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him anesthetics is really dangerous; you may kill the man. He may not be able to bear the pain, because the pain is going to be terrible. You have to cut his stomach; you have to cut out his appendix, you have to remove it. It will take one hour, two hours -- one never knows in what condition his appendix is.
But he was no ordinary man either -- otherwise they would have forced him -- he was the king of Varanasi. He said to the doctors, "But don't be worried" -- and the best doctors available in India were there; one expert from England was there. They all consulted: nobody was ready to do this operation, but the operation had to be done, otherwise any moment the appendix could kill the man. The state was serious, and both the alternatives seemed to be serious: if you left him without the operation he might die; if you did the operation without making him unconscious -- which had never been done, there was no precedent....
But the king said, "You don't understand me. There has never been any precedent because you have never operated on a man like the man you are going to operate upon. Just give me my religious book, SHRIMAD BHAGAVAD GITA. I wwill read it, and after five minutes you can start your work. Once I am involved in the GITA then you can cut any part of my body -- I will not be even aware of it; there is no question of pain."
When he insisted -- and anyway he was going to die so there was no harm in trying. Perhaps he was right -- he was well-known for his religious practices. So this was done. He read the GITA for five minutes and closed his eyes; the GITA dropped from his hands, and they did the operation. It took one and a half hours. It was really serious: only a few hours more and the appendix may have exploded and killed the man. They removed the appendix, and the man was completely conscious, silent -- not even a flicker of his eyes. He was somewhere else.
That was his life-long practice: just to read for five minutes, then he was on the track. He knew the GITA verbally, he could repeat it without the book. Once he started going into the GITA then he was really in the GITA; his mind was there -- it left his body totally.
That
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