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possible in those conditions. For a few things I had to speak, but my speaking was telegraphic. My father was very angry with me. He loved me so much that he had every right to be angry. The day he had sent me to the university he had taken a promise from me that I would write one letter every week at least. When I became silent I wrote him the last letter and told him, "I am happy, immensely happy, ultimately happy, and I know from my very depth of being that I will remain so now forever, whether in the body or not in the body. This bliss is something of the eternal. So now every week, if you insist, I can write the same again and again. That will not look okay, but I have promised, so I will drop a card every week with the sign "ditto." Please forgive me, and when you receive my letter with the sign "ditto," you read this letter."
He thought I had gone completely mad. He immediately rushed from the village, came to the university and asked me, "What has happened to you? Seeing your letter and your idea of this 'ditto,' I thought you were mad. But looking at you, it seems I am mad; the whole world is mad. I take back the promise and the word that you have given to me. There is no need now to write every week. I will continue to read your last letter." And he kept it to the very last day he died; it was under his pillow.
The man who forced me to speak -- for one thousand, three hundred and fifteen days I had remained silent -- was also a very strange man. He himself had remained silent his whole life. Nobody heard about him; nobody knew about him. And he was the most precious man I have come across in this, or any of my lives in the past. His name was Magga Baba. It is not much of a name; magga simply means a jug. He used to carry a jug -- that was his only possession, a plastic jug. From the same jug he would drink, he would ask for food with it. People would drop anything in the jug: money, food, water. And that was all he had. Anybody who wanted to take from his jug was also allowed. So people would take out money, or food -- children particularly, beggars. He neither prevented anybody from dropping, nor did he prevent anybody from taking. And he
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