My beloved Atman! Man is a disease. Diseases come to man, yes — but man himself is a disease. Man is a dis-ease. This is his trouble, and this is also his glory. This is his good fortune, and this is his misfortune too. In the sense in which man is a problem, a worry, a tension, a sickness, an illness — in that sense there is no other animal on earth like him. And yet that very illness has given man all his evolution. For illness means: wherever we are, we cannot be content. Whatever we are, we cannot be satisfied in being that. That very disease became man’s movement, his restlessness. But it is also his calamity — because he is restless, troubled, unquiet, unhappy, afflicted.
Except for man, no animal is capable of going mad. Until and unless man drives an animal mad, no animal becomes mad on its own — no animal becomes neurotic. In the jungle, animals do not go mad; in the circus they do. In the jungle, they are not deranged; in the zoo they go deranged! No animal commits suicide — only man is capable of suicide.
This disease called man has been approached in two ways — two remedies have been tried. One is medicine. The other is meditation. Both are treatments for the same malady.
It will be good to understand it a little like this: medicine looks at man’s disease from an atomic, molecular standpoint. Medicine treats each illness separately; it considers each particular disease as molecular. Meditation considers man as ill ‘as a whole’, not illness by illness. Meditation sees the person himself as sick. Medicine believes that diseases come upon the person from outside, are foreign, alien, extraneous.
But slowly the gap has been narrowing; slowly medicine too has begun to say: don’t treat the disease; treat the patient. Do not treat the illness; treat the ill person. This is a very precious insight. Because it implies that disease too is a way of living. Every man cannot fall ill in the same way. Our illnesses bear our individuality. If I fall ill with tuberculosis and you too, it does not mean we have the same TB. Our TBs will be different because we are two different persons. It is even possible that the medicine that heals my TB does not heal yours. Therefore, deep down the issue is not the disease, deep down it is the diseased person.
Medicine catches diseases from the surface. The science of meditation catches man from the depths. One can say medicine tries to make man healthy from the outside; meditation tries to make man healthy from within. Neither meditation can be complete without medicine, nor can medicine be complete without meditation. In fact man is both — though even to say ‘both’ is not quite right, because the very language creates a basic misunderstanding.
For thousands of years man has thought that the body is separate and the soul is separate. This way of thinking has produced two dangerous consequences. One, some people took the soul alone to be the man, and they neglected the body. The nations that did this developed meditation, but did not develop medicine; they could not create a science of medicine — the body was neglected. Conversely, some nations took man to be only the body and denied the soul; they developed medicine greatly, but had no movement in meditation. While man is both at once. Even so, when we say ‘both at once,’ the phrase gives the illusion of two things joined together.
No — the body and the soul are two ends of one and the same phenomenon. Strictly speaking, we cannot say body plus soul makes man. No. Man is psychosomatic — or somatopsychic. Man is mind-body, or body-mind.
To my vision, that part of the soul which falls within the grasp of the senses is called the body, and that part of the soul which remains beyond the reach of the senses is called the soul. The visible soul is called body; the invisible body is called soul. They are not two things, not two existences; they are two wave-states of one and the same existence.
In truth, the notion of two — duality — has harmed humanity much. We always thought in the language of twoness, and trouble followed. We used to think: matter and energy. Now we do not. We no longer say matter is separate and energy is separate. Now we say, matter is energy. In fact even saying ‘matter is energy’ is not quite right — old language hinders. There is something, X, which at one pole appears as matter and at the other as energy. They are not two. They are two ends of one energy, one existence.
Exactly so are man’s body and soul two ends of one existence. Disease can begin from either end. It may start at the bodily end and reach to the soul. Whatever happens to the body — its vibrations, its waves — are heard by the soul.
Hence it often happens that the disease is cleared from the body and yet the person remains ill. The disease departs, the doctor declares there is no illness; still the man feels ill and refuses to believe he is well. With such patients doctors are much harassed, because all their instruments say ‘nothing is wrong’ — and yet it is not so.
But ‘no disease’ does not mean health. Health has its own positivity. The absence of disease is merely negative. We can say: there is no thorn. But that does not mean there is a flower. The non-existence of a thorn tells only that — it says nothing of a flower. The presence of a flower is something else.
Up to now medical science has done no real work on the question: what is health? All its work has run toward: what is disease? Ask medicine, ‘What is disease?’ — it defines it. Ask, ‘What is health?’ — and it evades; it says: when no disease remains, whatever is left is health. This is a trick, not a definition. How can health be defined by disease? It is like defining a flower by thorns, life by death, light by darkness; defining woman by man or man by woman.
No, medicine has not yet been able to say, what is health? It can only say, what is disease? Naturally — because it catches things from the outside, and from the outside only disease is caught. That which is within — man’s innermost being, the inner soul — health can only be caught from there.
This is why the Hindi word ‘swasthya’ is extraordinary. The English ‘health’ is not its synonym. ‘Health’ comes from ‘healing’ — bound up with disease; to be healthy is to be healed. Swasthya does not mean ‘healed.’ Swasthya means to be established in oneself — that one who has reached oneself, who stands in oneself. Swasthya means self-standing. In truth, no language of the world has a word that equals swasthya. Other tongues have terms that are synonyms for disease or no-disease. Our very notion of health is only of not being ill. But not being ill is necessary for health, not sufficient; it is necessary but not enough — something more is needed.
From the other pole — from within — something else can happen. Even if disease begins outside, its echoes reach within. Throw a stone into a silent lake — the impact is only where the stone falls, but the ripples reach the distant shores where the stone never fell.
Just so, when something happens to the body, waves reach the soul. And if medicine treats only the body, what of those ripples that have gone to the far shore? If we keep our attention only where the stone fell, what of those waves that have been freed of the stone, which have begun their own existence?
When a man falls ill, even after bodily treatment the waves produced by the illness enter his soul. Therefore disease insists on coming back. Its insistence to return arises from those waves that have reached to the soul — and medicine has as yet no way to deal with them. Hence medicine without meditation will always remain incomplete. We shall cure the disease, not the diseased. In a way, this suits the doctor’s interests — that the person never be cured; only the diseases get cured and the patient keeps returning!
Disease can also arise from the other end. In truth, as man is now, there is tension within him. No animal is so dis-eased, so restless, so tense. Why? Because no animal has any notion of becoming. The dog is a dog — he has nothing to become. Man has to become a man — as yet he is not. Therefore you cannot say to a dog, ‘You are a little less a dog.’ All dogs are equally dogs. But to a man one can rightly say, ‘You are a little less of a man.’
Man is not born complete. His birth is incomplete. All animals are born complete; man is born incomplete. There is work to be done; only then can he be whole. That not-yet-complete condition is his disease. Therefore he is troubled day and night.
Usually we think the poor man is troubled because of poverty. But we do not see that the moment he becomes rich, the level of his trouble changes — not the trouble itself. In truth, the poor man is never as troubled as the rich man becomes. Because the poor have a justification for their trouble — ‘We are poor.’ The rich lose even that justification; they cannot say why they are troubled. And when misery is without cause, it becomes terrible. A cause consoles, because it gives hope: tomorrow we may remove the cause. But when illness is causeless, difficulty begins.
Thus poor nations have suffered much; when they become rich they will discover that rich nations have their own sorrows. Though I would still choose the rich man’s sorrow over the poor man’s — if sorrow has to be chosen, choose the richer one — yet the intensity of restlessness increases.
Therefore today America is the most restless and troubled country on earth — though never has any society had such comforts. In America for the first time disillusionment has happened on a mass scale; causes were supposed to be the reason for misery. America has discovered that there is no external cause — man himself is misery. He goes on inventing new miseries. The being within him is constantly demanding what is not. What is becomes worthless; what is obtained becomes futile. What is not, attracts. There is a ceaseless striving for that which is not.
Nietzsche has said: man is a bridge stretched between two impossibilities. Forever eager for the impossible, eager to be fulfilled.
From this eagerness for wholeness all religions were born. And know this: once upon a time, on this earth the religious teacher and the physician were one and the same person. The priest was the doctor; the priest was the healer. And it would not be a surprise if tomorrow the situation again became so — with a small shift: now the physician will have to become the priest. In America this has begun to happen, because for the first time it has become clear that the problem is not only of the body. In fact, it is also becoming clear that if the body becomes perfectly healthy, the problems will increase — for then for the first time one becomes aware of the diseases that are at the inner pole.
Even our awareness has its reasons. If a thorn pierces my foot, I become aware of the foot; otherwise I am not aware. And when the thorn is there, my whole soul becomes like an arrow pointing to the foot — it sees only the foot. Naturally so. But once the thorn is removed, the soul will look at something else. Hunger lessens, clothes are adequate, the house is in order, the wife one desired is obtained — though, know well, there is no greater misery. Those who get the desired wife, their misery has no end; for if the desired wife is not attained, at least one has the joy of hope — even that is lost.
I have heard about a madhouse. A man went to see it. The superintendent took him around. In one cell a man was behind the bars, holding a picture to his breast, singing some song. The visitor asked, ‘What happened to him?’ The superintendent said, ‘The woman he loved — he could not get her; he went mad.’ In the next cell another man was trying to break the bars, beating his chest, tearing his hair. ‘What happened to him?’ ‘He got the same woman whom the first did not get — so he went mad!’
But the one who did not get her was at least blissed with the picture — some difference there. The one who got her was beating his head and chest — no bliss there. Blessed are the lovers who never get their beloveds!
In truth, for that which we do not get, we can go on living in hope. The day it is attained, hope breaks and we are empty. The day the physician frees man of bodily troubles, that day the physician will have to complete another work: the day we free man of disease, we create for the first time the situation for spiritual disease. For the first time he will be troubled within and will ask: ‘Now everything is fine — and yet nothing is fine!’
It is no surprise that in India the twenty-four Tirthankaras were sons of kings; Buddha was a king’s son; Ram, Krishna — all from royal households. Their outer unrest had ended; their unrest began from the inner pole.
Medicine is the attempt to put the body in order and free it from disease — from the outside. But remember, even when man is freed of all illnesses, he is not freed of the disease of being man. The disease of being man is the longing for the impossible; never being satisfied with anything; always making futile whatever is attained, and investing meaning in what is not yet attained.
The cure for the disease of being man is meditation. The cures for diseases are with the physician — with medicine. But the cure for the disease called man is with meditation. And the day medical science will be complete is the day we understand man’s inner pole too, and begin to work with it. My own understanding is that the sick man sitting at the inner pole creates thousands of illnesses at the outer pole too.
As I said — if disease arises at the body, its vibrations reach the inner being. If disease arises in the inner being, its waves come to the bodily end. Hence the world has thousands of kinds of therapies; thousands of ‘pathies’ exist. This ought not to be so if pathology were a science in the strict sense — there could not be thousands of kinds. Yet there are, because man’s illnesses are of thousands of kinds. Some illnesses allopathy cannot help at all. Illnesses that move from inside outward are beyond allopathy — meaningless for it. Illnesses that move from outside inward — for them allopathy is very meaningful. Illnesses that arise within and only manifest on the body are never bodily in origin — their plane is always psychic, or deeper still, spiritual.
If a person’s illness is mental, bodily treatment will not help — it may even harm. Because medicine will do something to the person, and if that something does not help, it will harm. Only those treatments do not harm which cannot help either. For instance, homeopathy can do no harm, because there is no fear that it can help! But help does happen. That it cannot ‘deliver’ help does not mean help does not happen. Help happens — that is another phenomenon; to deliver help is another. Two different things.
Help happens because if the person is creating the illness from the mental plane, for that illness a false medicine is needed — a placebo is needed. He needs only to be given trust that he is all right. He is not ill — he is only in the idea of being ill. Let him be convinced. That trust can come even from the ash of some sadhu, it can come from Ganges water. And nowadays many experiments run with placebos. Take ten patients with the same diagnosis — give three allopathy, three homeopathy, three naturopathy. The amazing thing: all pathies cure equally and kill equally! In proportion there is little difference. Then one has to think what is happening.
In my view, allopathy alone is scientific medicine. But since man is unscientific, scientific medicine alone cannot do the whole work. Allopathy deals with the body in the scientific way. But man is also imaginative within, projective; therefore allopathy cannot complete the task. In truth, the patient on whom allopathy does not work is ill in an unscientific way.
What does it mean to be ill in an unscientific way? The phrase sounds odd. There can be scientific treatment and unscientific treatment — I tell you, there are scientific ways of being ill and unscientific ways of being ill. Illnesses that begin at the level of consciousness and descend to the body cannot be solved scientifically.
I know a young woman whose eyes became blind — but the blindness was psychological. The eyes were not truly blind. Eye specialists said the eyes are perfectly healthy — the girl is deceiving. But she was not deceiving. Leave her to walk toward a fire — she would walk into it. She would knock into a wall and break her head. She was not deceiving — she was truly blind. But the illness was beyond the physicians’ grasp.
They brought her to me. I tried to understand. It was discovered she was in love, and her family had stopped her meeting the beloved. After a few days of talking, she said, ‘I have no wish to look at anyone except him.’ If this resolve arises intensely — that there is no point in seeing anyone except him — the eyes will become psychologically blind; they will stop seeing. You cannot understand this from the anatomy of the eye — anatomically the eye will be perfect; only the attention behind the eye has withdrawn its hand.
We experience this daily, but we do not notice that the body’s instruments function only so long as we are present behind them.
A young man is on the hockey field; his leg is injured, blood is flowing — he has no idea. Everyone else sees it; only he does not. Half an hour later the game stops — he sits holding his leg, crying, ‘When did I get hurt? It hurts a lot!’ The leg was hurt half an hour before. What happened? The instrument of the leg is perfectly fine — half an hour later it reported. Why not before? Attention was not there; attention had shifted. Attention was in the game — so total that no quantity was left to run to the leg. The leg must have been reporting, the nerves firing, the wires tapping on their exchange — but the operator at the exchange was absent, asleep, or posted elsewhere. Only when he returned did the message get through.
I told the girl’s family: do one thing. I understand — the eyes with which she meant to see only one, you have stopped her from seeing. So she has committed a partial suicide — the eyes have died. Nothing else has happened — a partial suicide. Let her meet her beloved.
They said: what has that to do with the eyes?
I said: just try. As soon as she was told she could meet him — that at five he would come — she came and stood outside the door. Her eyes were fine!
No, this is not deception. And hypnosis has now done so many experiments that we can understand there is no trick here. In deep hypnosis, if you place an ordinary pebble in a subject’s hand and say, this is a live coal, he will behave exactly as with a coal — throw it, scream that he is burned. So far so good — but a blister will appear on his hand; then the difficulty begins. If by the idea of a coal a blister can arise on the skin, then treating that blister from the body side is dangerous; one must begin from the mind side.
We have kept only one pole of man in our view. Hence, though bodily illnesses have decreased, mental illnesses have gone on increasing. Those who think very scientifically now admit that at least fifty-fifty — fifty percent of illnesses are mental. Not so in India — for a mental illness the presence of mind is also needed! In India still ninety-five percent are bodily; in America the ratio rises.
Mental illness means it is born within and spreads without. Mental illness is outgoing; bodily illness is ingoing. If you treat a mental illness with bodily methods, the mental illness will immediately find another route. You can dam the outlet here, there, and a third place — it will emerge at a fourth, a fifth. Wherever the personality is weak, it will burst forth. Thus the physician often ceases to be a helper in curing a disease and becomes an assistant in multiplying it — what could go out in one stream begins to divide into many streams, because we place obstacles at many points.
Meditation, for me, is the medicine from the other pole. Naturally, medicine depends on matter; meditation depends on consciousness. There cannot be a pill of meditation — though the attempt goes on. LSD, mescaline, marijuana — a thousand devices are tried, to make a pill even for meditation. But there cannot be a pill for meditation. This stubbornness — that we will do everything from the outside — continues. Even if the mind is sick within, we will treat from without; we will not treat from within.
Drugs can give a false taste of inner health, but they cannot create inner health. By chemical means we cannot reach the ultimate pole of man. The deeper we go within, the more chemical activity fades; the less meaningful becomes the material approach; the more meaningful becomes a non-material, psychic approach.
Yet it has not happened because of prejudices. And it is a strange fact: doctors belong among the two or three most orthodox professions. Professors and doctors are leaders in orthodoxy — they do not drop old notions easily.
There are reasons — perhaps natural reasons. The professor, if he is too flexible and keeps dropping old ideas, will be in difficulty teaching children. Things must be fixed; only then can they be taught with confidence. They should be definite, not uncertain; solid, not liquid. The amount of confidence a professor needs, even thieves and bandits do not need! He must have the absolute certainty that what he says is right. Whoever needs such professional certainty becomes orthodox.
Teachers become orthodox. That does great harm — for education should be the least orthodox; otherwise it hinders growth. Hence you will notice: rarely are university professors inventors. So many professors in all the universities — and most Nobel Prizes go to people outside the universities.
The other very orthodox profession is the doctor’s. He too has professional reasons: he must decide quickly. The patient is dying now! If he thinks too much, the thinking will be done — but the patient will not be saved. If he is unorthodox and tries too many new experiments, danger. He needs ready-made answers twenty-four hours — so he depends on old knowledge, not the hassles of the new. Thus medical practice runs thirty years behind medical research — at least thirty. Many patients die needlessly because what should no longer be happening, continues.
One of the doctor’s deep-rooted beliefs is more trust in chemicals than in consciousness. Chemistry is important to him, not consciousness. The result is damaging — for so long as chemistry is important, experiments with consciousness will not be tried.
Let me mention a couple of experiments. Take childbirth. The problem of painless childbirth is old: how can a child be born without pain?
Priests have opposed this — in fact they oppose any attempt to make the world painless. For the day the world becomes without pain, the priest will be out of profession. If there is no suffering, even God may get neglected; who will go to pray? We remember Him in suffering. So the priest says: the pain of childbirth is natural — God’s arrangement.
This is false. There is no divine decree that childbirth must be painful. The physician believes in anesthesia — chemicals to make the body unfeeling so that the birth is painless. From the body side, women themselves have always used a similar strategy for millennia: around seventy to seventy-five percent of children are born at night; daytime births are fewer because by day the woman is more conscious; at night she is sleepy, relaxed. So most children are not born in sunlight — they come in darkness. In sleep the mother relaxes a little; it becomes easier for the child to be born. The mother begins to obstruct the child from the very first moment — later she will obstruct much, but she begins from the first.
One way: use chemicals to relax the body as in sleep. This is used — but it carries dangers. Greatest danger: we place no trust in human consciousness; and when trust in consciousness is reduced, consciousness itself dwindles.
A physician named Lozan (Lamaze) trusted man’s consciousness and enabled thousands of women to give birth without pain. It is the method of conscious cooperation: when the child is to be born, the mother meditatively, consciously cooperates — agrees, does not fight, does not resist. The pain does not arise from the birth but from the mother’s fight. She is tightening the mechanism of birth all the while. She is afraid of pain; afraid the child may be born; this fear-centered resistance is stopping the child; the child wants to come — there is a war between mother and child. In that conflict there is pain. Pain is not natural; it is only conflict.
This resistance can be dissolved in two ways: one, from the body side — make the mother unconscious. But remember: the mother who gives birth in unconsciousness will never be a mother in the full sense. Because when the child is born, not only the child is born — the mother too is born. It is a double birth. If it happens in unconsciousness, the fundamental bond between mother and child is distorted; the mother will not be born — only a nurse will remain.
Therefore I do not agree with chemically induced, unconscious childbirth. The mother should be fully conscious at the moment of her child’s birth — because in that very consciousness the mother is born.
If this is right, it means the mother needs training in consciousness for the time of birth. She must be taught to approach the moment meditatively. For the mother, meditation has two meanings: one, do not resist — cooperate totally with what is happening, like a river flowing wherever a hollow is found; like the winds that blow; like a dry leaf falling from a tree — no announcement, it simply falls. So also the mother — totally, consciously, melt into what is happening: total cooperation.
If the mother becomes totally cooperative and aware while giving birth — no resistance, no fear — and if she becomes joyfully absorbed in the event, birth will become painless. And I say this on scientific grounds — thousands of experiments confirm it. Pain will disappear.
And note the far-reaching results. To whomsoever we receive pain from in our first moment, a negativity begins to arise. With whom we begin with conflict, with that person friendship becomes difficult. If we begin our relationship with mother in struggle, cooperation will be superficial.
But if we give birth with conscious cooperation — then an amazing thing happens. So far we have only heard of labor-pain, not of labor-bliss — because it has not happened. With total cooperation there can be bliss in childbirth. I am not only for painless birth; I am for blissful birth.
Through medicine, at the most, you can have painless birth — not blissful. Through consciousness, there can be a blissful birth. From the very first moment a conscious interrelationship between mother and child. I say this only as an example — that inner work is possible.
Whenever we are ill we only fight from the outside. We never ask whether inwardly the person is ready to fight the disease. It is possible the disease is invited. Invited diseases are many. Very few come on their own; most are called. But the invitation was sent long before; the disease arrives late — so we do not connect the two.
For thousands of years many peoples did not know there was any relation between sex and childbirth — because nine months is a long gap; to link cause and effect over such a distance is hard. Not every act of sex results in conception either. Only much later did the idea arise that what happened nine months before bears fruit after nine months. Just so we invite many illnesses and later they come; the gap misleads us.
I heard of a man on the verge of bankruptcy. He feared to go to the market, feared to go to his shop, feared to go out. One morning he stepped from his bathroom, fell, and was paralyzed. Now his treatment goes on: paralysis. But we do not think that this man wanted to be paralyzed. Whether he consciously thought it is not the question. Perhaps he never made the thought ‘let me be paralyzed.’ But somewhere deep in the unconscious he wanted not to go to market, not to go to the shop, not to go out. And he wanted the assaults to stop and sympathy to begin. These were deep desires. Now the body will cooperate — it always follows the mind like a shadow.
We do not see the mind’s arrangements. Fast all day — at night the mind will arrange a banquet in a dream. It will say, ‘You were hungry — let us go to a king’s feast.’ At night you will eat. If in the night a strong urge to urinate arises, the mind rings the bell and arranges — it takes you to the bathroom in a dream. To keep sleep unbroken, the mind contrives. It is arranging twenty-four hours for your known and unknown desires.
Now the man has fallen with paralysis. Our medicines will likely harm him — because paralysis is not his disease; it is his preference. The paralysis is mental. Even if we remove it, he will create a second, a third, a fourth illness — until he gathers the courage to go to market. When he becomes ill he finds the whole situation changes. Now he has a justification for bankruptcy — ‘What can I do? I am paralyzed!’ He can say to the creditor, ‘Look at my condition’ — even the creditor will feel ashamed to ask. His wife will serve him more; sons will press his feet; friends will come to see him; people will sit by his cot.
In truth, until you fall ill, people rarely love you. So whoever longs for love must fall ill! Women often remain ill — largely because illness has become their route to receiving love. They know there is no other way to stop the husband; wife cannot stop him — illness can. Once this is learned, whenever sympathy is needed one falls ill. In fact, showing sympathy to the sick is dangerous. Treating the illness is right; sympathy is dangerous — you sweeten the taste of illness.
So this man has fallen with paralysis. No treatment can really cure him; he will only exchange one disease for another. Because paralysis is not bodily — it is oriented in mind. Such cases exist: a house catches fire — a man paralyzed for two years, who could not rise, is found running outside! When told, ‘You are walking!’ he says, ‘I? How can I walk?’ and drops again. He is not deceiving; the illness is mind-oriented, not body-oriented. That is all the difference.
Therefore, when a physician tells a patient, ‘Your illness is mental,’ the patient does not like it — because it carries the flavor of blame: as if he is pretending. This is wrong. No one pretends illness. Illness has causes — and mental causes are at least as important as bodily causes, perhaps more.
Hence never tell a patient, ‘You are mentally ill’ — it is abuse. He will not be cured — he will only turn against you. We have not yet created a respectful climate around mental illness. If my leg is hurt, everyone sympathizes. If my mind is hurt, people say, ‘It is only mental,’ as if it were my fault! It is not a fault. Mental illness has its plane. But the physician does not accept it — because he has only bodily means; what lies beyond his hand he denies. He should say, ‘This is beyond me. Either find another kind of physician, or I must become another kind.’
This man needs another treatment — one that comes from within outward. Sometimes a very small thing within can change the whole of life.
Meditation, for me, is the inward-outward medicine.
A man asked Buddha one day, ‘Who are you? A philosopher, a thinker, a saint, a yogi — who are you?’
Buddha said, ‘I am only a physician. Just a physician.’
Buddha’s answer is wondrous. ‘Only a physician — about the inner illnesses I know a little, and I share that with you.’
The day we realize we must do something about the inner illness — otherwise we can neither remove nor end the outer illnesses completely — that very day religion and science will begin to come close; that day medicine and meditation will come close. And in building this bridge, no other science can do as much as medicine can.
Chemistry has no reason yet to come close to religion; physics none; mathematics none. Mathematics can remain without religion — perhaps forever — for I cannot conceive a situation where mathematics will need religion to grow. Mathematics can go on playing to infinity — for mathematics is a game, not life.
But the physician is not in a game; he is with life. He will be the first bridge between religion and science — and it has begun in mature societies. The physician must deal with man. And, as Carl Gustav Jung said before he died: as a physician I can say that all the patients who came to me after the age of forty were, in the last analysis, suffering from a lack of religion. Astonishing — basically their illness was absence of religion; if they could be given some form of religion, they would become healthy.
Understand this. Up to thirty-five, life climbs; after thirty-five, life declines. Thirty-five is the peak. Up to thirty-five there may be no need felt for meditation — the body is still rising; most diseases may be bodily. After thirty-five illnesses take a new direction — because now life begins to move toward death. While life grows, it expands outward; while one dies, one shrinks inward. Old age is an inward shrinking.
In truth, at the very root of an old man’s illnesses stands death. People usually say, ‘He died of such-and-such disease.’ I would say it is more right to say, ‘He became ill because he was going to die.’ The possibility of death creates a vulnerability to a thousand illnesses. If a man is told with certainty he will die tomorrow, a perfectly healthy man will fall ill. All his reports were fine — yet if told he will die in twenty-four hours, he will catch a thousand illnesses in twenty-four hours he could not catch in twenty-four lifetimes.
What happened? He opened to illness. He dropped resistance. If one has to die, why resist? The wall of consciousness that resisted illness relaxed — he agreed to die, and illness began to enter.
Therefore retired men die quickly. A man should understand before retirement that it will cut five or six years from his life. The one who would have died at seventy will die at sixty-five; who at eighty, at seventy-five. The rest of the years he will spend preparing to die. Because once he feels useless to life, uprooted — no one needs him — greeting disappears; when he was in the secretariat it was different. Now no one greets him — greetings have their economics. Others have taken his post; they will be greeted. He is forgotten. He feels useless. Vulnerable on all sides to death.
When does a man’s consciousness become healthy from within?
First: when the feeling of the inner consciousness begins — the feeling of the within. Usually we have no feeling for the inner. All our feeling is of the body — of hands, feet, head, heart — not of that which I am. All our awareness belongs to the house; none belongs to the owner who lives in the house. This is dangerous — for if the house begins to fall tomorrow, I will feel I am falling. That will be my illness.
No — if I come to know I am separate from the house, that I am within the house, then the house may fall and I may still be. A fundamental difference. Then the fear of death weakens.
Only through meditation does the fear of death dissolve.
The first meaning of meditation: awareness of oneself.
Whenever we are conscious, our consciousness is always about something — never about the one who is conscious. Hence if we sit alone, sleep begins to come — because what to do? Read a newspaper, turn on the radio — and a little wakefulness seems to come. Leave a man utterly alone in a dark room — in darkness sleep comes, because nothing is seen; then consciousness is not needed. Nothing to see — what else to do but sleep? Alone, in the dark — no one to speak to, nothing to think — you slip into sleep.
Remember, sleep and meditation are similar in one sense and different in another. Sleep means: you are alone — and asleep. Meditation means: you are alone — and awake. If you can remain awake in your aloneness, within, toward yourself…
A man was sitting before Buddha one day, tapping his big toe. Buddha asked, ‘Why are you moving your toe?’
He said, ‘Leave it… it was just moving. I did not know.’
Buddha said, ‘Your toe moves and you do not know? Whose toe is it? Is it yours?’
‘Mine,’ he said, ‘but what kind of talk is this? Please continue your discourse.’
Buddha said, ‘I will not — because the man to whom I speak is unconscious. I do not even know if you hear me or not.’
He said, ‘What kind of thing is this? The toe moves…’
Buddha said, ‘From now on, be aware when your toe moves.’ With that, a twofold awareness begins — awareness of the toe, and awareness of the aware one.
Awareness is always double-arrowed. If we use it, one arrow can be toward the object and the other toward the subject.
The first meaning of meditation is to begin to be awake to the body and to oneself. If this awakening grows, fear of death diminishes. And any medical science that cannot free man from the fear of death can never heal the disease called man. Yes, medicine tries — by lengthening life. But making life longer only lengthens the waiting for death — nothing else. And a long waiting is worse than a short waiting. Extending life makes death more painful.
Do you know? In countries where medicine has lengthened life, a new movement has arisen — that of euthanasia. The aged demand a constitutional right to die — because you can hang them on and on, and it becomes very difficult to live. A man can be kept going with oxygen cylinders for a long time — but his life becomes worse than death. Countless people lie tied to cylinders in hospitals — they have no right to die; they demand it. I believe before this century ends, the right to die will be added to the birthrights in the constitutions of all educated nations — because a doctor has no right to keep a person alive against his will. Until now the right not to be killed against one’s will existed; now the means exist to keep one alive against one’s will.
Lengthening life will not reduce the fear of death. Making the body healthy will make life more comfortable, but not more fearless. Fearlessness comes only in one state — when I come to know within that there is something that never dies. Without that, never.
Meditation is the awareness of that immortality. That which is within me never dies; that which is without me is dying always. Therefore treat the outer, that it may live its days in comfort. And remember the inner, so that even when death stands at the door, fear does not shudder you.
Within — meditation. Without — medicine. Together they can make medical science complete. I take medicine and meditation to be two ends of one science — the links between them have not yet been forged. Slowly they are coming closer. Today in all advanced hospitals in America, a hypnotist has become necessary. Hypnosis is not meditation — but it is a good step. It is an acceptance that something must be done directly with man’s consciousness; working only with the body is not enough. Today the hypnotist comes; I say tomorrow a temple will come into the hospital as well. After that, a department of yoga should also come. Then we can treat the whole person. Let the physician care for the body. Let the psychologist and the psychiatrist care for the mind. Let yoga care for the soul. The day a hospital treats man’s personality as a whole, as a totality — that day will be a blessed day in human life. May that auspicious day come near; I ask you to ponder in this direction.
You have listened to my words with such love and calm — I am obliged. And in the end I bow to the God seated within all. Please accept my pranam.
Osho's Commentary
Man is a disease. Diseases come to man, yes — but man himself is a disease. Man is a dis-ease. This is his trouble, and this is also his glory. This is his good fortune, and this is his misfortune too. In the sense in which man is a problem, a worry, a tension, a sickness, an illness — in that sense there is no other animal on earth like him. And yet that very illness has given man all his evolution. For illness means: wherever we are, we cannot be content. Whatever we are, we cannot be satisfied in being that. That very disease became man’s movement, his restlessness. But it is also his calamity — because he is restless, troubled, unquiet, unhappy, afflicted.
Except for man, no animal is capable of going mad. Until and unless man drives an animal mad, no animal becomes mad on its own — no animal becomes neurotic. In the jungle, animals do not go mad; in the circus they do. In the jungle, they are not deranged; in the zoo they go deranged! No animal commits suicide — only man is capable of suicide.
This disease called man has been approached in two ways — two remedies have been tried. One is medicine. The other is meditation. Both are treatments for the same malady.
It will be good to understand it a little like this: medicine looks at man’s disease from an atomic, molecular standpoint. Medicine treats each illness separately; it considers each particular disease as molecular. Meditation considers man as ill ‘as a whole’, not illness by illness. Meditation sees the person himself as sick. Medicine believes that diseases come upon the person from outside, are foreign, alien, extraneous.
But slowly the gap has been narrowing; slowly medicine too has begun to say: don’t treat the disease; treat the patient. Do not treat the illness; treat the ill person. This is a very precious insight. Because it implies that disease too is a way of living. Every man cannot fall ill in the same way. Our illnesses bear our individuality. If I fall ill with tuberculosis and you too, it does not mean we have the same TB. Our TBs will be different because we are two different persons. It is even possible that the medicine that heals my TB does not heal yours. Therefore, deep down the issue is not the disease, deep down it is the diseased person.
Medicine catches diseases from the surface. The science of meditation catches man from the depths. One can say medicine tries to make man healthy from the outside; meditation tries to make man healthy from within. Neither meditation can be complete without medicine, nor can medicine be complete without meditation. In fact man is both — though even to say ‘both’ is not quite right, because the very language creates a basic misunderstanding.
For thousands of years man has thought that the body is separate and the soul is separate. This way of thinking has produced two dangerous consequences. One, some people took the soul alone to be the man, and they neglected the body. The nations that did this developed meditation, but did not develop medicine; they could not create a science of medicine — the body was neglected. Conversely, some nations took man to be only the body and denied the soul; they developed medicine greatly, but had no movement in meditation. While man is both at once. Even so, when we say ‘both at once,’ the phrase gives the illusion of two things joined together.
No — the body and the soul are two ends of one and the same phenomenon. Strictly speaking, we cannot say body plus soul makes man. No. Man is psychosomatic — or somatopsychic. Man is mind-body, or body-mind.
To my vision, that part of the soul which falls within the grasp of the senses is called the body, and that part of the soul which remains beyond the reach of the senses is called the soul. The visible soul is called body; the invisible body is called soul. They are not two things, not two existences; they are two wave-states of one and the same existence.
In truth, the notion of two — duality — has harmed humanity much. We always thought in the language of twoness, and trouble followed. We used to think: matter and energy. Now we do not. We no longer say matter is separate and energy is separate. Now we say, matter is energy. In fact even saying ‘matter is energy’ is not quite right — old language hinders. There is something, X, which at one pole appears as matter and at the other as energy. They are not two. They are two ends of one energy, one existence.
Exactly so are man’s body and soul two ends of one existence. Disease can begin from either end. It may start at the bodily end and reach to the soul. Whatever happens to the body — its vibrations, its waves — are heard by the soul.
Hence it often happens that the disease is cleared from the body and yet the person remains ill. The disease departs, the doctor declares there is no illness; still the man feels ill and refuses to believe he is well. With such patients doctors are much harassed, because all their instruments say ‘nothing is wrong’ — and yet it is not so.
But ‘no disease’ does not mean health. Health has its own positivity. The absence of disease is merely negative. We can say: there is no thorn. But that does not mean there is a flower. The non-existence of a thorn tells only that — it says nothing of a flower. The presence of a flower is something else.
Up to now medical science has done no real work on the question: what is health? All its work has run toward: what is disease? Ask medicine, ‘What is disease?’ — it defines it. Ask, ‘What is health?’ — and it evades; it says: when no disease remains, whatever is left is health. This is a trick, not a definition. How can health be defined by disease? It is like defining a flower by thorns, life by death, light by darkness; defining woman by man or man by woman.
No, medicine has not yet been able to say, what is health? It can only say, what is disease? Naturally — because it catches things from the outside, and from the outside only disease is caught. That which is within — man’s innermost being, the inner soul — health can only be caught from there.
This is why the Hindi word ‘swasthya’ is extraordinary. The English ‘health’ is not its synonym. ‘Health’ comes from ‘healing’ — bound up with disease; to be healthy is to be healed. Swasthya does not mean ‘healed.’ Swasthya means to be established in oneself — that one who has reached oneself, who stands in oneself. Swasthya means self-standing. In truth, no language of the world has a word that equals swasthya. Other tongues have terms that are synonyms for disease or no-disease. Our very notion of health is only of not being ill. But not being ill is necessary for health, not sufficient; it is necessary but not enough — something more is needed.
From the other pole — from within — something else can happen. Even if disease begins outside, its echoes reach within. Throw a stone into a silent lake — the impact is only where the stone falls, but the ripples reach the distant shores where the stone never fell.
Just so, when something happens to the body, waves reach the soul. And if medicine treats only the body, what of those ripples that have gone to the far shore? If we keep our attention only where the stone fell, what of those waves that have been freed of the stone, which have begun their own existence?
When a man falls ill, even after bodily treatment the waves produced by the illness enter his soul. Therefore disease insists on coming back. Its insistence to return arises from those waves that have reached to the soul — and medicine has as yet no way to deal with them. Hence medicine without meditation will always remain incomplete. We shall cure the disease, not the diseased. In a way, this suits the doctor’s interests — that the person never be cured; only the diseases get cured and the patient keeps returning!
Disease can also arise from the other end. In truth, as man is now, there is tension within him. No animal is so dis-eased, so restless, so tense. Why? Because no animal has any notion of becoming. The dog is a dog — he has nothing to become. Man has to become a man — as yet he is not. Therefore you cannot say to a dog, ‘You are a little less a dog.’ All dogs are equally dogs. But to a man one can rightly say, ‘You are a little less of a man.’
Man is not born complete. His birth is incomplete. All animals are born complete; man is born incomplete. There is work to be done; only then can he be whole. That not-yet-complete condition is his disease. Therefore he is troubled day and night.
Usually we think the poor man is troubled because of poverty. But we do not see that the moment he becomes rich, the level of his trouble changes — not the trouble itself. In truth, the poor man is never as troubled as the rich man becomes. Because the poor have a justification for their trouble — ‘We are poor.’ The rich lose even that justification; they cannot say why they are troubled. And when misery is without cause, it becomes terrible. A cause consoles, because it gives hope: tomorrow we may remove the cause. But when illness is causeless, difficulty begins.
Thus poor nations have suffered much; when they become rich they will discover that rich nations have their own sorrows. Though I would still choose the rich man’s sorrow over the poor man’s — if sorrow has to be chosen, choose the richer one — yet the intensity of restlessness increases.
Therefore today America is the most restless and troubled country on earth — though never has any society had such comforts. In America for the first time disillusionment has happened on a mass scale; causes were supposed to be the reason for misery. America has discovered that there is no external cause — man himself is misery. He goes on inventing new miseries. The being within him is constantly demanding what is not. What is becomes worthless; what is obtained becomes futile. What is not, attracts. There is a ceaseless striving for that which is not.
Nietzsche has said: man is a bridge stretched between two impossibilities. Forever eager for the impossible, eager to be fulfilled.
From this eagerness for wholeness all religions were born. And know this: once upon a time, on this earth the religious teacher and the physician were one and the same person. The priest was the doctor; the priest was the healer. And it would not be a surprise if tomorrow the situation again became so — with a small shift: now the physician will have to become the priest. In America this has begun to happen, because for the first time it has become clear that the problem is not only of the body. In fact, it is also becoming clear that if the body becomes perfectly healthy, the problems will increase — for then for the first time one becomes aware of the diseases that are at the inner pole.
Even our awareness has its reasons. If a thorn pierces my foot, I become aware of the foot; otherwise I am not aware. And when the thorn is there, my whole soul becomes like an arrow pointing to the foot — it sees only the foot. Naturally so. But once the thorn is removed, the soul will look at something else. Hunger lessens, clothes are adequate, the house is in order, the wife one desired is obtained — though, know well, there is no greater misery. Those who get the desired wife, their misery has no end; for if the desired wife is not attained, at least one has the joy of hope — even that is lost.
I have heard about a madhouse. A man went to see it. The superintendent took him around. In one cell a man was behind the bars, holding a picture to his breast, singing some song. The visitor asked, ‘What happened to him?’ The superintendent said, ‘The woman he loved — he could not get her; he went mad.’ In the next cell another man was trying to break the bars, beating his chest, tearing his hair. ‘What happened to him?’ ‘He got the same woman whom the first did not get — so he went mad!’
But the one who did not get her was at least blissed with the picture — some difference there. The one who got her was beating his head and chest — no bliss there. Blessed are the lovers who never get their beloveds!
In truth, for that which we do not get, we can go on living in hope. The day it is attained, hope breaks and we are empty. The day the physician frees man of bodily troubles, that day the physician will have to complete another work: the day we free man of disease, we create for the first time the situation for spiritual disease. For the first time he will be troubled within and will ask: ‘Now everything is fine — and yet nothing is fine!’
It is no surprise that in India the twenty-four Tirthankaras were sons of kings; Buddha was a king’s son; Ram, Krishna — all from royal households. Their outer unrest had ended; their unrest began from the inner pole.
Medicine is the attempt to put the body in order and free it from disease — from the outside. But remember, even when man is freed of all illnesses, he is not freed of the disease of being man. The disease of being man is the longing for the impossible; never being satisfied with anything; always making futile whatever is attained, and investing meaning in what is not yet attained.
The cure for the disease of being man is meditation. The cures for diseases are with the physician — with medicine. But the cure for the disease called man is with meditation. And the day medical science will be complete is the day we understand man’s inner pole too, and begin to work with it. My own understanding is that the sick man sitting at the inner pole creates thousands of illnesses at the outer pole too.
As I said — if disease arises at the body, its vibrations reach the inner being. If disease arises in the inner being, its waves come to the bodily end. Hence the world has thousands of kinds of therapies; thousands of ‘pathies’ exist. This ought not to be so if pathology were a science in the strict sense — there could not be thousands of kinds. Yet there are, because man’s illnesses are of thousands of kinds. Some illnesses allopathy cannot help at all. Illnesses that move from inside outward are beyond allopathy — meaningless for it. Illnesses that move from outside inward — for them allopathy is very meaningful. Illnesses that arise within and only manifest on the body are never bodily in origin — their plane is always psychic, or deeper still, spiritual.
If a person’s illness is mental, bodily treatment will not help — it may even harm. Because medicine will do something to the person, and if that something does not help, it will harm. Only those treatments do not harm which cannot help either. For instance, homeopathy can do no harm, because there is no fear that it can help! But help does happen. That it cannot ‘deliver’ help does not mean help does not happen. Help happens — that is another phenomenon; to deliver help is another. Two different things.
Help happens because if the person is creating the illness from the mental plane, for that illness a false medicine is needed — a placebo is needed. He needs only to be given trust that he is all right. He is not ill — he is only in the idea of being ill. Let him be convinced. That trust can come even from the ash of some sadhu, it can come from Ganges water. And nowadays many experiments run with placebos. Take ten patients with the same diagnosis — give three allopathy, three homeopathy, three naturopathy. The amazing thing: all pathies cure equally and kill equally! In proportion there is little difference. Then one has to think what is happening.
In my view, allopathy alone is scientific medicine. But since man is unscientific, scientific medicine alone cannot do the whole work. Allopathy deals with the body in the scientific way. But man is also imaginative within, projective; therefore allopathy cannot complete the task. In truth, the patient on whom allopathy does not work is ill in an unscientific way.
What does it mean to be ill in an unscientific way? The phrase sounds odd. There can be scientific treatment and unscientific treatment — I tell you, there are scientific ways of being ill and unscientific ways of being ill. Illnesses that begin at the level of consciousness and descend to the body cannot be solved scientifically.
I know a young woman whose eyes became blind — but the blindness was psychological. The eyes were not truly blind. Eye specialists said the eyes are perfectly healthy — the girl is deceiving. But she was not deceiving. Leave her to walk toward a fire — she would walk into it. She would knock into a wall and break her head. She was not deceiving — she was truly blind. But the illness was beyond the physicians’ grasp.
They brought her to me. I tried to understand. It was discovered she was in love, and her family had stopped her meeting the beloved. After a few days of talking, she said, ‘I have no wish to look at anyone except him.’ If this resolve arises intensely — that there is no point in seeing anyone except him — the eyes will become psychologically blind; they will stop seeing. You cannot understand this from the anatomy of the eye — anatomically the eye will be perfect; only the attention behind the eye has withdrawn its hand.
We experience this daily, but we do not notice that the body’s instruments function only so long as we are present behind them.
A young man is on the hockey field; his leg is injured, blood is flowing — he has no idea. Everyone else sees it; only he does not. Half an hour later the game stops — he sits holding his leg, crying, ‘When did I get hurt? It hurts a lot!’ The leg was hurt half an hour before. What happened? The instrument of the leg is perfectly fine — half an hour later it reported. Why not before? Attention was not there; attention had shifted. Attention was in the game — so total that no quantity was left to run to the leg. The leg must have been reporting, the nerves firing, the wires tapping on their exchange — but the operator at the exchange was absent, asleep, or posted elsewhere. Only when he returned did the message get through.
I told the girl’s family: do one thing. I understand — the eyes with which she meant to see only one, you have stopped her from seeing. So she has committed a partial suicide — the eyes have died. Nothing else has happened — a partial suicide. Let her meet her beloved.
They said: what has that to do with the eyes?
I said: just try. As soon as she was told she could meet him — that at five he would come — she came and stood outside the door. Her eyes were fine!
No, this is not deception. And hypnosis has now done so many experiments that we can understand there is no trick here. In deep hypnosis, if you place an ordinary pebble in a subject’s hand and say, this is a live coal, he will behave exactly as with a coal — throw it, scream that he is burned. So far so good — but a blister will appear on his hand; then the difficulty begins. If by the idea of a coal a blister can arise on the skin, then treating that blister from the body side is dangerous; one must begin from the mind side.
We have kept only one pole of man in our view. Hence, though bodily illnesses have decreased, mental illnesses have gone on increasing. Those who think very scientifically now admit that at least fifty-fifty — fifty percent of illnesses are mental. Not so in India — for a mental illness the presence of mind is also needed! In India still ninety-five percent are bodily; in America the ratio rises.
Mental illness means it is born within and spreads without. Mental illness is outgoing; bodily illness is ingoing. If you treat a mental illness with bodily methods, the mental illness will immediately find another route. You can dam the outlet here, there, and a third place — it will emerge at a fourth, a fifth. Wherever the personality is weak, it will burst forth. Thus the physician often ceases to be a helper in curing a disease and becomes an assistant in multiplying it — what could go out in one stream begins to divide into many streams, because we place obstacles at many points.
Meditation, for me, is the medicine from the other pole. Naturally, medicine depends on matter; meditation depends on consciousness. There cannot be a pill of meditation — though the attempt goes on. LSD, mescaline, marijuana — a thousand devices are tried, to make a pill even for meditation. But there cannot be a pill for meditation. This stubbornness — that we will do everything from the outside — continues. Even if the mind is sick within, we will treat from without; we will not treat from within.
Drugs can give a false taste of inner health, but they cannot create inner health. By chemical means we cannot reach the ultimate pole of man. The deeper we go within, the more chemical activity fades; the less meaningful becomes the material approach; the more meaningful becomes a non-material, psychic approach.
Yet it has not happened because of prejudices. And it is a strange fact: doctors belong among the two or three most orthodox professions. Professors and doctors are leaders in orthodoxy — they do not drop old notions easily.
There are reasons — perhaps natural reasons. The professor, if he is too flexible and keeps dropping old ideas, will be in difficulty teaching children. Things must be fixed; only then can they be taught with confidence. They should be definite, not uncertain; solid, not liquid. The amount of confidence a professor needs, even thieves and bandits do not need! He must have the absolute certainty that what he says is right. Whoever needs such professional certainty becomes orthodox.
Teachers become orthodox. That does great harm — for education should be the least orthodox; otherwise it hinders growth. Hence you will notice: rarely are university professors inventors. So many professors in all the universities — and most Nobel Prizes go to people outside the universities.
The other very orthodox profession is the doctor’s. He too has professional reasons: he must decide quickly. The patient is dying now! If he thinks too much, the thinking will be done — but the patient will not be saved. If he is unorthodox and tries too many new experiments, danger. He needs ready-made answers twenty-four hours — so he depends on old knowledge, not the hassles of the new. Thus medical practice runs thirty years behind medical research — at least thirty. Many patients die needlessly because what should no longer be happening, continues.
One of the doctor’s deep-rooted beliefs is more trust in chemicals than in consciousness. Chemistry is important to him, not consciousness. The result is damaging — for so long as chemistry is important, experiments with consciousness will not be tried.
Let me mention a couple of experiments. Take childbirth. The problem of painless childbirth is old: how can a child be born without pain?
Priests have opposed this — in fact they oppose any attempt to make the world painless. For the day the world becomes without pain, the priest will be out of profession. If there is no suffering, even God may get neglected; who will go to pray? We remember Him in suffering. So the priest says: the pain of childbirth is natural — God’s arrangement.
This is false. There is no divine decree that childbirth must be painful. The physician believes in anesthesia — chemicals to make the body unfeeling so that the birth is painless. From the body side, women themselves have always used a similar strategy for millennia: around seventy to seventy-five percent of children are born at night; daytime births are fewer because by day the woman is more conscious; at night she is sleepy, relaxed. So most children are not born in sunlight — they come in darkness. In sleep the mother relaxes a little; it becomes easier for the child to be born. The mother begins to obstruct the child from the very first moment — later she will obstruct much, but she begins from the first.
One way: use chemicals to relax the body as in sleep. This is used — but it carries dangers. Greatest danger: we place no trust in human consciousness; and when trust in consciousness is reduced, consciousness itself dwindles.
A physician named Lozan (Lamaze) trusted man’s consciousness and enabled thousands of women to give birth without pain. It is the method of conscious cooperation: when the child is to be born, the mother meditatively, consciously cooperates — agrees, does not fight, does not resist. The pain does not arise from the birth but from the mother’s fight. She is tightening the mechanism of birth all the while. She is afraid of pain; afraid the child may be born; this fear-centered resistance is stopping the child; the child wants to come — there is a war between mother and child. In that conflict there is pain. Pain is not natural; it is only conflict.
This resistance can be dissolved in two ways: one, from the body side — make the mother unconscious. But remember: the mother who gives birth in unconsciousness will never be a mother in the full sense. Because when the child is born, not only the child is born — the mother too is born. It is a double birth. If it happens in unconsciousness, the fundamental bond between mother and child is distorted; the mother will not be born — only a nurse will remain.
Therefore I do not agree with chemically induced, unconscious childbirth. The mother should be fully conscious at the moment of her child’s birth — because in that very consciousness the mother is born.
If this is right, it means the mother needs training in consciousness for the time of birth. She must be taught to approach the moment meditatively. For the mother, meditation has two meanings: one, do not resist — cooperate totally with what is happening, like a river flowing wherever a hollow is found; like the winds that blow; like a dry leaf falling from a tree — no announcement, it simply falls. So also the mother — totally, consciously, melt into what is happening: total cooperation.
If the mother becomes totally cooperative and aware while giving birth — no resistance, no fear — and if she becomes joyfully absorbed in the event, birth will become painless. And I say this on scientific grounds — thousands of experiments confirm it. Pain will disappear.
And note the far-reaching results. To whomsoever we receive pain from in our first moment, a negativity begins to arise. With whom we begin with conflict, with that person friendship becomes difficult. If we begin our relationship with mother in struggle, cooperation will be superficial.
But if we give birth with conscious cooperation — then an amazing thing happens. So far we have only heard of labor-pain, not of labor-bliss — because it has not happened. With total cooperation there can be bliss in childbirth. I am not only for painless birth; I am for blissful birth.
Through medicine, at the most, you can have painless birth — not blissful. Through consciousness, there can be a blissful birth. From the very first moment a conscious interrelationship between mother and child. I say this only as an example — that inner work is possible.
Whenever we are ill we only fight from the outside. We never ask whether inwardly the person is ready to fight the disease. It is possible the disease is invited. Invited diseases are many. Very few come on their own; most are called. But the invitation was sent long before; the disease arrives late — so we do not connect the two.
For thousands of years many peoples did not know there was any relation between sex and childbirth — because nine months is a long gap; to link cause and effect over such a distance is hard. Not every act of sex results in conception either. Only much later did the idea arise that what happened nine months before bears fruit after nine months. Just so we invite many illnesses and later they come; the gap misleads us.
I heard of a man on the verge of bankruptcy. He feared to go to the market, feared to go to his shop, feared to go out. One morning he stepped from his bathroom, fell, and was paralyzed. Now his treatment goes on: paralysis. But we do not think that this man wanted to be paralyzed. Whether he consciously thought it is not the question. Perhaps he never made the thought ‘let me be paralyzed.’ But somewhere deep in the unconscious he wanted not to go to market, not to go to the shop, not to go out. And he wanted the assaults to stop and sympathy to begin. These were deep desires. Now the body will cooperate — it always follows the mind like a shadow.
We do not see the mind’s arrangements. Fast all day — at night the mind will arrange a banquet in a dream. It will say, ‘You were hungry — let us go to a king’s feast.’ At night you will eat. If in the night a strong urge to urinate arises, the mind rings the bell and arranges — it takes you to the bathroom in a dream. To keep sleep unbroken, the mind contrives. It is arranging twenty-four hours for your known and unknown desires.
Now the man has fallen with paralysis. Our medicines will likely harm him — because paralysis is not his disease; it is his preference. The paralysis is mental. Even if we remove it, he will create a second, a third, a fourth illness — until he gathers the courage to go to market. When he becomes ill he finds the whole situation changes. Now he has a justification for bankruptcy — ‘What can I do? I am paralyzed!’ He can say to the creditor, ‘Look at my condition’ — even the creditor will feel ashamed to ask. His wife will serve him more; sons will press his feet; friends will come to see him; people will sit by his cot.
In truth, until you fall ill, people rarely love you. So whoever longs for love must fall ill! Women often remain ill — largely because illness has become their route to receiving love. They know there is no other way to stop the husband; wife cannot stop him — illness can. Once this is learned, whenever sympathy is needed one falls ill. In fact, showing sympathy to the sick is dangerous. Treating the illness is right; sympathy is dangerous — you sweeten the taste of illness.
So this man has fallen with paralysis. No treatment can really cure him; he will only exchange one disease for another. Because paralysis is not bodily — it is oriented in mind. Such cases exist: a house catches fire — a man paralyzed for two years, who could not rise, is found running outside! When told, ‘You are walking!’ he says, ‘I? How can I walk?’ and drops again. He is not deceiving; the illness is mind-oriented, not body-oriented. That is all the difference.
Therefore, when a physician tells a patient, ‘Your illness is mental,’ the patient does not like it — because it carries the flavor of blame: as if he is pretending. This is wrong. No one pretends illness. Illness has causes — and mental causes are at least as important as bodily causes, perhaps more.
Hence never tell a patient, ‘You are mentally ill’ — it is abuse. He will not be cured — he will only turn against you. We have not yet created a respectful climate around mental illness. If my leg is hurt, everyone sympathizes. If my mind is hurt, people say, ‘It is only mental,’ as if it were my fault! It is not a fault. Mental illness has its plane. But the physician does not accept it — because he has only bodily means; what lies beyond his hand he denies. He should say, ‘This is beyond me. Either find another kind of physician, or I must become another kind.’
This man needs another treatment — one that comes from within outward. Sometimes a very small thing within can change the whole of life.
Meditation, for me, is the inward-outward medicine.
A man asked Buddha one day, ‘Who are you? A philosopher, a thinker, a saint, a yogi — who are you?’
Buddha said, ‘I am only a physician. Just a physician.’
Buddha’s answer is wondrous. ‘Only a physician — about the inner illnesses I know a little, and I share that with you.’
The day we realize we must do something about the inner illness — otherwise we can neither remove nor end the outer illnesses completely — that very day religion and science will begin to come close; that day medicine and meditation will come close. And in building this bridge, no other science can do as much as medicine can.
Chemistry has no reason yet to come close to religion; physics none; mathematics none. Mathematics can remain without religion — perhaps forever — for I cannot conceive a situation where mathematics will need religion to grow. Mathematics can go on playing to infinity — for mathematics is a game, not life.
But the physician is not in a game; he is with life. He will be the first bridge between religion and science — and it has begun in mature societies. The physician must deal with man. And, as Carl Gustav Jung said before he died: as a physician I can say that all the patients who came to me after the age of forty were, in the last analysis, suffering from a lack of religion. Astonishing — basically their illness was absence of religion; if they could be given some form of religion, they would become healthy.
Understand this. Up to thirty-five, life climbs; after thirty-five, life declines. Thirty-five is the peak. Up to thirty-five there may be no need felt for meditation — the body is still rising; most diseases may be bodily. After thirty-five illnesses take a new direction — because now life begins to move toward death. While life grows, it expands outward; while one dies, one shrinks inward. Old age is an inward shrinking.
In truth, at the very root of an old man’s illnesses stands death. People usually say, ‘He died of such-and-such disease.’ I would say it is more right to say, ‘He became ill because he was going to die.’ The possibility of death creates a vulnerability to a thousand illnesses. If a man is told with certainty he will die tomorrow, a perfectly healthy man will fall ill. All his reports were fine — yet if told he will die in twenty-four hours, he will catch a thousand illnesses in twenty-four hours he could not catch in twenty-four lifetimes.
What happened? He opened to illness. He dropped resistance. If one has to die, why resist? The wall of consciousness that resisted illness relaxed — he agreed to die, and illness began to enter.
Therefore retired men die quickly. A man should understand before retirement that it will cut five or six years from his life. The one who would have died at seventy will die at sixty-five; who at eighty, at seventy-five. The rest of the years he will spend preparing to die. Because once he feels useless to life, uprooted — no one needs him — greeting disappears; when he was in the secretariat it was different. Now no one greets him — greetings have their economics. Others have taken his post; they will be greeted. He is forgotten. He feels useless. Vulnerable on all sides to death.
When does a man’s consciousness become healthy from within?
First: when the feeling of the inner consciousness begins — the feeling of the within. Usually we have no feeling for the inner. All our feeling is of the body — of hands, feet, head, heart — not of that which I am. All our awareness belongs to the house; none belongs to the owner who lives in the house. This is dangerous — for if the house begins to fall tomorrow, I will feel I am falling. That will be my illness.
No — if I come to know I am separate from the house, that I am within the house, then the house may fall and I may still be. A fundamental difference. Then the fear of death weakens.
Only through meditation does the fear of death dissolve.
The first meaning of meditation: awareness of oneself.
Whenever we are conscious, our consciousness is always about something — never about the one who is conscious. Hence if we sit alone, sleep begins to come — because what to do? Read a newspaper, turn on the radio — and a little wakefulness seems to come. Leave a man utterly alone in a dark room — in darkness sleep comes, because nothing is seen; then consciousness is not needed. Nothing to see — what else to do but sleep? Alone, in the dark — no one to speak to, nothing to think — you slip into sleep.
Remember, sleep and meditation are similar in one sense and different in another. Sleep means: you are alone — and asleep. Meditation means: you are alone — and awake. If you can remain awake in your aloneness, within, toward yourself…
A man was sitting before Buddha one day, tapping his big toe. Buddha asked, ‘Why are you moving your toe?’
He said, ‘Leave it… it was just moving. I did not know.’
Buddha said, ‘Your toe moves and you do not know? Whose toe is it? Is it yours?’
‘Mine,’ he said, ‘but what kind of talk is this? Please continue your discourse.’
Buddha said, ‘I will not — because the man to whom I speak is unconscious. I do not even know if you hear me or not.’
He said, ‘What kind of thing is this? The toe moves…’
Buddha said, ‘From now on, be aware when your toe moves.’ With that, a twofold awareness begins — awareness of the toe, and awareness of the aware one.
Awareness is always double-arrowed. If we use it, one arrow can be toward the object and the other toward the subject.
The first meaning of meditation is to begin to be awake to the body and to oneself. If this awakening grows, fear of death diminishes. And any medical science that cannot free man from the fear of death can never heal the disease called man. Yes, medicine tries — by lengthening life. But making life longer only lengthens the waiting for death — nothing else. And a long waiting is worse than a short waiting. Extending life makes death more painful.
Do you know? In countries where medicine has lengthened life, a new movement has arisen — that of euthanasia. The aged demand a constitutional right to die — because you can hang them on and on, and it becomes very difficult to live. A man can be kept going with oxygen cylinders for a long time — but his life becomes worse than death. Countless people lie tied to cylinders in hospitals — they have no right to die; they demand it. I believe before this century ends, the right to die will be added to the birthrights in the constitutions of all educated nations — because a doctor has no right to keep a person alive against his will. Until now the right not to be killed against one’s will existed; now the means exist to keep one alive against one’s will.
Lengthening life will not reduce the fear of death. Making the body healthy will make life more comfortable, but not more fearless. Fearlessness comes only in one state — when I come to know within that there is something that never dies. Without that, never.
Meditation is the awareness of that immortality. That which is within me never dies; that which is without me is dying always. Therefore treat the outer, that it may live its days in comfort. And remember the inner, so that even when death stands at the door, fear does not shudder you.
Within — meditation. Without — medicine. Together they can make medical science complete. I take medicine and meditation to be two ends of one science — the links between them have not yet been forged. Slowly they are coming closer. Today in all advanced hospitals in America, a hypnotist has become necessary. Hypnosis is not meditation — but it is a good step. It is an acceptance that something must be done directly with man’s consciousness; working only with the body is not enough. Today the hypnotist comes; I say tomorrow a temple will come into the hospital as well. After that, a department of yoga should also come. Then we can treat the whole person. Let the physician care for the body. Let the psychologist and the psychiatrist care for the mind. Let yoga care for the soul. The day a hospital treats man’s personality as a whole, as a totality — that day will be a blessed day in human life. May that auspicious day come near; I ask you to ponder in this direction.
You have listened to my words with such love and calm — I am obliged. And in the end I bow to the God seated within all. Please accept my pranam.