Brahma Yogi had also trained himself for another miraculous feat. Science says that there are certain poisons that if your tongue even touches them, you will die. There is no way to help you, your death is certain. He practiced for that too – not only touching those certain poisons , he would drink cups of those poisons. He baffled the scientists.
But in Rangoon an accident happened. His practice had made Brahma Yogi capable of containing anything in his stomach for thirty minutes without it mixing with his body in any way; but within thirty minutes it had to be thrown out. In Rangoon University he gave the demonstration of drinking poison, and then he moved to the hotel where he was staying – but you don’t know the traffic in the East; it is simply crazy. It is just a miracle that people go on reaching the places they want to reach. It is a miracle that every day you come back home alive.
The Eastern traffic has difficulties because it contains so many centuries together. Somebody is going on his donkey, somebody on his horse, somebody – in countries like China – sitting on a buffalo…bullock carts, camels, elephants…and added to all this, modern speedy vehicles; buses, trucks, cars. In the East you can find all the models of cars that have ever existed since God drove Adam and Eve out of the garden of Eden. That first car you can find in Bombay – still moving!
All the centuries together – and the roads were not made for buses and trucks, they are small, not broad enough. And people have no traditional sense that they have to keep to the right or to the left. People believe in freedom, and many people believe in the middle way; they just move in the middle of the road. And of course all the constitutions of the world say that man has a birthright of freedom to move, movement is man’s birthright. So Eastern traffic is really something worth seeing.
And how people go on managing in it is just a miracle: so many horns honking continuously, and nobody listening – who cares? These idiots go on honking and people go on moving at their own pace….
Brahma Yogi could not reach the hotel in time to throw out the poison; he died. But before dying he had demonstrated, almost all over the world, both these things: the poisons you think can kill man, can kill only if the man is not trained and disciplined in a certain way to keep the poison away from his blood stream; and all the symptoms of death are not at all symptoms of death, they are symptoms only of a body failure. Your deeper life force, elan vital, is eternal.
You say, “I am certain that I am going to die one day.” How can you be certain? You have not seen death yet, you have seen only symptoms, outward symptoms. You have never seen any life dying. You have seen only a dead body stop functioning; it was always dead, it is nothing new for it. It was a mechanism functioning for a certain period, programmed to function for a certain period. When the period is over the mechanism stops.