When you say disease, we have to classify them into two basic categories. One set of diseases are infectious – you contract them from outside. Maybe you ate something which was not hygienic and caught an infection. Or you went close to somebody who had a flu and got it. For that there are medicines.
The diseases that you are talking about are something that the body creates. The fundamental longing of the body is to survive and preserve itself. It is a very deep-rooted longing in this physical body, that it wants to survive – it wants to keep itself well. In spite of that, if it is creating diseases within itself, what could be wrong? Somewhere, without understanding a few fundamentals, we are going on assuming things.
One thing is definitely the mind. You might know of psychosomatic diseases. If the mind is functioning in a certain way, it hampers the functioning of the energy. Whatever is happening and whatever has happened in this body in terms of creating, maintaining and nurturing it, fundamentally depends on how your energy functions in this body. If for some reason your energy malfunctions, then a disease can manifest itself. If the energy malfunctions, what kind of disease it may turn into depends upon what is inherently weak in that person. It may be a hereditary aspect – some organ or part of the body could be inherently weak because the parents were so. So if the same imbalance happens in two people, one person may get asthma and the other may get diabetes, depending upon what each has inherited.
What type of imbalance you go through also has a very deep karmic implication. What we call as karma is a huge amount of impressions that we have taken into us, which have become their own kind of software. This software has developed certain tendencies; it tends to move in a particular way. Traditionally in India, we call these tendencies, vasanas. Vasana literally means smell. So what kind of smell emanates from you depends on what kind of garbage you have gathered. Depending upon what type of vasanas you have, accordingly you tend to move in certain ways and also certain aspects in the world tend to move towards you in a particular way. Is this absolute? No. If you become conscious, even if your smell is one way, you can go another way. But if you are not conscious, you naturally gravitate according to your tendencies. In the body, a certain manifestation of these tendencies can become disease. Because of certain tendencies, the energy does not function properly in certain areas of the body, and disease can happen.
So these are the different ways in which you can impair your energy system. Either by your own karmic system, by your own karmic accumulation; or because of improper eating and other kinds of habits; or by the way your mind functions; your stress, anxiety and these kind of things.
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Ranked amongst the fifty most influential people in India, Sadhguru is a yogi, mystic, visionary and a New York Times bestselling author Sadhguru has been conferred the Padma Vibhushan by the Government of India in 2017, the highest annual civilian award, accorded for exceptional and distinguished service.