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intelligence, education, culture, sharpness, the more I found it immensely helpful... not the textbooks, not the class lectures, but what I used to call -- they don't call them -- extra-curricular activities. I used to call my activities, extra-curricular; and they were really paying.
When on the first day I entered the university's philosophy class, I met Doctor Saxena for the first time. Only for a few professors did I have really great love and respect. These two were my most loved professors -- Doctor S.K. Saxena and Doctor S.S.Roy -- and for the simple reason that they never treated me like a student.
When I entered Doctor Saxena's class the first day, with my wooden sandals, he looked a little puzzled. He looked at my sandals and asked me, "Why are you using wooden sandals? -- they make so much noise." I said, "Just to keep my consciousness alert."
He said, "Consciousness? Are you trying to keep your consciousness alert in other ways too?"
I said, "Twenty-four hours a day I am trying to do that, in every possible way: walking, sitting, eating, even sleeping. And you may believe it or you may not, that just lately I have succeeded to be aware and alert even in sleep."
He said, "The class is dismissed -- you just come with me to the office." The whole class thought I had created trouble for myself the first day. He took me into his office and took from the shelf his thesis for a doctorate that he had written thirty years before. It was on consciousness. He said, "Take it. It has been published in English, and so many people in India have asked to translate it into Hindi -- great scholars, knowing both languages, English and Hindi, perfectly well. But I have not allowed anybody, because the question is not whether you know the language well or not; I was looking for a man who knows what consciousness is -- and I can see in your eyes, on your face, by the way you answered... you have to translate this book."
I said, "This is difficult because I don't know English much, I don't know Hindi much either. Hindi is my mother tongue, but I know only as much as everybody knows his mother tongue. And I believe in the definition
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