Healing the Body Through Spiritual Force or Through Faith

Healing the Body Through Spiritual Force or Through Faith
Posted on October 19, 2024
We tend to believe that an individual who has a strong mental development has advantages in all fields of life. It is true that the mind has provided some strong benefits, particularly in navigating the external world, society, career, etc. Yet it has its own drawbacks as well. The mind is subject to variability that weakens its ability to impact the body in a positive direction. The mind is constantly jumping from one thing to another, and it entertains all manner of thoughts, including those that support the process of healing the body, but also those that hinder that process. The mind is subject to doubt, to questioning, to skepticism, all of which weaken the intense focus necessary to have a lasting impact on the body’s health.

The Mother points out that a simple person who has faith is able to open up to healing forces and through that receptivity and constancy, the force can be more effective in its action on the body. For a highly developed mental individual to accomplish this, he must be able to make a transition to a higher stage of the evolutionary cycle, going beyond the mental to the spiritual realm of evolution.

A disciple asks: “Mother, by a mental effort — for instance, the resolution not to take medicines when one is ill — can one succeed in making the body understand?”

The Mother notes: “That is not enough. A mental resolution is not enough, no. There are subtle reactions in your body which do not obey the mental resolution, it is not enough. Something else is needed. … Other regions must be contacted. A power higher than the mind’s is needed….”

“No, it is not in the mental field that the victories are won. It is impossible. It is open to all influences, all contradictory currents. All the mental constructions one makes carry their own contradiction with them. One can try to overrule it or make it as harmless as possible, but it exists, it is there, and at the slightest weakness or lack of vigilance or inadvertance, it enters, and destroys all the work. Mentally, one arrives at very few results, and they are always mixed. Something else is needed. One must pass from the mind into the domain of faith or of a higher consciousness, to be able to act with safety.”

“It is quite obvious that one of the most powerful means for acting on the body is faith. People who have a simple heart, not a very complicated mind — simple people, you see — who don’t have a very great, very complicated mental development but have a very deep faith, have a great power of action over their bodies, very great. That is why one is quite surprised at times: ‘Here’s a man with a great realisation, an exceptional person, and he is a slave of all the smallest physical things, while this man, well, he is so simple and looks so uncouth, but he has a great faith and goes through difficulties and obstacles like a conqueror!’ “

“I don’t say that a highly cultured man can’t have faith, but it is more difficult, for there is always this mental elements which contradicts, discusses, tries to understand, which is difficult to convince, which wants proofs. His faith, is less pure. It is necessary, then, to pass on to a higher degree in the evolutionary spiral, pass from the mental to the spiritual; then, naturally, faith takes on a quality of a very high order. But I mean that in daily life, ordinary life, a very simple man who has a very ardent faith can have a mastery over his body — without it being truly a ‘mastery’; it is simply a spontaneous movement — a control over his body far greater than somebody who has reached a much higher development.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Powers Within, Chapter VI Faith, pp. 55-56