Read Summary of '''[[Health and Healing Summary|Health and Healing]]'''
|}
=Why is Health and Healing Important?=
Good. That's the one thing needed—important, very important: to keep the body in good health, in a sort of balance. We must keep our balance. Very important. The rest doesn't matter!<ref>http://incarnateword.in/agenda/04/july-24-1963#p40</ref>
<center>~</center>
"Of course you are right, there, when you say that one should seek the Divine for his own sake. For you people, it's easy to understand since you are bathing in this atmosphere here. But for the Western man, a proof is needed, he wants to know what he will gain! The easiest and most striking thing to demonstrate is healing. There. It's really quite simple. I don't know if you understand it. Christ, too, did the same thing!" <ref>http://incarnateword.in/agenda/10/october-25-1969#p12</ref>
<center>~</center>
It is in good health that the way towards transformation is found.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/15/illness-and-health#p5</ref>
<center>~</center>
As a result of this new relation between the Spirit and the body, the gnostic evolution will effectuate the spiritualisation, perfection and fulfilment of the physical being; it will do for the body as for the mind and life. Apart from the obscurity, frailties and limitations, which this change will overcome, the body-consciousness is a patient servant and can be in its large reserve of possibilities a potent instrument of the individual life, and it asks for little on its own account: what it craves for is duration, health, strength, physical perfection, bodily happiness, liberation from suffering, ease. These demands are not in themselves unacceptable, mean or illegitimate, for they render into the terms of Matter the perfection of form and substance, the power and delight which should be the natural outflowing, the expressive manifestation of the Spirit. When the gnostic Force can act in the body, these things can be established; for their opposites come from a pressure of external forces on the physical mind, on the nervous and material life, on the body organism, from an ignorance that does not know how to meet these forces or is not able to meet them rightly or with power, and from some obscurity, pervading the stuff of the physical consciousness and distorting its responses, that reacts to them in a wrong way. A supramental self-acting self-effectuating awareness and knowledge, replacing this ignorance, will liberate and restore the obscured and spoiled intuitive instincts in the body and enlighten and supplement them with a greater conscious action. This change would institute and maintain a right physical perception of things, a right relation and right reaction to objects and energies, a right rhythm of mind, nerve and organism. It would bring into the body a higher spiritual power and a greater life-force unified with the universal life-force and able to draw on it, a luminous harmony with material Nature and the vast and calm touch of the eternal repose which can give to it its diviner strength and ease. Above all,—for this is the most needed and fundamental change,—it will flood the whole being with a supreme energy of Consciousness-Force which would meet, assimilate or harmonise with itself all the forces of existence that surround and press upon the body.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-gnostic-being#p24</ref>
==Positive Effects of Health and Healing==
For a few days, and it's becoming increasingly established, there has been an impression that health or illness is a choice (to express it simply). A choice of every minute. For this body, at any rate, that's how it is. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/agenda/09/june-15-1968#p15</ref>
==Why it is Important to Resolve the Rift Between Two Different Beings?==
The moral of the condition you describe is not that Yoga should not be done but that you have to go on steadily healing the rift between the two parts of the being. The division is very usual, almost universal in human nature, and the following of the lower impulse in spite of the contrary will in the higher parts happens to almost everybody. It is the phenomenon noted by Arjuna in his question to Krishna, "Why does one do evil, even though one wishes not to do it, as if compelled to it by force?", and expressed sententiously by Ovid, "video meliora proboque, Deteriora sequor". By constant effort and aspiration one can arrive at a turning point when the psychic asserts itself and what seems a very slight psychological change or reversal alters the whole balance of the nature. <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/28/the-psychic-being#p86</ref>
==Role in Integral Yoga==
The first time I came here and spoke with Sri Aurobindo about what was needed for the Work, he told me (he also wrote it to me) that for the secure achievement of the Work we would need three powers: one was the power over health, the second was the power over government, and the third was the power over money. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/agenda/01/july-6-1958#p10</ref>
<center>~</center>
But the effect on me is odd: I have the impression that I am ill—there's nothing wrong with me, I am in good health, yet I have a constant impression of being ill.
The truth is, it's the transition from the ordinary mental consciousness to the supramental consciousness. The mental consciousness panics in the presence of the supramental consciousness. The vibration is so different I feel one could die every minute. Only when I am very tranquil.... <ref>https://incarnateword.in/agenda/13/march-14-1973#p7-p8</ref>
=What Happens when Health and Healing is Not Present?=