Osho,
Western medicine is highly developed, but it seems that people are sicker than they ever were before. Can you comment?

“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.”

To continue reading this OSHO Talk, visit: Health: Overflowing Energy of Life

If western medicine took man as a whole organism, could all diseases be cured?

“We have created much to help the human body – many medicines, much science, many instruments, many things. This century has created much as far as medicine is concerned, human health is concerned. But are you aware that new diseases have come in? – they go on balancing. You create a medicine and a new disease bubbles up, but the balance remains the same. The balance remains the same, the proportion remains the same. You create a new medicine and a new disease comes up and brings the balance again to the same level. You create laws, you go on creating laws, and new criminal acts are invented – they go on balancing.

“If we look at the world it is a deep balance, always balancing itself with the opposite….

“We solve one problem and another comes up, but the total number remains the same. The total number always remains the same. If you are aware of this totality, this duality, this complementariness, then what to do?

“This awareness will tell you that this is just the dynamics of the world, you cannot change it.

This is the very dynamics of the world: to be in duality, to be in antithesis, to be in a dialectical process.

“The world works through dialectics, through duality, and the anti-thesis in not anti. It is anti only in language – the antithesis is just a balance.”

Osho, That Art Thou, #33

And does this balance include health and sickness?

“You think a healthy person should never be ill; that is absolutely foolish. It is not possible. Only a dead person is never ill. A healthy person has to be ill sometimes. Through illness he attains health again and that health is fresh. Passing through illness, passing through the opposite, it becomes new again. Have you ever noticed? After a long fever, as you are getting well again, you have a freshness, a virginity; the whole body seems to be rejuvenated.

“If you remain continuously healthy for seventy years, your health will be like an illness, a death because it was never rejuvenated, never made fresh. The opposite always gives freshness. It will be stale if you are never ill; your health will become like a burden. Sometimes falling ill is beautiful. I am not saying to remain in bed forever; that too would be bad. Always being ill is bad. Anything that becomes a permanent thing is bad. Anything that moves and flows into the other is good, it is alive….

Without illness nobody will be healthy.

“And this is going to happen. It seems that someday cancer will be cured and nature will immediately create something more incurable.

“Remember, in this fight, science cannot win and should not win. Nature should always be the winner. Nature is wiser than all your scientists put together.”

To continue reading this OSHO Talk, visit: All Things Come in Their Due Season

In addition to this dialectical process of nature – are there any human factors influencing people’s health?

“All the religions – particularly Christianity – force everybody to be hypocrites, to pretend. No taste, no love, no appreciation of your own body and its wisdom. Your body is doing a tremendous service for you for seventy, eighty, or a hundred years – and you are not even grateful. All the religions treat the body as the enemy, so torture it. Torturing is virtue.

Rejoicing in your body, in its health, in its youth, in its old age, rejoicing in your body even in death, is what I teach.

“Christianity is basically masochistic – torture your body. The more you torture your body the greater saint you are. And there are idiots everywhere available – they are the majority in the world – who start doing all kinds of stupid things just to become saints.“

To continue reading this OSHO Talk, visit: Not Faith, but Fear

“Religions have been killing human beings – their naturalness, their consciousness, their innocence. All the religions praise fasting. Your body is hungry, your body gives you indications that it is hungry. Your stomach shouts loudly to you, ‘I am hungry!‘ But your religion says fasting is spiritual.

“This is making people schizophrenic, divided against themselves, and a house that is divided against itself cannot stand long; it is going to be in ruins soon. And that’s what has happened to humanity: all human beings are not what they would have been, they are just ruins. In a very subtle and psychological way they have been deprived of their own nature. That’s why old religions have not been able to transform humanity. On the contrary, they have been the hindrance for any transformation.

“I am telling you to be natural. When you are hungry you should eat, and when you are not hungry you should not eat.”

To continue reading this OSHO Talk, visit: Existence Is Only in the Present

So, listening to the body is the natural way to be healthy?

“You must become aware of your own body: its workings, its subtle feelings, its music, its silences. Sometimes the body is silent; sometimes it is noisy; sometimes relaxed. The feeling is so different in each state that it is unfortunate we are not aware of it. When you are going to sleep, there are subtle changes in your body. When you are coming out of sleep in the morning, there are changes again. One must become aware of them….

“We have not understood the language of our own bodies.

“My body has the experience of my father and mother, and their father and mother and so on – centuries and centuries during which the seed of my body has developed into what it is. It has its own language.“

To continue reading this OSHO Talk, visit: The Psychology of Dreams

“You listen to your own body. The body has a great wisdom in it. If you listen to it, you will always be right. If you don’t listen to it and you go on enforcing things on it, you will never be happy; you will be unhappy, ill, ill at ease, and always disturbed and distracted, disoriented….

“The body always gives you the right indication in the right moment. If you just listen to the wisdom of the body, all your wise men will look fools. Your body has its own wisdom. Rather than looking in The Holy Bible, or in the holy Koran, or in the holy Gita, you should listen to your own body. When it is thirsty, it says; when it needs rest, it says. When it is rested, it wants some exercise, it wants to run, to play, to swim, to go for a long walk….“

To continue reading this OSHO Talk, visit: Existence Is Only in the Present

Let the body be healthy, let the body be beautiful, let the body be graceful, because only in a graceful body will a graceful consciousness become possible, only in a healthy body will inner health happen – only in a peaceful, silent, relaxed body a relaxed consciousness.

“Remember that and there is no division. It is the same wave going out and coming in. It is just like breathing, going out and coming in. It is just like the blinking of the eye, opening and closing. Out and in, opening and closing, in-breathing and out-breathing – they are two aspects of you, two wings.

“So don’t be worried.

“The first thing to remember: the body is holy.“

To continue reading this OSHO Talk, visit: The Shadow of the Ego

Can meditation be useful to support us to be healthy – and even to create a holistic medicine?

“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.”

To continue reading this OSHO Talk, visit: Health: Overflowing Energy of Life

What is your view of a healthy person?

“To me, health means: the capacity to move in all directions. To be healthy is to be whole. The word ‘health’ comes from the same root as the word ‘whole’. To be healthy is to be whole, to be whole is to be all together. So to be healthy means: where opposites meet and are no more opposites but are transformed into complementaries.

“A healthy person is one who when he wants to move in, he moves. There is no hindrance. He has no compulsion to be an extrovert. And vice versa. If you are compulsively an introvert – whenever you start moving without, there are inner hindrances. You have to fight, you cannot flow, you have to force. Then you are ill.

“A healthy person, a healthy being, a healthy energy, is always ready to move anywhere. There is no compulsion to be somewhere in particular.

A healthy energy is a flowing energy.

“When you go to the market, you move out. Nobody inside condemns: ‘To move out is worldly, materialistic.’ Nobody condemns. When you go to the temple you move withinward. Nobody condemns….

Remember the word flowing. The more energy flows, the more healthy it is.

“You can reach to the highest peak and you can come down to the lowest world – and there is no problem. You can meditate and you can love. Meditation is going withinward, love is going without. Meditation is reaching to one’s own being. Love is an effort to reach to the other’s being.”

To continue reading this OSHO Talk, visit: Healthy Energy Is Flowing Energy

END

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This article is published in Osho.com