Medicine and Meditation: The Two Poles of One Science

 

 

My beloved ones.

 

Man is a disease. Diseases come to man, but man himself is also a disease. That is his problem, and that is also his uniqueness; that is his good fortune, and that is also his misfortune. No other animal on earth is such a problem, such an anxiety, such a tension, such a disease, such an illness as man is.

 

But this very condition has given man all his growth, all his evolution, because dis-ease means one cannot be happy with where one is; one cannot accept what one is. This very disease has become man’s dynamism, his restlessness – and at the same time it is also his misfortune because he is agitated, unhappy, and in suffering.

 

No animal except man is capable of going mad. Unless man drives an animal insane, it does not go mad on its own, does not become neurotic. Animals in the jungle are not mad, but they become crazy in a circus. In the jungle, the life of an animal is not warped; it becomes perverted in a zoo. No animal commits suicide; only man can commit suicide.

 

Two methods have been tried in order to understand and cure the disease called man. One is medicine, and the other is meditation. Both of them are treatments for the same disease. It will be good to understand here that medicine takes a micro view of man. It considers each disease in man separately, as a separate happening, and meditation considers man as a whole to be a disease. Meditation sees the personality of man as the disease, and medicine believes diseases come to man, that they are something foreign, alien to man.

 

The difference has slowly started to diminish, and medical science is also beginning to say: “Don’t treat the disease, treat the patient.” This is a very important statement, because it means that disease is nothing but an indication of the way in which a patient is living his life. Every man does not fall sick in the same way. Diseases also have their own individuality, their own personalities. It is not that if I suffer from tuberculosis and you also suffer from tuberculosis, we will both be the same kind of patient. Even our tuberculosis will present itself in two different ways, because we are two different individuals. It can also happen that the treatment that cures my tuberculosis does not bring any relief to your tuberculosis. So deep down, the patient is at the root, not the disease.

 

Medicine catches the diseases in man superficially. Meditation takes hold of man from deep within. In other words, it can be said that medicine tries to bring health to a person from the outside, and meditation tries to make the person healthy from deep within. Neither can the science of meditation be complete without medicine, nor can the science of medicine be complete without meditation, since man is both body and soul.

 

In fact, it is basically a linguistic mistake to say man is both. For thousands of years, man thought the body and the soul of a person were separate entities. That thinking gave birth to two very dangerous outcomes. One was that some people thought only the soul was the man and they neglected the body. Such people brought about developments in meditation but not in medicine: medicine could not become a science; the body was totally disregarded. In contrast, some people considered man as only the body and negated the soul. They did a lot of research and made great developments in medicine, but took no steps toward meditation.

 

But man is both at the same time. It is also a linguistic mistake to say “both at the same time”; it gives the impression that there are two things connected together, whereas in fact, the body and the soul of man are two ends of the same pole. Seen in the right perspective, you will not be able to say that man is body and soul. It is not so. Man is psychosomatic or somato-psychic – mind-body or body-mind.

 

According to me, the part of the soul within the grasp of our senses is the body, and the part of the body beyond the grasp of the senses is the soul. The invisible body is the soul, and the visible soul is the body. They are not two different things, and they are not two separate entities; they are two different states of vibration of the same entity.

 

Actually, the very notion of duality has harmed mankind badly. We always think in terms of two, and end up with problems. Initially we thought in terms of matter and energy; now we do not think that way. Now we cannot say that matter and energy are separate. Now we say matter is energy. The reality is that using the old language creates difficulties: even to say that matter is energy is not right. There is something – let us call it x – which seen from one end is matter, and seen from the other end is energy. They are not two; they are two forms of the same entity.

 

Similarly, the body and the soul are two ends of the same entity. Illness can begin from either of the two ends. It can start from the body and reach the soul – in fact, the vibrations of whatever transpires in the body are felt in the soul. That is why it sometimes happens that a man is physically cured of a disease but still goes on feeling ill. The disease has left the body and the doctor says there is no disease – but the patient still feels ill and refuses to believe he is not sick. All the various examinations and tests indicate that clinically everything is all right, but the patient goes on saying he does not feel well.

 

This type of patient has bothered doctors a lot because all the modes of testing indicate there is no disease. But having no disease does not mean that one is healthy. Health has its own positivity. The absence of disease is only a negative state. One might be able to say there is no thorn, but that does not mean a flower is present. “There is no thorn,” only indicates the absence of a thorn; the presence of a flower is an altogether different matter.

 

So far, medical science has not been able to achieve anything in the dimension of what health is. Its whole work has been in the dimension of disease. If you question medical science about diseases, it tries to give definitions – but if you ask it what health is, it tries to deceive you. It says that when there is no disease, what remains is health. This is a deception, not a definition. How can you define health in relation to disease? It is like defining a flower in relation to a thorn; it is like defining life in relation to death, or light in relation to darkness. It is like defining a man in relation to a woman, or vice versa.

 

No, so far, medical science has not been able to say what health is. It can only tell us what disease is. Of course, there is a reason for that. The reason is that the medical science only grasps the outer, and from the outside only disease can be understood. Health is only understood from the innermost being of man, from where his soul is. In this respect, the Hindi word swasthya is really wonderful. The English word health is not synonymous to swasthya. Health is derived from the word healing. Illness is associated with it; health means healed – one has recovered from illness.

 

Swasthya does not mean that; swasthya means one has settled within oneself, one has reached to the deepest point in oneself. Swastha, healthy, means one has become rooted in oneself. That is why swasthya is not just health.

 

Actually there is no word in any other language in the world comparable to the word swasthya. All the other languages of the world have words that are synonymous to disease or to no-disease. The very concept of health we carry is that of no-illness. In reality, having no illness is necessary, but not enough for swasthya. Something more is required, something that is possible from the other end of the pole where our inner being resides. Even if a disease starts from the outside, its vibrations echo all the way to the soul.

 

Suppose I throw a stone into a calm lake: a disturbance occurs only at the place where the stone hits the water, but the ripples it produces reach the banks of the lake where the stone did not hit. Similarly, the ripples of whatever happens to our bodies reach our souls. If clinical medicine only treats the body, what will happen to the ripples that have reached the faraway banks? If I throw a stone in the lake and only pay attention to the place where the stone hits the water creating a momentary impression, what will happen to all the ripples that have their own existence, independent of the stone?

 

Once a man falls ill, the vibrations of the disease travel all the way to his soul. That is why the disease often persists even after the body has been given treatment and is cured. The disease persists because its vibrations echo all the way to the person’s innermost being – and for that, medical science has no solutions so far.

 

So, medical science will always remain incomplete without meditation. We will be able to cure the disease but we will not be able to cure the patient. Of course, it is in the interest of the doctors that the patient is not cured, that only the disease is cured and the patient keeps coming back.

 

Disease can also originate from the other end. Actually, because of the state man is in, diseases are already present. Because of the state man is in, there is a lot of tension inside him. I have already said that no other animal is dis-eased in that manner, is restless in that manner, is in such a tension – and there is a reason for it. No other animal’s mind has the idea of “becoming.” A dog is a dog; it does not have to become one. But a man has to become a man, he is not one already. That is why we cannot say to a dog that it is a little less than a dog. All dogs are equally dogs. But in the case of man, we can reasonably say to him that he is a little less than a man. Man is never born in his completeness.

 

Man is born in an incomplete state. All other animals are born in their completeness. It is not so with man; there are certain things he will have to do in order to become complete. That state of incompleteness is his disease. That is why man is troubled twenty-four hours a day. It is not, as we commonly think, that only a poor man is troubled – because of his poverty. What we do not realize is that once he becomes rich, only the level of trouble changes but being troubled remains.

 

The truth is that a poor man never experiences as much anxiety as a rich man – because a poor man has at least a justification for his problems; he is poor. A rich man does not have even that justification; he cannot even pinpoint the reason for his anxiety. And when anxiety is without any apparent cause, it is terrible. A reason gives you some relief, some consolation because you have hope of removing the reason. But when trouble arises without any reason, difficulties increase. Poor nations have suffered a lot but the day they become rich, they will realize that rich countries have their own sufferings.

 

I would like you to choose a rich man’s sufferings, not a poor man’s. If it is a question of choosing sufferings, it is better to choose those of a rich man. But it will heighten the intensity of the restlessness.

 

Today, America faces a greater level of restlessness and anxiety than any other country in the world. Although no other society has ever had the facilities that are available in America today, it is in America that, for the first time, disillusionment has taken place; illusions have been broken. Man used to think he was anxious for a reason. In America, it has become clear that man is not anxious for any reason; man himself is the anxiety – he invents new anxieties for himself. The personality within him continually demands something that is not there, and what he has becomes more meaningless every day. Whatever he has already achieved becomes meaningless, futile, and whatever he doesn’t have attracts. There is continuous striving for things he doesn’t have.

 

Nietzsche has said somewhere that man is a bridge stretched between two impossibilities, always eager to achieve the impossible and always eager to become complete. It is out of this eagerness to become complete that all the religions were born.

 

It will be useful to note that there was a time when the priest was also the physician, when the religious leader was also the doctor; he was both the priest and the doctor. And it will not be surprising if we end up with the same situation again in the future. There will only be a slight difference: then the physician will be the priest. That has started to happen in America – because for the first time it has become clear that the question is not of the body alone. Also, it has come to light that if the body is completely healthy, it seems there is a great increase in problems; for the first time, people are starting to perceive diseases that are present within, at the opposite pole from the body.

 

Our perceptions need causes. It is only when a thorn pricks your foot that you feel your foot. As long as no thorn pricks it, you remain unaware of it. But when there is a thorn in your foot, your whole being becomes like an arrow pointed toward your foot; it naturally notices the foot and nothing else. If the thorn is removed from the foot, then too, the being notices something.

 

If your hunger is satisfied, good clothes are available to wear, your house is in proper order, and you have the wife you want… There is no bigger calamity in the world than that! There is no end to the suffering of a person who has the wife he wants. If you do not have the wife you want, at least you can derive some happiness out of hoping. Once you have the wife you want, that too is lost.

 

I have heard about an asylum. A man had gone to see the asylum and the superintendent took him around on a tour. Stopping in front of a particular cell, the man asked the superintendent what was wrong with the inmate.

 

The superintendent replied that the man had gone mad because he could not get the woman he was in love with.

 

In another cell, an inmate was trying to break the bars; he was beating his chest and pulling on his hair. When asked what was wrong with this man, the superintendent replied, “This man got the same woman the other one could not get – and he went mad!”

 

But because he could not have his beloved, the first person kept her photograph near his heart and was happy in his madness, while the second person beat his head against the bars.

 

Fortunate are the lovers who cannot get their beloveds! In fact, we hope for whatever we have not achieved, just so we can go on living in hope. Once we have achieved it, our hopes are shattered and we feel empty. The day that doctors free someone from his physical problems, he will have to take on the other part of the work. The day someone becomes free from bodily diseases, he will be able to become aware of his inner diseases. For the first time, he will be troubled inside and he will wonder why nothing seems to be really right, even if everything is all right on the surface.

 

It is not surprising that in India, the twenty-four tirthankaras were the sons of kings. Buddha was a king’s son, and Rama and Krishna were from royal families. For those people, troubles had disappeared at the body level; being troubled from within had begun.

 

Medicine tries to free man from diseases superficially, at the level of the body. But remember, even when he is free from all his diseases, man does not become free from the basic disease that comes with being man: the desire for the impossible. Man’s disease means not being satisfied with anything; man’s disease makes all that he achieves futile, and attaches significance to whatever he does not have.

 

The cure for the disease of being man is meditation. Physicians have the cure, medicine has the cure, for all other diseases, but for this particular disease of being man, only meditation has the cure. Medical science will be complete the day we understand the inner side of man and start working with that too, because according to my understanding, the dis-eased person who is sitting within us creates a thousand and one illnesses at the outer level, the body.

 

As I have already said, whenever the body becomes ill, the vibrations, the ripples reach up to the inner being. Similarly, if the inner being is diseased, the ripples reach the outer level, the body.

 

That is why there are so many “pathies,” systems of medicine, in the world. It would not be so if pathology, the study of the essential nature of diseases, were a complete science. Many systems of medicine are possible because man has thousands of types of diseases. Some types of diseases cannot be cured with the help of allopathy. For the diseases that originate in the interiority of man and travel to his periphery, allopathy is useless. For the diseases that start on the outside and move toward the interiority, allopathy is very successful. The diseases that reach the outside from within are not diseases of the body at all; they simply manifest at the level of the body. Their level of origin is always psychological, or still deeper, spiritual.

 

If a person suffers from a disease in his psyche, it means no physical medication can give him any relief. In fact, it may be harmful because the medication tries to do something and in that process, instead of giving relief, it is bound to do harm. Only medicines that do not actually have the potential to relieve the physical illness do not have the potential to cause harm. For example, homeopathy does not harm anyone because there is no question of any relief from it.

 

But homeopathy does give relief. It has no actual potential for providing relief, but that does not mean that people do not get relief. But to get relief is one story; to give relief is an entirely different story. These two things are two separate phenomena. People get relief because if the person is creating a disease at the level of his psyche, all he needs is a placebo for it. He needs a placebo for his disease; he needs the consolation, the assurance from a placebo. He needs to regain his confidence that he is not actually sick but is just carrying the idea that he is sick. That is all. That is why the same end result can be achieved with ashes from a monk or with holy water from the Ganges.

 

Today, a lot of experimentation is going on with what you might call “illusory medicine” – placebos. If ten patients suffer from the same disease, and if three of them are treated allopathically, three with homeopathy, and three with naturopathy, an interesting result is seen: each of these “pathies” affects the same percentage of people in a good way and in a bad way. There is not much difference in the proportions. This gives some food for thought. What is going on?

 

According to me, allopathy is the only scientific medicine. But since something in man is unscientific, scientific medicine alone will not do. Only allopathy deals with the human body in a scientific manner, but allopathy cannot cure one hundred percent because man, in his inner being, is also imaginative, inventive, and projective. Actually, a person on whom allopathy does not work is sick because of some unscientific reason.

 

What does it mean to be ill due to some unscientific reason? These words may sound very strange. You know there can be scientific medical treatment and there can also be unscientific medical treatment. I am saying there can also be scientific sickness and unscientific sickness – unscientific ways of falling sick. All diseases that start at the level of a person’s psyche and manifest at the level of the body cannot be cured in a scientific way.

 

I know a young woman who went blind. But the blindness was psychological; her eyes were actually not affected. Eye specialists said that her eyes were all right and that the girl was deceiving everyone. But the girl was not deceiving anyone – because even if you led her toward a fire she would step into it, or she would stumble against a wall and injure her head. The girl was not pretending; she really could not see with her eyes. But the disease was beyond the physicians.

 

The girl was brought to me and I tried to understand her. I came to know that she was in love with someone, but her family members had stopped her from seeing that person. When I repeatedly questioned her, she replied that she had no desire to see anyone else in the world except her lover. The determination not to see anything except her lover… If that sort of intensity is present in a person’s determination, their eyes can become psychologically blind. The eyes become blind, the eyes stop seeing anything. It cannot be understood by looking at the anatomy of the eyes because the anatomy is normal, and the mechanism of seeing is functional – but the seer who was behind the eyes has slipped away; has removed herself from there. We experience this in our day-to-day life, only we are not aware of it. The mechanism of our body functions only while our presence is behind it.

 

Consider a young man whose leg is injured while playing hockey. He is bleeding but he does not realize it. Others can see that he is bleeding but he himself has no inkling of it. Then after half an hour, when the game is over, he suddenly grasps his leg in pain. It hurts a lot, and he asks when he got hurt. He was injured half an hour earlier. The injury in his leg is a reality, and the sensory mechanisms in his leg were working very well – it is they who finally informed him about the pain half an hour later. So why was the information not conveyed earlier?

 

His attention was not on the leg, his attention was on the game. His attention on the game was so absolute that there was nothing left to notice his leg with. His leg must have kept informing him – the muscles, the nerves must have sent impulses; the leg must have knocked on all possible doors, it must have rung the exchange – but the operator at the exchange was asleep. He was fast asleep, or he was present somewhere else. He was absent; he was not present. Only when the operator returned half an hour later did the young man notice there was an injury to his leg.

 

I told the girl’s family to do one thing. I told them that since she was not allowed to see the person she wanted to see, she had committed a partial suicide – a suicide of the eyes: “Nothing else is the matter with her except that she has gone into a phase of partial suicide. Let her lover meet her.”

 

They said, “What has that got to do with her eyes?”

 

I asked them to just try it once. And as soon as she was informed that she would be allowed to meet her lover and that he would arrive at five o’clock, she came and stood at the door. Her eyes were fine.

 

No, this is not deception. Experiments in hypnosis have shown that there is no possibility for deception in it. I am telling you all this from my own experiments. If a deeply hypnotized person is given an ordinary pebble in his hand and told that it is a piece of hot coal, he will behave exactly the way he would with a hot ember in his hand. He will throw it away; he will start screaming, crying out that he has been burned.

 

Up to this point it can be easily understood. But he will also get blisters on his hands, and then the difficulty arises. If you can get blisters merely from the idea that there is a burning coal in your hand, it is dangerous to begin the treatment of those blisters at the level of the body. The treatment for those blisters should start at the level of the mind.

 

Since we consider only one side of man, we have been able to slowly eliminate diseases which come from the body, but the diseases originating in the mind have increased. Today, even those who think only in terms of science have begun to agree that at least fifty percent of all diseases are of the mind. This is not so in India because for diseases of the mind, first a strong mind is required. In India, we still see that about ninety-five percent of diseases are of the body, but in America, the proportion of diseases of the mind is increasing.

 

Diseases of the mind usually begin from within and spread to the periphery; they are diseases that go outward, while those of the body go inward. If you try to treat the bodily manifestations of a mental disease, it will immediately find some other means of manifestation. You may be able to stop small trickles of mental disease from one place or from a second or a third – but it will certainly manifest at a fourth or fifth place. It will try to manifest from the weakest spot in the personality of the individual. That is why so often a physician is not only unable to treat a disease, but on the contrary, helps it to multiply into various forms. What could have been eliminated in one location starts coming out in various places, and in various ways – because doctors continue to create obstructions to it.

 

According to me, meditation is the cure for the other side of the human being. Medicines naturally depend on matter and its chemical constituents; meditation depends on the consciousness. There can be no pills for meditation, although people are trying: LSD, mescaline, marijuana, thousands of things are being tried. Thousands of efforts are being made to produce pills for meditation but you can never have a pill for meditation. Actually, trying to make such pills is the same old stubbornness of treating only from the level of the body, making all treatments come from the outside. Even if our psyche is affected inside, we are still treating from the outside, never from within. Drugs like mescaline and LSD can only produce an illusion of inner health; they cannot create inner health. We cannot reach man’s innermost being through chemical means. The deeper we go within, the more chemical activities lessen. The deeper we go within man, the less meaningful the physical and material approach starts to become. Only a nonmaterial approach, or we could say a psychic approach, has meaning there.

 

But this has not been achieved so far because of prejudices and bias. Interestingly, medicine is one of the two or three most orthodox professions in the world. Professors and medical doctors are highest on the list of the most orthodox people. They do not let go of old ideas easily. There are reasons for this, perhaps quite natural reasons. The most prominent among them is that if doctors and professors become flexible and drop old ideas quickly and easily, they will have a difficult time teaching the students. If things are fixed, they are able to teach efficiently. Ideas need to be definite and solid, not shaky and fluid, and then they will have the confidence to teach them.

 

Even criminals do not require the amount of confidence that a professor needs. He needs to have the confidence that what he says is absolutely right – but whoever has a professional need of being absolutely right becomes orthodox. Teachers become orthodox. This does great harm because education should be the least orthodox in every sense; otherwise there will be obstacles in the path of progress. This is the reason why no teachers are inventors. There are so many professors in the universities, but inventions and discoveries are made by people on the outside. More than seventy percent of Nobel prizewinners are people from outside the universities.

 

The other profession full of orthodoxy is that of the physicians. That too has a professional reason. Doctors have to make decisions very fast. If they start to contemplate when a patient is on his deathbed, only ideas will remain; the patient will be dead. If the doctor is very unorthodox and liberal, explores new theories, and does new experiments every time, then too there is a danger. All those who have to make instant decisions rely mainly on past knowledge, old knowledge; they do not want to get caught up in new ideas.

 

The people who make decisions on the spot every day have to rely on past knowledge. That is why the medical profession runs about thirty years behind medical research. This results in many patients dying unnecessarily because what should not be practiced today is actually being practiced. It is a professional hazard. It is why some of the concepts held by doctors are very fundamentalist deep down. One of those is their faith in medicine rather than in man himself, more faith in chemicals than in consciousness. They give more importance to chemistry than to consciousness. The most dangerous outcome of that attitude is that as long as chemistry is given sole importance, no experiments will be done on consciousness.

 

I would like to give you a few examples of this so that you can have an idea. How to have painless labor during the birth of a child has been a very old problem; how to bear a child without pain has been a question for a long time. Of course, the priests are against it. Actually, the priests are against the very idea that the world should be free from pain and suffering – because they would be out of a job if there were no pain in the world; their profession would have no meaning. If there is pain, suffering, and misery, there is a call, a prayer. Even God may be totally neglected if there were no suffering in the world. People may not even pray, because we remember God only when suffering. Priests have always been against painless labor. They say that pain during labor is a natural process.

 

But there should be no pain. To call it an arrangement of God is a false idea. No God wants to give pain during childbirth. A doctor believes that for the painless birth of a child, anesthesia needs to be given, or a medicine needs to be given, or some kind of chemicals. All those doctors’ remedies start at the level of the body; that means we put the body in a state where the mother does not realize she is in pain.

 

Naturally, women themselves have been experimenting with this on their own for centuries. That is why seventy-five percent of babies have to be born during the night. It is difficult in the daytime because a woman is very active and aware at that time. During the night she goes to sleep and she is more relaxed. So seventy-five percent of babies do not get a chance to be born when the sun is shining; they have to be born in darkness. When the woman is sleepy, she is more relaxed and it is easier for the baby to be born. A mother starts to create obstacles for the child right from the moment it is about to be born. Of course, later on she manages to create many more obstacles for the child but she begins causing hindrances for the child even before it is born.

 

One of the remedies is to do something through medication, so that the body becomes as relaxed as it is during sleep. Those remedies are being used, but they have their own drawbacks. The biggest drawback is that they don’t trust at all in the consciousness of the person – and as the trust in human consciousness goes on decreasing, that consciousness starts to disappear.

 

A doctor called Lamaze has trusted in human consciousness and has managed thousands of painless deliveries of babies for women. His method is one of conscious cooperation; the mother tries to cooperate meditatively, consciously, during the delivery. She welcomes it, does not fight against it or try to resist it. The pain that is produced is not because of the childbirth but because of the fight the mother makes against it. She tries to constrict the whole mechanism of childbirth. She is afraid it will be painful and she is afraid of the labor. The fear-centered resistance prevents the child from being born at the same time as the child is trying to be born. There is a conflict between the two, a clash between the mother and the baby. That conflict is responsible for the pain. The pain is not natural; it is only from the clash, the resistance.

 

There are two possible ways to solve the problem of resistance. If one is working at the level of the body, one can sedate the mother. However, the thing to remember here is that a mother who delivers her child in a state of unconsciousness can never become a mother in the fullest sense. There is a reason for that. When a child is born, not only is a child born, a mother is also born. The birth of a child is actually two births; on one hand a child is born and on the other hand, an ordinary woman becomes a mother. If the baby is born during a state of unconsciousness, one has managed to distort the basic relationship between the mother and the child. The mother will not be born; only a nurse will be left behind in the process.

 

I am not in favor of delivering a child through sedating the mother with the help of chemicals, or by using superficial means. The mother should be fully conscious during the delivery because in that very consciousness, the mother is born too. If one understands the truth of the matter, the mother’s consciousness should be trained for the delivery. The mother should be able to go through childbirth meditatively.

 

Meditation has two meanings for the mother. One is that she should not resist, she should not fight. She should cooperate with whatever is going on. She should be in total cooperation with the process that is unfolding, just like a river flows wherever there is a depression in the earth, just like the winds blow, just like the leaves fall – a dry leaf simply falls off the tree and no one knows about it. If the mother gives her total cooperation during the delivery, does not fight against it, does not become afraid, becomes fully and meditatively immersed in the event, the birth will be painless; the pain will simply vanish.

 

What I am telling you has a scientific basis. Many experiments have been done using this method. The mother will be free from pain – and remember, it will have far-reaching results.

 

In the first place, from the very first moment of contact we start to cultivate a bad feeling toward anything or anyone who produces pain in us. We fall into a kind of enmity against anyone with whom we had a struggle during our very first experience. It becomes an obstacle in forming a friendly relationship. It is difficult to create a bridge of cooperation with someone we had a conflict with from the very beginning. The relationship will be superficial.

 

However, the moment we are able to deliver a child with our cooperation and in full awareness… A very interesting thing is, until now we have only heard the expression labor pains; we have never heard the expression labor bliss – because it has not taken place so far. But if there is full cooperation, labor bliss will also happen.

 

I am not in favor of painless birth; I am in favor of blissful birth. With the help of medical science, at the most we can achieve painless birth, never blissful birth. If we approach it from the side of consciousness, we can have blissful birth. Then, right from the first moment, we will be able to build a conscious inner connection between the mother and the child.

 

This was only an example to show you that something can be done from within too. Whenever we fall sick, we try to fight the sickness from the outside only. The question is, is the patient really ready to fight the sickness from the inside? We never bother to find out. It is quite possible that the disease is self-invited. The number of self-invited sicknesses is great. Actually, very few diseases come on their own; most of them are invited. Of course, we invited them long before they came; that’s why we are unable to see any connection between their arrival and our invitation.

 

For thousands of years, many societies in this world could not form a connection between sexual intercourse and childbirth because the time difference is great – nine months. It was difficult for them to relate such a distant cause with its effect. And then, not all intercourse leads to childbirth, so there was no obvious reason to connect the two. Only much later did man understand that what had happened nine months before resulted in the birth of a child. He could form a cause-and-effect relationship. The same happens to us regarding illness. We invite it at a certain moment, but it arrives later on. Much time passes between the two events and that is the reason we are unable to see a connection between the two.

 

I have heard of a man who was on the verge of going bankrupt. He was afraid to go to his shop or to the market. He was afraid even to walk on the streets. One day as he was coming out of his bathroom he fell down, paralyzed.

 

All sorts of treatments were given to him, but no one wanted to accept that the man had wanted to become paralyzed. He did not think about it consciously, but that was not the point. Nor does it matter whether he had had any concept of paralysis in his mind or not – most probably he had never thought about it. But somewhere, deep inside his mind, in his unconscious, he must not have wanted to go to the market, or to the shops, or walk on the streets. That is the first thing.

 

Secondly, in some way, he also wanted the hostilities toward him to stop and to get sympathy instead. Those were his deep desires. Obviously, his body supported him. The body always follows the mind like a shadow; it will always support the mind. The mind makes the arrangements.

 

Actually, we never realize the arrangements the mind makes for us. If you have fasted the whole day, you will have a meal during the night; the mind will see to that. It will say to you that you have fasted the whole day and you must be uncomfortable: “Let’s go to a feast at the king’s palace!” So you will eat there in your dreams at night.

 

The mind arranges for everything the body cannot do. Most of our dreams are like that – just substitutes. What we could not do in the day, we do in the night. The mind arranges all of it. If suddenly you feel like going to the bathroom at night, it means that the mind is sounding an alarm. It can send you to the bathroom in your dream and you will feel less strain on your bladder. You will think everything is all right, and you have been to the bathroom. The mind arranges things so that your sleep is not disturbed. All day and all night, the mind is constantly making arrangements so that all your known and unknown desires are fulfilled.

 

The man became paralyzed and fell down. If we try to cure something like that with medicine, it might actually harm him – because he did not become paralyzed; he brought the disease upon himself. If we cure his paralysis, he will manifest a second, or a third, or maybe even a fourth disease. Actually, until he gathers the courage to go to the market, he will suffer from one disease or other.

 

As soon as the man fell ill, he realized the whole situation had changed. He had a justification for going bankrupt: “What can I do? – I am paralyzed!” He told his creditors, “How can I repay you? You can see the condition I am in.” Actually, if a creditor came to him at that time, he would feel ashamed to ask for the money. The man’s wife was taking better care of him, his children were serving him better, his friends were coming to meet him, and people were surrounding his bed.

 

In fact, we never show our love to anyone until he falls sick. So whoever wants to be loved has to fall sick. Women are always falling sick and the main reason is that it is the way for them to receive love. They know there is no other way of keeping their husbands at home. A wife cannot keep him there, but an illness can. Once someone realizes that and it becomes fixed in his mind, every time he wants sympathy he will fall sick.

 

Actually it is dangerous to show sympathy to a sick person; you should only treat the person’s illness. It is dangerous because through sympathy, you may be making his disease more palatable, and that will be harmful.

 

No medicine will cure that man of his paralysis; at the most he will keep changing diseases because in reality he does not have a disease. It is just deep self-hypnosis; his paralysis is mental in origin.

 

There is a similar story about another man who also suffered from paralysis. He suffered for two years; he could not even get up. One day his house caught fire and everybody ran out of the house. Suddenly they panicked and wondered what had happened to the sick man. Then they saw him coming out – he was running – and the same person could not even sit up before. When his family pointed out to him that he could walk, he said that it couldn’t be possible, and he collapsed then and there.

 

What happened to that man? He was not deceiving anybody. His disease was mind-oriented, not body-oriented. That is the only difference. That is the reason why, when a physician tells a patient that his disease is in the mind, the patient does not like it – because it seems to convey that he is unnecessarily pretending to be sick. That is not right. No one wants to pretend he is ill. There are mental reasons for falling sick, and those reasons are as important or maybe more important than the reasons for falling sick because of an actual physical problem. It would be mistreatment on the part of the physician to tell someone, even by mistake, that he is mentally ill. The patient would not feel better hearing that statement; in fact he would feel bitter toward the doctor.

 

We haven’t yet been able to develop a friendly attitude toward mind-oriented diseases. If my leg is hurt, everyone will be sympathetic but if my mind is hurt, people will say it is a mental disease – as if I have done something wrong. If my leg is hurt, I will get sympathy but if I have a mind-oriented disease, I will be blamed, as if it is my fault! No, it is not my fault.

 

Mind-oriented diseases have their own place but physicians don’t accept that. Their reluctance comes from the fact that they only have treatment for body-oriented diseases; it is for no other reason. It is beyond the doctor, so he just says it is not a disease. Actually, he should say it is beyond his scope. He should advise the person to find a different type of doctor – or he himself should try to become a different type of doctor. The person actually needs a treatment that starts from within and moves outward – and it is possible that a very small thing could change his inner life.

 

According to me, meditation is a treatment that spreads from the inside out.

 

One day somebody went to Buddha and asked, “Who are you? Are you a philosopher or a thinker or a saint or a yogi?”

 

Buddha replied, “I am only a healer, a physician.”

 

His answer is truly marvelous: “I am a physician; I know something about the inner diseases, and that is what I am discussing with you.”

 

The day we understand that we have to do something about mind-oriented diseases – otherwise we will never be able to eradicate all body-oriented diseases completely – we will see that religion and science have begun to come closer to each other. That day we will see that medicine and meditation have begun to come nearer to each other. My own understanding is that no other branch of science will help to bridge this gap as much as medicine.

 

As yet, chemistry does not have any reason to come close to religion. Similarly, physics and mathematics have no reason to come close to religion as yet. Mathematics can survive without religion, and I think this will remain true forever – because I cannot see a situation where mathematics will need the help of religion. I cannot conceive of a moment when mathematics will feel that it cannot develop without religion. That day will never come. Mathematics can keep its game going for eternity because mathematics is only a game; it is not life.

 

But a physician is not playing a game, he is dealing with life. Most probably it is the medical doctor who will become the first bridge between religion and science.

 

Actually, it has already started to happen, especially in the more developed and understanding nations. And the reason is that doctors have to deal with human lives. It is what Carl Gustav Jung said just before dying. He said: “Based on my experience of being a physician, I can say that basically the illnesses of all the patients who came to me after the age of forty were due to a lack of religion.” That is a very surprising point. If somehow they can be given some kind of religion, they will become healthy.

 

It is worth understanding. As the life of a person declines… Until the age of thirty-five it is on the rise, and then it begins to move downward. Thirty-five is the peak. So it can happen that up to the age of thirty-five a person may not find any value in meditation – because until then a man is body-oriented; the body is still on the rise. Perhaps all diseases at that stage are of the body, but after the age of thirty-five, diseases will take a new turn because life starts to move toward death. When life grows it spreads toward the outside, but when man moves toward death he shrinks inward. Old age means to have shrunk withinward.

 

The truth is that most probably all the diseases of old people are deep down rooted in death. Usually people say that such and such a person died because of such and such a sickness. But I think it would be more appropriate to say that such and such person is sick because of death. What happens is that the idea of death makes a person vulnerable to all kinds of diseases. As soon as someone feels he is moving toward death, the doors to all kinds of diseases open and he starts to catch them. Even if a healthy person comes to know for sure that he is going to die the next day, he will fall sick. Everything was all right, all the reports were normal: the X-ray was normal, the blood pressure was within normal limits, the pulse was all right, the stethoscope conveyed that everything was perfect. But if a person becomes completely convinced he is going to die the next day, you will see that he will start to catch a variety of diseases. He will catch as many diseases in twenty-four hours as it would normally be difficult to catch in twenty-four lifetimes.

 

What happens to him? He opens himself up to all kinds of diseases. He stops resisting. Since he is certain of his death, he moves away from the consciousness within that has acted as a wall, forming a barrier against disease. Then he is ready for his death and diseases start to come. That is why people die soon after retirement.

 

Anybody who wants to retire should understand this before retiring. They will die as much as five or six years earlier. Someone who would have died at the age of seventy will die when he is only sixty-five; someone who would have died at the age of eighty will die when he is seventy-five. The ten or fifteen years of his retirement will be spent preparing for death. He will not accomplish anything else because he knows that now he is of no use in life. There is no work for him, and no one will greet him on the road.

 

It was different when he was in the office. After retirement, no one will even look at him because they will have to greet someone else. Everything works with economics. New people will come in the office, so people will have to greet them. They cannot afford to go on greeting the old man as well. They will forget him.

 

He suddenly realizes he has become useless. He feels uprooted. He is of no use to anybody. Even his sons are busy with their wives, and going to the movies. The people he knew have slowly started ending up in the cemetery. He has become useless for the very people who needed him earlier. Suddenly he is vulnerable and he opens up completely to death.

 

When is man’s consciousness healthy from within? When he first begins to feel his inner consciousness. Usually we do not feel the inner; all we feel is the body – the hand, the leg, the head, the heart. We do not feel who we are inside. Our whole awareness is focused on the house and not on the dweller of the house.

 

It is a very dangerous situation because if that house begins to fall apart later on, the man will think he is falling apart, and that itself will become his sickness. But if he comes to know he is separate from the house – he is only residing in it, and even if the house collapses he will still remain – it will make a big difference, a basic difference. Then the fear of death will fade away.

 

Without meditation, the fear of death will never disappear. The first meaning of meditation is awareness of oneself. As long as you are conscious, your consciousness is always an awareness of something, it is never the awareness of itself. That is why when you are sitting alone you start to feel sleepy because there is nothing to do. If you read the paper or listen to the radio, you feel a little alert. If you are left alone in a dark room, you will feel sleepy because since you cannot see anything, you do not require your consciousness. If you cannot see anything, what can you do except sleep? There does not seem to be any other solution. If you are alone, in darkness, no one to talk to, nothing to think about, sleep will envelop you. There is no other way.

 

Remember that sleep and meditation are alike in one sense, and different in another. Sleep means you are alone but you are in slumber. Meditation means you are alone but awake. That is the only difference. If you can remain awake about yourself when you are alone…

 

One day a person sitting with Buddha was fidgeting with his big toe. Buddha asked him, “Why are you moving your toe?”

 

The person replied, “Forget it, it was just moving. I was not even aware of it.”

 

Buddha said, “Your toe is moving and you do not even know? Whose toe is it? Is it yours?”

 

The man said, “It is mine – but why have you deviated from what you were saying? Please continue.”

 

Buddha said, “I will not continue with my talk any longer because the person I was talking to is unconscious. And remain aware of your toe movement in the future. That will create a double awareness in you. In the awareness of the toe, the awareness of the watcher will be born as well.”

 

Awareness is always double-pointed. If we experiment with it, one side of it goes outward and the other inward. So the first meaning of meditation is being aware of our bodies and ourselves. If the awareness increases, the fear of death will fade away.

 

A medical science that cannot free man from the fear of death can never cure the disease that is man. Of course, medical science tries hard; it tries to do this by increasing the lifespan. But increasing the lifespan only increases the waiting period for death and nothing else – and it is better to wait for a shorter period of time than a longer one. By increasing the lifespan, you make death frightening for longer.

 

Did you know there is a movement going on in the countries where medical science has increased people’s lifespan? The movement is for euthanasia. Old people are demanding that the constitution give them the right to die. They say life has become arduous for them, and they are just kept hanging on in the hospitals. It has become possible; a man can be given oxygen and kept hanging on endlessly. He can be kept alive, but that life is worse than death. Nobody knows how many people in Europe and America are lying in hospitals upside down and in other strange positions, hooked up to oxygen. They do not have the right to die, and they are demanding to be given the right to die.

 

My understanding is that by the end of this twentieth century, most of the developed countries in the world will have the right to die added to their constitutions as man’s birthright – because a doctor has no right to keep a person alive against his wishes.

 

By increasing the age a person lives to, you cannot remove the fear of death from him. By making a person healthy, you can make his life more happy but not fearless. Fearlessness comes in only one situation: when one comes to know there is something inside that never dies. That understanding is absolutely essential.

 

Meditation is the realization of that immortality. That which is my interiority never dies, and that which is my outside always dies. That is why you should treat the outer, the body, medically so that as long as it lives, it lives happily – and revive the memory of that which is within you, so that even if death is at your doorstep, you are not afraid. Meditation from within and medication from without can make medical science a complete science.

 

According to me, meditation and medicine are two poles of one science – but their connecting links are still missing. Slowly, slowly they are coming closer to each other. Today, in most of the major hospitals of America, a hypnotherapist is essential. Hypnosis is not meditation, but it is a good step. At least it shows there is an understanding that something needs to be done about the consciousness of man, and that just treating the body is not enough.

 

As I see it, if hypnotherapists come into the hospitals today, meditation will come tomorrow. It will come later; it will take a little time. After hypnotherapy, every hospital will have a department of meditation. That should happen, and then we will be able to treat man as a whole. The body will be taken care of by the doctors, the mind by the psychologists and psychiatrists, and the soul by meditation.

 

The day hospitals accept man as a whole, as a totality and treat him as such, will be a day of great benediction in the life of humanity. I am asking you to think in this direction so that this day may come soon.

 

I am grateful that you listened to my talk with such love and silence. To end, I offer my respectful greetings to the godliness living within each of you. Please accept my greetings.

 

-Osho, "Into the Void, #1"