Zen: The Art of Nothing

This weekend, as I read Maya Tiwari’s story of how she fought and ultimately won over terminal cancer, I came upon an interesting statement. She said that through her ten surgeries, she had full faith in the doctors, and trusted that they would cure her. During her tenth surgery, she realised that unless she went away from the medical establishments, she would certainly die. She realised that her fate was in her hands.

It is a mistake most of us often make. A lot of the people I know, believe that doctors can always be counted on, to solve one’s health problem. I wish that were true. Allopathy doctors are here to numb our symptoms – but the cause still remains.

Nevertheless, the point I’m trying to make here is, that your health is your responsibility. You are not a victim of a disease. You only fall sick when you subconsciously/ consciously want to, and the moment you realise it, you will either stop falling sick, or your sickness will stop affecting you as much it now does.

Sickness is not a problem, it is just an indication that something is wrong, either in your mind, or in your lifestyle. Often, an illness is your body’s way of begging you to pay attention to certain aspects. What do you do? You pop a pill and forget about it. And what does your body do? It finds another disease.

It is time we owned up to our health problems and took the initiative to cure ourselves. In most occasions, a simple determination to get alright, works. In other cases, we can let our bodies guide us towards the right kind of foods. I have seen many worry about their health, resist their disease too, but never take any action towards eliminating it. That is what I call a pseudo-concern. Your worry is your way of convincing yourself that you’re trying to become ok. A balanced approach would be to accept the disease or the pain, and take proactive steps to improve the condition.

I usually discourage the use of antibiotics because they weaken the body by doing its fighting for it. Painkillers work by simply numbing the pain signals to the brain. After all, no one can cure you but yourself, and if you have to take help, you might as well turn to a wholistic system of healing which will strengthen your body in the long and short run.

When I talk about miraculous healing, many refuse to take it as proof that the system works. They brush it off as a result of faith. How convenient. Surprisingly, I never find people saying that an operation cured a person because of faith. I say surprising, because thats exactly what it is. Why is it that some operations fail, while the same operation done on another person is a complete success? Why is it that on one occasion, some pill works perfectly for you, but on another day, it just doesn’t seem to work?

A study was conducted, where a group was divided into two; one group was given a paracetamol (crocin) and the other was given a placebo ( a fake pill), but told that it was a paracetamol. For every five that were given a paracetamol, 2 were cured. For every 5 given the placebo, 2 were cured as well. It is, afterall, all in the mind.

For all those who refute alternative therapy as ‘just faith’, I have only one question to ask. If faith can cure people without medicines, then why shouldn’t we have faith? There are thousands of instances where doctors gave a person 2-6 months to live, the patient trashed the medical system and decided to live life on his/ her terms, and then went on to live many, many more years. Google Maya Tiwari, if you want a living example. There are others who had similar experiences with pranayama, laughter therapy, etc.

Science has also proven that having unshakable faith opens us up to a host of things normally not available to us. Reader’s Digest recently published an article on how those who believe in ghosts and ESP were able to access information from their subconscious minds. They did a test where people were shown a set of cards on a computer screen and asked to predict the card which the computer will choose.

What the participants did not know, was that for a fraction of a second the card which would be chosen, was flashed on the screen. The time interval was short enough for the eyes not to register it, but long enough for the subconscious mind to note. Those who believed in the supernatural got most of the cards right, and those who didn’t got most of the guesses wrong. The ‘intuition’ in this case, was just a simple connection with their subconscious minds. By having faith, you might be helping yourself evolve.

To sum it all up, I’ll put it this way. If faith can cure people of even terminal diseases, then they are utter fools, who do not believe.

A lot of misery has been inflicted upon the world in the name of religion. Of course, there are plenty of peace loving religious people out there too, who are identified in their belief systems about their favorite deity (or the lack of one, depending on the religion)

It is common among educated people to look down upon the religious, because they are blind believers. But the more I look around, the more I observe that people are really all the same, irrespective of their belief systems.

Ultimately, everyone has a belief system that they will defend tooth and nail, in order to preserve their identity. Atheists are blind believers too, most of them believe blindly in science. I say blindly, because they selectively believe in studies that appeal to their set of beliefs. Science is not only that which has been proven in a double blind scientific study. Many of these studies are rigged by benefiting parties anyway. Science is about an attitude in life – being open to the experiences in life and maintaining an awareness that not all questions have answers. A really scientific person is more likely to be an agnostic than an atheist.

Same with the ‘spiritual’ – those obsessed with spiritual growth, and being a better person everyday. They are busy chasing the ultimate goal – enlightenment, and often all those who aren’t involved in the chase are looked down upon. Spirituality is a very profitable, marketable industry today, selling products from incense to organic vegetables to big, expensive workshops. Those who are tired of chasing material pleasures now have something new, something much more covetable, to chase. These are the new age ‘spiritual’ group of people,.

Real spirituality is about the spirit. The spirit does not grow, the spirit is unchangeable. The phrase ‘spiritual growth’ is an oxymoron. There is no such thing. A spiritual person rests in the spirit and has nothing to chase. Just as one would find blind, obsessed people in all categories – religious, atheists and spiritual, one would find really ‘spiritual’ people in all categories as well. Ultimately, people are the same everywhere. Labels do not make anyone better or worse. Labels are just labels.