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, 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, tedious, difficult work, 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 too short to work on all the postures of the body, to change the whole inner being, they were the first in the world to think of lengthening the life so that they can accomplish the task in this life.
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. They found exact ways, which are now confirmed by science from other investigations.
Science is still not involved in looking at what yoga has found, but working on different things, psychologists have come to know that if you eat less, you live longer. You will be thin, you won’t look so beautiful, but your life will be lengthened. If you eat more, you may look good, but your life will be shortened. Even today there are people who eat so little that you cannot conceive how they survive, but they survive longer than anybody else – I used to know a man who died in his one hundred and fortieth year. And the whole process is just to take as little food as possible. The reason is not that they want to live long; the reason is that they have developed a system that is concerned with the body, and the body is our most unconscious part: it does not change easily. It takes a long time, but it does change.
I have found people who have done almost miracles just by body postures which look irrelevant, because consciousness is such a faraway thing. But just sitting in a certain posture you will be surprised: you can watch how you change. Everybody knows about the lotus posture in which you see Buddha sitting. That is the most famous posture. It has been found now that gravitation has the least effect on you if sit in the lotus posture with your spine absolutely straight and the whole body relaxed. And it is gravitation that kills you; the more you are affected by gravitation, the more you are pulled towards the grave.
It became perfectly clear when Einstein declared that if we can find vehicles moving with the same velocity, the same speed, as light, then the people who go in those vehicles will not age – not at all. If they leave the earth and come back after fifty years, all their contemporaries will be dead. Perhaps one or two may still be alive – on their deathbeds – but they will come back exactly the same age as when they left. His idea was that at the speed of light, aging stops. But that is only an hypothesis, there is no experiment to prove it. It is difficult to find a vehicle which will move with the speed of light, because at that speed everything will burn up. There is no metal, there is no material, out of which you can make the vehicle, so it seems to be impossible.
But Einstein was not aware of the yoga explanation. The yoga explanation is that the person can come back to the earth the same age because he has been out of the field of gravitation – that’s why he cannot age. And that seems to be far more practical, far more scientific – not just an hypothesis. Thousands of yogis have lived longer than anybody else. Just sitting in that posture, gravitation has the least effect on them.
And why does eating less or fasting help to lengthen life? The yoga system has found that when you eat, your food is doing two things. One, it is giving you nourishment. That we know; that’s why we eat. Second – of which we are not aware – is that eating is tiring your digestive system; it is becoming older. The more it has to digest the less young it is. Your life depends on your digestive system. So if you eat less, your nourishment will be less, 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. So much work has been dropped that the digestive system can work 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 reason 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 but change body postures. In a certain posture the mind functions in a certain way. In one posture it stops functioning, in another posture you become very alert; and you know it, but you have never cared to go deeper 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 so that even if you fall asleep you will not fall down on the earth – even then you will not be able to sleep, because so much blood is rushing into your head. For sleep, the blood should not be going into the head with great speed, in great amounts. It should be going less – that’s why everybody uses a pillow: it is a yoga posture.
Yoga has been thinking of every detail – like 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 off completely; otherwise they cannot sleep. You can see this happening in ordinary life also: 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.