All kinds of funny things happened to me. I remember when I rubbed my body like this, there was a sparkle, like a phosphorous glow, on the body. She [Valentine] used to run out of her bedroom to see—she thought there were cars going that way in the middle of the night. Every time I rolled in my bed there was a sparkling of light [Laughs] and it was so funny for me—"What is this?" It was electricity—that is why I say it is an electromagnetic field. At first I thought it was because of my nylon clothes and static electricity; but then I stopped using nylon. I was a very skeptical heretic, to the tips of my toes, I never believed in anything; even if I saw some miracle happen before me, I didn't accept that at all—such was the make-up of this man. It never occurred to me that anything of that sort was in the making for me.
Very strange things happened to me, but I never related those things to liberation or freedom or moksha, because by that time the whole thing had gone out of my system. I had arrived at a point where I said to myself "Buddha deluded himself and deluded others. All those teachers and saviors of mankind were damned fools—they fooled themselves—so I'm not interested in this kind of thing anymore," so it went out of my system completely. It went on and on in its own way—peculiar things—but never did I say to myself, "Well, [Laughs] I am getting there, I am nearer to that." There is no nearness to that, there is no farawayness from that, there is no closeness to that. Nobody is nearer to that because he is different, he is prepared. There's no readiness for that; it just hits you like a ton of bricks.
The whole thing is finished for me and that's all. The linking gets broken and once it is broken it is finished. Then it is not once that thought explodes—every time a thought arises it explodes. The division cannot stay there, it's a physical impossibility. You don't have to do a thing about it. That is why I say that when this explosion takes place (I use the word explosion because it's like a nuclear explosion) it leaves behind chain-reactions. Every cell in your body has to undergo this change.
It's an irreversible change. There's no question of your going back. It is like a nuclear explosion. It shatters the whole body. It is not an easy thing. It is the end of the man, such a shattering thing that it blasts every cell, every nerve in your body. I went through terrible physical torture at that moment; not that you experience the explosion—you can't experience the explosion—but its after-effects. The fallout is the thing that changes the whole chemistry of your body. The senses are operating now without any coordinator or center, that's all I can say. Unless that alchemy or change in the whole chemistry takes place, there is no way of freeing this organism from thought, from the continuity of thought.
The blinking of the eyes stopped and then there were changes in taste, smell and hearing. I noticed that my skin was soft like silk and had a peculiar kind of glow, a golden color.
I no longer spend time in reverie, worry, conceptualization and the other kinds of thinking that most people do when they're alone. My mind is only engaged when it's needed, for instance when you ask questions, or when I have to fix the tape-recorder or something like that. My memory is in the background and only comes into play when it's needed, automatically. When it's not needed there is no mind here, there is no thought; there is only life.
My body had gone away and it has never come back. The points of contact are all that is there for the body. Nothing else is there for me because the seeing is altogether independent of the sense of touch here. I had discovered that all my senses were without any coordination. I felt the life energy drawing to a focal point from different parts of my body. Even now it happens to me. The hands and feet become cold, the body becomes stiff, the heartbeat slows down, the breathing slows down and then there is a gasping for breath. Up to a point you are there. You breathe your last breath, as it were, and then you are finished.
What happens after that, nobody knows. How long it lasted I don't know. I can't say anything about that because the experiencer was finished. There was nobody to experience that death at all. So that was the end of it. I got up. The things that had astonished me that week had become permanent fixtures. I call all these events a calamity because from the point of view of one who thinks this is something fantastic, blissful, full of love, ecstasy and all that kind of a thing, this is physical torture. Not a calamity to me but to those who have an image that something marvelous is going to happen.
It's something like you imagine New York. You dream about it. You want to be there. When you are actually there, nothing of it is there. It is a godforsaken place and even the devils have probably forsaken that place. It's not the thing that you had sought after and wanted so much but totally different.
What is there you really don't know. You have no way of knowing anything about that. There is no image here. Then suddenly, there was an outburst of tremendous energy shaking the whole body, vibrating. It lasted for hours. I couldn't bear it but there was nothing I could do to stop it. There was a total helplessness. This went on and on, day after day. Whenever I sat, it started—this vibration like an epileptic fit or something. Not even an epileptic fit; it went on for days. It was a very painful process because the body has limitations. It has a form, a shape of its own.
So when there is an outburst of energy which is not your energy or my energy but God's (call it by any name you like) it is like a river in spate. The energy that is operating there does not feel the limitations of the body. It is not interested. It has its own momentum. It is a very painful thing. It is not ecstatic, blissful and all that rubbish, stuff and nonsense. It is really a painful thing.
Oh I suffered for months before and after that, everybody has—a great cascade; not one but thousands. It went on and on for months. It's a very painful experience, painful in the sense that the energy has a peculiar operation of its own. It is clockwise, counterclockwise, and then it is this way, and then this way, and then this way. Like an atom, it moves inside—not in one part of your body—the whole body. It is as if a wet towel were being wrung to get rid of the water. It is like that—the whole of our body. It's such a painful thing. It goes on even now. You can't invite it. You can't ask it to come. You can't do anything. It gives you the feeling that it is enveloping you, that it is descending on you.
Every time it is new. Very strange, every time it comes in a different way. So you don't know what is happening. You lie down on your bed and suddenly it begins. It begins to move slowly like ants. I'd think there were bugs in my bed, jump out, look, see no bugs, then I'd go back, then again. The hairs are electrified. So it slowly moves. There were pains all over the body. Thought has controlled this body to such an extent that when that loosens, the whole metabolism is agog. The whole thing was changing in its own way without my doing anything. Every cell started changing and it went on and on for six months. In all, it took three years for this body to fall into a new rhythm of its own. I behaved normally, I didn't know what was happening. It was a strange situation.
The state is something natural. Do you see the swellings here? Yesterday was the new moon. The body is affected by everything that is happening around you. It is not separate. Whatever is happening there is also happening here. There is only the physical response. This is affection. Your body is affected by everything that is happening around you, and you can't prevent this for the simple reason that the armor that you have built around yourself is destroyed. So it is very vulnerable to everything that is happening there.
There are certain glands. These ductless glands are located in exactly the same spots where the Hindus speculated the chakras are. They have feelings, extraordinary feelings. There is one gland here which is called the thymus gland. Doctors tell us that is active through childhood until puberty then becomes dormant. In your natural state that gland is reactivated.
[Up and down his torso, neck and head, his friends observed swellings of various shapes and colors which came and went at intervals. On his lower abdomen, the swellings were horizontal, cigar-shaped bands. Above the navel was a hard, almond-shaped swelling. A hard, blue swelling like a large medallion in the middle of his chest was surmounted by another smaller, brownish-red, medallion-shaped swelling at the base of his throat. These were as though suspended from a varicolored, swollen ring—blue, brownish and light yellow—around his neck. His throat was swollen to a shape that made his chin seem to rest on the head of a cobra, as in the traditional images of Shiva. Just above the bridge of the nose was a white, lotus-shaped swelling. All over the head the small blood vessels expanded, forming patterns like the stylized lumps on the heads of Buddha statues. The arteries in his neck expanded and rose, blue and snake-like, into his head.]
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