vision. If you are down far enough, your views on every subject are likely to be extreme.From time to time as I interact with people in my guise as a physician, I run across theextreme form of this extreme view, when I hear people tell me that some health professional of the new age variety has told them that, if they are not getting well, it is because they wish to be sick. Now, undoubtedly this is sometimes the case, and yes, Ihave seen many people who are unwell because they have some good reason to be sick.Maybe it gets them sympathy from other family members; maybe it allows them to avoidthe housework, or not go to work, or whatever. However-it is also very much the casethat not every sick person is sick because they want to be sick. Sometimes illness is amatter of free will, and sometimes it is a matter of fate. To assume that sickness is alwaysdue to some desire to be sick, and that every patient could swiftly get well by simplywilling to be well, seems to me a dramatic misreading of the Law of Karma. Human beings tend to dramatically misread the Law of Karma, for human beings, given theoption of perceiving things clearly or perceiving things with a bias, will generally movein the direction of bias. We do this because we exist in an extraordinarily dense realm of reality, where we find ourselves because of the density of the karmas that caused us to be born here.Fashions in bias do change; if today in the "modernized" world many people pooh-poohthe thought of fate, many "traditional" people remain convinced that everything in our lives is fated. Thousands of years ago certain Upanishads express the opinion that, shouldan individual fall ill, the worst thing he or she could do would be to go to a doctor. Thesetexts explain that people become unwell as a result of unwise karmas, the results of eachof which will have eventually be endured. Going to a doctor will just to postpone or attempt to evade those karmas. Instead of that, better to be brave about it, stiffen your upper lip, and plow through that misery without attempting to ameliorate it in any way.This view regarded the whole idea of doctoring as being somehow non-dharmic,immoral, anti-religious. The
Charaka Samhita
, Ayurveda's most famous text, was written partly in response to this "holier than thou" and "karmically purer than thou" attitude thenrampant among the priestly characters who composed screeds like these Upanishads.The
Charaka Samhita
contains a passage describing this priestly attitude, in which it asksthe question, even if it is your fate to be unwell, what if it is also your fate to locate a physician? Is it reasonable to deliberately accept the undesirable fate simply because of some theoretical belief that it might somehow help you out in the future? Should you notinstead respect the fact that providence has provided you an opportunity to assist your healing process? Naturally the physician's opinion was that patients should not be afraidto come to doctors and spend their hard-earned money on cures, which might or mightnot work; and naturally, if you sicken further or even die after the physicians have donetheir best to cure you, they may well claim that it was your fate not to respond to themedicine. Despite all this, aren't you still better off trying out medicine instead of simplysitting back quietly and accepting your fate-assuming of course that you have somereasonably competent physician available to you?Of course, if you do go to the doctor, and you do take the medicine, and you do get well,we will never really know what would have happened if you hadn't; we'll never know if
Leave a Comment