Read Summary of '''[[Health and Healing Summary|Health and Healing]]'''
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=What Health and Healing is Not=
From the standpoint of health, it's terrible. And "health" doesn't exist, it means nothing; it no longer means anything. "Disease" no longer means anything, it really doesn't: it's distortions of vibrations and shiftings of vibrations, and... (what can I call it?) encrustations—from the point of view of movement, it's like bottlenecks, and from the point of view of the cell, it's like encrustations: it's what remains of the old Inertia out of which we came. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/agenda/05/november-28-1964#p9</ref>
One thing that seems to be trying to come is the power to heal. But not at all as it's described, it's not that at all—it doesn't give the impression of "healing," you understand. It's ... putting things in order. But that's not it either.... It's a little something that disappears, and that little something is ... essentially it's the Falsehood. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/agenda/08/july-12-1967#p11</ref>
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The cases of friction you speak of seem to me to arise from ordinary motives of discord and they are certainly not the results of any spiritual Force working to heal the dangers of social or vital attraction by the blessings (!) of personal discord. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/31/problems-in-human-relations#p11</ref>
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The body had based its sort of sense of good health on a certain number of vibrations, and whenever those vibrations were present, it felt in good health; when something came and disturbed them, it felt that it was about to fall ill or that it was ill, depending on the intensity. All that has changed now: those basic vibrations have simply been removed, they no longer exist; the vibrations on which the body based its sense of good or ill health—removed. They are replaced by something else, and something else of such a nature that "good health" and "illness" have lost all meaning! Now, there is the sense of an established harmony among the cells, increasingly established among the cells, which represents the right functioning, whatever that may be: it's no longer a question of a stomach or a heart or this or that. And the slightest thing that comes and disturbs that harmony is VERY painful, but at the same time there is the knowledge of what to do to reestablish the harmony instantly; and if the harmony is reestablished, the functioning isn't affected. But if out of curiosity, for instance (it's a mental illness in humans), you start asking yourself, "What's that? What effect will it have? What's going to happen?" (what the body calls "the desire to learn"), if you are unlucky enough to be that way, you can be sure (laughing) that you'll have something very unpleasant which, according to the doctor (according to ignoramuses), becomes an illness or disrupts the body's functioning. While if you don't have that unhealthy curiosity and, on the contrary, will the harmony not to be disrupted, you only have to, we could say poetically, bring one drop of the Lord on the troubled spot for everything to be fine again.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/agenda/04/july-20-1963#p39</ref>
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Visions and experiences need not at all depend upon physical weakness or a pathological taint. It is not safe to judge from individual cases. The majority of those who have developed the faculty do not suffer from these defects. Those on the other hand who cannot keep their psychic experiences when in a robust state of health, lose them because then they get into a very external consciousness and feel at ease in it; but the true psychic does not depend for his experiences on disease. <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/28/occult-powers-or-siddhis#p25</ref>
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I don't know whether I can throw any positive light on X's mystic experiences. The description, at any rate the latter part, is not very easy to follow as it is very allusive in its expressions and not always precise enough to be clear. The first part of the experience indicates a native power of healing of whose action she herself does not know the process. It seems from her account to come from something in herself which should be, from the terms she uses, a larger and higher and brighter and more powerful consciousness with which she is in occasional communion but in which she does not constantly live. On the other hand another sentence seems to point to a Godhead or Divine Presence and it would then be not so much within as above. The language later on would seem to indicate such a Presence giving commands to her to guide others so that they might grow in consciousness. But she distinctly speaks of it as a greater "me" standing behind a blue diamond force. We must fall back then on the idea of a greater consciousness very high up with a feeling of divinity, a sense of considerable light and spiritual authority—perhaps in one of those higher spiritual mental planes of which I speak in The Life Divine and the letters. The diamond light could well be native to these planes; it is usually white, but there it might well be blue: it is a light that dispels or drives away all impure things, especially a demoniac possession or the influence of some evil force. Evidently, the use of a power like this should be carefully guarded from the intrusion of any wrong element such as personal love of power, but that need not cause any apprehension as a keen inlook into oneself would be sufficient to reject it or keep it aloof. I think that is all I can say upon the data given in her letter. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/28/occult-powers-or-siddhis#p31</ref>
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The general question is a different matter. There is a sort of traditional belief in many minds that the practice of Yoga is inimical to the health of the body and tends to have a bad effect of one kind or another and even finally leads to a premature or an early dropping of the body. Ramakrishna seems to have held the view, if we can judge from his remarks about the connection between Keshav Sen's progress in spirituality and the illness which undermined him, that one was the result and the desirable result of the other, a liberation and release from life in this world, mukti. That may or may not be; but I find it difficult to believe that illness and deterioration of the body is the natural and general result of the practice of Yoga or that that practice is the cause of an inevitable breakdown of health or of the final illnesses which bring about their departure from the body. On what ground are we to suppose or how can it be proved that while non-Yogis suffer from ill health and die because of the disorders of Nature, Yogis die of their Yoga? Unless a direct connection between their death and their practice of Yoga can be proved—and this could be proved with certainty only in particular cases and even then not with an absolute certainty—there is no sufficient reason to believe in such a difference. It is more rational to conclude that both Yogis and non-Yogis fall ill and die from natural causes and by the same dispensation of Nature; one might even advance the view, since they have the Yoga Shakti at their disposal if they choose to use it, that the Yogi falls ill and dies not because of but in spite of his Yoga. At any rate, I don't believe that Ramakrishna (or any other Yogi) fell ill because of his trances; there is nothing to show that he ever suffered in that way after a trance. I think it is said somewhere or he himself said that the cancer in his throat of which he died came by his swallowing the sins of his disciples and those who approached him: that again may or may not be, but it will be his own peculiar case. It is no doubt possible to draw the illnesses of others upon oneself and even to do it deliberately; the instance of the Greek king Antigonus and his son Dimitrius is a famous historical case in point. Yogis also do this sometimes; or else adverse forces may throw illnesses upon the Yogi, using those round him as a door or a passage or the ill wishes of people as an instrumental force. But all these are special circumstances connected, no doubt, with his practice of Yoga; but they do not establish the general proposition as an absolute rule. A tendency such as X's to desire or welcome or accept death as a release could have a force because of her advanced spiritual consciousness which it would not have in ordinary people. <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/31/illness-and-health#p8</ref>
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A body is not a cloth—nor is a sick body a torn cloth. A body weak or sick can renew itself, recover its vitality—that happens to thousands of people. A cloth has not a renewable vitality. It is only if one is old beyond fifty-five or sixty that the renewal becomes difficult—even then health and strength can be kept or recovered enough to keep the body in a good condition. <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/31/illness-and-health#p34</ref>
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Of course injections are all the fashion; for everything it is "inject, inject and again inject". Medicine has gone through three stages in modern times—first (at the beginning in Molière's days) it was "bleed and douche", then "drug and diet", now it is "serum and injection". Praise the Lord! not for the illnesses, but for the doctors. However each of these formulas has a part truth behind it—with its advantages and disadvantages. As all religions and philosophies point to the Supreme but each in a different direction, so all medical fashions are ways to health—though they don't always reach it.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/31/doctors-and-medicines#p23</ref>
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Doctors advise marriage because they think satisfaction of the sexual instinct is necessary for the health and repression causes disturbances in the system. This is true only when there is no true giving up of the sexual indulgence, but only a change in the way of indulging it. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/31/sex#p72</ref>
==Misunderstandings of Health and Healing==
You ask me whether your illness comes from yoga. By no means—far from damaging health, yoga helps to build up a health that is robust and unfailing. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/15/illness-and-health#p1</ref>
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How to explain it?... It's rather strange: the cells' attitude and their state of consciousness is changing with extraordinary rapidity; yet from the ordinary viewpoint of 'health,' there is no corresponding progress, quite the contrary. One could say things aren't going too well, but I see clearly that it's not true. I see that it isn't true, it's only an appearance—but reconciling the two is difficult. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/agenda/02/march-14-1961#p8</ref>
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No, only one thing worries me, one thing alone: your physical health. But to tell the truth (the true truth of what I KNOW), I don't think there's any climate a body can't adapt to.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/agenda/03/may-29-1962#p13</ref>
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You see, the faith of people is a superstition—it's not faith, it's superstition. Now there are more and more people who think they have faith, and they ask me ridiculous things! They have superstitions like.... Someone brings me a child born with a deformed arm, and the superstition is that if I put my hand on the arm of the child, he'll be healed.... Things like that. It's completely stupid. That's not Power! They need a little miracle, you know, at their level.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/agenda/12/may-8-1971#p50</ref>
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Someone disappears, people ask me where he is, whether he's dead or alive. Someone else has worries: he wants to see me. Someone... People I don't know at all! A stack of letters! They ask me for success in their business, for good health, for a child (a boy!), a good job.... Anyway everything that people are capable of wanting, they write and ask me. Oh, there are also those who ask me to tell their fortune! Many ask me, but I answer them bluntly, "I am not a fortuneteller, I don't read tea leaves". <ref>http://incarnateword.in/agenda/04/september-4-1963#p2</ref>
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Health protected by twenty thousand precautions is the gospel of the doctor; but it is not God's evangel for the body, nor Nature's. [Based on Aphorism 399] <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/10/aphorism-394-395-396-397-398-399#p6</ref>
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I don't know, I believe there won't be a dozen people here who have come to the Ashram and eaten the food of the Ashram without saying, "Oh! I am not used to this food. It is very difficult." And how many, how many hundreds of people who prepare their own food because they cannot eat the food of the Ashram! (Mother slams the book down on the stool.) And then, they justify this! So it is here that these ideas begin to come, and they say, "My health! I can't digest well!" All this is only in their head. There is not a word of truth in it. NOT ONE WORD OF TRUTH . It is a perpetual lie in which everybody lives, and in this matter, indeed, I may tell you what I think, you have not advanced any farther than the mass of human beings. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/06/9-june-1954#p7</ref>
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In my own experience I have found that those who possessed well developed and well organised "psychic" and occult powers were healthy and well poised; indeed they said that in ill health or physical weakness they could do nothing—it impaired their power. These certainly had no lack or deficiency of the red aura. <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/28/occult-powers-or-siddhis#p23</ref>
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It depends on the consciousness [whether one wants to live a long life]. As it is, at present, most people do not get tired of life; they die because they must, not because they want to—at least, that is true of the vital; it is only a minority that tire of life and for many of these it is due to the discomforts of old age, continued ill-health, misfortune. Supposing a consciousness descended in the body that got rid of these discomforts, would people get tired of life in the same way merely because of its length or would they have some source of perpetual interest within as well as without that would keep them on—that is the question. Of course physical immortality would not mean that one is tied down to the body, but that one is not subject to disease and death, but can keep or leave the body at will. I don't know whether Ashwatthaman lives on because he cannot die or because he won't die—whether it is for him a doom or a privilege. There are by the way animals that live for many centuries, but as they have not the philosophic mind the question for them does not arise—probably they take it as a matter of course. <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/28/transformation-and-the-body#p35</ref>
=What are the Different Types of Healing?=