An illness is like a mis-spelt word of an unknown script

Health is not only about keeping diseases at bay or staying fit by some measure or another. It is, above all, an attitude towards life. We may wish to be free of all struggles and all pains but do we understand why the law of struggle and pain came into existence in the first place? What is this law that turns our plans topsy turvy, upsets our dreams, and challenges us to dare failure and sport with defeat? Why do we fear this so much? If instead of all this fear we could look straight into its eyes, into the eyes of disease and death and fall and failure ,if we could see behind the mask, the smile of Love leading us through a narrow and stifling gate towards some greater heights of Glory and Truth, then we would stop being afraid and simply laugh at our pain and smile at the struggle. This is an attempt to look at this aspect of life differently.

The Language of Life Dr. Alok Pandey

An illness is like a mis-spelt word of an unknown script. The modern physician is like someone trying to correct the word by restructuring the letter without knowing the script or the meaning. He feels his way through some deformed letters and tries to correct it as children do in Kindergarten. But even after the deformity is set right, the erroneous word remains because one knows nothing about the meaning. The meaning of life must be known to understand the true error and set it right. For the mis-spelt word of illness is not just a structural issue but also a cognitive one. The average physician sees the structural defect that medical science has come to decipher by studying thousands of hieroglyphs. But a rare physician tries to go beyond the structure and see where the letters have changed positions lending thereby to a wrong sense to the very meaning of life.

The meaning of life is not merely in the structure of the letters and the rules of grammar of the language of life. The genetic code is simply the external script. The processes are simply the rules of its grammar, the punctuation, comma, exclamation, and the full-stop. But the one who holds the meaning and writes the poetry of life is hidden behind in the depths. He uses matter for page , will as pen, faith as the invisible ink. The contents of his life, his thoughts, feelings, desires, impulses, hopes, fears, expectations and aspirations constitute the various characters of his drama and what he speaks and does through them is the sense and substance of his complex play.
When the writer is fully conscious, when he inscribes some deep truth and has a sense of beauty and harmony in his calligraphy, when he is deliberate in his writing and knows the rules of the game of life, then he remains free of afflictions. But if he is casual, full of error and jumble, confused within and ignorant outside, then his language of life shares this defect and reveals this imperfection. Even if we correct a letter or a word here and there, he continues to mis-spell and his sentences become a jumble. There are two ways to avoid these errors which translate as an illness.

• One is not to write much and to keep it all simple, perhaps very simple. Those who have a rudimentarily developed consciousness, whose life is full of a natural ease and a spontaneous simplicity with few wants and needs, avoid the errors of life that come by sheer excesses. They have few characters in their play, some small hopes and very few anxieties and fear.
• The second way is to go to the other pole of a complex and developed consciousness with many characters in the play and a rather complicated script. For these, the only way is to discover the harmony of a higher divine Perfection. For while a short and simple script can be managed by a novice, a large and complex script needs a Master Artist.

This Master Artist is within us as the Lord of Life. Either we must live with the sense of a carefree albeit unconscious surrender to His delegate Nature, or else, do consciously and in detail what the simple creatures of Nature do spontaneously and unconsciously through her. That is to say, place our entire being consciously and willfully in the Hands of the Divine Master of Life through a detailed and integral yoga so that He takes up our pen and ink and erasing our errors rewrites the script and the drama of our life afresh.
This is the secret art we are here to learn. Till we learn that, till we hang between the animal simplicity and the divine spontaneity, we shall only exchange one error for another, correct the deformed letter but leave the word mis-spelt and lose thereby the meaning of life and our manifold existence because we knew only the form of letters but not the language, the structural aspects of the hieroglyph but not its meaning and sense.

(Dr. Alok Pandey has been working in the field of psychiatry with a spiritual approach for more than 15 years. He has developed a working concept of integral health and integral psychology which he is using in his life and practice. He is one of the founders of SAIIIHR). http://nextfuture.sriaurobindosociety.org.in/nov07/nfmay06_menu.htm