Compilation · Physical
Healing: Compilation
Passages from the works of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother on healing, each with its source.
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To feel and love the God of beauty and good in the ugly and the evil, and still yearn in utter love to heal it of its ugliness and its evil, this is real virtue and morality.1
What Is Healing?
Definition
Spiritual power of healing: opening and receptivity to the divine influence.2
What is majorly understood as healing power is a very great mental or vital power that imposes itself through the resistance of Matter… It’s the contagion of a vibration. And then it’s irrevocable.
…they [”supreme faculties”] are the faculties that develop in man as he opens to the higher mind and overmind, and through those regions he receives the light of the Truth. These faculties are not a direct expression of the supreme Truth, but a transcription, an indirect reflection of it. They include intuition, foreknowledge, knowledge by identity and certain powers such as that of healing and, to an extent, of acting upon circumstances.3
Pain and Suffering
Human beings always suffer because of egoistic causes, humanly… So, always at the root of human sorrow there is a turning back upon oneself, more or less conscious, more or less …acknowledged, but it is always that. Even when one weeps over another’s misery, there is always a mixture.4
All disorders, all suffering is falsehood.
Thus it can be said that illnesses are falsehoods of the body…
… an illness is only a wrong attitude taken by some part of the body.5
Role of Medical Science and Medicine
Medical Science has been more a curse to mankind than a blessing. It has broken the force of epidemics and unveiled a marvellous surgery; but, also, it has weakened the natural health of man and multiplied individual diseases; it has implanted fear and dependence in the mind and body; it has taught our health to repose not on natural soundness but a rickety and distasteful crutch compact from the mineral and vegetable kingdoms.6
Drugs often cure the body when they do not merely trouble or poison it, but only if their physical attack on the disease is supported by the force of the spirit; if that force can be made to work freely, drugs are superfluous.
The doctor aims a drug at a disease; sometimes it hits, sometimes misses. The misses are left out of account, the hits treasured up, reckoned and systematised into a science.
Medical Science to the human body is like a great Power which enfeebles a smaller State by its protection or like a benevolent robber who knocks his victim flat and riddles him with wounds in order that he may devote his life to healing and serving the shattered body.
The chief role of the doctor is, by various means, to induce the body to recover its trust in the Supreme Grace.
In most cases the use of medicines—within reasonable limits, that is, when one doesn’t poison oneself by taking medicines—is simply to help the body to have confidence. It is the body which heals itself. When it wants to be cured, it is cured. And this is something very widely recognised now; even the most traditional doctors tell you, “Yes, our medicines help, but it is not the medicines which cure, it is the body which decides to be cured.”
In every case, it is the Force that cures.
Medicines have little effect; it is the faith in medicines that cures.
Get treated by the doctor whom you trust and take only the medicines that inspire trust in you.
The body only has trust in material methods and that is why you have to give it medicines—but medicines have an effect only if the Force acts through them.7
Why Heal?
The true solution can intervene only when by our spiritual growth we can become one self with all beings, know them as part of our self, deal with them as if they were our other selves; for then the division is healed, the law of separate self affirmation leading by itself to affirmation against or at the expense of others is enlarged and liberated by adding to it the law of our self-affirmation for others and our self-finding in their self-finding and self-realisation. Our oneness with others must be fundamental, not a oneness with their minds, hearts, vital selves, egos,—even though these come to be included in our universalised consciousness,—but a oneness in the soul and spirit, and that can only come by our liberation into soul-awareness and self-knowledge. To be ourselves liberated from ego and realise our true selves is the first necessity; all else can be achieved as a luminous result, a necessary consequence.8
What Impedes Healing?
Disharmony
Sri Aurobindo says, “Disease is needlessly prolonged and ends in death oftener than is inevitable, because the mind of the patient supports and dwells upon the disease of the body. ” [Mother adds], An illness of the body is always the outer expression and translation of a disorder, a disharmony in the inner being; unless this inner disorder is healed, the outer cure cannot be total and permanent.9
Ego
Our first division is that created by our ego and mainly, most forcefully, most vividly by our life-ego, which divides us from all other beings as not-self and ties us to our ego-centricity and the law of an egoistic self affirmation. It is in the errors of this self-affirmation that wrong and evil first arise: wrong consciousness engenders wrong will in the members, in the thinking mind, in the heart, in the life-mind and the sensational being, in the very body-consciousness; wrong will engenders wrong action of all these instruments, a multiple error and many-branching crookedness of thought and will and sense and feeling. Nor can we deal rightly with others so long as they are to us others, beings who are strangers to ourselves and of whose inner consciousness, soul-need, mind-need, heart-need, life-need, body-need we know little or nothing. The modicum of imperfect sympathy, knowledge and good-will that the law, need and habit of association engender, is a poor quantum of what is required for a true action. A larger mind, a larger heart, a more ample and generous life-force can do something to help us or help others and avoid the worst offences, but this too is insufficient and will not prevent a mass of troubles and harms and collisions of our preferred good with the good of others. By the very nature of our ego and ignorance we affirm ourselves egotistically even when we most pride ourselves on selflessness and ignorantly even when we most pride ourselves on understanding and knowledge.10
Egoistic Altruism
Altruism taken as a rule of life does not deliver us. It is a potent instrument for self-enlargement and for correction of the narrower ego, but it does not abolish it nor transform it into the true self one with all. The ego of the altruist is as powerful and absorbing as the ego of the selfish and it is often more powerful and insistent because it is a self-righteous and magnified ego. It helps still less if we do wrong to our soul, to our mind, life or body with the idea of subordinating our self to the self of others. To affirm our being rightly so that it may become one with all is the true principle, not to mutilate or immolate it.10
Fear
…the first condition: not to fear and to be calm. If you begin to boil and get fidgety in your body, it is finished, you can do nothing.11
Most of your troubles come from fear. In fact, ninety per cent of illnesses are the result of the subconscient fear of the body. In the ordinary consciousness of the body there is a more or less hidden anxiety about the consequences of the slightest physical disturbance. It can be translated by these words of doubt about the future: “And what will happen?” It is this anxiety that must be checked. Indeed this anxiety is a lack of confidence in the Divine’s Grace, the unmistakable sign that the consecration is not complete and perfect.
It is fear which makes one fall ill and it is fear which makes healing so difficult. All fear must be overcome and replaced by a complete trust in the divine Grace.12
How to Heal?
It is absolutely false that anything human can heal a human evil. Only the Divine can heal. It is in Him alone that one must seek help and support, it is in Him alone that one must put all one’s hope.13
Q. Mother, is it possible to develop in oneself the capacity to heal?
A. In principle, everything is possible by uniting consciously with the Divine Force. But a method has to be found, and this depends on the case and the individual.
The first condition is to have a physical nature that gives energy rather than draws energy from others.
The second indispensable condition is to know how to draw energy from above, from the inexhaustible impersonal source.
…never take the attitude of hoping for support, help, comfort from anyone except the Divine. That is absolute. [Mother says], I have never, not once, met anyone who tried to cling to something to find support there (someone doing yoga or who has been put into touch with yoga) and who was not deceived—it breaks, it stops, one loses one’s support. Then one says, Life is difficult—it is not difficult but one must know what one is doing. Never seek a support elsewhere than in the Divine. Never seek satisfaction elsewhere than in the Divine. Never seek the satisfaction of your needs in anyone else except the Divine—never, for anything at all. All your needs can be satisfied only by the Divine. All your weaknesses can be borne and healed only by the Divine. He alone is capable of giving you what you need in everything, always, and if you try to find any satisfaction or support or help or joy or… heaven knows what, in anyone else, you will always fall on your nose one day, and that always hurts, sometimes even hurts very much.
To separate yourself from the thing and call in the Mother’s force to cure it [is the Yogic method]—or else to use your own will force with faith in the power to heal, having the support of the Mother’s force behind you. If you cannot use either of these methods then you must rely on the action of the medicine.14
Prerequisites to Healing
The material power to heal demands a great sincerity in one’s goodwill.15
Body’s Amenability
To heal [illness] by the true force is obviously the best provided the body is amenable. It has a consciousness of its own which must be fully enlightened before it gives a full response.16
Calmness
For everything—to live the spiritual life, heal sickness—for everything, one must be calm.17
…as soon as one feels a wave of physical disequilibrium, of ill health coming, well, to concentrate in the right spirit is to concentrate in an inner calm, a trust in the divine Grace, and a will to remain in physical equilibrium and good health. This is the right spirit.18
Real Aspiration
…if sincerely one wants to be healed, if one has a real aspiration to overcome the obstacle, to rise—rise above oneself, to give up all that pulls one back, to break the limits, become clear, purify oneself of all that blocks the way, if truly one has the intense will not to fall back into past errors, to surge up from the darkness and ignorance, to rise into the light, stripped of all that is too human, too small, too ignorant—then that works. It works, works powerfully. At times it works definitively and totally.19
Sacrifice and Self-giving
It is with the sense of separation that pain, suffering, misery, ignorance, and all incapacities have come. It is with an absolute self-giving, self-forgetfulness in a total consecration that suffering disappears and is replaced by a joy which