EWS #52 Viruses and bacteria (1)
Feb 15, 2020
Topics:
Narad (0:00:30):
Namaste and welcome to our continuing series, Evenings with Sraddhalu.. We welcome you here today for a very important talk on bacteria and viruses. Do you have something to read from the Mother on that?
Sraddhalu (0:00:54):
Yes. First I want to change how we view bacteria, viruses, microbes generally from the way we've been taught. You know in medicine there's a very fixed picture that's given to us, that these are little creatures which have an independent life of their own and they are somehow always changing, maybe evolving, we don't know, and every now and then they get into you and they cause an illness and so you have to fear them. This is the starting point of at least what is taught. Now the science may be more complex but what is taught to the common person through media is a fear of bacteria and of viruses and it's almost as if you're made helpless once it gets into you then it's going to do its thing, you have to take medicine in order to get cured and without medicine it will keep wreaking havoc. Or maybe your body is strong enough but that's not encouraged in how it's taught to you. Equally, you are given this impression that all bacteria, viruses etc are all bad. Whenever you say, ‘oh. there might be bacteria on this don't touch’, your starting assumption is bacteria are bad or your hand has touched the floor or something you start eating, ‘no, there is bacteria, throw it away’. So the assumption or the implication here is bacteria are bad.
In fact, from a purely science perspective, the picture is very different. And then we look at it from the yoga perspective, where it is even more different. So from the purely science perspective, we recognize that 90% of all bacteria are actually good for you. We'll even go so far as to say in your body, if you count the number of cells, and you count the number of bacteria, the number of bacteria is far greater than the number of cells in your body. And all those bacteria are good for you. Even, they are necessary for you. Even, without them, you would not be able to live. So now suddenly we change our picture of our relationship with bacteria, right? So in fact just in the gut, in the abdomen, nearly two kilograms, that's what, four pounds, 4.4 pounds of body weight is bacteria, which are doing good work, important work. You take them out and you cannot digest food. It's the bacteria which are doing the most significant part of the digestion of the food. We'll push it a few more steps. We discover that around the gut is also your what they call the second brain. Because the number of neurons of your body primarily are maximum in the brain and second most collection of neurons is in the abdomen, surrounding this whole region where the digestion takes place. And that's why we say gut feel, you feel something here instinctively, it's almost the power of your brain's thinking which is organised here, but it's not conscious, it is subconscious, semi-conscious. But it's all here surrounding this whole digestive process where all the bacteria, nearly 2 kg of it, is sitting.
[Narad] I think Sri Aurobindo mentions that one has to feel poetry in the solar plexus.
[Sraddhalu] Yes, and this whole part (points to entire stomach and abdomen area), there's something so important happening that the body needs to produce almost the second brain here And all those bacteria, they are there not only for digestion. They are also secreting, they're secreting this, secreting nutritional content which the body is absorbing. Now even under certain extreme conditions, if you provide enough nutrition for your bacteria, the bacteria will take that basic nutrition and convert it to amino acids, vitamins and other structures which your body will then absorb from the bacteria they are feeding you. Now one of the common myths which is given to you by, let's say doctors, because they're just repeating what they learned by heart to pass an exam. They don't know anything really, other than what they learned by heart. So one of the common myths is, if you are in a vegetarian diet, your body is not producing B12, vitamin, right? And other vitamins, vitamin K is not so produced by the body and partly it's true. But what is not taught to them and so not told to you is that the bacteria which are sitting in your gut are producing your B12, are producing vitamin K and many other things. And so your food need not have B12 if you have the correct bacteria who can take your food and convert it to B12 or vitamin K or many other vitamins. So here's something very interesting. The bacteria are almost like a layer in the digestive process they help, but further they build on the digestive process to give you things which the food being digested would not have and give you nutrition.
Narad (0:06:21):
We have an instance, very interesting, of Novak Djokovic, the tennis player. He's a pure vegetarian and he's third in the world of all-time grand slams. He lives only on vegetarian food.
Sraddhalu (0:06:39):
If you think of the horse, it's vegetarian, the fastest, strongest, strongest animal in many ways. The elephant, huge, entirely vegetarian. So this idea that vegetarian food is not enough to sustain you is entirely wrong. But something can go wrong here. If you take an antibiotic, what does it do? It's anti-bio. It kills bacteria. It kills life. Except that your body is too big for the antibiotic to kill your cells, they first begin by killing your bacteria which are weaker, smaller. And so the antibiotic serves to eliminate a large part of your gut bacteria and totally unbalance what we call the gut microbiome. As a result of that, now you don't have any more of the bacteria which should be nourishing you. And once you have created an imbalance there, there is a whole chain reaction, you will have all kinds of lack of various kinds of vitamins and things which normally they would have been producing but they have just been knocked out. In fact something more serious happens. Remember I said 90% of the bacteria are good for you and there's this 10% which is not so good for you and we're talking of the whole of nature. But in your body nearly 100% is good for you, but when you take in this antibiotic and the good bacteria have been killed because you wanted to kill a few bad bacteria at that point there is a large patch where there are no bacteria to speak of. At which point the most virulent, the most violent, the most strong bacteria will first grow which one was that by the way? That's the one which attacked you, remember? or new ones which come in, of them the most virulent will first fill the gap. And so what happens every time you take antibiotics? Maybe it takes care of that immediate problem where you had a loose stomach or something but you've created a space where the most vicious and violent of the bacteria will first grow before the more gentle, kind, caring, your friendly bacteria can catch up and so it always tends to exaggerate or give more space for the negative. Now, I'll broaden this discussion to something outside our body. So in the good old days the approach in India was at least that you did not kill bacteria, recognizing that they are good for you, they are necessary for you. In fact, you want to be surrounded by the good ones. They tried to promote the good bacteria rather than trying to kill. So it's a very different approach than what you have today in hospitals. In the hospitals, the starting point is no bacteria. And look at the nature of the fight. Everyday you have to keep killing, killing, killing bacteria, in your hands, your face, your devices which you use, the cotton, everything has to be sterile, sterile, and if one thing gets in, you sterilise all over again. Of course they creep back, you sterilise.
What they did instead in India was they increased the good bacteria to such a great number that the bad bacteria didn't have a place to come in. So if you go back barely 20 or 30 years, it's not so long, you would have seen even in Pondicherry, every morning they would take a little bit of cow dung, mix it by hand in a bucket of water and then splash this mixed water in front of the house. Precisely the space that you have to step upon before you enter the house. And if in the house your floor was mud, as it was in many of the villages, they would splash it on the mud floor equally. And if you ask them what are you doing, they'll say we are purifying the house. Now here comes the modern medicine, let's not give any other name to it, modern medicine which now is the accepted norm, which is, ‘how horrible, you are actually spreading more bacteria, which are full in the, cow dung is full of the bacteria, You're spreading more bacteria. How can this be? It's not purifying, you're dirtying it’. So they ridiculed it to such an extent that people stopped doing this and as a result their immunity actually went down. What was happening meanwhile, when they were doing this was, you spread this cow dung which is full of good bacteria into that entire space in front of the house. As you walk in, your feet are, so to say, picking up the good bacteria. The air in that space is full of good bacteria and whatever you may be carrying is as if being washed away. You enter the house where you live, it's full of good bacteria in the air. So even if you come in sick, you're breathing in more good bacteria than bad bacteria and there's a process of purification that's taking place. Actually it was purifying. If you understand the sense of purity as goodness coming in rather than blank coming in. You see, our concept of purity is sterility where there is nothing. But if you think of it as a positive affirming goodness, then you are filling the space with goodness.
Narad (0:12:10):
I have seen this many many times. I have seen it all through India. Many of you have seen it, I am sure.
Sraddhalu (0:12:16):
Yes, yes. And of course there was one condition for this to work, which will not work today by the way for many of the houses. The cows should have been healthy normal cows to whom you did not give antibiotics because the moment you have given them antibiotics, you have messed up their gut biome and which is now following a chain reaction unfortunately, almost all the cows today which are being prepared for milk are being pumped with antibiotics and with hormones to lactate them and the result is a completely unbalanced gut biome and urine. By the way, the urine of the cow is also considered to be a purifying agent and even a medicinal agent for healing all kinds of illnesses, but not other animals. That's the interesting thing. And the reason for this, we'll come to it when we look at the yogic perspective of bacteria and viruses, but just to prepare, anticipate that, the reason for this is the consciousness of the cow, which is one of the most sattvic animals among all. And as a result, the bacteria which they carry are also highly sattvic, highly pure in the sense of filling with goodness and well-being. And so, the cow dung and the cow urine was highly prized for all these things. So I'm coming back now to our own gut. If you understand what's happening out there, the same thing happens inside us. The same thing happens on our skin surface by the way. We focused so far on the gut. And I'm not done with the gut, but we'll come back to it. The same thing applies everywhere else in your body.
Now remember, you have more bacteria than cells, so it's not just in the gut, but it's also present on your skin and a very large part of your skin surface is full of bacteria and if you have for example a lack of bacteria, let's say you've sterilised some part of the skin immediately there is a scramble, bacteria which are in the air which are all around us which are in the rest of the skin they begin to grow settle from the air and the scramble allows now the more vicious and violent bacteria to first get a foothold. So let's say you started using medicated soap which is intended to kill bacteria, antibacterial soap, one of the worst things you could do. You start applying that, you will notice the day you don't apply that, you'll have terrible body odour. Because at that point you have encouraged the most vicious bacteria to grow every day you beat them back by killing them and every day they push back by the end of the day you have body odour. The bad ones are the ones who create body odour. The good ones incidentally can grow and fill your skin and you will have no body odour.
Narad (0:15:08):
Interestingly, our good friend Dr. Pachegaonkar speaks about this at great length and says that it's enough generally just to wash with water.
Sraddhalu (0:15:20):
Do you know that one of the cleanest creatures, free of bacteria entirely, and we are now using the sterility as a reference for cleanliness, is the cockroach? <laughs> Interesting. And they are always, I think, because they lick themselves or the body produces something. I'm not sure of how, why exactly it is so, but it's almost completely free of bacteria. But freedom from bacteria is not our goal because the body needs them. And looking at the skin now, just as with the gut, the good bacteria on your skin are providing a layer of protection from ultraviolet rays, from the excessive dehydration, they are also supplying you with nutrition, they are also breaking down the waste that your body puts out through the pores and they break down the waste in a way that your body does not smell. So ideally as Dr. Pachegaonkar said, you don't need to apply a medicated soap, you don't need to make it sterile, it's harmful in fact but on condition that you have not already done it. If once you have harmed the skin microbiome then you have to allow it to regenerate and settle and one of the ways by the way incidentally is to use cow derivation, cow dung, cow urine, cow milk. So far we didn't speak about cow's milk.
Narad (0:16:52):
We should speak about that. Because we should speak a little bit about Jersey cows.
Sraddhalu (0:16:59):
Okay. So, the cows milk and especially milk which has not been pasteurised, fresh milk from the cow is full of good bacteria and so you drink that it regenerates your stomach micro, your gut microbiome, you apply that on your skin and it regenerates the local skin bacteria. Well cow dung, cow urine you may not be too happy applying, but the point being if you had sprayed it on the ground, your air in the house would be full of good bacteria which would naturally settle on your skin. You can use yoghurt from the cow.
[Narad] Raw milk is almost prohibited now in America. You can’t get it by occasionally.
[Sraddhalu] By law it is prohibited. By law, you cannot sell milk which is raw in America and in India luckily there's no such law but still it's difficult to get it because everybody has been told in the last whatever 40-50 years that pasteurised is good for you, healthy, safer. Of course there's a point to it but the bigger point is that all the good bacteria have been killed. And those good bacteria, let's say you had turned that into yoghurt and taken that yoghurt would have been far more nutritious and your B12 and other factors which you thought were missing would have been regenerated by gut biome and skin. Applying the yoghurt to the skin would be good. But again, one condition, the cows should not have been filled with antibiotics. So it's difficult to get that today.
But still at the end of the whole story even with the antibiotics given to them if you make yoghurt out of it, the lactobacilli, the bacteria which are specific to milk they have a kind of a longest shape like rods they say those are good for your skin and if you apply them on your skin it may take a few days, you'll find body odour will go away. It has to be fresh yoghurt though and not the yoghurt which has been manufactured in the factory and then preserved so that it can last for many weeks. You see there again the bacteria have been killed so that they can be preserved. But if you make it at home you're trying to preserve it, after a few days it will become too sour. That's because the bacteria are living. So you have to have fresh yoghurt which is difficult to get. If you go to Europe people don't make yoghurt at home because it's not warm enough and so you buy yoghurt in these little plastic packets where it's been manufactured a month or two before. It doesn't have the same effect. So I'm putting all these qualifiers for those who might want to try it out. So you have to have fresh yoghurt, you apply that to your body and within a few days, you'll find the skin bacteria balance will change, body odour will change, you will even find perhaps a pleasant odour or at the very least you will not have any bad odour. But one more thing which will happen is you will feel your skin in better shape. It will not dry out as easily. A lot of people who have problem of skin itching, you'll find the problems go away and these are quite remarkable things and with different people you'll have different results but always positive.
Sraddhalu (0:12:25): So far we've touched gut bacteria, skin bacteria and then there are bacteria in other places in your hair. Do you know that the primary cause of dandruff is the imbalance between two kinds of bacteria and when that balance is set right you do not have dandruff at all. So every time that you have used medicated shampoo which is killing bacteria to get rid of dandruff, you're again breaking that balance and again allowing the dandruff the more vicious bacteria to come back and the chain continues. So again what was the good old days, what did you do? You put yoghurt. Some people put eggs, by the way, interestingly, egg white or stirred egg, which again you allow to ferment slightly. In one of the things they do also, it's called congee in South India. You take rice with water and you ferment it overnight. And the next day you can use that water, you can drink it, it's very good, it's a probiotic, good for your gut health, you can apply it on the body, you can put it on your hair.
So all of this is to show you that our current understanding is actually completely wrong. It's based on this wrong idea of our relationship with nature. And it came, well, in the industrial mindset where we had to dominate and whatever we found was not what we want we had to kill and remove to flatten and destroy and that's what we've been doing to nature to our forests and to everything else and then to our body. There's one more factor in the gut bacteria. Of course there are other parts of the body which have their own specific bacteria by the way. There are microbes which are attached to eyelashes. It's a very strange thing, they live only on the eyelashes and nowhere else in the body. You will not find them anywhere else except the eyelashes. Isn't that a strange idea? And they live near the root of the eyelashes. There are equally specialised bacteria inside the ears, inside the nose, inside the mouth, all kinds of crevices in the body where the bacteria are doing good work. What they do we don't even know because we don't have a body to bother to study them because bacteria are bad. Remember that was the wrong idea. Coming back to the gut bacteria, we have now discovered something even more interesting. Increasingly the nature of the bacteria in the gut is being associated with a whole host of illnesses and their cures, including epilepsy including connections with brain degeneration Alzheimer's including nervous degeneration diseases including depression and various other mental disorders which are very specific to the brain functioning have been linked to a particular balance or imbalance of gut bacteria. And you have to start wondering what is there in the gut that's affecting the brain because we were taught that there is actually a blood-brain barrier which prevents bacteria from entering the brain region so only very fine molecules can cross through bacteria block, the brain is one of the most sterile spaces of your body and well we might say the bacteria in the gut are producing certain products which are feeding the brain or creating imbalance. Maybe, but is it really that?
Sraddhalu (0:24:14):
And there's something much more complex which we will fully appreciate only when we look at the yogic perspective of bacteria. So I think we'll enter into that discussion now. I want then later to contrast bacteria with viruses and then we'll discuss what happens when humans manipulate viruses and the issues relating to that. So when we look at the human body, there's a very interesting quotation of the Mother. There are quite a few things she speaks of. I want to read from something. She says, “In reality, illness is only disequilibrium. If then you are able to establish equilibrium, this disequilibrium disappears. And illness is simply always, in every case, even when the doctors say that there are microbes, in every case, a disequilibrium in the being. A disequilibrium among the various functions, disequilibrium among the forces. This is not to say that there are no microbes, there are, there are many microbes, there are many more microbes than are known now”. Here is a hint, a few things which I will read out where you will see the Mother is telling you what science does not yet know and at least at that time science knew nothing about these things which now are being increasingly confirmed. “So there are many more microbes than are known now but it is not because of that you are ill for they are always there. It happens that they are always there and for days they do nothing to you and then all of a sudden one day one of them gets hold of you and makes you ill. Why? Simply because the resistance was not as it used to be habitually. Because there was some disequilibrium in some part, the functioning was not normal. But if by an inner power you can re-establish the equilibrium, then that's the end. There are no more difficulty. The disequilibrium disappears.” and then she speaks of other ways of curing and so on, and she says, “Only those who do not let you do it are not cured and this is visible. They do not allow you to act, they cling to the illness. I tell them, ‘Ah, you are not cured? Go to the doctor then’. And the funniest part of the thing is that most often they believe in the doctors, although the working remains the same”. So she was speaking earlier about a more direct intervention by which she would cure people, but those types who didn't want to be cured, she sent to the doctor. “Every doctor who is something of a philosopher will tell you, it is like that. We doctors give only the occasion but it is the body that cures itself. When the body wants to be cured, it is cured. Well, there are bodies that do not allow equilibrium to be re-established unless they are made to absorb some medicine or something very definite which gives them the feeling that they are being truly looked after. So you see it is now in the body consciousness that there is this need or this belief, oh I need the medicine. But if you give them a very precise, very exact treatment that is sometimes very difficult to follow, they begin to be convinced that there is nothing better to do than to regain the equilibrium and they get back the equilibrium”.
It gets into a very funny story she narrates and I will read that out because it's worth sharing here although it's going beyond the bacteria discussion. “I knew a doctor who was a neurologist and treated illnesses of the stomach. He used to say that all the illnesses of the stomach came from a more or less bad nervous state. He was a doctor for the rich and it was the rich and unoccupied people who went to him. So they used to come and tell him, I have pain in the stomach, I cannot digest, and this and that. They had terrible pains, they had headache, they had, well all the symptoms. He used to listen to them very seriously. I knew a lady who went to him and to whom he said, ‘Ah, your case is very serious. But on which floor do you live? On the ground floor. Alright. This is what you have to do to cure your illness of the stomach. Take a bunch of fully ripe grapes. Do not take your breakfast. For breakfast, it upsets your stomach. Take a bunch of grapes. Hold it in your hand like this very carefully. Then prepare to go out. Not by your door. Never go out by your door. You must go out by the window and get a stool and go out by the window. And there you must walk while eating one grape every two steps, not more, yes not more. You will have stomach ache if you do more steps. One single grape every two steps, you must take two steps then eat one single grape, you should continue till there are no more grapes. Do not turn back. Go straight on till there are no more grapes. You must take a big bunch and when you're finished, you may return quietly. But do not take a conveyance. Come back on foot, otherwise the whole trouble will return. Come back quietly and I give you the guarantee that if you do that every day at the end of three days, you will be cured”. So she's quoting the doctor in all this. And then Mother says, “and in fact this lady was cured”.
Sraddhalu (0:30:11):
Okay, so I skip this to go to something else which is even more stunning, which is from a statement that Sri Aurobindo makes. Sri Aurobindo says something which is in his Thoughts and Aphorisms. Now the Aphorisms are an extraordinary gift. There are so many things he has covered there. It is all categorised into three broad categories of karma, bhakti and jnana. There are so many things he has given there which blow your mind. And it is a useful exercise. You read one aphorism and let it blow your mind, think of the implications, then go to the next and what you thought was blown, mind will get further blown up. So he takes you through a series of insights and breakthroughs. So there's a whole section where he talks about health and illness. And before I come to the mind blowing aphorisms, I will just get to the preparatory ones before, he says, “Health protected by 20,000 precautions is the gospel of the doctor, but it is not God's evangel for the body nor Nature's”. So 20,000 precautions, what do you do? Every morning you have your medicated soap to wash, medicated soap for the body, you have your shampoo for the hair and then in the food you have to have this and that and all the rest.
Next aphorism, “Man was once naturally healthy and could revert to that primal condition if he were suffered. But Medical Science” and he puts n-cap s-cap, Medical Science, it’s like a big person, big thing in itself, ,an entity, “But Medical Science pursues our body with an innumerable pack of drugs and assails the imagination with ravening hordes of microbes”. Very interesting now. Already here you are beginning to wonder what is this? So first he is criticising this innumerable pack of drugs. If you go to a medical store, you look inside little boxes, and all the names, and you ask for a name and they look up on their computer and say, ‘yes we have a stock and they pull it out’, and so many names and so many drugs and every now and then they produce more and more and by the way if you've been using something which is 20 years old you continue to use it but if you go to a new doctor, he'll say, ‘oh that is old medicine, now they have a better version’ and he gives you a new one but that's on the drug side. But the other side which is more interesting, he says, ‘and assails the imagination with ravening hordes of microbes’. Now what has medical science taught you? Oh, horde of microbes, hundreds, millions, billions of microbes, they are all over on your skin and on the floor and everywhere in the air is full of microbes. You are breathing in microbes, right? So in your mind you have got this picture of hordes of microbes everywhere and the fear with it. So the imagination is filled with this.
Sraddhalu (0:32:59):
Next comes this mind-blowing aphorism. He says, Sri Aurobindo says this, “I would rather die and have done with it than spend life in defending myself against a phantasmal sea of microbes. If that is to be barbarous and unenlightened, I embrace gladly my Cimmerian darkness”. Oof! Let it sink in. ‘I would rather die and have done with it, in defending myself against a phantasmal siege of microbes’; So remember our mentality has been, oh, microbe, microbe, microbe, microbe. The siege which you have, the microbes have surrounded you and are trying to break through your body's defences and you have to treat your body to fight them, vaccinate your body to fight them. This whole game, the microbes, he says, are phantasmal. It is a fantasy of your imagination. It's almost like a phantom which is coming but there's no such thing really. It's all been created, an illusory appearance. ‘If that is to be barbarous and unenlightened’, because science will say oh you are a primitive guy if you don't accept all this, ‘I embrace gladly the Cimmerian darkness’.. Do you know that word Cimmerian? C-I-M-M-E-R-I-A-N. Cimmerian darkness. It's a nomadic tribe from Asia Minor, member of mythical people living in…<audience says something inaudible> No, Cimmerian, it's like really barbaric people who live in darkness, who don't want light. And if Sri Aurobindo's statement that I would rather die than spend my life defending against these hordes of phantasmal microbes, that obviously this fellow is unenlightened. He doesn't know about science. He is uneducated, right? That's what you would say, that's the Cimmerian darkness bordering on death. Because from science's perspective, if you don't believe this you are practically dead because microbes are going to invade you anyway, right?
So maybe I look at the next two because it will kind of, “Surgeons save and cure by cutting and maiming”. Think about it. You maim the body, you leave it permanently damaged. “Surgeons save and cure by cutting and maiming. Why not rather seek to discover Nature's direct all-powerful remedies?”. And next aphorism, “It should take long for self-cure to replace medicine because of the fear, self-distrust and unnatural physical reliance on drugs, which Medical Science has taught to our minds and bodies and made our second nature”. So think of it this way, the programming has gone so deep, he says you can't knock it out just like that. It should take long for self-cure to replace medicine. Okay, you have been programmed for a few generations, let's say last four or five generations. So maybe in a couple of more generations we could undo the programming. But right now you have fear, self-distrust, you don't trust yourself and unnatural physical reliance on drugs. Not only that, the Medical Science has talked to our minds and bodies and made our second nature. It's almost as if the body and mind need this. It's part of your nature to have to have those drugs. So the point of this of course is just because you've read this Sri Aurobindo statement, I would rather die than do this, please don't stop your drugs because you have already built a reliance on them. If you suddenly stop them, you'll end up with bigger problems.
Sraddhalu (0:37:40):
So what you can do, of course, is build gradually a greater strength. And recognize the place of the drugs assisting you not only physically, but much more also in the mind. And every time you take your medicines or drugs, invoke the help. Let that amplify the result of the drugs. And maybe you might find over time you may taper down the need for the drugs and so give your body and your mind the conviction that actually you are strong enough. But it takes time, so take your time. And then the next one, maybe we close this discussion, “Medicine is necessary for our bodies in disease only because our bodies have learnt the art of not getting well without medicines.”, we have learnt the art of not getting well without medicines. “Even so, one sees often that the moment Nature chooses for recovery is that in which the life is abandoned as hopeless by the doctors”. Interesting. So many cases where the doctor says ‘no hope’ and then suddenly Nature chose. One more thing then we will read. “Distrust of the curative power within us was our physical fall from paradise”. Interesting. So paradise was that state in which we were able to be immune to disease. Physical fall from paradise not spiritual or psychological fall was distrust of the pure curative power within us. And then he says, “Medical Science and a bad heredity are the two angels of God who stand at the gates to forbid our return and re-entry”. So you cannot re-enter paradise of freedom from sickness or paradise of immunity from sickness because there are two angels of God standing in the way. Medical Science again, M capital, S capital, like it's a being, and bad heredity. And you have to think of the implications. They forbid our return and re-entry.
Okay, so we can close this part of our discussion and go to one more which is from the Mother's discussion about microbes. So now we are coming more into the true nature of microbes and for that purpose we will see what Mother has to say. And you must keep in mind the Mother knew far more than she let out as did Sri Aurobindo. A lot of things they did not speak because it was premature to the current mentality of humanity. It would be so different that they would say, ‘oh, she is talking some ancient beliefs or some old teachings’. Even now, I have met people and great devotees, sadhakas with lot of intellectual training and they are the ones who have this problem. They will say, ‘oh, you know that text Mother is speaking of, that is what they used to believe in that century, it's not true actually modern science has come far away ahead’. Okay, because they're so programmed in their intellect,. okay.
So this one example she's giving to Satprem, where Satprem says he got ill and he got this illness and Mother says is it painful? He says, ‘oh terrible, as if I were burning within’. And then Mother says to him, ‘that's it, like red hot iron claws. And the other two had the same thing, the very same thing’. Satprem, ‘My body and muscles are aching all over as if I had been battered’. And Mother says, ‘yes, that's it, mon petit (mon petit - my child). Yes, that's it, mon petit.. The doctors would say it was a mass of germs or microbes or viruses or god knows what. But it was vital ill-will, vital malice. But with a coating material enough to act directly’, Mother strikes (makes a movement of fist as if). ‘It was instantaneous, you know, no need of incubation, instantaneous like a fiery sword ripping open your stomach. charming! It will go away but I stopped the immediate effect’. I think Mother also had it earlier, so she's speaking of what she did to her own body. She said I stopped. ‘The immediate effect, was almost catastrophic. I stopped it with my great method, that sort of inner immobility and leaving everything in the Lord's hands. Nonetheless, the next day I was unwell. I'm not quite well yet as though the body had been terribly shaken. Then I saw all kinds of things. Oh bah bah! An adverse organisation in the most material vital by misleading unenlightened spiritual aspirations’. And she describes what is the force behind it. But you see the way she is describing this attack, she says very casually microbes, viruses or god knows what, almost as if that's irrelevant. But it was vital ill-will, vital malice, but with a coating material enough to act directly and she strikes.
Sraddhalu (0:43:06): Now here we come to the yogic understanding of the true nature of microbes, viruses, etc. So you see here an ill will with a coating material, with a coating material enough to act directly. So you have an ill will which is primarily of a vital character of energy bundle and with a coating which is almost material and so it can act on matter directly. Now here we get our first clue. But we will look at another passage of the Mother where she describes this in much greater detail. Lets just load this (waiting for it to load on his phone) and there she explains that the formation of the microbes is actually the materialisation of vibrations from the lower vital worlds and she links it also to dead people. Yes, here we have it. We will complete with this. So I have the text. So there are, people ask about microbes in the water and why do we take precautions to drink only filtered water. She says you know even if you could convince yourself that what you're drinking is healthy water it won't be enough because in your subconscious you're open to all these negative suggestions that this water is not healthy, it will cause you to fall sick and in your subconscious that impulse is going to come in and seize and do its thing. So, then she speaks of the origin of the microbes. So she is speaking of the origin of the microbes, the beginning she says, is in the vital. “Now without going to that extreme, there are in the physical atmosphere, the earth atmosphere, numerous small entities which you do not see. For your sight is too limited, but which move about in your atmosphere. Some of them are quite nice, others very wicked. Generally, these little entities are produced by the disintegration of vital beings. They pullulate and these form quite an unpleasant mass. There are some which do very fine things. I believe I narrated to you the story of the little beings who tugged at my sari to tell me that the milk was about to boil. But all of them are not so good. Some of them like to play ugly little tricks, wicked little pranks. So most often it is they who are behind an accident. And she is talking about the accidents. And then, if there is a group of such small entities, they may clash with one another because among themselves they do not have a very peaceful life. Clashing with one another, fighting, destroying, demolishing each other and that is the origin of microbes”.
So lower vital beings very close to the physical plane and because it's their nature to be, well in conflict and chaos, they are fighting, they're breaking down each other, and that demolishing each other and that is the origin of microbes. “They are forces of disintegration, but they continue to be alive even in their divided forms and this is the origin of germs and microbes. Therefore, most microbes have behind them, a bad will and that is what makes them so dangerous. And unless one knows the quality and kind of badwill and is capable of acting upon it, there is a 99% chance of not finding the true and complete remedy. And now”, she summarises, “the microbe is a very material expression of something living in a subtle physical world and that is why these very microbes that are always around you, for years together do not make you ill and then suddenly they make you fall ill. There is another reason - the origin of the microbes and their support lie in a disharmony, in the being's receptivity to the adverse force”.
Sraddhalu (0:47:29):
And then she gives the example of what happened in Japan where she had caught that plague and she managed to defeat, she didn't take medicine because she had the occult power. She recognized what the being was and she managed to defeat it. And then she explains that “the people who had died, the air was full of the microbes of illness and there was the fear and all that, but the people who had died in the war, their degenerating vital bodies that was leading to the formation of these microbes and germs. And internally, it's finally an energy that you're battling and an ill will inside that energy which is the root cause of it”. So now we come back to that earlier discussion where she said that to Satprem, she said that there was this ill will and with a material coating so it could go bang straight into the body.
Now we're going to take a step back. All microbes are essentially formations of life energy approaching matter, so the lower vital world and the subtle physical, that's the band in which the energy bundles, tiny, not distinct enough to have an individuality, but broken up and as a group they might have a group tendency, that acquiring almost a material character of coating that becomes the base of what we see as microbes and viruses, bacteria generally. Let's put microbes as bacteria and viruses. Let's look at the distinction between the two and the implications of this knowledge in greater detail when we have our next session. But just to quickly summarise what we have looked at, we started with this big picture of our current conception and relationship towards microbes and viruses. We will for the moment stay with microbes but we actually saw that 90% of all microbes are really good for us. Our body has more microbes than cells. Our abdomen, gut, skin etc depend on microbes not only for good health but for our basic nutrition survival. And in the old days, rather than trying to kill microbes and sterilise the good, the approach was to spread good bacteria and now you can think of it as good vibrations which is behind the bacteria. You see with the material form good vibrations spreading, purifying the air and therefore with that there is no place for the bad will or bad bacteria to grow and this is a much safer, saner, practical approach and more aligned to nature. It's as if you try to make land barren and what will happen next the first thing that grows will be the plants which have the strongest, the thorns, because that's how nature starts, the most hardy resilient plants, nature will start regaining that place and then only other plants would be able to grow. So in the same way with the bacteria the most vicious bacteria begin to grow because they're vicious you have all the illnesses which come. So we now review all bacteria, not as merely physical independent entities but formations from the vital turning to the physical at a very borderline edge contain largely formed of little beings, lower vital tiny beings and the ill will of the beings clashing make for the bad bacteria, goodwill of the good beings working together make for the good bacteria, and of course there is 90% goodness 10% illness in the bacteria as we experience them. But as Mother said, there are far more bacteria than we know. And now we understand why. Because for every vibration, there is an equivalent bacteria, which expresses that vibration. So with this background, we will explore the yogic perspective of bacteria and then look at what happens when human beings start manipulating bacteria and viruses.
Narad (0:51:41):
Thank you so much, Namaste.
[Sraddhalu] Namaste.