EWS #44: Questions and answers (1)
Sept 21, 2019
Topics:
Narad (0:00:00):
Welcome everyone to our continuing series, Evenings with Sraddhalu. Namaste, Sraddhalu. I wanted to tell you that we have some good news. <<Nadejda(?)>> of Russia is doing the subtitles in Russian for the first and second I believe, talks - Evenings with Sraddhalu. So she will continue these and will complete all of them.
Sraddhalu (0:00:48):
That means viewers can enable Russian subtitles if they don't follow English. There is also the English subtitles which is automatically generated which she has corrected for the correct spelling. So that's also going to be helpful.
Narad (00:01:20):
Today we have a few questions from a young man I met a few weeks ago, Gaurav. And his first question is, “What is the place and value of humour in spiritual life? As I have often observed, when we are with family or friends, we say things which create the laughter and bring some fun into the atmosphere. But those things which we say seem to come by vital impulse. Should we keep quiet or allow this to happen?” Well, we know what Sri Aurobindo has said about the place of humour. You remember his quote? "It is the salt of existence". And then he continues on, things are worse and maybe even getting worse than worse. So he gives a high place to humour.
Sraddhalu(00:02:34):
And in his own letters you will see subtle humour, sometimes quite trenchant in its message and yet humorously.
[Narad] Yes, especially to Nirodbaran, but also to others.
[Sraddhalu] And someone asked him at one point, how is it that you have such a humorous side? And he responded from the Vedic quotation, 'raso vaisaha', Rasa is the delight of life and Saha is the divine, raso vai saha, is the Divine is the very essence of delight, and so in the very response he is also identifying himself with the Divine and because the Divine is essence of delight, obviously that has to manifest in him equally and so if you relate it to the question, place of humour in spiritual life, the essence of spirit is delight and humour is an aspect or a form in which the delight can express itself. But we distinguish between the delight manifesting in a humorous or joyous or playful manner from what he has otherwise described as this vital impulse which can often be crude or coarse and often as an impulse it is not expressive of something higher.
[Narad] Often the opposite.
[Sraddhalu] Yes, in fact it pulls the consciousness in a direction which is also crude and gross. A lot depends on the people with whom you interact. And if you interact with a certain grade of consciousness you can give a subtle or a higher uplifting turn of joy or delight humorous or otherwise and it will completely pass above them. They need that crude and coarse drive to feel something. Mother observes that there are people who are so insensitive that they need something harsh or painful or coarse to feel and anything refined they don't feel at all. And this is the reason why you see in a large part of humanity today, the need for heavy metal, hard rock and crude, coarse and violent stimulation in cinema because they have been so numbed that they don't feel unless it has that harsh grossness. But always the evolution is towards refinement, towards culturing, towards something more beautiful and more uplifting. And so that instinctive coarse form of the vital drive certainly would turn away from that movement and would be contrary to the soul's subtlety and sensitivity. But the point is that the soul's subtlety and sensitivity can express through the vital. The vital can have an uplifting and refined and even beautiful form and expression. So the problem is not the vital. The problem is the vital which has not been refined and otherwise turned upward. And so the course forms would be ideally either discouraged or limited. And if you have friends who need that grosser form and you have to interact with them, you can of course review your friendship and your circle of friends, but at least while you are with them, you can choose to not get pulled into that kind of a low grade of vital exchange and they may choose to do that and you can still remain quiet if you need to but also you can occasionally bring a slight upward turn, turn the direction of conversation, lift the quality of consciousness a little bit and if they appreciate it, then over time it will help them also and if they don't appreciate it and cannot understand, they'll just start avoiding you and you will end up with a different set of friends which better match your consciousness and need. But the aspect of humour, as distinct from this, of the vital impulse itself, the aspect of humour can come in so many different ways. It can come in a form which is not vital, it can even be a mental form of humour, a subtlety of mind which gives a different viewpoint. I'll just give a good example from Sri Aurobindo again. There's a letter which he received from a disciple addressed to Sri Aurobindo where the disciple wrote, 'Sir, can I have a timepiece'? And Sri Aurobindo writes back, 'How about some timeless piece'? You see, it's a play on the word piece and time piece, timeless peace. And it's a play in the mind, it's a kind of a refined mental play, it has nothing to do with the vital, it tickles on a very different level. There can also be a kind of humour which is much more of a psychic feel. And all of these are possible and are necessarily a part of the Divine expression in the play. The world itself, if we see it as essentially being an expression of the Divine leela, the play of the Divine, certainly humour and the joy of the play and the various colours of that joy are all intended for the spiritual life.
Narad (0:08:22):
I believe there is a line in Savitri, 'Yet for joy and not for sorrow earth was made'. Beautiful line!
Sraddhalu (0:08:30):
My teacher, MP Pandit, once commented that before he came to the ashram, he always had this very strong association of seriousness with spirituality. And then in his contact with the Mother, he found the Mother was always laughing and she enjoyed that play and she wanted people around her to be more smiling and expressive of joy and that made him think, 'oh yeah, so one can be spiritual without being serious'. He mentions that in one of his talks. What tends to happen though is in a spiritual context, one tends to be interiorised and automatically the most spontaneous outer play tends to quiet down. So for example, if you go to the Matrimandir, you'll find all the notices saying silence, silence, silence and by the time you get to the queue which is going to go up, everybody is serious, not speaking and there's a kind of a, perhaps even a sombre feeling or mood and it can simply be that they are interiorized and so the more casual excitation which is normal to life on the surface, that calms down, but it doesn't mean that you lose humour, just because you are interiorized. What will happen eventually though is when the outer consciousness becomes sufficiently harmonised with the inner, then one can be interiorized and still be expressive and should be expressive of the joy within. When you are more interiorized, let's say not just as an exercise, but in relation to the Divine Presence, there is a joy of the presence, there is a fullness of the presence. And you may feel it internally and externally you may be as if blank because you are all inwardly focused. But eventually and especially for the Integral Yoga, this has to flow out into all the parts of your being and so it has to radiate through your consciousness. It doesn't mean you are smiling and grinning, but the glow of that joy, Sri Aurobindo uses the word from Sanskrit, 'harsha', a kind of an uplifting glow of joy has to be there. It should express because that's the nature of the soul which is manifesting and then of course, in each of your actions in your speech in every gesture in all your movements the joy of the soul should eventually fill and it may take forms of humourous play also.
Narad (0:11:02):
Oh we've had some in the ashram such as Amrita and we have many stories about him that we hanother question from Surav and that is on prayer. At one side we say let thy will be done not mine and at the side we pray to the mother for different problems in our life which we are facing It can be health, money, some other problem, anything. So does it mean that our prayers are selfish? That most of the time we are always praying for our self-interest or one's own betterment? Is it right? Could you please put some light on the right form of prayer?
Sraddhalu (0:12:00):
It's a very important question. When we pray, always our first impulse is for ourselves or for a situation that affects us or indirectly or directly benefits us. Otherwise we don't feel the urge to pray. On the other hand, we are also told that it should be always the Divine will that should manifest and not ours. And it seems a contradiction at first. In the formulation of the prayer one can do it in many different ways. One can for example say, 'help me to have this or make this happen', it can be a very specific formulation or you can say, 'this is a situation which is problematic and may Thy will be done'. In both ways you are invoking for help from the Divine for a situation to be corrected. It's bothering you. It's going to be corrected. In the first case you have asked for a specific outcome which you think is good for you and in the second case you leave the outcome to the Divine. If you look at it that way, there is no contradiction. You are still praying for a situation that concerns you, but what you ask for is for the Divine will to be executed. It's a very simple resolution, but the question has more nuances. In the very act of asking for some, one of your, let's say, friends who's sick to get well, you can deem it as a selfish prayer, because you're asking for your friend to be healed but if you think of it more generally, sickness is a falsehood. So to ask for healing is in line with an evolutionary purpose and it's not just a personal purpose. You may ask because you are aware of this, it directly affects you. There are millions of sick people out there, you may want to pray for them also but here it's a space where you are more directly concerned and responsible. And although it may seem like a personal prayer, one can shift the attitude and view it not as a personal interest but as an evolutionary purpose. And then again the whole sense of the prayer and the mood of the prayer changes. It's also acceptable to ask for something for yourself. You have a financial difficulty, you can say, 'help me grow in wealth'. You have a problem in your work or in your business or you have a promotion that's blocked, you're asking for a promotion, you want help for getting through an exam and it's alright to ask, there's nothing wrong with that. And you can ask and formulate clearly what outcome you want, with the rider that this is what I want but I accept whatever you choose.
Narad (0:15:00):
Mother does say be careful how you pray, because the answer may not be the one you're looking for.
Sraddhalu (0:15:06):
You see, the manner in which one prays. She explains the criteria which makes prayer effective. There are several facets to a prayer. First of all, the prayer itself, if it is precisely formulated can even lead to precise results. Most people say, 'help, help', the help comes, but it may be a general help. But you can ask, help for this outcome and the help comes and works towards that outcome, if it is good for you. If it is not, the Divine grace might say, well I'm going to work against it even though you've asked for it. So that's where if you have the attitude that you will accept whatever the Divine considers more helpful for you. And yet you may choose to ask because that's your best understanding, that's the best attitude. So if you don't make a specific prayer, the help is there but it may not be so pointed in its particular focus. You can, for example, say 'help me get through this difficulty in this manner which is the best that I know, but I'm open to whatever you show me as the better way' and if you keep that attitude you are open to the guidance, which can fill you, that shows you a different way. Often if you start with the assumption that the Divine knows better than you what's good for you, then things become easier. Know also that the Divine knows better than you what's happening inside you, what you're thinking, what you're desiring, what your secret desire is. So I may say, 'please help for this good outcome' and I cover for myself the real interest I'm going to benefit from it, so I really want my benefit there but I give to it a more philanthropic appearance to cover, deceive myself and create this pretty appearance of generosity when in fact there's a deep set personal interest of personal benefit. It could be things like this, but the Divine knows intimately what's happening inside you and so the Divine can precisely work in the manner that is best suited for your growth, which may include getting rid of that particular distortion that you have or working around it in some way. But then if the question would be, if the Divine already knows exactly what you need, then why pray at all? It should happen automatically. That's where we come to the important idea that the act of prayer is what opens you to the help. Mother says the help is there with you, but it becomes effective when you pray. You are as if opening the passage for the help to be able to work in you or in the situation or through you on a situation.
So pray consciously, you must. The formulation of prayer, if you are honest, can be as precise as you want but with the rider that the Divine may show you a better way or give you the strength to manage in a different way and whatever the outcome you will accept as the Divine's will in the given circumstances. So for example, the partition of India was not Divine will. It's not that the Divine wanted partition. It's not that it was necessary. But having happened, the Divine can use it. So even the Divine works within constraints of circumstances and just because in spite of your prayer you got a knock and you hurt your arm doesn't mean you will say, 'ah the Divine willed it so I hurt myself', it's not that, rather you were going to have a much bigger knock and the Divine intervention kind of pushed it aside and limited it to a periphery of your arm rather than a more deep knock. So I often find people making these very casual statements like, 'what God has willed', so you missed your flight, 'God's will I missed my flight'. No, you were negligent, you didn't take care, please don't blame God for your negligence. And so, one has to be honest in the way one sees this invocation and acceptance of the Divine will but if you take this general attitude, it can be, it's the best from the spiritual perspective.
There is a very interesting experiment which was done. Three sets of plants. In the first plant, you have a control so nothing is done. Second set of plants, a group of practitioners, religious or spiritual practitioners are asked to pray for the plant to grow fast. So they come every day, they do their prayer, 'grow fast, grow fast, grow fast' and they go away. The third set of the third pot or set of plants, you have a group of practitioners who come and pray, 'Thy Will be done'. And after a month or so, you find the best growth is in the third pot. The second pot has some growth compared to the other. But I will explain the rationale of it in this way. If you are going to observe the growth of a plant, from the point the seed has sprouted and the plant begins to grow, at first the plant needs to consolidate its strength, build its root structure, accumulate enough nutrition that it can grow to be healthy. But if right at the beginning you start measuring its vertical growth and say grow fast, show your leaves and flowers, before its internal base is strong enough, then that plant will actually grow to be less strong. So it has its own rhythm and when you pray, 'Thy will be done', the divine works in the best way possible, strengthening first what needs to be strengthened and then developing other things to give you the best outcome. If you have a fever, you say take out the fever, well okay, that's one outcome, but if you say, 'Thy will be done', the Divine might momentarily intensify the fever in order to heal, to eliminate the infection and then knock it out to make you free. So the 'Thy will be done' approach might lead to slightly different outcomes than your understanding would lead you to expect. But in the long run it will give you the best outcome. This formulation though which is given, 'let thy will be done and not mine', I don't know where he has got, that but to me that 'and not mine' sets up needlessly a conflict. You are exaggerating your own will and putting it against the Divine will and it needlessly creates a division. The better approach would be, let 'Thy will be done', in a movement of complete submission of oneself, that my will should join and merge into thine, rather than not mine which is separate. So, it's not just a question of formulation, but the whole movement of the consciousness which must turn to join with the Divine, so that the Divine will may become eventually my will, it may guide my will.
Narad (0:22:30)
Very often we have very great difficulties with egos and serious problems in groups and prayer may be the only answer, because it cannot be solved on a mental level. The second thing I would ask about is, well, let me tell about the plant again, because you picked up a very good point. When the plant begins to grow, when the seed germinates, it doesn't put out leaves. We think they are leaves, but they're actually cotyledons, or seed leaves. These are the energy forms to allow the roots to develop. If you pray then, it's a mistake. You have to let the plant establish itself first, its own consciousness. Also, there's this thing of, in poetry, I asked Amalkiran once, if you feel a line is not correct, and you're not supposed to use the mind to solve it, what do you do? And he looked at me and he said one word - 'appeal', and then he said after a few moments, 'if you are patient there will always be an answer'.
Sraddhalu (0:24:15):
There's another couple of points I want to touch upon on the question of prayer. Sri Aurobindo explains that prayer is not like a slot machine, you put a coin in a slot and you get a response. You can't just say, please give me rain and the rain should come. Say now stop and the rain should stop. The Divine is not there to do your bidding on the moment's whim. So the whole understanding of prayer is that you are reaching out to invoke an intervention, and the intervention, the help will be there always and immediately without a doubt. Your ability to receive or the circumstance's ability to be able to contain what intervention comes or what best outcome the Divine chooses or can work out at that moment, all of those may not fit. And so you may say my prayer was not answered, but that's a wrong understanding. It could be that the prayer was answered in a manner so different that you didn't recognize. For example, if you take what we call growing pains, in any passage of growth sometimes there are certain painful transitions and if you don't accept that pain or accept that you have to pass through that, you will never develop to the level that you need to. And a good example from nature would be a butterfly coming out of its cocoon has to literally push its way out and struggle painfully but the very exercise of struggling develops its muscles by which it can open its wings and fly out. If at that point you cut open the cocoon the butterfly fly plops out and doesn't have the strength to be able to fly. So that growing pain is almost a necessity and especially in the human life to experience what we will later call in life as maturity. You have to go through certain types of difficulties and everyone goes through them in some form or other. And at that point if you ask for help for the difficulty to go away, the Divine will not do it that way. The Divine will either give you the wisdom to understand why this is helpful for your growth or how you must change or the Divine may give you the strength to survive through that difficult passage or the Divine may even assist by imprinting in you the maturity needed that you can view the whole thing now differently and then the problem itself becomes unnecessary. But all depends on your receptivity but in all three examples which I have mentioned, it's a change taking place inside you and nothing changing outside you. And most people when they pray, they expect everyone else should change. They don't start with the idea that maybe I should change and the prayer is for me much more than for others so that the situation may change. And so if you have this broader understanding, you will actually be, perhaps conscious of how the intervention takes place and you will see then how wonderful the Divine wisdom can be. Mother explains three things necessary for the prayer to be effective. First, she says, a precise formulation of the mind is a great help, especially if you want a very particular outcome. Second, she says, the prayer should rise on the crest of emotion. Your entire heart should rise, turn in devotion, in self-giving and when that happens, the prayer is most intense and most complete in its outreach as well as in its result. And third, she says that the source of all prayer, eventually, ultimately, is the psychic presence and if it can, if one can be conscious of the soul's perspective and turn from a deeper poise or centre oneself in a deeper poise in the call, then again the call is, draws a response which is much more direct and the connection is much more close and pure. The emotions can ask, 'help me, save me', or in the soul's call, and you can feel the difference in quality is completely different. In the soul's call, there is no agitation, but there can be a pure intensity of its concentration. And there, because the soul feels the presence of the Divine most closely, the contact is instantaneous and the help also therefore felt instantaneously.
[Narad] Could you touch for a moment on prayers of gratitude?
[Sraddhalu] To me the sense of gratitude is a movement much more of self-giving. What is gratitude? What do you feel when you feel grateful? It is difficult to describe, the movement is really one essentially of self-giving and love and closeness that you feel, because you realise that the sense of separation of I and the Divine has no meaning there, in the manner in which the thing was given, you lose yourself in gratitude, in emergence in the Divine. And so it need not take the form of prayer anymore. It is just joyous self-giving.
Narad (0:29:46):
I somehow remember that Mother said that many people pray to her when they are in trouble. But very few pray to her when nothing is wrong.
Sraddhalu (0:29:59):
Yes, not only that, she said gratitude is not a human emotion. Most people don't know even to be grateful to the Divine. And she said something interesting, she said, the best way to show one's gratitude to the Divine is to be simply happy. For all that you've been given, what's the best way you can show that gratitude? The little things for which we become unhappy are so small, so petty, so meaningless in the face of all the humongous gifts that we have been given and the very fact that we are born alive with the knowledge, with the intelligence, with the strength, with the formed, evolved body in which so much can be done and with the opportunities we have for learning and growth and service, and the least you could do is to express that gratitude by just being happy.
Narad (0:31:05):
We have one more question from Saurav. In the video of Dabur Research Foundation, you talked about self-healing. Could you please explain the process to do it? And if one is healthy, then can we use that prayer, meditation, with intention to make progress in our sadhana?
Sraddhalu (0:31:38):
It's a very big subject, but we can touch upon some important approaches. When you look at sickness, ill-health, compare with what is healthy, what's the difference? Essentially, sickness is a state in which different parts have got out of harmony, health is a state in which all the parts are now working in harmony or take a part which is not functioning, within it, parts have got out of harmony or its connections with other parts have got out of harmony, So all ill health essentially boils down to disharmony. The disharmony can exist on many levels. It can be purely physical, it can be vital, emotional, it can be mental, it can even be spiritual or psychic, which can lead to illnesses and sometimes of pretty strange kinds and whatever the actual cause of harmony if you can address that and set right that harmony, well you have healed yourself. It's as simple as that. How do you set it right? That's when we will enter into details. So depending on where you have the disharmony you will use different approaches to set it right and there is no one single approach, there are many approaches. I'll share an example of miraculous intervention which is one of my favourite stories from the ashram history. There was one Dr. Ramachandra. He was a homoeopath and he was known for miraculous cures. And there is a famous incident where Dr. Ramachandra was invited by somebody in the French Consulate who had fallen sick. He was on the deathbed. The doctors had ruled out all hope. They said he is going to die. The priest was already there doing prayers. They expected him to die any moment. And at that point the family called Dr. Ramachandra. They had heard of his miraculous interventions so they said please come and see if you can do something so he comes over, does some check and then pulls out his homoeopathic remedy, pops it into the mouth of the patient and then announces boldly, 'in one hour either he will die or he will be completely cured', and then he says 'my work is done', he walks out. He's done his medicine, he's gone. So the family is waiting, it could go either way and exactly in about an hour, this guy gets up from his deathbed, completely cured and is ready to get on with life because he has no illness. And so the regular doctor said, 'oh you must rest now'. So the family asked Ramachandra, they trusted him more, 'what do we do'? He said, 'no, he can get on with his life, he is cured, he is fine'. So it was such a dramatic cure, from the deathbed in one hour, you are completely normally functional, that it created ripples in the ashram, especially among the allopaths. And among them, Nirodhbaran, who wrote to Sri Aurobindo, letters saying, 'what is this, how can this be and if homoeopathy is so powerful then we should all abandon allopathy and follow homoeopathy' and Sri Aurobindo, in a series of letters explains to him that it is not about which 'pathy' you use, each 'pathy' has its own place and he explains nature has many lines of working and this wording is very suggestive, I had intended to write something about it which never happened. So there is a line of working and another line of working. It is basically a chain of cause-effect processes that nature has formed. But there are many chains that she has created and they are basically patterns of habit entrenched in the universal consciousness that nature has built up by which she works out certain outcomes. This goes into a much deeper discussion of how ultimately there is no such thing as physical laws. They are all habits of nature which he has built up over billions of years. So there are lines of habits which he has built up and even in the bodies working there are many lines. And each Pathy system basically taps into a cluster of or one line or a cluster of lines. Allopathy for example observes certain types of processes in a more gross and superficial working. Homoeopathy taps into a slightly subtler level of working.
Sraddhalu (0:36:34):
Sri Aurobindo explains that in any cure there are three elements. There is the instrument, instrumentation and there is the factor X. And factor X he does not specify, obviously it is the spiritual force. But the instrument is the doctor through whom the action is taken, the instrumentation is the medicine or other intervention that you have done and the factor X is that other thing which comes through. So we need to look at all three and then we will have a better understanding of any healing phenomena. So again going back to the example of Dr. Ramachandra, he was writing to Sri Aurobindo regularly as was normal in those days. He would write for example, it's not exactly the wording but something along these lines, 'today I met such and such patient, he had this illness, I gave him this medicine, I prayed to you before giving and I felt your force at 2.30 p.m'. So there is series of such letters where he specifying, 'I prayed to you I received the force and he puts the time', and then a couple of letters where he's forgotten to put the time and Sri Aurobindo has written in the margin 2.15 p.m. or whatever the time was. So here you get an insight into the factor X - he's praying to Sri Aurobindo, he feels the help of Sri Aurobindo's force, but Sri Aurobindo is conscious of the prayer and the response that he is giving and has bothered to note the time and mention it in the letter. And the factor X now we will consider to be the most important. But it still needs factor X which will make for the miraculous cure of the type of Dr. Ramchandra. You remove factor X and you will have some intervention, some healing, but it may not have that kind of a miraculous or dramatic outcome. So factor X, we will still consider most important. But being most important, it cannot exist on its own. It still needs the other two. So let's look at now the instrument, who is the doctor that comes. And when for example you are in high fever, you are so weak, you are in bed, you can hardly get up, and your body feels like it could never get well. Sickness is its state of being. If you think about what it feels like to be free of sickness, you can't remember it. You cannot feel it. That's the condition of the body. And in comes the doctor now to meet you, and he walks into your room with this force of vitality and says, 'Ah! You're looking good, you will get well'. By the time the doctor has come in, you have already got enough strength to sit up, and you start feeling good. And the doctor says, 'you know, now your illness has finished three days, it's time for the fever to go, it will break now, any moment. Here's your next dose of medicine', and he gives it, you take it in your hand, you have not yet taken it into the body and you're already feeling better. If you're not feeling better already, you're not going to get well with that medicine but the point is you're already feeling better before you've eaten the medicine. If you observe carefully, people / patients, at the moment when they're given medicine, just before that they are like this, dull, weak, energetically. And when the medicine comes, they brighten up. On their face you can see the shift, in their body you can see a shift, the energy reaching out as if to grasp the medicine, 'ah, this is what's going to cure me'. But the energy that has come up is already quite fresh. And if at that moment the medicine was a placebo, you would still get the result, or at least a significant result. So, if this shift can happen without the medicine going into your body, you see how the role of the doctor and the patient and the energetic relationship and the relationship of faiths is so important. Now consider the doctor walking in, he's a weakling, he's tired, he's drained out, he's sad, unhappy, perhaps depressed, he ambles into your room where you're lying down as a patient, 'okay what's your problem? Oh no, I'm sorry, I'm not sure I can help you, but if you like you can try this medicine here', and he goes away. What do you think will happen to you? Now the doctor could be as competent as he was but just the approach of mannerism changes the outcome and this is where the factor of the instrument becomes so important.
Sraddhalu (0:41:25):
There are very interesting examples where somebody who was far away, was in another city, the family wrote so and so is sick, we need help. And Mother wrote back saying, 'The person is resistant to my help and I will send the help through you', meaning the person who had written the letter, someone of the family members. And so she asked that person to be conscious or to be nearby, near the patient, so as to be able to route the help through them. But meaning that the doctor can be a vehicle for a certain help as the instrument. The patient may be open to the doctor or not. He can be resistant to this doctor but open to another and the cure will depend on that relationship. So this is the question of the instrument who makes effective the healing. If the instrument believes that the patient will be well, it transmits that faith and the patient catches it. In fact if you look at this a little more deeply, the state I described of the patient when you're sick in fever, you don't remember what it's like to feel well. At the moment when your fever is about to slide off, you will suddenly remember in the body, the memory in the body of what it feels like to be well momentarily that memory comes back and then you know ah now I know I'm going to get well it's as if the movement of getting well has started with the memory of the good feel, the feeling of normalcy of health momentarily awakening in the body consciousness. So this is really the key. If the body can remember what it's like to be well and can bring back that memory, well it gets well. Mother explains this with regard to the body consciousness. For the body, to experience is to know. In the mind you can know as an idea without experiencing it, but in the body you have no idea, you have no emotion. The body is a different instrument. To the body consciousness to know is to experience. So when you're doing gymnastics, you do a somersault. Unless you have done the somersault you don't know what it's like. But you can experience what it's like to do a somersault by watching someone doing it and as if absorb the imprint of the somersault. And then your body can flow with it and do it as if it caught the experience of it. It's the same thing with health. When the body does not remember what it's like to be healthy, well it's sick. When it can bring back the memory of the good health, it starts getting well immediately. So the doctor coming in is as if bringing something of this. And if he has a strong vitality, he is able to transmit this vitality. And the vitality is one thing, it boosts your life force. But the imprint in the vitality of the get-well state is what really does the trick. So you have the instrument and then you have the instrumentation that's the medicine itself. The medicine of course can be completely a placebo, you will still have result. It can also have an effect in the body which may help, which may hinder, but still it serves its purpose also. We'll just look at that momentarily. I'll give another example of a patient. He was bedridden entirely. They had given him two days to live. The doctors with their experience can tell you how long you're going to live, pretty much. So they had given him two days. And at that point, his doctor said, 'you know, there's a particular drug which is under clinical trials right now. And it has shown some hope but still under clinical trials, we don't normally use it but in your case, since everything else has failed, would you like to try it?', and the patient says, 'yes of course, I am desperate to get well'. He is given this drug and within a few days the patient is now standing, walking freely down the corridor of the hospital greeting other patients, practically cured and then the doctor comes with the message saying, 'well, the clinical trials have ended and we find the medicine is completely useless. It has had no result. But since in your case, it has been very effective, let's continue'. The next day, the fellow is flat on the bed and he dies a day later. What happened?
Sraddhalu (0:45:57):
it was not the medicine so much as the relationship the patient had with the medicine. When you accept this is going to cure me, you have given to your body a certain faith, conviction, which is the point that it holds and it is able to do what it does. It may actually trigger things. One of the things medicines do which actually heals much more than the actual chemical reaction and this is how certain types of placebos work not all, some can be just sugar. They're medicines which trigger an imbalance. They're strong medicines. They shift the balance of let's say pain. They break the cycle of pain giving the body just enough time to be able to break out of what is otherwise a habit of being in pain. So let's say you have pain, the pain continues, it becomes, we say chronic. Chronic equals habit. Whenever a doctor says this is chronic, recognize it's just a habit embedded in the body. If the pain continues too long, the doctor says it is going to become chronic. What does chronic mean? It's just a word to describe what? Habit. Body gets into the habit, it thinks this is the way to be and it forgets what it's like. At that point you give a painkiller, it breaks the pain cycle, the body says, ah yes, this is what it's like to be free of pain and it catches that and holds it. And then suddenly, even when the pain comes back, it goes, ah, I don't want this and it's able to push it away. So, there are other types of medicines which will make a radical shift in certain chemicals, hormones, minerals, but the radical shift as it breaks the body's habitual state of being in sickness pushes it out just enough that the body says, 'oh I can be different, I can feel different', and it catches that moment to start the healing process. So the instrumentation can have a tremendous effect even if it does not specifically work on that sickness, it just destabilises some aspect of the body which helps it break out of that habitual passage. And often that is good enough to get well. So it serves a critical element. Of course, it can also intervene chemically to push in the direction needed which helps the body to do what it wanted to do anyway. But once we recognize that what it's doing is shifting the body state enough that the body can catch what it wants, we come to this conclusion.
Sraddhalu (0:48:36):
So I'm going to put it through two quotations of the Mother which I will only from memory, so approximately, something like this, she says in one of her messages. She says, 'Ultimately the body should be taught to be able to cure itself' and somewhere else in one of the conversations in the classes she has in the playground, she speaks of the body being able to recover the state of health or the consciousness of health and there's a whole discussion around that. The second message which she has given which is put prominently in the ashram nursing home although no doctor really bothers with it. ‘Ultimately it is faith that cures', and people read it and they go blank and they take it to mean your faith in the Divine and okay then it will cure ultimately. And so all the doctors who work there, they don't even bother looking at it now, it's just become part of the furniture so to say. But if you could understand it, if you could understand it for what it truly means, that the body feels in it, its own faith of being well and you have to get to that point. It's not about whether I have faith in the Divine of being cured. It's about my having the faith that I can be cured. And what is faith? If you go deeper into the word, Sri Aurobindo defines it as the knowledge of the soul. That somewhere within you I know what it's like to be cured. And that knowledge of knowing what it's like to be cured is what cures you. So now you see the message in a very different context. If you can help awaken that knowledge of what it feels like to be cured, knowledge is an experience for the body, then it leads to the cure. If the body cannot have that, for whatever reason the body is unconscious, then in the life force you bring that awareness and infuse it into the body. Or in the mind you bring the memory of it and infuse it into the lifeforce and infuse it into the body. And if you don't have it, someone next to you can have it and can infuse it into you. The environment around you can infuse into you the memory of what it's like to be cured.
Sraddhalu (0:51:00):
Now take the opposite situation. When you go into a hospital, the environment is a huge mental formation, a vital formation of the hospital - sickness is normal and without the medicine and without the process and without the machinery of their intervention you cannot get well. Every doctor is taught to believe that, every patient is convinced that this is true, every family member has been told there is no other way except this way and you have no other recourse except what we say and if we say this patient will die in two weeks, well we are God. At least that's the attitude. And if the doctor says this patient has only two weeks to live, he's putting into that statement his force of will to ensure he comes right. He doesn't want to be proved wrong. He doesn't want to see the patient get up and walk off after two weeks. So there's this huge machinery which is there in a hospital. Mind, vital, mind vital and physical formations which bind you. You take the same patient out, put him in the countryside, surrounded by happy animals, growing trees and plants and running water, fresh air, sunlight and with loving members of the family saying, 'come, let's walk, let's get well, you're going to get well, don't worry', and you can see how the whole body mind and life energies will shift into a completely different state. So this is one of the problems of modern medicine, that the hospital has become this gigantic machinery, and if you slot yourself into the machinery, well, you are a victim of the machinery, in both positive and negative way. If you get well, it is through the machinery process. If you die, it is through the machinery, process, and there is no other option. So there is a classic example which is documented medically of this man in New York. He discovers he is living in a city in the time when New York was quite polluted and in a routine which is completely cut off from nature, dark, heavy, dingy life and he is diagnosed with cancer and he is told you have two months to live. It is an incurable form of cancer. We can treat you but you will suffer for two months but you will still die. So what do you choose? And the fellow says, 'well if I have only two months to live, let me go back home to my family and my countryside'. And he came from Greece originally. So he flies to Greece, goes to his family farm and starts farming, 'Let me die happily in my last days. Why suffer the medicines which are worse than the disease as they say for cancer'. Two months pass, three months pass, one year passes, two years pass and someone reminds him, 'hey by the way you are supposed to die after two months, what happened to you, you are not yet dead'. He says, 'oh yeah, two years have passed'. So he goes back to New York and does a checkup and the cancer is healed completely in his life in the countryside as a farmer where he engages with the soil and receives the soil's fresh energies, pure water, clean air, non-poisonous, aligning himself to nature rather than the sickness of a city and it did it. So if you think of it in these terms, faith is a very deep term that Mother has used in a very deep sense and it can come in from many ways. And the ways are what we recognize and say that has cured, the medicine has cured, doctor has cured, force has cured. But ultimately, she says. She doesn't say 'faith is what cures', she says, 'ultimately it's the faith that cures'. All these things act upon the aspect of the faith in the body and that's why she says the body has to be taught to be able to heal itself, that the body as it falls sick should be able to say, 'ah where is the part in me where I know my good health and how can I draw it out', and the body can learn to do this and cure itself and then the sickness might come from whatever external causes the body will find its way to do it. Eventually though she says, it should come to a point where the body refuses to fall ill. And this of course is more complex because as I said the illness can come from the life force or the mind disharmony is also eventually settling in the body. So external triggers for example in the body could be foods you eat, poisons you have and in the food you have hormones. But what is really happening is in the food there is a component of life force that has got warped and hormones really represents that and that warped form of life force is coming into you and warping you or let's take it to a more broad level. You have every day an experience of fear, as you walk into a workplace, your boss is a bit of a tyrant and at every point he is threatening you and putting you under pressure and you're always feel like you feel like you're being watched in a jail and what happens when you fear your abdomen constricts. So every day you have a constricted state lasting for 8 hours, 10 hours, you come home you don't relax fully. Within a few months the state of constriction becomes normal, eventually that becomes a tightness which prevents the juices from flowing. It's a state of energy of tightness which leads to physical tightness, which leads to physical blockages of juices flowing, your digestion is affected, your kidney or your liver functions or most likely in this case of the fear it can even take the form of the pancreas which gets affected and then you end up with a physical illness. But the chain started from an emotional knot.
Sraddhalu (0:56:55):
Or it can be from a mind perspective. You look towards the world, you look towards your future, and you turn away, you shrink in fear from the future. You can't face what might be out there. The uncertainty or the possibility of anything happening is too scary. You pull back, and that starts a chain in the energies which settles in the body or as I said it could be a psychic or spiritual disharmony and that is more complex and that's what leads to the most weird diseases, where biologically they'll say everything is fine but we can't explain why there's this sickness and it means this. It can often be because of a misalignment of the inner and outer. The soul wanted a direction of life which went in a particular way. The outer personality either from external circumstances or its own fixation in desire, habit patterns has taken a different form and there's a gap and somewhere deep within, the soul is deeply unhappy, if we may use that term, and there's a disconnect which leads to the outer personality feeling, after all that I do it's somehow empty and the emptiness I try to fill by doing more of the excitation and more of the drama. ‘Play hard, work hard’ is the formula often used. So I play harder, I work harder and I do everything harder and I still feel some hollow and I cover it up. And eventually of course it leads to all kinds of weird illnesses and particularly what they call psychosomatic or nervous types of illness etc. It can also be from a misalignment with the spiritual consciousness but at the end of the day, all of these are disharmonies which put, and we call it a sickness only when it affects the body eventually when it affects your most surface part of the functioning. But if you see a person before the sickness hits the frontal part, you can say, ah, there's already an illness in formation. And if you cure it there, it may never reach the surface layers.
So this is a kind of a, I would say, broad description of the whole framework of healing and cause of sickness and healing of sickness ultimately it will boil down to bringing back harmony and the harmony will be a part in you that already knows and is in harmony that pushes forward and if the soul's influence is your source and there is sufficient connection from the psychic being into your mind, life or body or one of these at least, then from there the harmony can imprint itself and correct for the disharmony and heal. And when that happens, you have these very rapid miraculous cures. We have examples where somebody is racked with tumours of cancer and these are medically documented. There are about 2000 cases which have been documented. I believe it's in the database of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, where a person has racked with tumours all over literally overnight sometimes within a few days there's some intervention, the person has some near-death experience, they die, they go out of the body they have contact with the higher planes, they come back and within a day all the tumours are gone. It's a miracle and medical sciences are, 'that's not even possible' and so they just push it aside and refuse to look at it. And that's one of the things you can say, 'you know this is very effective', and the doctor says, 'is it from a study or anecdotal', and by anecdotal they mean, 'oh yeah someone documented it but it's not from a study in a lab, we're not going to look at it'. But these kinds of magical, miraculous cures are equally possible and they always involve a spiritual intervention. It's as if the higher consciousness, like a stamp, goes wump, imprints its harmony and says enough of this, expels the disharmony and the cure is there. This is possible to each one of us in principle. If we can put ourselves in alignment with that action and invoke Mother's force. So we come to one last example of this disciple who was sick and dying, I forget his name, Nishikanta, and he demands, he asks for Mother to put her foot on his chest. And Mother accepts, she comes down, he is placed on the floor, she puts her foot and he is cured. And for the rest of his life he went around saying, “with one foot, I was cured of all sickness. Imagine if Mother had put both feet”. <laughter> So the lesson for us is not the physical feet, whatever it is, the foot, but her consciousness imprinted in the most material part of our consciousness. And that you can have where you are, as you are.
Narad (1:02:17):
We could close with perhaps an experience of mine. I was in my early 30s working in the Matrimandir and I got amoebic dysentery and it was a horrible thing because the description for the medicine was worse than the disease. It was Flagyl at that time and I was taken to the nursing home. My body didn't want to live any more. So I wrote to Mother and I said, 'Mother, should I just leave everything and trust to you, or should I take the medicine and trust you?'. Mother said, 'keep praying to me and take the medicine'. And the next time I was taken there, Mary Helen wrote to Mother that the amoebic dysentery has come back. And Mother wrote very clearly, 'he cannot afford to be ill'. And I never had it again.
Thank you.
Sraddhalu (1:03:31)
Thank you.