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at the cigarette from all sides, put it in your mouth, wait. There is no hurry. Go very slow-motion, just as if a film is going in slow motion.
He said, "What is that going to do?"
I said, "That we will se later on... then take your lighter, look at it."
He said, "You are making me a fool -- what is that going to do?"
I said, "You just.... Twenty years you have done it your way; twenty days you do it my way. Look at the lighter, then light the cigarette, then smoke as slowly as possible. And be watchful that the smoke is going in, then the smoke is going out. That is the oldest meditation, vipassana. Gautam Buddha may never have thought that it will be used with a cigarette and a cigarette lighter -- but I have to manage for him.
He would not do Vipassana, but this.... He said, "Okay, I will try it, twenty days it is not much."
But the second day he came to me and said, "This is strange. Doing things so slowly makes me so alert; smoking, and watching the smoke going in and the smoke going out makes me so silent that already, in two days, I am smoking almost fifty percent less.
I said, "Just wait twenty days."
He said, "I don't think it will last twenty days; at the most five days and it will be finished."
I said, "Don't be in a hurry to finish it, because if anything remains clinging it will enforce you again. So go very slowly; there is no hurry, and there is no harm. It does not matter -- at the most you may die two years earlier. But anyway, what were you going to do in those two years -- just smoke... more! So there is no harm anyway; the world is too populated, and if people go on disappearing a little earlier, making space for other people, it is very compassionate of them."
He said,"You are a strange fellow." And after the fourth day he told me, "Now, as my hand moves towards the pocket, suddenly a stop comes -- from where, I don't know. I have not been smoking for one whole day because each time I try to take a cigarette, I cannot take the packet out. What is the secret of it?"
I said, "There is no secret; you have just learned to smoke consciously, with awareness. And nobody can
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