Patterns of illness
Recurrent Illnesses*
Mother, there are people who suffer from certain illnesses year after year,
we know. Now, if we observe this illness, we see that it comes at a particular
time of the year and this goes on the next year also, and it is like that.
But the time is fixed. Then what is the reason, and how can one get rid
of this?
What is...?
The reason...
There could be many reasons. It depends on the person you ask. If you ask an astrologer he will tell you, "It is the stars, when the stars come into the same position, the same conditions recur." Well, this is not so wrong. It can be like that. It can also be the individual's reaction to certain types of climate, you see, or to the sun's position; or it may be quite simply a bad habit. That's all. (Laughter)
And if one forms... If by chance it has happened to you twice consecutively, then you form… you have a good formation, you see, which remains like that (gesture) in the subconscient, without showing itself - if you don't observe it! And then, just when the time draws near, quite gently it pushes up from within and tells you, "Take care, the time is coming, the time is coming, the time is coming!" So naturally, that comes along too. Usually these things are like that.
But almost everything that happens in the physical is like that. The first time it may be quite simply a concurrence of circumstances; then, the mind intervenes and makes a construction. Now, if one accepts the construction, one is sure that it functions with clockwork precision. But even if one says, "Oh, nonsense, it is only an idea!" and does this (gesture) still the idea, instead of going away, enters inside, into the subconscient, simply the subconscious mind, and there it remains quietly. And then, when the time comes to manifest itself, from inside, like this, it makes a kind of… as though it were tickling the memory a little, nothing more than that, just that. If it rubs the memory just a little, like that, then suddenly one day you remember: "Why, last year, at this time I was ill." And crash! There it is, it has entered. It has entered the zone of the active consciousness, and a few days later the thing happens.
But when you have had either an experience or, like this, some kind of phenomenon or an illness (above all in the case of illness or even an accident), the body remembers for a very long time. If you want to be completely cured, you must cure this memory in the body, this is absolutely indispensable. And whether you know it or not, you work in order to cure the memory in the body. When the remembrance is effaced, the body is truly healed.
Unfortunately, instead of destroying the remembrance, you push it back. Most of the time you push it down into the subconscient and sometimes into the inconscient, still more deep. Well now, if it is pushed back, if it is not completely effaced, then very gently, very gently, without seeming to do so at all it comes up to the surface; and something of which you have been cured for years, if by chance it crosses your mind simply like that, just like a little dart, as fast as that, like a passing dart: "Why, at this time I had that", you may be sure that sooner or later - a few seconds, a few minutes, a few hours or days later, it will return. You can... It may come back in a much milder form, it may come back in the same form, it may come even more strongly. That depends on your inner state. If you are in a pessimistic state, it will come back more strongly. If you are in an optimistic state, it will be much weaker. But it will come back and you will have to begin the battle all over again against the memory of your body so as to destroy it - if this time you are more attentive. If you can destroy it, you are cured. But if you don't destroy it, it will return. It will take a longer or shorter time, it will be more or less total, but it will return. It can come back in a flash. If you are wide awake and, when it returns, if you have enough knowledge and indeed enough clear-sightedness to tell yourself, "Well, here is that wretched remembrance come back again to play its tricks", then you can give, can strike a violent blow and indeed destroy its reality. If you know how to do this, then it is an opportunity to get rid of the thing immediately. But it is not very easy to do this.
How to do it?
How to do it? (Mother laughs.) How to do it? It is the same thing as, the
same method as, knowing how to destroy a formation, you understand.
It is a certain strength to dissolve things, which can undo formations.
It depends on the nature of the formation. If it is like this, a formation
of an adverse kind, then you need the force of a perfectly pure constructive
light. If you have this at your disposal, all that you have to do is to
bombard the thing with it, and you can dissolve it. But it is an operation
which must be performed with inner forces; it cannot be done physically.
That is why all physical remedies, you see, are simply palliatives; they
are not cures, because they are not strong enough to touch the living centre
of the thing.
*Heading is given by the editor
The Mother. Collected Works of the Mother, Vol.6. Pondicherry; Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, 1979, pp. 366-9.
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