Daily Offerings from Alokda

Added to this primary source of disharmony, there are secondary causes as well. These arise due to the fact that Man is neither alone nor isolated in the cosmos. He himself is one field for the complex play of forces that weave the fabric of his nature. But in a deeper view of things everything in this cosmos can be seen and understood in terms of energies and forces. These are broadly of three or four categories. There are the gross physical forces that material Science studies. There are also the subtle forces that psychological Science tries to explore. Finally, there are occult forces hidden to our present abilities and capacities for perception and conception. To use the term from Indian Thought, these forces can be each categorized by their action as forces of creation or constructive forces, forces of preservation or balancing forces, forces of disintegration or destructive forces. Indian Thought gave to these forces significant names of Rajas (constructive and creative), Sattwa (preserving and balancing), Tamas (destroying and disintegrative). The respective beings and powers behind these three are Brahma, Vishnu, Mahesh, the trinity of Indian spiritual thought and vision. Illnesses also arise when there is an imbalance between these forces either due to an unequal stress in the nature or due to coming in contact and proximity with one or the other.

Let us take an example, words, written or spoken, music that is expressed, food, air, water, organisms, etc. are all gross forces and each exercise influence us to a certain degree. The corresponding subtle forces would be Thought, inner harmony and rhythm, feelings, strength, will etc. The occult element would be the various types of energies and beings that enter into us unseen and move us even without our knowledge. Now, words of Thought, food, air, feelings, organisms, people, plants, for that matter anything can have on us a destructive, constructive or preservative influence. Indian thought elaborately classified these phenomena and discovered that each and every object or form can be resolved into varying degrees of combination of five elements, namely space (etheric vibrations), air (movement), water (attraction and repulsion), fire (energizing a form), earth (concretizing, precipitating, gravitational). Different activities of life require different elements. However, if the use of one of these elements is in excess or in deficiency compared to the others, the balance is disturbed leading to a state of disharmony and illness.

Finally, we have a whole range of physical and biological phenomenon which can upset the state of harmony and trigger an imbalance. This means that the vision of Integral Health provides us with a comprehensive understanding of health and illness, and, man’s relation with the world around. It takes into account and does not exclude physical causes of health and illness. But it sees them in a New Light, thereby allowing a deeper and more holistic understanding. Similarly Integral Health takes into account and does not exclude different forms of healing practices that mankind has evolved so far. But here too it sees them in a New Light providing us with a greater flexibility and a more holistic approach.

Alok Pandey

The vision of Integral Health is based on an integral understanding of man. The truths of integral healing are derived from Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga and his Guidance along with the Mother, on various aspects of health and healing. Taken in its totality, it is a comprehensive guidance on each and every aspect of human existence, right from our bodily to the highest spiritual existence. Sri Aurobindo’s teaching also reconnects man, the mental being, to his larger cosmic and Divine existence. In this total vision we do not see things and events in isolation but as part of a larger movement of Nature towards realizing greater and greater degree of Perfection through the various forms She has evolved so far.

The human body is one such form and though, largely still of an animal make, it hides within itself new, higher and greater possibilities that are bound to emerge in due course of Time. However, unlike the animal, man can collaborate in the process through an integral yoga.

Or he can resist the change.

The result is an evolutionary conflict that we experience within and around. The past and the future both act upon man. He feels the pull of the dark subconscient energies accumulated and inherited from the earth’s past. He also feels drawn, however vaguely, to the bright Superconscient which is Earth’s Destiny. In man these two currents meet, often in disharmony with each other. He is caught between the forces of ‘natural’ disintegration and the forces of New Creation which visit his heart and mind thereby creating hope, idealism and dreams of a better humanity and earth. It is this inner conflict that is the primary cause of disharmony in man. Humanity experiences it as an inner ‘unease’ and a ‘ restless urge’ to find ‘something’ or ‘someone’ who can give it the much needed Peace and Joy and Truth and Freedom and Love. At first he seeks these things outside through objects and persons and outer circumstances. But as he evolves and becomes aware of a larger subjective existence within himself, he seeks them inside, in the spaces of his inner being. But until he has found the right balance between the inner and the outer, his ‘unease’ has a tendency to precipitate into a ‘disease’. The disease serves to remind him that there is a need to rediscover the threads of his life and to reorient them. It is in fact, an evolutionary door if we thus use it.

We move ever towards the New and the Unknown. But the New is not always new even as the old is not always old.

The New may be a rediscovery by another age of the old much as a child ‘discovers’ and is thrilled with discovering what his parents and grandparents already know.
The old too may be a partial glimpse ahead of Time of that which the race must realize much later. The dreams of Leonardo Da Vinci were not old and the ancient legends of Daedalus and Icarus were precursors of the Future. The Vedic Rishis and the Chaldean mystics foresaw something that the race was yet to experience. Krishna is still alive in the psychological spaces of man waiting for his call to be heard. Christ and Buddha wait on the threshold of our inner being for humanity to receive their message rightly.

Therefore, as we enter into the New and the Unknown future, we should carefully discern the surviving ghosts and phantoms of a slain past from the early blush of a forthcoming Dawn. The first leads us back to the cycles that have exhausted their purpose, the second to endless new discoveries.