Osho International Foundation

Paracelsus used to say, “Until we know the state of your inner harmony, we can at the most release you from your illness – because your inner harmony is the source of your health. But when we release you from one illness, you will immediately catch another, because nothing has been done with regard to your inner harmony. The fact of the matter is that it is your inner harmony which must be supported.”

Western medical science has viewed man as a separate unit – apart from nature. That is one of the biggest errors 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 that part 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. I will give you a few examples which can make it clear to you.

Acupuncture was developed in China nearabout seven thousand years ago by accident. A hunter was trying to kill a deer, but as his arrow was moving towards the deer, a man not knowing what was happening came in between and the arrow hit the man’s leg. The man had been suffering from migraine his whole life; the moment the arrow hit his leg, the migraine disappeared. This was very strange. Nobody had thought about it in that way.

Out of that accident the whole of acupuncture developed, and developed

to a full science. So if you go to an acupuncturist and you say, “Something is wrong with my eyes,” or “Something is wrong with my head,” or “Something is wrong with my liver,” he may not bother about your liver, your head or your eyes. He will think of the whole organism; he will try to heal you – not just the part that is sick.

Acupuncture has developed an approach to seven hundred points, which were discovered in man’s body. Man’s body is a bioelectric phenomenon, alive. It has a certain electricity – hence we call it bio-electricity. This bioelectricity can be reached through seven hundred points in the body, and each point relates to some part of the body, which may be far away from it. That’s what happened in that accident: the arrow hit a bioelectric point that related to the head, and the migraine disappeared.

Acupuncture is more holistic. The difference has to be understood. When you take man as a machine you take a partial view of him. If his hand is sick, you just treat the hand; you don’t bother about his whole body, of which the hand is only a part. The mechanical outlook is partial. It succeeds, but its success is not real success because the same disease that has been repressed in the hand by medicine, surgery or other things, starts expressing itself somewhere else in a worse form. So medicine has developed tremendously; surgery has become a great science – but man is suffering from more diseases, sicknesses, than ever.

This dilemma can be understood. Man should be taken as a whole, treated as an organic unity. But the problem with modern medicine, Western medicine, is that it does not think you have any soul, that you have anything more than a body-mind structure. You also are a machine: your eyes can be replaced, your hands can be replaced, your legs can be replaced – and sooner or later brains will be replaced.

But do you think if we can take Albert Einstein’s brain while he is dying, remove it before death is certain and transplant it, for example in the skull of Polack the pope, do you think he will

Health should have something more positive, because health is the positive thing and sickness is the negative thing. Now the negative is defining the positive.

Health is the feeling of well being, your whole body functioning at its peak without any disturbance. You feel a certain well being, a certain at-onement with existence. That was not happening through surgery.

India abandoned the whole science and developed a totally different approach, Ayurveda, which means “science of life.” It is significant. In the

West we call it medicine, and medicine simply indicates sickness. Health has nothing to do with medicine. Medicine means that the whole science is devoted to curing you from sicknesses.

Ayurveda has a different approach. It is the science of life; it helps you, not to cure sicknesses but to prevent sicknesses from happening – to keep you so healthy that the sickness becomes impossible. The ways of the East and the West are different on this point, whether man is a machine or a spiritual entity with a wholeness....

Secondly, what Western medicine has done is make people less immune.

Real medicine should give you immunity rather than take it away. It should make you stronger, able to fight any infection rather than make you weak so that you are vulnerable to all kinds of infections.

One very famous psychologist, Delgado, has been working on animals. He was surprised to know that if rats are given one meal a day, they live twice as long; the life span of the rats who are given two meals a day is cut in

Man has to reconsider all traditions, all different sources; whatever facts have become available have to be reconsidered. A totally new medical approach has to be evolved which takes note of acupuncture, which takes note of Ayurveda, which takes note of Greek medicine, which takes note of Delgado and his research – which takes note of the fact that man is not a machine. Man is a multidimensional spiritual being, and you should behave with him accordingly

become an Albert Einstein? The brain is only a part. He would become a strange phenomenon, a crossbreed between a Polack and Albert Einstein. At least right now he is perfectly a Polack; then he would be in a limbo, not knowing who he is – a pope or a physicist.

In India, medical science developed almost five thousand years ago. And you will be surprised to know that whatever surgery we have today is exactly described by Sushrut, one of the greatest surgeons in the East, in ancient scriptures five to seven thousand years old. But it was abandoned – and that is the point I want you to notice. Why was a developed science abandoned? – because it was found that surgery takes man as a mechanism, and man is not a mechanism; so rather than destroying man they abandoned surgery.

All the finest instruments that surgery uses are described by Sushrut in his scripture. All the operations, even the brain operations, are described in full detail as if it is a modern textbook on surgery. But it is at least five thousand years old. They developed it to the same point where we are, and they must have faced the same problem that we are facing. They must have found that something is basically wrong.

We go on working so much… and the sickness and the disease go on increasing. Even if we make a person without sickness, that does not mean that he is healthy. Absence of sickness is not health; that is a very negative definition.