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can be broken -- and I say this with long and great experience. When I try to break your rock, it is very difficult, because your rock tries to protect itself in every way.
You try to protect your diseases, your illnesses. You try to protect your neurosis, your madness -- because that's what you are identified with. You think you are that. You are not.
Until you die, you will never know who you are.
Right now you can sit in a yoga posture and repeat the mantra of Maharshi Raman, `Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?' -- you will not know. That mantra will be just in the mind. Raman knew through it -- he passed through death. It happened when he was seventeen years of age. He was meditating continuously from his very childhood, must have carried the urge from the past lives. He was not like an ordinary child, not interested in this world from the very beginning. Whenever he had the opportunity he was waiting, and with closed eyes, moving into silence and deeper silence. Suddenly, when he was seventeen years of age, suddenly in meditation he felt that he was going to die. And when you are in a deep meditation and you feel that you are going to die, it is not just a feeling or a vagrant thought -- it grips you in your totality, because there is no thought to fight with it. You cannot argue. It is so self evident in a silent mind that you are going to die.
And it comes to every meditator -- and blessed are those to whom it comes.
Suddenly he felt that he was going to die -- and nothing can be done: death is absolutely certain. So what to do? He was sitting under a tree. He lay down, ready to die. Accepted. Relaxed his body. No struggle with death. And he found, by and by, that the body had become cold. It was a dead corpse. Even if he had wanted to move his hand he couldn't have. The contact with the body was lost. Then he felt the mind disappearing, like when water evaporates. And soon there was no mind. The contact with the mind was lost. Then he waited and waited and waited -- when will death happen? And it never happened. He had come to the deathless. But this is a totally new man. The old man is there no more. The son to some father
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