Healthcare

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…

Osho, do you feel that biological or physical diseases are also reactions to sociological or psychological backgrounds?

Sir, one more contradiction I am coming across is about free will and destiny. People say they are suffering because of old karmas, and others go completely opposite to that. It is very confusing whether there is anything like destiny or free will—whether there are past karmas or something else will happen in the future. This contradiction is, I think, a vital one in society today. Both are true, and there is no real contradiction between them. A contradiction appears—on the surface it is there—but inwardly there is none. I remember: a man once went to Caliph Ali and asked the same question—“Is man free in his actions, or is he bound? Is it destiny, or is it freedom? Are we doing what we must, or are we doing what we choose?” Ali looked at him for a while and said, “Do one thing: lift one foot and stand on…

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.

People in both the east and the west are suffering in every dimension of life. Will you diagnose this suffering for us: its causes, its preventions and its cures?

All the meanings that we look for, search for, desire for, are ego meanings. You must attain something otherwise you are no one. You only feel fulfilled if you achieve something. Through achievement the ego is fulfilled so you must achieve something -- maybe riches, maybe prestige, maybe knowledge. You must attain something, you must be able to attach something to yourself that you can claim as mine: my achievement. Only then is there an 'I', otherwise 'I am no one.' The mind feels anguish and the mind also feels suffering, dukkha. It feels anguish when there is mental disharmony and it feels suffering as far as ultimate suffering is concerned. This feeling, too, is of the mind. You must know the distinction clearly. Mind is in anguish as far as mental inner disharmony is concerned, and mind is in dukkha as far as the ego and ultimate destiny is…