Health: overflowing energy of life

Question 1:

Western medical science has viewed man as a separate unit - apart from nature. That is one of the biggest faults that has been committed. Man is part of nature; his health is nothing but being at ease with nature.

Western medicine takes a mechanical view of man, so wherever mechanics can be successful, it is successful. But man is not a machine; man is an organic unity, and man needs not only the treatment of the part that is sick. The sick part is only a symptom that the whole organism is going through difficulties. The sick part is only showing it because it is the weakest.

You treat the sick part, you are successful... but then somewhere else the disease appears. You have prevented the disease from expressing itself through the sick part; you have made it stronger.

But you do not understand that man is a whole: either he is sick or he is healthy, there is no station between the two. He should be taken as a whole organism.

I will give you a few examples which can make it clear to you.

Acupuncture was developed in China nearabout seven thousand years ago by accident. A hunter was trying to kill a deer, but as his arrow was moving towards the deer, a man not knowing what was happening came in between and the arrow hit the man's leg. The man had been suffering from migraine his whole life; the moment the arrow hit his leg, the migraine disappeared. This was very strange. Nobody had thought about it in that way.

Out of that accident the whole of acupuncture developed, and developed to a full science. So if you go to an acupuncturist and you say, "Something is wrong with my eyes, or something is wrong with my head, or something is wrong with my liver," he may not bother about your liver, your head or your eyes. He will think of the whole organism; he will try to heal you - not just the part that is sick.

Acupuncture has developed seven hundred points which were discovered in man's body. Man's body is a bio-electric phenomenon, alive. It has a certain electricity - hence we call it bio-electricity.

This bio-electricity has seven hundred points in the body, and each point relates to some part of the body which may be far away from it. That's what happened in that accident: the arrow hit a bio-electric point which related to the head, and the migraine disappeared.

Acupuncture is more holistic. The difference has to be understood. When you take man as a machine you take a partial view of him. If his hand is sick, you just treat the hand; you don't bother about his whole body of which the hand is only a part. The mechanical outlook is partial. It succeeds, but its success is not real success because the same disease which has been repressed in the hand by medicine, surgery and other things, starts expressing somewhere else in a worse form.

So medicine has developed tremendously; surgery has become a great science - but man is suffering from more diseases, sicknesses, than ever.

This dilemma can be understood. Man should be taken as a whole, treated as an organic unity. But the problem with modern medicine, Western medicine is that it does not think you have any soul, that you have anything more than a body-mind structure. You also are a machine: your eyes can be replaced, your hands can be replaced, your legs can be replaced - and sooner or later brains will be replaced.

But do you think if we can take Albert Einstein's brain while he is dying, remove it before death is certain and transplant it - for example in the skull of Polack the pope - do you think he will become an Albert Einstein? The brain is only a part. He would become a strange phenomenon, a crossbreed between a Polack and Albert Einstein. At least right now he is perfectly a Polack; then he would be in a limbo, not knowing who he is - a pope or a physicist.

This we are already doing: we transfuse blood and we change people's other parts; we have mechanical hearts. A man with a mechanical heart cannot be the same as a man with a real, authentic heart. The man with the mechanical heart will not have anything like love. Even if he loves, he will love through the mind. His love will be, "I think I love you"; it will not be direct from the heart, because he has no heart.

In India, medical science developed almost five thousand years ago. And you will be surprised to know that whatever surgery we have today is exactly described by Sushrut, one of the greatest surgeons in the East, in ancient scriptures five to seven thousand years old. But it was abandoned - and that is the point I want you to notice.

Why was a developed science abandoned? Because it was found that surgery takes man as a mechanism - and man is not a mechanism; so rather than destroying man they abandoned surgery.

All the finest instruments that surgery uses are described by Sushrut in his scripture. All the operations - even the brain operations - are described in full detail as if it is a modern textbook on surgery. But it is seven thousand... or at least five thousand years old. They developed it to the same point where we are, and they must have faced the same problem that we are facing. They must have found that something is basically wrong.

We go on working so much... and the sickness and the disease go on increasing. Even if we make a person without sickness, that does not mean that he is healthy. Absence of sickness is not health; that is a very negative definition. Health should have something more positive, because health is the positive thing and sickness is the negative thing. Now the negative is defining the positive.

Health is the feeling of well-being; your whole body functioning at its peak without any disturbance, you feel a certain well-being, a certain at-onement with existence. That was not happening through surgery.

India abandoned the whole science and developed a totally different approach, ayurveda, which means science of life. It is significant. In the West we call it medicine, and medicine simply indicates towards sickness. Health has nothing to do with medicine. Medicine means that the whole science is devoted to curing you from sicknesses.

Ayurveda has a different approach. It is the science of life; it helps you, not to cure sicknesses but to prevent sicknesses from happening - to keep you so healthy that the sickness becomes impossible.

The ways of the East and the West are different on this point, whether man is a machine or a spiritual entity with a wholeness.

A new phenomenon has supported the East tremendously, and that is Kirlian photography in the Soviet Union. A great scientist and photographer, Kirlian has been able to develop such sensitive films and lenses and cameras that he can take pictures of the future. For example, you give him a bud and he photographs it, and the photograph is of a flower not of a bud. When the bud blossoms it is exactly the same as the photograph that Kirlian has taken. He has caught some future development before its happening.

He has tried the same on human beings and he has found strange conclusions which fit with the Eastern attitude, but which are absolutely against the mechanical attitude of Western medicine. For example, a man's finger is cut off in an accident. Immediately he is photographed by Kirlian, and the picture shows four fingers - but it also shows the aura of the fifth, a faint picture of the fifth which is missing. So what is coming into the photograph? The finger is not just material; there is something inner to it, the spiritual part of it, which comes into the photograph.

Kirlian has been able to predict diseases that will happen to somebody six months later. Just by taking photographs, X-rays, he can say, "This person is going to have tuberculosis within six months - because his photographs already show it." And he has always proved right.

The doctors refused to believe him in the beginning because the man showed no symptoms of tuberculosis. Their X-ray and their methods had nothing to say about the man: he seemed to be perfectly healthy; there was no sickness present.

But one question Kirlian has raised: the man does not feel well-being. He is healthy according to the textbooks of Western medicine, but according to the Eastern way of thinking he is not healthy because he is not feeling an overflowing energy of life. Something in him is developing and destroying his well-being. Anybody who reported to Kirlian that he was not feeling well - although he could not pinpoint his sickness, Kirlian immediately photographed him and found out what was going to happen to him.

This has tremendous implications. It means people can be prevented from being sick before they are ever sick, because now we have methods to know six months ahead.

Why actually six months? I was puzzled when I came to know about Kirlian and his work. In the East from my childhood I have heard the saying that before death comes, six months before, a man stops seeing the tip of his own nose, because the eyes start turning up. So when he cannot see the tip of his own nose, that is a sure sign. That is described in ayurvedic scriptures thousands of years old: you can know that you are going to die within six months if you cannot see the tip of your nose.

Your eyes are preparing to turn upwards.

All over the world, the moment a person dies people close his eyes. Why do they close the eyes?

Because they are afraid of people looking at just the white of his eyes - his eyes have turned up, and only the whiteness has remained. Children are there, young people are there; it is better not to let them know. Immediately the eyes are closed. And it is strange that everybody dies with open eyes...

But when the eye is turning up the eyelid cannot go down; the whole energy is moving upwards.

I was amazed because of the time limit, six months: Kirlian says every sickness can be known six months before. Every person should go for a checkup, and in every hospital there should be a Kirlian photography arrangement so everybody can know beforehand what kind of trouble he is heading towards... and it can be prevented.

But that means you will have to change your idea of taking man as a machine.

A machine has no future. Kirlian has tried taking pictures of a car but he has not been able to find that something is going to go wrong within the next hour, that the car will not start. No machines have any future; hence, what is going to happen cannot be pictured.

Secondly, what Western medicine has done is make people less immune. If you go to India you will see that in the same river buffaloes are enjoying their bath, donkeys are drinking, people are taking a bath, clothes are being washed - and the same water is being drunk. Nobody feels sick, nobody falls victim to infections. But the Westerner going to India immediately feels in trouble. He cannot drink any available water because all water is polluted; all water has amoebas, all water is not right for drinking. He can only take soda water. His immunity has been destroyed by too much protection.

Real medicine should give you immunity rather than take it away. It should make you stronger, able to fight any infection rather than make you weak so that you are vulnerable to all kinds of infections.

It is a known fact that rich people fall sick more than poor people. Poor people cannot afford it; rich people can. In the East poverty is great, and those poor people do not have even enough food - if they can manage one meal a day that is very fortunate - but they are not sick. The rich people, even in the East, are more sick. In the Eastern science of medicine - that is ayurveda - a few diseases are defined as royal diseases. They happen only to very rich people or to royalty - first you have to be able to afford them. For example, tuberculosis is known as a royal disease. A poor man cannot have tuberculosis.

From another direction, one very famous psychologist, Delgado, has been working on animals. He was surprised to know that if rats are given one meal a day, they live twice as long; the lifespan of the rats who are given two meals a day is cut in half. He himself was surprised: less food and longer life; more food and less life.

Now he has come up with the theory that one meal is perfectly enough; otherwise you are loading the system of digestion, and that causes the cut in your lifespan. But what about people who are taking five meals a day...? Medicine will not allow them to die but will not allow them to live either.

They will simply vegetate.

Man has to reconsider all traditions, all different sources; whatever facts have become available have to be reconsidered. A totally new medical approach has to be evolved which takes note of acupuncture, which takes note of ayurveda, which takes note of Greek medicine, which takes note of Delgado and his researches - which takes note of the fact that man is not a machine. Man is a multidimensional spiritual being, and you should behave with him in the same way.

Health should not be defined negatively: you don't have any sickness so you are healthy. Health should find some positive definition. I understand why they have not been able to find a positive definition - because sickness is objective, and the feeling of well-being is subjective.

Western medicine does not accept that there is any subject in you. It only accepts your body; it does not accept you.

Man has to be accepted in his totality.

All other methods that have been used around the world should be brought into a synthesis; they are not against each other. Right now they are functioning as if they are against each other. They should be brought to a synthesis and that will give you a better view of man and a better life for human beings.

For example, acupuncture is by and by being accepted, because the seven hundred bio-electric points discovered by the acupuncturists thousands of years ago have again been discovered by Kirlian photography. He has pictured them, and you can count them; there are exactly seven hundred. You should appreciate the genius of the people who had no cameras, who had no sensitive films. They still managed to find out exactly the same seven hundred points. It is now well known, by brain surgeons particularly, that everything has its center in the brain. If your hand becomes paralyzed, it is stupid to treat the hand; you cannot treat it. Then the only suggestion, the mechanical suggestion, will be to cut it off and put on a mechanical hand which will at least be movable, you can do something with it. This hand is absolutely useless, it has died.

It has not died. Some center in your head controls this hand, and that center has to be cured. The hand has not to be touched at all; that center is not working, there is some problem with the center.

Sooner or later the whole of medicine is going to become dominated by the brain centers. Those centers have control of everything in the body. When something goes wrong in the center it is only symbolically represented by the outer part of the body. You start treating the outer part; you don't go deep enough.

Modern Western medicine is superficial. You should go to very root: why has this hand suddenly become paralyzed? The center in the brain is in some trouble, and that center can be cured very easily. It is a bio-electric center.

You will be surprised to know that once it happened in Sweden to a beautiful woman... something went wrong in the inner bio-electric system. She started giving shocks to people. To shake hands with the woman you needed tremendous courage! Her husband applied for a divorce, because to make love to her meant getting such an electric shock that he would fall out of bed. Even her own children had to be kept separately.

She was examined by medical people. They had no way to find... they had never heard of such a disease. It was not a disease - just some electric wires got entangled, something went wrong in her electrical system. That woman was the first to give the idea that the body is running on bio- electricity. They put a five-watt bulb in her hand and it lit up. And that woman became of tremendous importance in understanding man.

Perhaps when you are not feeling well-being it is just that your battery is running out - you need some recharging. If your hand has gone paralyzed, perhaps the center has lost its electricity; it can be recharged. No medicine is needed, no surgery is needed. We are in a position now to look at man from different angles: how different societies, in different cultures, in different times have treated man. And sometimes if strange things seem to be working, they should be accepted rather than rejected.

For example, seventy percent of diseases are only in your mind: you don't have them, you just think you have them. Now, to give you allopathic medicines for these diseases is dangerous, because all allopathic medicine is somehow or other connected with many poisons. If you have a disease, medicine is good; but if you don't have the disease but only the idea, then homeopathy is the best because it harms nobody. It has nothing in it, but it is a great help to humanity. Thousands of people are getting cured by homeopathy.

The question is not whether homeopathy is real medicine or not. The question is: if people are having unreal diseases, you need some unreal medical system for them. Homeopathy has nothing in it, but there are people who don't have any sickness but are getting tortured with the idea that they have. Homeopathy will help them immediately. It cures people but it never harms anybody. It is bogus medicine - but what to do with a bogus humanity?

The Indian physician and the practical nurse don't have any instruments, sophisticated mechanisms, X-rays or other things; they don't have even the stethoscope. They just check your heartbeat - and this has been functioning perfectly well for thousands of years. They check it because the heartbeat is your very center of life; if something is not perfect it gives them indications of what has to be done. Rather than treating the disease, they will try to make your heartbeat more harmonious. Their medicine will help your heartbeat be more harmonious, and immediately the disease disappears.

You think the disease has been treated - but the disease was only a symptom.

That's why in ayurveda they could discard surgery completely: it was reducing man into a machine.

When things can be done very easily with minerals, herbs, natural things, without poisoning the system of man, then why unnecessarily go on giving man poisons? - which are going to have their side effects!

Perhaps that is one of the reasons why medicine has grown and evolved... and side by side disease goes on growing. You treat one disease, but you treat it with poison; the disease will be gone but the poison will be left in the system. And that poison is going to create its own effects. So all herbal medicines, all minerals and things like homeopathy should be combined.

There should be only one science with different branches, and the medical person has to decide to which branch this man has to be sent. It is no use telling somebody, "You don't have the disease"; it is no use at all. He will simply change the doctor, that is the only effect. He will love the doctor who says, "You have the disease."

I used to know a quack. He was a very clever man. The moment you entered his dispensary, before meeting him you had to pass through his lab. Just to create an impression on you he had a big lab of strange instruments... and he would not use ordinary things.

For example, he would not use a stethoscope to check your heartbeat. You would have to lie down on a table... it was nothing but two big bottles with different colored water in them, and the water starts jumping up and down with your heartbeat - a stethoscope made in a different way. You are more impressed than with just an ordinary stethoscope. He watches, and you are watching....

I asked him, "Why do you do all this nonsense?" He had made his whole lab so that the patient was almost killed by the time he was examined. He said, "Just human psychology. It does not need treatment."

It has been found in many experiments that allopathy succeeds in seventy percent of cases; homeopathy also succeeds in seventy percent of cases; ayurveda also succeeds in seventy percent of cases, and acupuncture also succeeds in the same way. It is strange: it seems a few people - seventy percent - are willing to be cured, and any kind of medicine helps.

A few people have lost the will to live; then no medicine can help because the basic will to live is no longer there. They have already died; they are only waiting for the funeral time. These people do not need medicine, they need a different kind of therapy which gives them the will to live again. That is their basic thing - only then will any other medicine help.

All these things have to be combined together into a synthesis, a whole, and man can be completely free from diseases. Man will be able to live at least three hundred years; that is a scientific estimate.

His body has the possibility to go on renewing itself for three hundred years. So whatever we have been doing is basically wrong because man dies at seventy.

And there are proofs...

In a part of Kashmir which is now part of Pakistan - Pakistan has occupied it - people live very easily to one hundred and fifty years. In Russia there are many people who are one hundred and fifty years old, and there are people who have even reached one hundred and eighty.

Now, these people's foods, their habits should be studied, and those foods and those habits should be made known.

A person one hundred and eighty years old in Soviet Russia, in a particular part of the Caucasus, still works in the field just like any young man; he is not even old. His food, his way of living has to be looked into very deeply. And there are many people in that area - only in that area, Caucasia... That area has produced really strong people. Joseph Stalin himself was from that area; George Gurdjieff was from that area - tremendously strong people.

Medicine needs a totally new orientation. It is possible now because everything is known that has happened around the world; we just should not be prejudiced from the very beginning.

Question 2:

The people who are working, researching new medicines go on declaring new successes in their fields. But their successes in their scientific research work has nothing to do with what humanity is continuously doing; they are unrelated.

For example, homosexuality has created AIDS. Scientists are not responsible for it. The medical profession is not responsible for it, but in some way it has supported the basic cause that creates homosexuality. For example, no medical person, no Nobel prize winning medical man has the guts to say that celibacy is unnatural, and sooner or later it is going to create troubles.

The problem is that the scientist is also an ordinary human being; he is a Catholic, he is a Hindu, he is a Mohammedan. In his lab while he is doing his work he is not a Catholic, he is not a Mohammedan.

But outside his research work he is just an ordinary man with all the prejudices and conditionings.

Even though he knows perfectly well through his scientific researches that celibacy is not possible, and if you try for the impossible you are going to get into troubles....

All the religions have been teaching celibacy.

Celibacy is the cause of homosexuality.

Homosexuality has brought the disease AIDS. .pmNow the scientific person should be courageous enough to get rid of his conditionings. .pm6 I have seen medical doctors suggesting to students that if you masturbate you go blind... which is sheer nonsense. Nobody has ever gone blind because of masturbation, and those who have gone blind have not gone blind because of masturbation. They suggest that you will become an idiot, retarded, your intelligence will not grow.

The medical profession is also part of the vested interests. They know perfectly well that there is no relationship between blindness and masturbation. They know perfectly well that when a boy is fourteen he is now ready by nature to reproduce, that a girl when she is thirteen is ready to become a mother. We are preventing these people for almost ten years: now, how are they going to remain celibate for these ten years?

Rather than helping the poor children, rather than giving them the right guidance, they have been creating fear in them... for centuries, just living on fear. And they will masturbate - masturbation is not going to be stopped by anything - but now the joy of masturbation will not be there. They will masturbate with the fear that soon they are going to be blind and their intelligence is not going to grow. They will not go blind, but if they accept the idea that their intelligence is going to suffer, it is going to suffer - not because of masturbation, but because of the idea planted in their minds.

A scientific medical approach should be to tell the boys and the girls, "Now you are ready as far as nature is concerned, but the society is not ready. Society wants you to be educated, society needs you to be educated, and these ten years will be difficult for you." And the boys and girls should tell society to make these ten years as easy as possible.

When the pill is there, what is the point...? Why not allow girls and boys to have the same hostels?

They should be allowed to make love; in fact it will give them great experience and richness for their lives. Meeting many boys, meeting many girls, they will have a certain idea of what kind of woman they would like to choose when they want to get married, or what kind of man they would like to choose. Right now without any experience they have to choose. On small things we expect experience....

I had applied for the post of editor in a newspaper. The owner interviewed me and the first question was, "Have you worked somewhere as an editor?"

I said, "What kind of nonsense question is this? Wherever I go, this will be the first question. It means I can never work as an editor. Somewhere I have to begin; why not here? Somewhere I have to begin without experience; if everywhere experience is needed, then God is at fault. He should send people - trained typists, trained editors, trained journalists with certificates."

The old man was shocked when I said, "This is simple nonsense. This is not an interview. You give me the chance: somebody has to give me the chance first."

He thought for a moment and he said, "Your logic is right. I never thought about it. I have been asking every candidate, 'What is your experience?' - and they all showed me their experience. You are the first one who has shown up my nonsense. You are accepted. Naturally, somewhere one has to begin, so why not here?"

In small things you are asking for experience. In a lifelong affair - the meeting of man and woman to live together, to have children, to create the new generation - you don't bother about experience.

Instead just the opposite is insisted upon: the girl should be virgin. Can you see the stupidity of the idea?

About boys they are a little less strict, because they know boys - they cannot remain virgins. You will be surprised to know that even girls cannot remain virgins; it is against nature. In the middle ages girls were going to the doctors to create a fake virginity so that when for the first time the husband made love to them, he was satisfied that the girl was a virgin. Doctors had arrangements to make the girl look like a virgin. But what kind of fake, false society are we living in?

There cannot be any check on the boys because it is very difficult, there is no way to know whether the boy is virgin or not. But for the girl there is a way: there is a small, thin skin screen that should remain unbroken; if it is broken she has lost her virginity. But any doctor can manage it with a thin plastic screen, and then deceive the foolish husband and the whole tradition. And that has been done in all the countries where virginity is respected. I have heard that here in Greece virginity is one of the great things, although it is impossible to find a single virgin.

Those ten years are of immense importance, because boys and girls can have enrichment, experience. Knowing others, they can feel who could be the right person, what kind of qualities will be the right qualities, with whom they feel most intimate.

If the medical profession is really scientific it will tell society that the girls and the boys should be given freedom to experiment before they decide for their whole life. This will avoid masturbation, this will avoid homosexuality, this will avoid lesbianism - and this will avoid AIDS.

They have to tell the boys and the girls, "You have to take every care. The pill is there for women" - the pill has existed for many years, and now recently they have made a pill for men too - "so be on the pill, so you are completely safe."

Virginity is not the real thing; the pill is the real thing.

They should tell the students, "You have to go into the experience." And they have to tell the society, "Your demands are unnatural, and your fears are absolutely false."

Then there will be a parallel success: their new inventions will not be thrown immediately overboard by new diseases. And about their discoveries... they have to remember the whole man. For fifty years they have changed so many medicines because they were found to create new diseases.

When a medicine is first discovered there is great euphoria in the scientific circles: "Now we have found something for the disease!" But they don't think that this medicine may have its own effects, short-term, long-term - and that's what is going on. Medicines go on becoming more, and nobody connects... because the result may come after twenty years. You may have taken the medicine twenty years before, and after twenty years you will find a new disease happening to you because the medicine was not natural, it was not in harmony with the cosmos. It was just invented by man for a certain disease without taking account of the whole life of man, and without thinking what the after-effects, by-products of this medicine can be.

The medical profession has to be more responsible. It is not just a profession; it has to be more compassionate. And before they experiment with human beings, they have to work with their medicines and have to be perfectly satisfied that these medicines are not going to create bad effects, ever.

But society is strange; it lives on traditions and orthodoxies. For example, alcohol is legal, although it certainly has bad effects on the liver, on the brain; and it is addictive; the person starts falling apart. But because Christianity looks for every guidance towards Jesus, and he was drinking wine, naturally it is something spiritual. It has not to be made illegal - to make wine illegal means Jesus was doing criminal acts - but marijuana, which has no bad effects as far as is known to the scientists, is made illegal.

But scientists seem to be very cowardly people. They should say clearly to the world that marijuana has no bad effects; that it can even be helpful, that it can give people relaxation, good sleep - and there is no hangover the next day. We have to get rid of rotten traditions. And if marijuana has any bad effects, those effects can be removed from it; something synthetic like LSD can be made, perfected.

If people are living in misery and are not able to find a way of meditation to go beyond misery, I don't think they should not be allowed something that relieves them for the moment of their misery, something that makes them happy for the moment. It is momentary - but who knows, the momentary experience may give them the idea of making it permanent.

The only way to make it permanent is meditation. Meditation is the ultimate non-medicinal drug, with no bad effects. Of course, it is not something that you have to take into your body and your body system; it is something that you have to become inside yourself.

Diseases go on increasing because the scientists are not courageous enough to bring the society up to date. Society is lingering far behind. And the scientists are not sensitive enough to see what a drug or a certain medicine can do to people: it may remove a certain sickness, it may create many more. Science has to be more alert, more compassionate, more courageous. Only then is it possible to prevent sicknesses from increasing.

Sicknesses like AIDS, which are nothing but death delayed... scientists are of the opinion that there is almost no way to cure it. It is not a disease; something inside the man has died.

My own explanation is that two men making love means that the two similar energies mixing with each other have no tension. A certain tension is needed for life. Slowly, slowly they lose all the tension needed for life, and death becomes absolutely necessary. That is what AIDS is.

Lesbians are still free... but they should not be happy. It is better, seeing what has happened to homosexuals, that they should get out of lesbianism. It may take a few years more for lesbianism to create its own disease - and that disease will be far more dangerous than AIDS, because two negative energies mixing with each other are bound to create a far more deadly disease than two positive energies meeting with each other.

Negativity is part of death.

Positivity is part of life.

A man and a woman making love bring a balance between negativity and positivity, between life and death, so that the contradiction between life and death disappears and they become complementaries. It is healthy.

Question 3:

It is the best thing to help people to be healthy, because it gives you the taste of eternal life. It leads you into the shrine of your own being which has never known any death or any sickness. And when you become identified with it - which you really are - your resistance to sickness, to disease, even to death, is tremendously powerful. Yes, meditation can be a great help for people for health.

Every medical institute or hospital must have a special section, a division for meditation. Anyone who is in hospital should also be meditating. While he is taking medicines he should also be meditating.

By the way, you will be surprised to know that the words medicine and meditation both come from the same root, which means that which gives you health. Medicine is the physical way, meditation is the spiritual way. The spiritual is certainly higher, stronger.

Question 4:

Autogenic training is good, but it is not meditation. Autogenic training is a very superficial relaxation, but it is basically mind over body, mind telling the body, "Relax."

You lie down silently, you close your eyes, and you start feeling where the tense points are in your body. Your knees are tense and you order the knees to relax; your hands are tense, you order the hands to relax. And this way you go on all over the body, giving each part which feels tense the order to relax. Slowly, slowly your whole body feels absolutely relaxed.

This is good. This is helpful for the body, but it is not meditation because it is still mind in control; it is mind dominating the body.

Meditation is mind no more in control.

Something beyond mind, your being has taken control both of mind and body.

Autogenic training can be helpful for physical relaxation; it can also be helpful to enter into meditation. First use the mind to relax the body, and then finally say to the mind, "Now you relax. I am here to take care; you just relax."

When the mind also relaxes and there is no mind, no thought, but absolute serenity, silence, a tremendous blissfulness arises in you. Meditation is the ultimate....

Autogenic training is just the beginning, but it is not bad - it is perfectly good. And it is a good sign that medical doctors all over the West have accepted autogenic training. That is a good sign.

Sooner or later they will have to accept meditation too.

Question 5:

No.

Question 6:

Man can be divided, just for this explanation, into three parts: the body, the mind, the soul. If all the three are perfectly in tune and there is a well-being in all the three, it becomes one well-being of the total organism - from the physical, psychological, to the spiritual. Then it is holistic health. The whole of your being has to be healthy.

There are people with healthy bodies like Muhammad Ali, but these people don't have any sense of something beyond mind. They have trained their bodies; their bodies are perfect animals. Their minds are not so evolved. No Bertrand Russell will be ready for boxing; the whole idea is ugly, it is barbarous. Their bodies are in health, and strong, but just like animals. Their minds are very retarded; otherwise they would not be in such an ugly and violent profession.

There is no question of their being meditative or their being in touch with the beyond. The holistic person is whole, undivided, one.

His zorba and his buddha have become one.

His hedonism and spiritualism have become one.