"Meditation prepares you for the other half; it helps you to know death without dying. And once you have known death without dying, the fear of death will disappear forever. Even when death comes, you will be silently watching it, knowing absolutely that it cannot even make a small scratch on your being. It is going to take away your body, your mind, but not you.

"You belong to the immortal life. Your experience was good; you are saying, 'As a child, one of my favorite games was to imagine I was going to die in the next minute. I enjoyed feeling the tension build up until it reached a peak and then slipped into relaxation, and I felt as if I was bubbling with happiness.'

"Unknowingly, you were doing a simple exercise of meditation. Perhaps from your past life, you may have carried the knowledge, the experience of the meditation, but it is one meditation amongst hundreds of methods – this is one of the methods. And it is not only you, Dhyan Amiyo; many children go on playing things which are of immense importance. But they cannot understand the importance, they can only play them as a game.

"For example, all over the world, children like to twirl, to whirl, and naturally the parents will stop them: 'Don't do that, you may get dizzy. You may fall, you may hurt yourself.' But all over the world, children enjoy it. And it was from seeing children enjoying whirling that Jalaluddin Rumi got the idea that there must be something…because whenever you see a child whirling, his face changes. A strange grace comes to his face; he starts radiating a certain aura, and when he stops he is so full of joy….

"Jalaluddin Rumi tried – in the forest, so nobody makes a laughingstock of him – just to know what these children find in twirling. And he was amazed: he discovered one of the greatest methods of meditation, and for twelve hundred years after him, his school has been a living school. His school is called the Whirling Dervishes; in their temple, that is their prayer, that is their meditation. That is their whole religion."