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Existentialism and Verifying the Absolute Part 3 “He was initiated right away, and then what happened to him was, within two minutes, he started to laugh—and he laughed, and he laughed, and he laughed, and he laughed; waves of joyfulness in his heart, waves and waves and waves. For fifteen minutes he was laughing. In a deep, dark room, even one candle can produce a glare, a dazzle in the eyes. The whole of his awareness was sunk in that gloomy mood of change and change and change, and ‘life is just no good and no worth and nothing’—all that gloomy. And we didn’t know whether he actually transcended or not, but sure enough he went a few steps into the subtle, and that was enough for him to bring the waves of joyfulness. And when he narrated the whole thing to me, he said, ‘I was feeling foolish within myself, but I didn’t know how to restrict laughing. I didn’t know why I was laughing, but I knew that I was laughing, and fifteen minutes.’ And this was due to the contrast, great contrast. So never mind what a man has been so long, or so far ’til now; let him start to meditate—his heart will swell in love, in happiness. His life will take a direction towards more progressive enlightenment, more progressive, more progressive. This is really awakening the reality of life from within—really awakening the life. And for that, what was done? Nothing other than a few words of advice so that his mind may take the inner course—very spontaneously. After initiation he came, and he said, ‘Maharishi, tell me, what I experienced was—it was very wonderful, and I laughed, and I laughed, and I laughed, and I didn’t know why I was laughing, and there was no reason for that, but I laughed—but tell me, was it real?’ This question comes again from the unreality of life having been fixed in the mind for so many years—that the life is unreal and the life is unreal—so he even starts to doubt his own experience. He feels good, feels happy, wants to confirm whether it is real happiness, because he knows everything to be changing, and on that basis of change, he knows everything to be unreal. And now he started to laugh for the first time in his life—not speaking of his early days when he was a child and he was not gripped by this existentialism. As a child he must have been laughing a lot. But now he said, ‘Real, unreal.’ I said, ‘Now we’ll analyze whether it was real or unreal.’ I said, ‘This is a flower, and you open your eyes, and what you find is a flower; and you open your eyes, and what you find—a mike or a table. Perception is innocent; perception, whatever perception, it is innocent. ‘We experience this—innocent. Innocent experience is real. If you are manipulating in your mind that I am now going to see a flower, and I am going to see a flower, and I am going to see a flower, and here is the flower I see—this may be an unreal vision of a flower. You may hypnotize yourself that, “I am seeing something, and I am seeing,” and then you begin to see that thing. Such a sight will be unreal, and this will be the effect of putting yourself in that mood, and due to that mood you see that that thing is there. But when you don’t create any mood, when you are innocently perceiving, the object that you perceive must be there—and this vision can only be called real. Because you have not manipulated in your mind; that perception is not resulting from your previous thoughts. ‘You started to meditate, you were given a word whose meaning even you were not told, and then you started to experience, and then what you experienced?’ He said, ‘The word faded, faded, and I didn’t know about the word, and what I was doing was laughing.’” Maharishi Mahesh Yogi 3 August 1970 Humboldt College, CA, USA