46. Turning A Blind Eye

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Arogya and Adhyatma seem to be two sides of the same coin. If society is considered as a whole, both of these seem to deteriorate together (as is happening now) or both flourish together. And as mentioned in earlier posts, the distinction between them vanishes if we go on probing deep into the definition of health. Lately, I have started noticing something strongly common between people's approach towards these as well - turning a blind eye to things well within our scope and always blaming out-of-bound things.

Whenever I gave lectures on health to the health-home participants in our Yoga campus at SVYASA, I have always observed one consistent thing. Most people do not take the ownership for their disease. As I proceed with my lecture, I go on listing several factors that cause/trigger/aggravate diseases (not the contagious diseases, but the NCDs which are more prevalent today). Such as stress, irregular food habits, lack of exercises, addictions and lack of overall regulation of the daily routine. These factors cause majority of the diseases of our times. I explain quite logically how each of these factors cause impairment in the system and cause it to breakdown over the years (as briefly explained in the earlier posts on health). Although things are so firmly put forth, finally some in the audience casually turn a blind eye towards all that. They start blaming pesticides, food preservatives and pollution for their disease. Although they are also a factor to be considered, this attitude is very funny. Ignoring a hundred things which are very well in their own control, they focus on pesticides which is not in their control at all. And then finally they pass the judgment "Disease came because of that, we cannot do anything". Drinking ten cups of coffee every day, eating irregularly whenever food is seen (like a cow!), using cell phone for hours together, talking news matters (such as someone killing his mother in some corner of the country!) and worrying over it every day, not performing any type of bodily exercises - they do not want to change any of these which are very well in their control. But they only want to worry about the pesticides in the food over which they do not have any control! It is very lazily convenient to blame something which is out of our control and say "I am not well because of that, so nothing can be done. I am not responsible for the disease". So I tell them: First take care of all the things which are well within your boundaries, and even after that if you fall sick, then let us worry about that later. If all the self-generated factors contributing to the disease are taken care of, what will pollution and food preservatives alone do? Will they cause all the diseases by themselves? What will be the percentage and intensity of the disease due to these external factors alone? If you look at it, they have a very small effect compared to the self-generated causes. If we have self-regulated everything else, these external things alone cannot harm us to the extent we are projecting them to. It is stupidity to sit and cry worrying about them, ignoring everything else that we can change ourselves.

And of course, heredity is a master excuse given by most. I always ask them one question. How many generations back can we trace this to? 2,3,4? Somewhere someone should have given a beginning, isn’t it? Somebody in our ancestry did some or all the mistakes listed above (improper life style) and became a prey of some disease. And along with their wealth, their diseases also flowed to us. If they had the power to begin, why don’t we have the power to stop? If we have the power to store information in the DNA and make things go wrong, why don't we have the power to erase it and make things right? Doesn't it look like plain common sense?

But they argue further! "Scientists have told that genes cannot be modified" they say. For decades scientists fed this negativity to the world and now the common public is not aware what exactly the truth is. Gene encoding and gene expression - are two things. Just because something is stored in the genes does not mean that they will express themselves always. Now scientists are finding that gene expressions can actually be changed by our own regulation of life. What encodings of genes express themselves can be controlled by us. We can suppress them or aggravate them - it is fully in our control. And some scientists are even saying that prolonged regulation can change gene encodings as well. And by the way, do you know how much of the total genes scientists have understood? Less than 2%! And they called the rest 98% as junk DNA! How intelligently stupid! Just because they didn't understand what that 98% is doing, they called it junk. Who knows what is in that 98%? And without knowing such a big portion of the genes, how can we pass a judgment on them? In fact, lately scientists are slowly finding that the remaining DNAs are not actually junk and they play a vital role in regulatory aspects of the genes themselves. You may find details on the net. But anyway, to me, it seems childish to go on probing deeper and deeper like an unending play. It is better to regulate our life at the macro level which will automatically make necessary changes at micro levels of our body, instead of learning a thousand theoretical things about the genes and not following any regulation in our life! It is better to just to go and eat the mango instead of meticulously counting the number of trees in the orchard!

If my parents had diabetes, that particular gene encoding may pass on to me. But that itself does not guarantee that I will become diabetic. It does not mean that I have to accept it as a final death sentence of the supreme court. I can very well regulate my life in a good way and totally suppress these encodings from expressing themselves. I can even change the encodings by prolonged regulation of life and not allow it to pass further to my children. But hardly anyone in today's world regulates their life so well so as to make this happen. And just because no one in today's materialistic and lazy population is trying to do it, scientists called it as impossible (I call lazy population because everyone prefers popping a pill over 30 min of exercise). But the fact is that it is possible - we are the masters. Samskaras (tendencies i.e. gene encodings) are created by us, they do not create us.

This way, by giving so many reasons, people are not ready to take the ownership for their ill-health. They are always busy listing other remote factors for the disease. This happens so because, if they blame the external factors, then they can just sit idle saying "I cannot do anything about it". They can say that all solution must come only in the form of swallow-able pills. Laziness and negativity go hand in hand. Modern medicine is thriving mainly because of this negative attitude and laziness. It always wants to make you feel helpless. "You cannot do anything, it cannot be cured" doctors say so easily when you go to them for diseases such as diabetes, asthma etc. And the patient too is somewhat happy not taking ownership of it and spends the rest of the life swallowing some pills.

This negative tendency is not limited to health alone. This very much defines us in everything, and therefore it has infected our spiritual life as well. The negative approach that we have for health is exactly the same when it comes to spirituality. I have already written plenty of things in these lines in relation to spirituality. How we give plenty of excuses for not doing things, how we are not ready to take ownership of our stagnations in spiritual pursuit etc. I have even heard people say "I am not getting a proper Guru, that is why I am not progressing", or sometimes much sillier ones as "There has to be tiger skin for proper meditation. I cannot meditate without that".

Yoga-spirituality is the exact opposite of this negative tendency. In Yoga therapy, first, one has to see the facts logically and accept responsibility for the disease. Once intellect is repaired with the notional corrections, cure follows automatically. If one has wholeheartedly accepted the responsibility of his disease, he will automatically start moderating his life style and will cure himself over time. It is not at all magical. It is plain and simple common sense. After all, our natural state is to be healthy, not diseased. When things are normal and soothing, body heals itself. There is nothing miraculous about it. We should start seeing the obviousness of it and therefore naturally become positive.

Same thing applies to spirituality. One has to simply start following whatever practices are within one's limits. Worrying about things that cannot be followed, that are not within our purview is of no use at all. It only creates stagnation. Follow whatever is possible, and then see how things change as in a chain reaction.

If you happen to read Mahabharata (I hope you will get to), you cannot help getting irritated with Dhritarashtra and Duryodhana. Pages after pages of Mahabharata are filled by Vidura and Bhishma's preaching to both of these about Dharma. But in the end Dhritarashtra always whines "Sigh.. Whatever you say is so wonderful Vidura. But what to do. I cannot follow any of that". After a few days he calls Vidura again and asks him to preach. And after the preaching is over, he sings the same whining song again. He seems to be our ancestor and his genes seem to have flowed very efficiently over thousands of years! Although we celebrate Krishna Ashtami, Rama Navami, Hanuman Jayanti for some days every year, the rest of the year seems to be Duryodhana Jayanti for us! LOL. The essence of celebrating festivals is to imbibe positivity of those great characters like Krishna, Rama and Hanuman. Wearing new dress and eating good food is all secondary. Primary thing is to get rid of the negative whining tendency and weakness which are the qualities of the blind Dhritarashtra. Among these positive-negative characters we have to decide which ones we want to become; and act accordingly. Instead of turning a blind eye towards in-scope things and stagnating ourselves, let us turn a blind eye towards out-of-scope things and progress.

30. Self-Realization V/S Self-Cheating

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Before we go into the reversibility of the NCDs, I wanted to share and explain a medical fact in terms of Yoga and philosophy. We looked at Self-cheating with philosophical perspective in Hide and Seek. Now let us look at it with medical and health perspective. When modern medicine cannot find the root cause of a disease, it simply calls the disease as ‘Idiopathic’ (their way of saying ‘I do not know the cause’). And most of the NCDs are idiopathic (if not all)! Somewhere or the other you will see a sentence in modern medical textbooks ‘However, details about the cause of the disease remain unknown’. Then without understanding it fully, what are they treating? They are treating the symptoms of the disease, and not the disease itself. No doubt, modern medicine has contributed a lot by providing immediate relief for all sorts of diseases, but they have certainly not found a holistic solution in many cases.

We have a military system in our body – White Blood Cells (WBC). They are very small in number compared to Red Blood cells, same as how the military strength of a country would just be a very small percentage of its total population. Different types of WBCs constitute the Immune system of our body. For this military system to function properly, the first and foremost requirement is that the WBCs should be able to clearly discriminate between Self and non-Self cells. Our body has thousands of types of cells of its own, and WBCs should have acquaintance with all of them. In a healthy body this is what happens, same as how military functions in a healthy country. Hence, when a foreign bacteria enters the system, the WBC immediately identify it to be foreign, investigates it, and if necessary kills it. This may seem like a simple thing, but we have to actually wonder about the intelligence of the WBCs in discriminating self and non-self cells. But as is the case with most things, until it functions properly, we do not bother about it!

But it has already begun to fail. WBCs are already going crazy. Just as how in a politically unrest country military takes over and tortures its own people, our system has gone into a social crisis. Our own military, our own WBCs have lost discrimination. They have begun attacking our own cells. They kill our own Insulin cells (partial cause of Diabetes), they kill our own bone cells (Rheumatoid Arthritis), they kill our own colon lining (Colitis), they unnecessarily wage war against harmless foreign cells (Allergies, partial cause of Asthma). Why? What has gone wrong? Why our own cells are killing our own cells? Why this Self-cheating? (Modern medicine calls this Self-cheating as Autoimmunity)

It is worth explaining a little more about diabetes. As seen above, deactivation of insulin is one reason of diabetes. There is yet another interesting reason. Sometimes, even if there is sufficient quantity of insulin in the body, glucose distribution may not be efficient. Insulin in our body is just like the vehicle for the VIPs. It transports Glucose to all the cells of the body. All the cells of the body, from brain to toe, finally require glucose for energy production. It is their common fuel. And Insulin is their transporter. All the cells of the body are well protected with cell walls – not everyone can enter it freely. The gates will open only for designated VIPs, like Insulin. The security system of the body cells recognizes the vehicle Insulin, not the passenger glucose. The security guard recognizes manager’s car, not the manager. In a healthy body this system works well without problems. But in a diabetic body, the security does not open the gate even for Insulin! Security does not identify the manger’s car. Confusion! Body cell is actually depleted of Glucose, Insulin has come with glucose, but the security says ‘I don’t know who you are’. The cell wall is not opening the gates to allow Insulin inside. How can confusion reach such micro levels? Cheating at such infinitesimal level in the whole body! Corruption at such depths! Who is cheating who? WBC, Insulin, Body cells – don’t they belong to the same Self?

And doesn’t this ‘self-cheating’ sound familiar? Isn’t this how we are living on the outside? In the name of being diplomatic, in the name of being smart, in the name of being modern, are we not cheating and lying to ourselves so casually? (Hide and Seek explains this in detail) While we lie to others, while we engage in dummy arguments with others, are we not suppressing our own inner voice of truth? Are we not ourselves splitting ourselves into two and creating a battle? “यथा राजा तथा प्रजा” – Subjects follow their King. We are corrupted to the core, and hence our obedient citizens (cells of the body) too. We cheat ourselves so generously, and hence our subjects cheat among themselves. Who is to be blamed?

So, is this the only reason for diabetes and autoimmunity? Well, may not be. Lifestyle and wrong regulation of day-to-day activities also play a major role. So, increased sympathetic arousal (stress – as explained in the previous post), wrong life style, wrong habits and finally Self-cheating have all come together to establish an evil empire. All villains have joined hands so efficiently in the 21^st century and grown strong roots of corruption. But who is the Godfather of all these villains? Us! And finally who are these villains harming? Us! India is racing ahead to become the Diabetic capital of the world! What an achievement!

Then comes the excuse of hereditary. Well, just one question. How many generations back can we trace this to? 2,3,4? Somewhere someone should have given a beginning, isn’t it? Somebody in our ancestry did some or all the mistakes as above and became a prey of some disease. And along with their wealth, their diseases also flowed to us. If they had the power to begin, why don’t we have the power to stop?

Secondly, every person’s body will have some weak point or the other. Some or the other organ will be comparatively weaker than the others. That is ‘hereditary’. But that itself is not enough to make that organ break down. Suppose you have 5 fans in your house. You may have one defective fan (of some local brand) among 4 good branded fans. If you overuse all the 5 fans, for 6 months, the defective fan will fail first. So, can the local brand alone be blamed fully? Who over-used it? If it was used moderately, it would have come for 3 years perhaps. Same is the case with hereditary disorders. The vulnerability is already there. But how fast it will manifest into a problem will entirely depend upon us. Probably we can even nullify the hidden vulnerability by leading a life free of all the above evils. Diabetes/Hypertension were seen only in old age in earlier generations. But today they manifest by 40 itself. So, if it can be accelerated, why not look at the possibility of decelerating it and nullifying it? So clearly, ‘It is hereditary, I can’t do anything’, is an excuse of the weak, lazy and escapist.

Ok, what we have to do? Accept the mistakes. Stop blaming others and the world, stop giving silly excuses for our problems. Lead a moderated life. Do not cheat ourselves. Be straightforward to ourselves. Be content with whatever money we get. Be simple outside and strong inside rather than being decorative outside and empty inside. Don’t go on a mad rush after wealth. Don’t lose our health for the sake of wealth, only to spend the same wealth on repairing health one day! Etc etc. Well, there will be a plenty of such morals and values. We may find them in the dusty books of forgotten libraries! Changing the attitude, is without doubt, the most necessary and efficient thing to fight against these modern diseases. It is part of the Yoga Therapy as well. Other aspects of the therapy, which is mostly common sense, we shall see briefly in the next post.

So, whether Self-Realization is achievable or not, we have successfully achieved Self-Cheating and percolated it into every cell, every corner of our body. So, with logic then, Self-Realization must also be as easy as getting diabetes! ;)

Note - This and the previous posts give only the basics of Pathogenesis of diseases as per Yoga therapy. How stress can be correlated to each disease individually can be found in detail in books published by SVYASA (Yoga for Back Pain, Yoga for Asthma etc).

29. Rampage of Rajas

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This post, may not directly be related to Self-Enquiry or spirituality. But I thought of writing what I have learnt from my Yoga college (SVYASA) about Psycho-Somatic Diseases. I was amazed with the simplicity of fact, and how much we have complicated the simple truths in the name of modernization and logic. In the last post we saw the necessity of moving towards Sattva from a spiritual perspective. This post and the next one will show how essential it is to cross Rajas and move to Sattva, even for the sake of enjoying good health.

The modern era is that of internet, technology and cell phones. But it is also the era of nuclear weapons and NCDs – Non-Communicable Diseases. In the previous centuries, it was the epidemics that were on rampage (plague, cholera etc), whereas now contagious diseases cause very few deaths around the globe (e.g. H1N1). In the current century, a new crisis has risen, that of NCDs. Everyday, slowly but definitely, the whole world is moving towards increased incidences of Hypertension, Diabetes, Asthma, Ulcer, Depression, Anxiety, Arthritis, Back-pain, Obesity and a host of other diseases. In the earlier centuries, these common ailments were mostly prevalent only in the old age, perhaps after 60 or 70 years. But today, these have become a common feature in the middle aged. If a person is over 40 years and if he is free of all the NCDs (most common ones are Hypertension and Diabetes), then people have started treating him like a hero of the society! “Do you know? That uncle is 45 but he does not have high B.P. or Diabetes” – what a compliment! And we, the proud city-dwellers, laugh at an innocent villager who looks at an A.C. bus in amazement. In fact, that villager has the right to laugh at us for looking at ‘No-Diabetes’ with awe! Which one is better? Not being aware of A.C. buses, or not being aware of a disease called Diabetes or Hypertension?

All the activities of the body are being controlled by the brain. Brain is the exchange center for all the to-fro signals. These signals travel throughout the body through the nervous system. The signals are very mild electrical signals with intensity in the order of micro-volts. The basic details about the nervous system is shown in the figure below.

So, in case of Voluntary systems, both work and rest are in our control. We regulate the work-rest cycle as we require. We carry a load for sometime, hands and legs pain, so we keep it down to relax for a while. After some rest we resume the activity again.

But in case of Involuntary systems, the work-rest cycle is mostly controlled by external stimulus. Eating the food is in our control, no doubt, but once we have swallowed, digestion is beyond our control. Acid and bile secretion happen on their own as soon as we eat food. And they automatically stop when digestion process is complete.

On-Off is shown only for the sake of simplicity. It does not mean that heart switches off literally! It only indicates that 'On' is an excited state and 'Off' is a relaxed state. Also, in case of digestive and excretory system, sympathetic-parasympathetic do the opposite. When Sympathetic system is active, digestive system is less active and when Parasympathetic system is active, digestive system is excited. Details are shown in the table below:

Organ/Activity	Sympathetic	Parasympathetic
Heart beat rate	High	Low
Blood Pressure	High	Low
Breathing Rate	High	Low
Muscle stiffness	High	Low
Heat Generation - Sweating	High	Low
Digestion	Less Active	Normally Active
Excretion	Less Active	Normally Active
Eyes	More Active	Normally Active

This is only a very basic list showing some simple aspects. Medical science will talk about plenty of these things in terms of hormone secretion, chemical release etc.

How external situation controls the Involuntary N.S. can be understood with a simple example. If a snake enters the room in which you are in now, you jump up in fright and sympathetic system switches on in your body. Without your explicit permission, heart rate increases, B.P. rises etc as indicated in the table above. This has been designed as an emergency system for the sake of the survival of the body. When situation is against us, automatically the sympathetic system takes over and does the necessary changes in the body. For both flight and fight, body requires more energy, briskness than usual. And hence body adapts with all the changes listed. Since all the energy is directed towards external muscles, digestion process becomes sluggish. Once the snake moves out or is caught and taken, mind calms down and Parasympathetic system becomes active. And automatically, all the changes that took place earlier get reversed and come back to normalcy. In the example of the snake, body undergoes a big stimulus and intense excitement in the sympathetic system. And after the snake is caught, there is an equally big sigh of relief. But in day-to-day life there are hundreds of smaller stimuli and relaxations which we usually do not notice. For e.g. when a young boy speaks about a cricket match he is a little more excited than usual. And after the discussion is over, his system relaxes for a while. This way, a living entity is constantly under work-rest cycles, cycles varying in degree and intensity.

Till now there is no problem. This is how a living being is supposed to be. But problems appear when the spring is pressed more and more but not allowed to relax equally. System begins to show errors when the balance between the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems are disturbed. But then, why does this imbalance occur?

The snake example is too simple for us to see the complications involved. Suppose while working in office, you did a big blunder, unintentionally. Manager comes running to your place and yells at you so loud that the entire floor stops working and looks at you. Now you may be either angry or afraid. But in either case the sympathetic system has switched on. You say ‘Sorry’ and after shouting for 3-4 minutes the manager returns to his place. And now begins the problem. Instead of switching off the sympathetic system and relaxing, you mind goes on replaying the same scene again and again. In the next half an hour the 3 minute scene would have rewound and replayed 10 times. Every time you modify the scene a little and think about it repeatedly. “I should have replied like this, I should have pointed out this” etc. Then you go to your close friends and put forth all the arguments justifying your mistake – another hour gone. You again discuss it throughout while having lunch with colleagues. When you return home you describe the entire history of today’s event to husband/wife/mother/father at least 3 times. And probably that day in your dream, you will become a super-hero character boss-buster and punish all the managers with rage. Even the next day when you see that manager your anger is on the verge of bursting. Well, days pass and slowly you begin to forget (not fully). After a few days when you remember this incident, you do not get as angry as you did on the first day.

So, a 3 minute incident kept the sympathetic switch on for several hours in effect. And each time you replayed the incident in the mind, the same sympathetic arousal took place in the body, which is actually totally needless. Unnecessarily the B.P. raised, heart rate raised, breathing got impaired, digestion process got inhibited etc. You may say, well that is fine, only few hours, so no harm done. But wait! With our current lifestyle, our days are filled with such incidents! If not so bad as to make the manager yell everyday, some excitement, some trouble or the other keep coming every day. Office related, money related, family related, property related etc.

And yes, we will not see any problems in the body in few days or few months. A young body tries to adapt. So, we do not consider these little stressful incidents that dangerous. But our youth, especially between 25-35 is filled with such incidents. Small or big, stressful incidents bombard the nervous system so much in these 10 years, that along with accumulating money, we would have accumulated some unnecessary voltage in our nervous system. The body tries and tries hard to bring back normalcy during the limited resting hours, but alas, sleep hours alone are insufficient to bring about sufficient rest to the system. Dreams are also exciting the sympathetic system by showing agitating scenes. We charge the battery only 70-80% but try to extract 100% or even more of charge from it. This repeats for years, and finally one day the system fails, at some part of the body.

In the electrical circuit of your house, suppose there is a leakage and no one notices. A constant low voltage is continuously flowing through all the electrical apparatuses of your house. It is so low, that even when you notice probably you ignore it. But after several months, probably a fan or a bulb burns. Although very faint, when left alone for a long time, it could burn some part of the circuit. Similarly, mind thinks and thinks, and sends continuous signals through the nervous system in microvolts. The intensity of the thoughts have rapidly increased in 21^st century and hence the voltage of the signals as well. All have forgotten how to switch off this voltage, and have left it freely flowing, even during dream-sleep. Over the years it accumulates, finally to break down some organ in our system.

So, we are irreversibly rich by 40, and also irreversibly sick by 40. In today’s generation, it is our own mad rush after money, it is the demands of our own beloved family, it is our own desires for accumulating property that gives us these little little stressful incidents constantly to finally give us some NCD. Well, you may say little worries are part of the family life. Yes, true, but that ‘little worries’ have probably crossed a certain limit. Consequences and statistics are in front of us. Our earlier generations also had worries, no doubt, but perhaps they didn’t live as lavishly as we are living today. They did not make fuss about taste of the food, size of the bed or the color of the paint of the house. They certainly did not worry themselves as much as we are worrying today. Today we are lavish and confident on the outside but growing empty and insecure inside.

And by the way, ‘irreversibly sick by 40’ – is only according to modern medicine. As per Yoga therapy NCDs are reversible, fully or partially. We shall look at it briefly in the next post.