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that he was dead. He would not go to the office... his family would tell him, "Go to the office; otherwise how are we going to survive?" But he would say, "Have you ever heard of any dead man going to the office? Have you ever heard of any dead man helping his relatives, his family, his friends to survive? I am absolutely helpless, what can I do? Nobody has any control over death; I am dead."
People tried in every way: "You are talking and you are eating and you are sleeping and you are walking -- and still you go on insisting that you are dead?"
He said, "I know more about myself... I don't need anybody's advice. I feel absolutely certain that I am dead, and if a dead man feels hungry -- he eats. What is wrong with it?"
Finally they took him to a psychiatrist, and the psychiatrist said, "I will settle him. He is a little rare; I have never come across.... There have been many kinds of people, but he surpasses them all."
He talked with the dead man, and the dead man's arguments to prove that he was dead were perfectly rational. Not only that: when his family left and he was alone with the psychiatrist, he pulled his chair close to him and told him, "You are also dead. I did not say it in front of those people; otherwise your whole profession would be disturbed. We are in the same boat; just as I died, you died."
The psychiatrist said, "This is too much. You are trying to convince me."
He said, "It is not a question of conviction: once dead, dead forever. Do you think somebody convinced me? I discovered myself that I am dead -- and because I know how to discover it, I have discovered that you are dead too. It is good that they brought me here; otherwise you would have lived with the wrong conception -- that you are alive."
The psychiatrist thought, "What to do with this man?" He took out his paper knife, to cut the man on his hand. Before cutting the man -- just to bring a little blood -- he said, "Have you ever heard that dead men don't bleed?"
The man said, "Yes, when I used to be alive, I heard the saying that dead men don't bleed."
The psychiatrist said, "Okay, now this will be decisive." He cut a
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