A healthy person is bound to fall ill sometimes. But you have different conceptions; you think a healthy person should never be ill -- that is absolutely foolish. It is not possible. Only a dead person is never ill. A healthy person has to be ill sometimes. Through illness he attains to health again, and then the health is fresh. Passing through illness, passing through the opposite, it again becomes new. Have you ever watched? After a long fever, when you are getting well you have a freshness, a virginity; the whole body seems to be rejuvenated.
If you remain healthy for seventy years continuously, your health will be like an illness, a death, because it was never rejuvenated, never made fresh. The opposite always gives freshness. It will be stale if you are never ill; your health will become like a burden. Sometimes falling ill is beautiful. I am not saying to remain in bed forever; that too would be bad. Always ill is bad. Anything that becomes a permanent thing is bad. Anything that moves and flows into the other is good, it is alive.
Because of such statements, Aristotle called Heraclitus a little defective -- defective in character, defective in his physiology, somehow biologically defective. ... Because who will say that illness is good? Aristotle is logical. He says health is good, illness is bad; one has to avoid illness, and if you can avoid it completely, that will be the best thing. That's what science is doing all over the world -- trying to remove illness completely. It follows Aristotle. But I say to you, the more science tries to avoid illness, the more new diseases arise.
There are many new diseases which were never there in the world before. Because you close one door to illness, another has to be opened immediately by nature -- because without illness no health is possible; you are doing a foolish thing. You close one door; now no more malaria, no more plague -- two doors have to be opened somewhere else. And if you are mad about closing doors -- and science is closing all the doors -- then more dangerous diseases will arise, because if you close a million doors of illnesses, then nature has to open a very, very great door so that it balances the millions of doors. Then cancer comes in. You cure diseases and you create incurable diseases. Cancer is a new phenomenon; it was never before in the world -- and it is incurable. Why is it incurable? -- because nature is defending its law. You go on curing every disease so something incurable has to be created, otherwise man will be dead. Without illness nobody will be healthy. And this is going to happen. It seems some day cancer will be cured, then nature will immediately create something more incurable.
And remember: in this fight science cannot win and should not win. Nature should always be the winner. Nature is more wise than all your scientists put together.
Look: go to a primitive community where no medicine exists, where no doctors are, no science to cure them. They are less ill and more healthy. Illness is common but not incurable. And there are a few primitive communities still alive which don't believe in medicine at all. They don't really do anything, or whatsoever they do is just to console the patient, in fact. Mantras, magical tricks -- they are not medicines: they are just to help the patient to pass time -- because nature cures itself. It is said that if you take a medicine for a common cold, it will be cured in seven days; if you don't take, then in a week.
Nature cures itself. In fact, nature cures. One has to give time; patience is needed. The English word for an ill person, patient, is beautiful. It means patience is needed; one has to wait. In fact, the function of the doctor is to help the patient to be patient. By giving medicine he is consoled. He thinks: "Now something is being done and soon I will be cured." He is helped in waiting. The doctor cannot do anything else. That's why so many "pathies" work -- homeopathy, allopathy, ayurveda -- thousands of pathies work; even naturopathy works. Naturopathy means not doing anything, or doing something which is actually nothing. That's why even Satya Sai Baba succeeds. Consolation is needed -- the work is done by nature itself.
Heraclitus is not defective, Aristotle is defective. Something is lacking in Aristotle's physiology and biology. But the whole Western mind has followed Aristotle. And if you go to the very logical end, which is to make the human body completely healthy, without any disease, the logical end will be to have plastic parts. This heart, natural heart, is bound to be ill sometimes, tired, wearied, needs rest. A plastic heart needs no rest; it is never tired. And if something goes wrong you can simply change the part. You can go to the garage and simply change the part, you can carry spare parts with you. Sooner or later, the whole body -- if Aristotle succeeds to the very end, and Heraclitus is not
listened to and not taken back into the human consciousness -- if. Aristotle goes on and on, the logical end will be a plastic body with spare parts; not blood flowing in the veins, but some chemical which can be immediately pumped out and refilled.
But what type of man will be there? Of course no illness, but no health either. Imagine that type of man yourself: that you have all things plastic -- plastic kidneys and plastic hearts and plastic everything, plastic skin, and inside you plastic -- will you be healthy? Will you ever be able to feel a wellbeing? No, you will not be ill, that's right. The mosquitoes will not affect you -- you can meditate without being disturbed, they cannot bite. But you will be enclosed in a shell and cut off from nature completely. No need to breathe, because the whole thing can be run by a battery. Just imagine yourself completely encapsulated in a mechanical phenomenon -- will you ever be healthy? You will never be ill, that's right, but you will never be healthy. And whenever you fall in love you will not be able to put your hand on your heart, because there is nothing but plastic. OSHO The Hidden Harmony, Chapter-7
Man is not one body, man has many bodies -- layers of bodies. The body we know is only the outermost; inside it there is another, and inside that, another. Rishis have divided these layers into five.
The first is known as the food body, the physical body. Ordinarily, we remain attached to this body. We are in a deep illusion and are identified with the physical one. This attachment to the physical body will not allow you to move inside. But why this attachment? -- because we don't know that there is another; we have never become aware that inside this body there is another. This body is so solid, so non-transparent, you cannot have any glimpse within. This solidity of the body means that we have been using foods which make it solid. This body can be made transparent also -- just like a glass body in which you can have a glimpse inside.
The change of food is bound to change the qualities of your physical body. Food is not just energy, it is also a qualitative thing. Food is not just a fuel, it contributes more than fuel -- it gives you either transparency, or non-transparency. The insight into this phenomenon can mutate, and you can have altogether a different type of body. And it is not so difficult to change this body, because the body is a flux, every moment changing itself; it is a process, it is not a static thing. The moment you came here, you had another body; now the body has changed. It is changing constantly, every moment; it is riverlike, moving and changing -- it is not a static thing.
If you change direction, the body takes a jump; only the direction has to be changed. One should become aware, that whatsoever one is eating must be such that it doesn't make one's body heavy. This heaviness is not concerned with weight: sometimes you feel that you are weightless, as if you can fly. So the food that can give you the feeling of weightlessness is the right food. The food that gives you the feeling of being burdened is not the right food. All non-vegetarian foods make you more rooted in the earth; you cannot fly. Vegetarian foods give you wings; you have an inner feeling that you can just levitate, you can just go out of gravitation.
Food is right if it is non-gravitational. If you can feel non-physical in it, it is good. Really, the body is felt only when it is heavy; when you have the feeling of heaviness inside, only then you feel the body. When the body is not heavy with wrong foods, you are bodiless. That's why when the body is diseased, when the body is ill, you feel it; when it is healthy, you don't feel it. You feel your head only when there is a headache; when there is no headache, there is no head.
So to define health positively, there is only one way: A person who is not feeling his body, is healthy. The more you feel your body, the more ill you are, because when the body is really healthy, there is no need to feel it. Only pain is felt. And if you even feel pleasure, it must be a sort of pain. Pleasure is never felt, because only a disturbance is felt. Silence is never felt really, only noise is felt. And if you begin to feel silence....
Real, authentic silence is not felt. Really, when you are not feeling any noise, it is silence. When you are not feeling your body, it means you are not feeling any disturbances; you are healthy. So the feeling of bodilessness is healthy. Any food that gives you a feeling of bodilessness is good, is right food. So be discriminative; be consciously discriminative. Don't eat anything which makes you more embodied, which makes you more of a body. Go on eliminating all that gives you a bodiness, and then you will begin to transform your body towards a transparency.
This may look paradoxical, but this is true. When you are really healthy, you are desireless -- illness and unhealthiness create desires. This is one of the basic distinctions between Eastern and Western thinking. They say, in the West, that to be filled with desire means you are healthy. But their understanding is very superficial, because desire is a disturbance. Something is still incomplete, that's why the desire. Something is incomplete, so there is the urge to fulfill it. But when you are really healthy you are so fulfilled, you are so complete -- the circle is so complete -- that there is no desire.
Desire means you are incomplete. Somewhere, something is still lacking; somewhere, something is absent; somewhere, you are feeling a vacuum.
This is what illness means: a vacuum. Health means: so much fulfilled, so much filled there is no more space. When there is no inner space, there is no desire; so a really healthy person is desireless, and a really healthy person is bodiless. These both are associated: To be a body is to be in desire; to be in desire is to be heavy with the body.
Make the body as if it is not. The more absent, the better; the more present, the more you are falling downwards. You can just become a stone, and many are that -- just stones. They only feel awake when the body demands something; otherwise, they are asleep. When the body demands, they feel awake; then the demand is fulfilled -- they again fall deep into sleep.
One should create a body which has needs but not demands. Needs are natural; demands become crazy and obsessions. Demands mean you are addicted; the body is the master. All the austerities were not meant as suicidal methods, they were not masochist -- they were really an inner transformation, they were really a change of power. OSHO That Art thou, Chapter-6
A healthy person is bound to fall ill sometimes. But you have different conceptions; you think a healthy person should never be ill -- that is absolutely foolish. It is not possible. Only a dead person is never ill. A healthy person has to be ill sometimes. Through illness he attains to health again, and then the health is fresh. Passing through illness, passing through the opposite, it again becomes new. Have you ever watched? After a long fever, when you are getting well you have a freshness, a virginity; the whole body seems to be rejuvenated.
And remember: in this fight science cannot win and should not win. Nature should always be the winner. Nature is more wise than all your scientists put together.
Man is not one body, man has many bodies -- layers of bodies. The body we know is only the outermost; inside it there is another, and inside that, another. Rishis have divided these layers into five.
