Why should the World Health Organization promote meditation methods for curing diseases?

Osho, if many diseases can be cured through meditation, why not persuade the World Health Organization to help promote meditation methods?

Listen to politicians talk! And you think they’ll be interested in meditation! They have no concern with meditation. Yes, they go to priests and temples and mosques—at election time! They offer flowers, take prasad, perform puja, bathe in the Ganges, even fast! But for elections! Even if they met God, do you think they would ask for liberation? Never. Heaven? Never. They will say, Lord, please get me a party ticket for this election! Just let me win this time—just this once! And You are the purifier of the fallen—what can’t You do! You are omnipotent. A politician kept losing—lost and lost—seven elections in a row. He was distraught. One night he went to the river to jump and kill himself. As he was about to jump, an old crone placed her hand on his shoulder. He turned and saw a woman so horrific he had never seen the like!…

[NOTE: This is a typed tape transcript and has not been edited or published, as of August 1992. It is for reference use only. The interviewer's remarks have been omitted where not relevant to Osho's words] INTERVIEW BY SWAMI VIDEHA, RIZA MAGAZINE, ITALY QUESTION:* BHAGWAN, THE MAGAZINE IS A MEDICAL PSYCHOSOMATIC MAGAZINE, SO WE ARE SPEAKING TO PROFESSIONALS: DOCTORS, PHYSICIANS, AND PEOPLE DEALING WITH MEDICINE WHO LIKE TO KNOW ABOUT THE SCIENCE OF MEDITATION. CAN YOU INTRODUCE THIS TO THESE PEOPLE? ANSWER:* The first thing -- perhaps they may not be aware of it -- is that the words "medicine" and "meditation" come from the same root. Their meaning is the same: to heal. Medicine heals the body, meditation heals the soul. Medicine is outwardly, meditation is inwardly. And man is whole only when medicine and meditation are together in deep harmony.

A friend has asked: what is the relation between meditation and jati-smaran, past life remembering?

When one succeeds in recalling past lives and they begin to appear like dreams, immediately one's present life begins to look like a dream too. Those who have called this world maya have not done so just to propound a doctrine of philosophy. Jati-smaran -- recalling past lives -- is at the base of it. Whosoever has remembered his past lives, for him the whole affair has suddenly turned into a dream, an illusion. Where are his friends of past lives? Where are his relatives, his wife and children, the houses he lived in? Where is that world? Where is everything he took to be so real? Where are those worries that gave him sleepless nights? Where are those pains and sufferings that seemed so insurmountable, that he carried like a dead weight on his back? And what became of the happiness he longed for? What happened to everything he…

Can meditation be useful for the common people to be healthy?

It is the best thing to help people to be healthy, because it gives you the taste of eternal life. It leads you into the shrine of your own being which has never known any death or any sickness. And when you become identified with it -- which you really are -- your resistance to sickness, to disease, even to death, is tremendously powerful. Yes, meditation can be a great help for people for health. Every medical institute or hospital must have a special section, a division for meditation. Anyone who is in hospital should also be meditating. While he is taking medicines he should also be meditating. By the way, you will be surprised to know that the words medicine and meditation both come from the same root, which means that which gives you health. Medicine is the physical way, meditation is the spiritual way. The spiritual is certainly…

Osho, how would you like your bold experiment to be under scientific scrutiny? Also, is there any particular method of meditation useful for treatment of a particular type of mental illness?

Science HAS ITS OWN LIMITATIONS. I am ready, I can invite scientists to come here to watch what is happening. They are welcome. But they will not be able to know the real thing that is happening here. They will only be able to know the body of it, they will miss the soul -- their very methodology prevents it. Just like if you ask the scientist, "Please watch this roseflower, it is so beautiful" -- he can analyse the roseflower, he can reduce it to its constituents. He can tell you how much water is in it, and how much colour and how much perfume, and how much earth and how much air. He can tell you everything that comes within HIS vision, that which he can catch hold of by his methodology. But his methodology is limited. He will not be able to catch hold of the beauty…