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the mother speaks and the father listens -- and that's how the children learn. That's how I have learned.
"My father is a silent man; my mother speaks and he listens -- and I learned the language. It is just a mother tongue, I don't know much; Hindi has never been my subject of study. English I know just a little bit, and that is enough for your so-called examinations, but for translating a book which is a Ph.D. thesis.... And you are giving it to a student?"
He said, "Don't be worried -- I know you will be able to do it."
I said, "lf you trust me, I will do my best. But one thing I must tell you, that if I find something wrong in it then I am going to make an editorial note underneath, putting a star on it, that this is wrong, and how it should be. If I find something missing, I am going to put a star again and a footnote that something is missing, and this is the part that is missing."
He said, "l agree to that. I know there are many things missing in it. But you surprise me: you have not even seen the book, you have not even opened it. How do you know that things will be missing in it?"
I said, "Looking at you... in the way you can see by looking at me, that I am the right person to translate it, I can see perfectly, Doctor Saxena, you are not the right person to write it!"
And he loved that so much that he told it to everybody. The whole university knew about it -- this dialogue that had happened between me and him. In the next two-month summer vacation I translated the book, and I made those editorial notes. When I showed him, there were tears of joy in his eyes.
He said, "I knew perfectly well that something is missing here, but I could not figure it out because I have never practiced it. I was just trying to collect all the information about consciousness in Eastern scriptures. I had collected a lot, and then from that I started sorting it out. It took me almost seven years to finish my thesis." He had done really a great scholarly job -- but only scholarly. I said, "It is scholarly, but it is not the work of a meditator. And I have made all these notes -- that this can be written only by a scholar, not by
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