inhaling very slowly.
When exhaling draw a diagonal through your center to 4 — Willing in front of you to the left going down.
Repeat this a few times if necessary.
Inhale going out to the zero point, exhale going down through the center to the 4 point.
Then return to your center and simultaneously expand to the two points (0–4) at once — inhaling your breath while you do this, then exhale and come back to the center.
Do it a second time.
The third time, if you wish, you can pierce through the Will-point into the Earth and through the Awareness point towards the infinite.
Then follow the same process with 7–3, 6–2, 5–1.
End by remaining in your center, in your Whole Self which includes all numerals and the Zero Awareness.

The fear of death has always made people do crazy things. For ages, whenever people become affluent, all the powerful people, the greatest emperors always looked for immortality. The mummies in Egypt are an example of this. When people became affluent, when they felt they had everything but life still had not happened to them — this is the experience of the affluent — naturally they sought immortality. Every king, every powerful person on the planet always sought to be immortal somehow. But that would be the worst curse for anyone. If you really want to curse someone, do not wish them death; wish them endless life. Just imagine, after ten thousand years, still walking the same planet, still trying to do the same stupid things, how would it be. What a curse it is!
There is a story about Alexander the Great. I don’t know why he is called “Great.” What is great about the man? From the age of sixteen till he was thirty-two when he died, for sixteen years non-stop, the man fought, killing thousands of people — people he never knew. He would just come to a new country, kill the people and say “I have conquered.” What has he done that is of any consequence or any good to any other human being? What has he done of any consequence or any good to himself? He lived an utterly idiotic life and died a miserable man. He is called “Alexander the Great” but they forgot his last name — it should be “Alexander the Great Idiot.”

Alexander and the Yogi

Alexander, as he sought many other idiotic things in his life, also sought immortality because he wanted to conquer the whole world with his might. In a most brutal way he has conquered half of the known world at that time and he was becoming desperate because now he saw that he needed much more time to fulfill his project. So he wanted to become immortal. In search of immortality, he naturally came towards India because so many stories had reached Greece and he had heard a lot about Indian yogis. People had told him that many of these yogis were immortal so he was eager to meet one.
He sent a team of soldiers ahead of the rest of the army and told them, “Get me a yogi.” After a search, they found a yogi sitting in meditation. The soldiers said, “Come with us. Our Emperor wants you.” The yogi replied, “I am not going anywhere. If your Emperor wants, let him come here. He is most welcome but I am not going anywhere.” When they heard this they pulled out their swords, “Either you come with us or we cut your head off and take it with us.” The yogi laughed and said, “Okay, take my head. What is he going to do with my head. Let him take it. Anyway I have reached a point in my life where I am finished with everything that I have to do. I am just waiting to go. You have come to assist me.”
The soldiers had never seen anything like this. These soldiers were deadly people. It was nothing for them to take a life. The moment they pull their swords out everyone trembled. But this man says, “Okay. Take it.” They did not know what to do. They went back to Alexander and told him, “We met a yogi.” “Where is he, where is he?” “He is not willing to come.” “Why didn’t you drag him and come?” “No, he is not that kind. He is not even afraid. We threatened to take his head but he says, ‘Take it.’”
Alexander thought, “If he said, ‘Take my head, I am not bothered,’ he must be immortal. I want to meet him.” Alexander went and asked the yogi, “Oh yogi, are you immortal?” The yogi said, “‘Yes, I am not only immortal, I am all-pervading. I have crossed the limitations of the physical. I am everything and nothing.” Alexander asked, “Can you teach me immortality? I will give you anything you want.” Alexander asked his soldiers to bring huge chests of all the looted jewels, pearls, diamonds and gold. He opened it and said, “The treasure of the world is here.” The yogi laughed and said, “You have been picking things from the earth. All these gems and stones and gold are just earth. Somehow you attached too much value to it. You did not attach value to the mud that you walk on, which feeds you every day. This stone and this metal are no good for anything. You cannot eat it, you cannot do anything with it, but you carry it as treasure. This is trash which you picked up from earth. Why are you seeking immortality? This is not for you.” Alexander replied, “Either you teach me immortality now or we are going to take off your head!”
The yogi looked at the man, very amused and said, “Okay, you want to know it so badly. There is a particular forest here.” He gave Alexander the directions as to how to go there. And the yogi told him, “If you go to this place, you will find a small cave. Enter the cave. There will be a small pool of water. Take a handful of water and drink it. You will become immortal.”
Alexander set up an expedition. With a group of his bravest soldiers, he went into the forest. As the yogi had indicated certain landmarks, accordingly he went and found the cave. He entered the cave and was about to put his hands into the water and drink. There was a crow sitting on the other side of the pool. The crow said, “Wait! Stop!” Alexander looked surprised. A crow speaking Greek, not “Caw!”
The crow said “A long, long time ago I made the mistake of drinking from this pool, and I have been sitting here for I don’t know how long. My problem is I cannot die. I am finished with life in every way but I cannot die.” Can you imagine the predicament? “And I will sit here forever. Do you want to do this?” Alexander had his hands in the water. He was about to drink. All his life he wanted to become immortal. Now this crow put such a question and suddenly his life was in a different perspective. Conquering the world is a big thing for the next fifty years or so. But after five million years of sitting here, what would it mean? And you still cannot die.
Alexander just stood there, trembling. Sense dawned on him. Slowly he walked back and never drank from the pool. Otherwise we would have had to suffer Alexander even today. Aren’t we glad all the dead people are dead? Maybe you think, “No, but my father was such a wonderful man!” If he lives too long, he will become insufferable. He should live his normal course of life and go. Only then it is good.

Life & Death in One Breath

The greatest calamity of the human mind is that it is against death because the moment you reject death, you also reject life. Every moment of living here, we can either refer to this process that you are going through as life, or we can refer to it as death. Death is not something that is going to happen to you. Death is not in the future. The moment you are born, one half of death occurred. Your inhalation is life, your exhalation is death. When a child is born, the first thing the child does is one gasp of an inhalation. And if you look at your life, the last thing you will do is an exhalation.

Between life and death — life needs a certain tension; otherwise you cannot keep it going. Death is utter relaxation. Right now, you can experiment and see, if you take one big exhalation and one big inhalation and see how your body and your mind is, you will find the exhalation to be more relaxing. In fact, whenever you get tense, when things build up too much in you, the natural mechanism in the body wants to exhale. This is what you call as a sigh. It relaxes you a little bit. If in the very process of life, you know the relaxation of death, then life is an utterly effortless process.

This is how it would have naturally been if human beings’ minds had not banished death as evil. If traditions and cultures had not taught you that death is evil — that it should be avoided — you would breathe in a completely different way. If you observe, for almost 99% of people, because their mind has rejected death, they will inhale, but exhalation does not happen totally. This is one of the reasons why, over a period of time, you build up so much tension within the system that mentally and physiologically, it reaches a point of snapping.

A Reminder of Your Mortality

Right now, it takes a lifetime for people to understand that they are mortal. When you are young you think you are immortal. As the body starts creaking a little bit, you start to realize that the earth is calling. This body is a loan from this planet. The very body that you are is just the food that you have eaten. The food that you ate is just the earth. So you are just a piece of earth. The earth is calling you all the time but when you are old, you hear it very clearly.

You need to celebrate and enjoy every moment of your life because the goddamn thing is ticking away; it does not wait for you for a moment. Especially because you are mortal, it is extremely important that you make this into a joyful and fantastic process. If you were immortal, you could enjoy a hundred years each of depression, anxiety, madness and misery, and then on the 500th anniversary, you could become joyful. But it is not so; you are mortal and life is ticking away. There is no time for frustration, depression, anxiety or anger; there is no time for any unpleasantness in this life.

If you are constantly reminded that you are mortal, this whole life process will want to experience everything; it will become super alert. If you know you are going to die in the next one hour, you would notice every little bit of life. You will not miss anything. If every human being structures their psychological and emotional framework around the most fundamental fact of their life — their mortality, if you accept death as a process of life — constantly, moment to moment — your values of life would be completely different. Like a flower which blooms in the morning and dies in the evening, if you knew that you are also very much the same process — right now you are blooming, tomorrow morning you may be dead — then you would not miss a single flower on the road. You would become extremely life-oriented and your life will unhinge itself from the physicality and look for something beyond, naturally. The spiritual process will become a natural process of growth for you.

How Your Energy System And Imagination Are Connected for Ascension

“If you have conclusions about everything, there is no possibility, no receptivity. If you have conclusions, you do not have to be attentive — you can go through life like you are dead. The more conclusions you have, the more rigor mortis there is in your mind and in your body as well.”

There is a certain geometry to the physical existence and to the energy existence. Everything in the universe, from the atomic to the cosmic, works the way it does because of geometric perfection. One of the most fundamental and the most stable forms in geometry is a triangle. In the human energy system, there are two equilateral triangles — an upward-pointing one below, and a downward-pointing one above. Normally, these two triangles meet just above the anahata. To work with your mind and imagination, it is important to adjust the alignment of the two triangles at least to some extent. The ideal alignment would be that the upward-pointing and the downward-pointing triangles intersect to such an extent that they form a perfect six-pointed star with six equilateral triangles on the outside.

With the necessary alignment, you will be able to exercise your imagination in such a way that you can manifest what you want outside of you. To enhance the power of your imagination, you need to lift the upward-pointing triangle, which in terms of the geometry of the body is the foundation, to such an extent that it includes the vishuddhi, which is the basis of your imagination. There is sadhana to move it up and hold it there, all the time. If you do not have such sadhana, a simple way to achieve this is not to eat for a period of time. Generally, when the stomach is empty, the upward-pointing triangle tends to rise by itself. Once you eat, it descends again.

The Importance of Keeping the Chakras Mobile

There are one hundred and fourteen chakras in the body. The seventy-two thousand nadis, or energy pathways in the system, have one hundred and fourteen significant junction points, where the nadis meet in substantial numbers and redistribute themselves. These points are generally known as chakras, which literally means “wheel” or “circle,” though they are actually triangles. We call them “chakras” because that suggests movement — moving forward. Out of these hundred and fourteen, two are outside of the physical realm. For most human beings, these two are very feeble, unless they put in the necessary sadhana. Out of the remaining one hundred and twelve chakras, a few are generally located in certain parts of the body, on a physiological level. The rest of the chakras could be moving to some extent.

The way the chakras move depends on what you do with yourself. If you want to empower yourself to do different types of activities and to adjust to different type of situations, the pranic physiology or the chakra physiology of the body needs to be able to adjust accordingly. Doing the necessary work to keep the chakras mobile is important because the mobility of the chakras determines how flexible and effective you are in different types of situations, in order to meet different types of requirements. The problem with most human beings is in one situation, they function well. In another situation, they are a total mess. This is because they can only think, feel and act in a particular way.

You should be able to do everything well, with a little practice. But this will not work if your energy system is rigid. So, keeping your system mobile is important, not just because we want to do different kinds of activities in the world. It also gives you a certain flexibility of experience, that you are comfortable in any kind of situation. To be at ease, your energies must be flexible. These hundred and twelve chakras can be used as hundred and twelve doorways to your ultimate nature. That is why Adiyogi gave one hundred and twelve ways to attain to the ultimate.

To be able to move this complex triangular structure of your physiology the way you want it requires a different level of sadhana. But the most fundamental thing is that these two triangles should intersect. Normally, the upward-pointing triangle is below and the downward-pointing triangle is above. If you bring the two equilateral triangles to a point where they intersect in such a way that they form a star with six equilateral triangles, the system is in balance and becomes very receptive. My work is about presence and transmitting something, for which you need receptivity. My words are not going to enlighten you. I only say things to confuse you, because you cannot enlighten anyone by talking. It is the presence that has the power to transform.

From Conclusions to Confusion to Consciousness

Talking is a good tool only to destroy the idiotic conclusions that people have made. When conclusions are destroyed, confusion happens. Being joyfully confused about everything in the universe is a good state to be in. This means you are constantly paying attention to everything. Once you realize that you do not know a thing, you become receptive. If you have conclusions about everything, there is no possibility, no receptivity. If you have conclusions, you do not have to be attentive — you can go through life like you are dead. The more conclusions you have, the more rigor mortis there is in your mind and in your body as well.

“Being joyfully confused about everything in the universe is a good state to be in. This means you are constantly paying attention to everything. Once you realize that you do not know a thing, you become receptive.”

If you are doing hatha yoga every day, you will notice that on a day when your attitude is kind of rigid, your body will not bend. On another day, when you are happy and mentally flexible, your body will bend much better. The nature of your consciousness is manifesting in every cell of your body, every moment of your life. That is why there are many kinds of self-inflicted diseases in the world today. Never before, human beings had as many food choices as we have today. In earlier times, people ate what was locally available. Today, in spite of so much variety, there is so much illness. In fact, the more choices people have, the sicker they get.

The United States is probably one of the countries with the greatest variety of food choices, but they also spend a huge amount of money on healthcare — three trillion dollars per year. That is a crime against humanity. If those who do not get sufficient nourishment are ill, it is understandable. But if those who are eating well are sick, it means something fundamental is going wrong. We have not understood that every cell in your body was created by the nature of your consciousness. If you do not know how to keep the nature of your consciousness well, you will not know how to keep your system well. Then you will function by accident, which need not be so.

We as human beings do everything that other creatures do too — we eat, sleep, reproduce, and die. One thing that distinguishes us is we are making a lot of fuss about all that, just as an aside. The most important difference about human beings is we can do all these things fully consciously. For example, you can eat fully consciously. Let us say you are hungry. If you were some other creature, you would just pick up whatever suits you and devour it. But as a human being, you are able to wait until mealtime, sit at the table, chant the invocation, and rather than stuffing your face with both hands, eat with your right hand. This is being conscious. If you go by the body alone, you will want to eat immediately. But since you have the necessary intelligence and awareness to hold back the compulsions of the body, you can respond to the situation in a conscious manner. If someone behaves very compulsively, they say he is like an animal. So, this is a journey from compulsiveness to consciousness.

Consciousness gives you the possibility to become free from your tendencies. Even if you have been ruled by all kinds of tendencies until this moment, if you respond fully consciously now, there will be a distance between you and the accumulated tendencies that you have. If you make every aspect of life conscious — not only in action, but also in thought, emotion, and energy — you will be on top of the world.

The fear of death has always made people do crazy things. For ages, whenever people become affluent, all the powerful people, the greatest emperors always looked for immortality. The mummies in Egypt are an example of this. When people became affluent, when they felt they had everything but life still had not happened to them — this is the experience of the affluent — naturally they sought immortality. Every king, every powerful person on the planet always sought to be immortal somehow. But that would be the worst curse for anyone. If you really want to curse someone, do not wish them death; wish them endless life. Just imagine, after ten thousand years, still walking the same planet, still trying to do the same stupid things, how would it be. What a curse it is!

There is a story about Alexander the Great. I don’t know why he is called “Great.” What is great about the man? From the age of sixteen till he was thirty-two when he died, for sixteen years non-stop, the man fought, killing thousands of people — people he never knew. He would just come to a new country, kill the people and say “I have conquered.” What has he done that is of any consequence or any good to any other human being? What has he done of any consequence or any good to himself? He lived an utterly idiotic life and died a miserable man. He is called “Alexander the Great” but they forgot his last name — it should be “Alexander the Great Idiot.”

Alexander and the Yogi

Alexander, as he sought many other idiotic things in his life, also sought immortality because he wanted to conquer the whole world with his might. In a most brutal way he has conquered half of the known world at that time and he was becoming desperate because now he saw that he needed much more time to fulfill his project. So he wanted to become immortal. In search of immortality, he naturally came towards India because so many stories had reached Greece and he had heard a lot about Indian yogis. People had told him that many of these yogis were immortal so he was eager to meet one.

He sent a team of soldiers ahead of the rest of the army and told them, “Get me a yogi.” After a search, they found a yogi sitting in meditation. The soldiers said, “Come with us. Our Emperor wants you.” The yogi replied, “I am not going anywhere. If your Emperor wants, let him come here. He is most welcome but I am not going anywhere.” When they heard this they pulled out their swords, “Either you come with us or we cut your head off and take it with us.” The yogi laughed and said, “Okay, take my head. What is he going to do with my head. Let him take it. Anyway I have reached a point in my life where I am finished with everything that I have to do. I am just waiting to go. You have come to assist me.”

The soldiers had never seen anything like this. These soldiers were deadly people. It was nothing for them to take a life. The moment they pull their swords out everyone trembled. But this man says, “Okay. Take it.” They did not know what to do. They went back to Alexander and told him, “We met a yogi.” “Where is he, where is he?” “He is not willing to come.” “Why didn’t you drag him and come?” “No, he is not that kind. He is not even afraid. We threatened to take his head but he says, ‘Take it.’”

Alexander thought, “If he said, ‘Take my head, I am not bothered,’ he must be immortal. I want to meet him.” Alexander went and asked the yogi, “Oh yogi, are you immortal?” The yogi said, “‘Yes, I am not only immortal, I am all-pervading. I have crossed the limitations of the physical. I am everything and nothing.” Alexander asked, “Can you teach me immortality? I will give you anything you want.” Alexander asked his soldiers to bring huge chests of all the looted jewels, pearls, diamonds and gold. He opened it and said, “The treasure of the world is here.” The yogi laughed and said, “You have been picking things from the earth. All these gems and stones and gold are just earth. Somehow you attached too much value to it. You did not attach value to the mud that you walk on, which feeds you every day. This stone and this metal are no good for anything. You cannot eat it, you cannot do anything with it, but you carry it as treasure. This is trash which you picked up from earth. Why are you seeking immortality? This is not for you.” Alexander replied, “Either you teach me immortality now or we are going to take off your head!”

The yogi looked at the man, very amused and said, “Okay, you want to know it so badly. There is a particular forest here.” He gave Alexander the directions as to how to go there. And the yogi told him, “If you go to this place, you will find a small cave. Enter the cave. There will be a small pool of water. Take a handful of water and drink it. You will become immortal.”

Alexander set up an expedition. With a group of his bravest soldiers, he went into the forest. As the yogi had indicated certain landmarks, accordingly he went and found the cave. He entered the cave and was about to put his hands into the water and drink. There was a crow sitting on the other side of the pool. The crow said, “Wait! Stop!” Alexander looked surprised. A crow speaking Greek, not “Caw!”

The crow said “A long, long time ago I made the mistake of drinking from this pool, and I have been sitting here for I don’t know how long. My problem is I cannot die. I am finished with life in every way but I cannot die.” Can you imagine the predicament? “And I will sit here forever. Do you want to do this?” Alexander had his hands in the water. He was about to drink. All his life he wanted to become immortal. Now this crow put such a question and suddenly his life was in a different perspective. Conquering the world is a big thing for the next fifty years or so. But after five million years of sitting here, what would it mean? And you still cannot die.

Alexander just stood there, trembling. Sense dawned on him. Slowly he walked back and never drank from the pool. Otherwise we would have had to suffer Alexander even today. Aren’t we glad all the dead people are dead? Maybe you think, “No, but my father was such a wonderful man!” If he lives too long, he will become insufferable. He should live his normal course of life and go. Only then it is good.