ILLNESS



Now, another thing. Yoga you can do only in the measure of your capacity. You are told to open yourself and receive the force, to have faith and good will and you will be protected. In fact you you bathed with the consciousness, the force and the protection. You receive all that in the measure of the faith you have and open yourself to them and they help you to be in good health, to reject the small inner disturbances when these do happen, to re – establish the order, to protect you from the small attacks and accidents that seek to upset the balance.

But if you have in your being somewhere, in your vital or in your mind, several parts or even in one part some incapacity to receive the force that comes down, and acts as a grain of sand in a machinery. You have seen a fine machine working so beautifully, so perfectly ? Now put just a pinch or even a grain of sand into it, immediately all on a sudden the machine goes wrong and stops. Well, a slight lack of receptivity somewhere, something that is unable to accept or hold the force, something shut up, is like a dark point in you, a little thing hard like stone which the force cannot penetrate, which refuses, either cannot or will not change, and that immediately brings about the loss of equilibrium.

You see there are so many reasons that combine, sometimes in an extraordinary degree of complexity to produce an illness. Modern medicine lays a great stress on microbic infection and the dictum is to kill the microbes and the disease will be cured and it is so in many cases, but for us, illness, as I say, has other deeper causes. It is an expression of a disorder of an inner subtler kind. If you cannot reach and touch that you cannot be free from illness or prevent it from recurring. For that one needs a profound occult knowledge, a considerable knowledge of the inner working of each part of the being in its entirety.

Now let us come to be external causes. That brings in another element of complication. If you were in a perfectly harmonious environment, full of a faultless goodwill, then you have to find fault with yourself for all your mishaps. But the fact is that the difficulties inside are also found outside. You can to a certain extent establish a harmony within yourself, but you live in surroundings filled with disharmony. Unless you shut yourself up in an ivory tower, which is not only very difficult, but not always recommendable, you are obliged to receive what comes from outside and also to give out what you have in you. You breathe out and you breathe in. There is a constant give and take. Thus there occurs an intermixture.

In this world, one can say, all is contagious: for one lives in the midst of a net of ceaseless vibration. You give out vibrations to others, you receive vibration from others. And they are of infinite complexity. There are broadly speaking, the mental, vital, physical vibrations and also many other kinds. Even if there is not bad will in your environment, the give and take itself is contagious enough to produce untoward things. For example, there is an accident and you are a witness to it. When you observe, you absorb some vibrations and if you are oversensitive and have fear in addition, or even recoil (recoil or repulsion is only fear in another form, it is the moral expression of physical fear), you may have that reaction in you translated into a physical upsetting.

People say it is nervousness, and nervously, unbalanced persons alone are seriously affected. In reality. It is hypersensitivity of the vital and it does not mean inferiority in any sense. On the contrary as you progress spiritually the sensitiveness of the nerves also increases; and if your self – control also does not increase in the same proportion, anything may happen. But that is not the only factor you have to reckon with. For, to our misfortune, much ill – will exists in the world, beginning from the lesser, coming from ignorance and stupidity, to the greater that derives from wickedness and ending with the formidable one that belongs to the antidiving forces. All that is in the atmosphere. I do not say this to frighten you, for you know that you must fear nothing.

All the same this is how things are. It is these forces that attack you sometimes voluntarily sometimes involuntarily – involuntarily through other persons; others are attacked, they do not know it even and they pass on the illness. But there are voluntary or wilful attacks. The other day we spoke of mental formations and of wicked people who purposely make these formation to harm others. Now there are people who go a little further. There is an occult knowledge that is misdirected, perverted. It is called Black Magic. It is a thing which should not be touched. Unfortunately, there are people who touch it and deal in it through pure wickedness. Do not think that it is an illusion or a superstition. It is a real thing.

There are people who know how to do magic and do it and with their magic they obtain thoroughly detestable results. It is well understood that when one has protection, one is safe. But there is a “provided,” there is a condition which is to be complied with always, otherwise disagreeable things happen. So long as you have the full force of purity in you, you are inviolable; if someone does anything against you, it falls back upon him automatically, just as a tennis ball re – bounds towards you when you send it against a wall; it comes back sometimes with a redoubled force and the sinner is punished by his own sin.

But everything depends upon the person who is the object of attack, upon his force, his inner purity. I have come across many, very many cases of the kind. To resist the attack, you must become, as I have said, fighters of the vital, spiritual fighters in your vital. All who do yoga sincerely must become so, and when they can become they are quite safe. But one of the conditions enabling you to become such a fighter is that you must never have an evil will or an evil thought against anyone. For if you have a bad feeling, a bad will or a bad thought against people, you at once bring yourself down to their level and then you receive their blows.

Now, even if you do not go to this extreme limit, there are, much nearer, in the physical, in the terrestrial atmosphere a large number of small beings whom you do not see, because your sight is too limited, but who move about in your atmosphere. There are some who are very good and nice, others who are wicked. Mostly those entities are the offshoots of the disintegration of vital beings, of persons who have died and are on the way of gradual dissolution. Often they are seized by Asuric forces and used by them as their instruments for all kinds of mischief. There are, as I say, good fairies like the one that pulled at my sari to warn me that the milk I has left on the fire was boiling and I must go and see it did not overflow.

But all are not like that, many indulge in bad tricks and are never more happy than when men are in trouble. Very often they are behind accidents that happen to people. They get immense pleasure in the disorder and confusion following an accident. It not only amuses them but gives them their food. They draw sustenance from the human vitality thrown out of the body by emotion and excitement and all that. And further, these beings are not harmonious among themselves. They quarrel, they fight, they dash against each other, want to hit and destroy one another. And this is the origin of microbes.

Microbes are forces of disintegration, the living remnants, scattered bits of the vital passions and desires and hungers of dead people, taken possession of by the vital beings, asuric beings. Most of the microbes have behind them a bad will and this is what makes them so dangerous. Unless one knows the quality and the kind of the bad will behind and can act upon it, in 99 cases out of 100, one is unable to find the true and the total remedy.

The microbe is only the most material expression of some entity which is living, the embodiment in the most physical of a vital force. These microbes are around, you, within you and for years, still they do not make you sick. All on a sudden. however, you fall a victim to them. There must be then some other immediate and active cause. It is what I have said at the very beginning, a discord that has come about, an opening to the adverse force which is the origin and support to the microbes.

Now we know something of the causes of illness. We have next to see how to cure and then how to prevent. You might wonder how many people without occult knowledge or power, keep in good health, well, there is occult power working individually and universally, with or without your knowledge, that gives you the sustaining strength. Naturally the better way is to be conscious of it. When the body is ill, the usual method is to give it the conditions in which it may have the conviction that it cannot but be healthy: this is how it takes the resolution to become healthy and in fact, it is cured. But if your body has no will, no resolution to cure, whatever you do and however you try it will not cure.

N C Das
N C Das
Calcutta