Is there any medicine for becoming healthy?

You have asked: “Is there any medicine for becoming healthy?”

There is only one medicine for becoming healthy: the realization that I am the soul—not the body, not the mind. Illnesses belong to the mind; illnesses belong to the body. You will be surprised to know: women go mad less than men; the number for men is double. Men go mad twice as much. Why? Because a woman’s madness is discharged in bulk; a man’s madness remains stuck. And women are less mad because their attachment is with the body; the body doesn’t really go mad. Men go mad because their attachment is with the mind; the mind goes mad. More men commit suicide—twice as many men. This may surprise you. Ordinarily you will find women giving more threats of suicide. They don’t do it; they threaten—don’t worry too much about their threats. And even if they do, they try with such arrangements that they can be saved. Even if…

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.

Osho, if even the body is not healthy, how will I go beyond the body, and then beyond the mind? Osho, I have become very despondent—please give some guidance.

Samadhi! The body is always unhealthy. The body can never truly be healthy. That’s why the wise have called the body a disease. Not only the bodies of those admitted to hospitals—body as such is a disease. It is called a disease because the body is born and it will die. From birth onward, the body is dying. After birth, what else have you done except die? The moment you were born, dying began. A one-day-old child is already one day dead. With the very first breath taken after leaving the mother’s womb, that much death has already happened—the journey toward death has begun. After birth, only death is certain. And of that which is destined to die, what kind of health can there be? Health belongs only to the immortal. One who is truly healthy is one who knows the immortal. The body is mortal; death is hidden in…

So some physician might have cured the blisters on her face; he might even have done plastic surgery and replaced the facial skin entirely—then the disease would have manifested from some other door. The hands might have developed eczema, or the legs might have become paralyzed, or the eyes gone blind, or the ears deaf—the disease would have found another door. The disease does not end; it looks for a door. In truth, what we call disease is not the disease itself; it is a symptom. The ordinary physician fights the symptom; the great physician fights the root. Modern psychology says that until a person’s mind is changed, there is no real freedom from any illness. Hence you too must have seen: once you get caught in the circle of illness, there seems no way out.

Western societies have developed the costliest health system that ever existed. People spend billions of dollars a year for it and it is really successful in some fields of surgery or in transplantation and preventing infections. But it seems that people are more sick than they ever were before. What is health?

Kirlian has been able to predict diseases that will happen to somebody six months later. Just by taking photographs, X-rays, he can say, "This person is going to have tuberculosis within six months -- because his photographs already show it." And he has always proved right. The doctors refused to believe him in the beginning because the man showed no symptoms of tuberculosis. Their X-ray and their methods had nothing to say about the man: he seemed to be perfectly healthy; there was no sickness present. But one question Kirlian has raised: the man does not feel well-being. He is healthy according to the textbooks of Western medicine, but according to the Eastern way of thinking he is not healthy because he is not feeling an overflowing energy of life. Something in him is developing and destroying his well-being. Anybody who reported to Kirlian that he was not feeling well…