Mother's Chronicles (Book 2)

6

Illnesses

The 'floating kidney' was not the only malady that laid up Mirra. The list is long.

To begin with, she had her adenoids removed in her childhood. It had left a weakness. "It's an old complaint," Mother told Satprem in 1962, "dating from the removal of adenoids in my childhood; the way it was operated on left a kind of small cavity, which was nothing in itself, except that occasionally it would give me a cold. But as a result of overwork it came back in the form of an ulcer." Talk of 'overwork'! Naturally, if Mother rested a bare two hours out of twenty-four, and that too in her chaise-longue—no lying down properly in bed for her —and this for a number of years, what else can we expect? As Mother explained : "It was originally brought on by overwork when I was going to the Playground and resting only two hours

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out of twenty-four, which wasn't enough, a sort of ulcer formed between my nose and throat." But she had cured it once, when another bout of overwork brought it back again. And this ulcer "gave me artificial colds; so sour and corrosive, a terrible irritation in the throat and nose." It had got much worse when Mother was taking classes in the Playground. Then she began her own yogic treatment. "It was over in a week, and for three years there was no further sign of it. Recently — the last two or three months —I felt it trying to come back, for exactly the same reason of overwork." But as was her wont Mother made light of her ailment. "It did come back. It gave me one of those stupid colds — sneezing, coughing. It's not quite over yet. But it's nothing." She added laughingly, "It just gives me an excuse to tell people I am still not quite well!"

Although Mother made light of it, it was a right royal cold, I can assure you: hoarse voice, swollen face, watering eyes, an almost continuous sneezing and coughing, to say nothing of the accompanying fever. That is the type of cold Mother used to have, I saw for years. I noticed also that she caught colds quite frequently. Except perhaps the last year or

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two when I don't remember seeing her with any cold.

In the same letter of the 6th April 1925 to Andre, apart from her 'floating kidney' Mother also mentions her liver: "As for my liver, it started complaining in 1901, and has never stopped since then."

Her first taste of measles as well: "The first time I was down with measles in Paris, you were three or four years old." She had measles a second time, in Japan. But Japan is another story. We shall come to that later. Let us simply say for now that her body had lived through terrible tensions and serious illnesses during her four years' stay in Japan.

"When I came here [to Pondicherry from Japan in 1920] I was not worth much," wrote Mother, "and did not give myself many months to live."

Tuberculosis, rhumatism, influenza, filariasis and neuritis, a flurrying heart . . . you name it and she had it.

But —yes, there is a big BUT. We do not know of any illness of Mother's, during her ninety-five years upon this earth, through which she did not go the entire length. AND she always got well.

Through it all Mother found out that any illness,

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or any accident for that matter, is the result of a break in equilibrium. She would delve deep and find the root cause of the break, which in most cases was a falsehood. Then she would set about uprooting the underlying falsehood, and cure herself. Illness, after all, is a kind of falsehood of the body, I dare say.

Illness, like every other subject, was a field of study for Mirra —mainly through those that occurred in her own body. As always, her study was thorough. Mother once gave us a talk on illnesses, their causes and their cures. She said that "There is nothing fundamentally incurable. It all depends." She sketched out rapidly, but comprehensively, the numerous possible causes of an illness. But aren't microbes what cause illnesses? To which Mother replied that microbes are essentially a vibratory mode: "What people assume to be a microbe is quite simply the materialization of a vibration." She added: "To be able to cure an illness you have to know its cause, not its microbe. Because, it so happens (excuse me, I hope there are no doctors here!), it so happens that when there are microbes the doctors find splendid remedies to kill those microbes, but while curing some, these remedies make others

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even more ill! Nobody knows why. . . . Perhaps I know the why." Mother said modestly.

Maybe because "The doctor aims a drug at a disease; sometimes it hits, sometimes it misses," as Sri Aurobindo noted?

But microbes are always there hovering around us, everywhere, are they not? So what makes some catch them while others remain immune? "Fear," answers Mother.

"Yes, I knew someone who had such a fear that he caught cholera!" Mother shared with us a grain from her own vast store of experience. "There was cholera in the next house, and this person got into such a blue funk that he caught cholera, without any other reason; there was no other reason for him to catch it; it was solely out of fear." Mother summed up: "It's a very common thing; the majority of cases in an epidemic is that."

So fear is at the root of contagious diseases? But fear is not the only emotion that helps spread contagion. Other strong emotions can act in the same way. "I knew a person who got a wound through a kind of horror at the sight of another person's wound." Mother

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exclaimed, "He managed it!"

To return to Mother's story on epidemics. "I have seen just the opposite," She hastened to add. "I have seen here, in this country, villagers whose drinking water was no longer water, it was nothing but mud. I saw it with my own eyes. It was a yellowish mud in which cows had bathed and done all the rest, and wherein people had walked after loitering on the road. They threw their rubbish in it and everything was in there! Well, I saw those people. They went in — it was yellow mud, and over there, at the end, there was a little water: it was not water, it was yellowish, you see —they bent like this, scooped up the water and drank. Some even didn't let the water settle. Some knew what to put in, what herbs, to make the water settle and become slightly clearer if left undisturbed long enough. But others knew nothing at all, and they drank it. So then I made inquiries. There was, as it happened, an epidemic of cholera all around. I asked, 'Are there still people left alive in this village with such water?' They replied, 'We haven't a single case of cholera.' They were used to it, so they were immunized."

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Ignorance, they say, is bliss. But ignorance can also be microbe-resistant, perhaps!

Anyhow, we are sure that had but one person in the village caught this cholera microbe, the entire village would have been wiped out . . . through the entry of fear. And no doctor with all his microbe-resistant drugs could have saved anyone.

There are doctors and doctors. Some are great psychologists. They understand that "It is not the medicine that cures so much as the patient's faith in the doctor and the medicine," as Sri Aurobindo said. "Many years ago," narrated Mother, "we had here an epidemic of cholera ; it was very severe. But the Director of the hospital [the General Hospital] was a very energetic man. He decided to vaccinate everybody. While sending people off after vaccination, he would tell them, 'You have been vaccinated, nothing will happen to you; but had you not been vaccinated, you would certainly have died!' He told them this very authoritatively. In general, this type of epidemic lasts a long time and is very hard to check, but in fifteen days, I think, this doctor succeeded in eradicating it; anyway it was miraculously quickly done. But he knew

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very well that the best effect of his vaccinations was the confidence it gave to people."

Mother was perhaps sometimes sarcastic towards some doctors, but she was appreciative of others. As for instance, "A doctor friend I knew in France, some forty or fifty years ago," she told us in 1956, "would say to all his patients, 'Take the medicine while it is in vogue, for that's when it will cure you.' There you are." We all laughed and Mother joined us.

As we know that there is nothing like laughter to keep any illness, any disorder or any doctor at bay, let us listen to a story from Mother's granary.

"I knew a doctor, a neurologist, who treated stomach diseases. He maintained that all stomach diseases were caused by a more or less weak state of nerves. He was a rich people's doctor; rich and idle people went to him. Well then, they would come and say, 'I have stomach-ache, I can't digest,' and this and that. They had atrocious pains, they had headaches, they had . . well, all the symptoms. And he would listen to them very gravely." Mother's eyes twinkled. "I knew a woman who went there and to whom the doctor said: 'Ohh! Your case is very serious. But on which

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storey do you live? On the ground floor! Good. Now then, here's what you have to do to cure your stomach ailment. Take a bunch of very ripe grapes. Don't take breakfast, because breakfast upsets your stomach. Just take a bunch of grapes. Hold it in your hand, like this, very carefully. Then you must arrange to go out —but not through the door, you must never go out through the door! You must climb out of the window. Install a pair of steps. Climb out of the window. Go to the street, and walk there eating one grape every two steps —no more! Above all, no more, or you'll get stomach-ache! One grape every two steps. Take two steps, eat one grape, and continue till no grape is left. Don't turn back, go on straight ahead until not a single grape remains. You will need a big bunch. And when you have finished, you may return quietly. But don't take a car! Come back on foot. Otherwise all the pain will return. Come back quietly, and I promise you that if you do this every day, you'll be cured in three days.' " Thus advised the doctor at great length. "And cured she was, the woman." Mother ended her story amid our uproarious laughter.

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