My beloved ones,
Man is a disease. Diseases come to man, but man himself is also a disease. That is his problem, and that is also his uniqueness; that is his good fortune, and that is also his misfortune. No other animal on earth is such a problem, such an anxiety, such a tension, such a disease, such an illness as man is.
But this very condition has given man all his growth, all his evolution, because disease means that one cannot be happy with where one is; one cannot accept what one is. This very disease has become man’s dynamism, his restlessness – but at the same time it is also his misfortune because he is agitated, unhappy, and in suffering.
No other animal except man is capable of becoming mad. Unless man drives an animal insane, it does not go mad on its own, does not become neurotic. Animals in the jungle are not mad, but they become crazy in a circus. In the jungle, the life of an animal is not warped; it becomes perverted in a zoo. No animal commits suicide; only man can commit suicide.
Two methods have been tried in order to understand and cure the disease called man. One is medicine, the other is meditation. Both of them are treatments for the same disease. It will be good to understand here that medicine takes a micro view of man – considers each disease in man separately, as a separate happening – and meditation considers man as a whole to be a disease. Meditation considers that the personality of man is the disease; medicine considers that diseases come to man – that they are something foreign, alien to man. But slowly this difference has diminished and medical science has also started saying: “Don’t treat the disease, treat the patient.”
This is a very important statement, because this means that disease is nothing but an indication of the way in which a patient is living his life. Every man does not fall sick in the same way. Diseases also have their own individuality, their own personalities. It is not that if I suffer from TB and you also suffer from TB, we will both be the same kind of patients. Even our TB’s will present themselves in two different ways – because we are two different individuals. It can also happen that the treatment that cures my TB does not bring any relief to your TB. So deep down the patient is at the roots, not the disease.
Medicine catches the diseases in man superficially. Meditation gets hold of man from deep within. In other words, it can be said that medicine tries to bring health to a person from the outside, and meditation tries to make the person healthy from deep within. Neither can the science of meditation be complete without medicine, nor can the science of medicine be complete without meditation, since man is both body and soul.