Guide to Health

Health was my primary objective for over twenty years. From my personal experiences during my stay in England, I have arrived at certain definite conclusions; therefore I can be sure of their reliability.

As the maxim goes, "Prevention is better than cure". It is easy and safer to prevent an illness by the observance of the natural laws of health, than to try to cure it when it has already been brought about by our own ignorance and carelessness. Hence it is our duty to understand correctly the laws of health at the very outset.

From authentic sources, both oriental and occidental, we learn that a man's state of health depends on his own state of mind. Illness is theresult, not only of our actions, but also of our thoughts. It is true that more men die of the fear of cholera and plague than the disease itself.

Ignorance is one of the root causes of disease. We worsen a very simple case of any dis-ease by our sheer ignorance of the most elementary laws of health. Again, strange though it is, we know about things at a distance but we are ignorant of things near at hand. There is nothing so closely with us as our own body, but our ignorance of that also is immense. We are ignorant of the structure of our body, the mechanisms by which the different organs of our body work; how evil thoughts and passion affect us, how our mind travels over illimitable space and time while our body is at rest and so on.

We at present are in such a position that we don't know how to deal with the most ordinary scalds and wounds; we are helpless if a thorn punctures our foot, and become totally upset if we are bitten by an ordinary snake. We ought to conquer this helplessness.

I do not mean to say that the facts mentioned here cannot be found anywhere else, but here they are, in a nutshell, condensed from the substance of several books on the same subject.

We have created the very bad practice of calling in a doctor and taking medicine for trifling matters. Illness is just Nature's warning that some filth has accumulated in some portion of the body, and it is wise to allow Nature to remove the filth. Taking medicine renders the task of Nature doubly difficult. To help Nature in her task, it is better to remember certain elementary principles -

(1) By fasting, the filth may not accumulate all the more

(2) Vigorous exercise in the open air will enable some filth to escape through perspiration.

Above all, keeping the mind under strict control is very necessary. We see in our daily life that those who resort to medicine fall ill more often. Astley Cooper admits, "Science of medicine is mere guesswork."

Sir John Forbes confesses that most diseases are cured by Nature rather than by medicine. Drs. Baker and Frank say that more people die of medicines than of disease.

Be patient in your soul and don't call for a doctor immediately. But if you are forced to, then choose an efficient doctor and follow his instructions strictly.

**Contents and Sample Pages**