And not only asthma, but physical diseases can come back. A child may have fallen from a tree thirty years ago. Then he starts to meditate and to move backwards, and suddenly he feels pain on the knee. For thirty years it has never been there, but now suddenly the memory comes. The body also carries a memory, each cell carries a memory. It is a minute, very atomic computer.

You see a black spot on my nose? Once I removed it, but it came back again; the body has a memory. It has a blueprint of everything, so whatever has happened to you is doubly recorded – in the mind and in the body – and the mind triggers the whole thing. The body is a little slow, stupid, and it has to be so – but once the mind remembers, it triggers it. Then you move into a situation which you had completely forgotten for years. It is alive again as if it was just yesterday.

But in a way this was good. You have suffered, and I can see you felt very depressed, but if you can complete the whole process…

That’s what I don’t know – how to work with it right now.

Just be a watcher. Don’t do anything, because whatsoever you do will repress – because the whole effort of the mind is to suppress anything that is painful.

That’s what you have done in the past, and the mind will do the same again. Then the doors of the memory will close again, and the whole thing is lost.

Suffer it, and allow it to be there. It can’t kill you, so don’t be worried. It can be painful – it will be – but it cannot kill you. Just watch as if it is happening to somebody else. Next time an attack comes, be far away, just watching from a distance. Just watch the misery, the suffering, the pain, the whole body in spasm. Watch unconcerned, indifferent, with nothing to do, and then just see….

Within two to three days everything will have passed, and then you will come out of it very fresh, as fresh as you have never been. It will go, but complete the process – don’t try to escape from it. This experience can become a very enriching one.

Once it happened that one of my friends, a very old man of seventy-eight, fell from the staircase and broke many of his bones. The doctors told him to remain on the bed for six months, because he was very old and the body would take a long time to regain its strength.

He was an active man, very very active. When I went to see him he started crying – and he is not a man who ordinarily cries; I had never seen him cry before. He said, “It would have been better if I had died. Death is not so bad, but six months just lying on the bed is impossible. I will commit suicide. Six months seems almost endless and the pain is too much, I will not be able to survive it.” I told him to do one thing: to close his eyes and move to where the pain was, to pinpoint it.