Vedic scientist-philosophers have known for thousands of years that a preventative if not total cure exists in nature for every disease that could possibly affect humankind. As a result of this knowledge being spread far and wide by the scientists, perfectly good health was enjoyed by most people who followed the Vedic way of life from the earliest days on this planet.
Known as rishis among the Vedic peoples, these learned male and female scientists identified the systems of the body and taught a method of balancing them to attain perpetual good health. To achieve this balance, they used diet, herbal treatments and yogic breathing as their basic tools.
Until comparatively recently, this was the only medical practice known to the Vedic peoples from the earliest times. Good health was the normal state of being except in cases of sheer ignorance and neglect, accidents, violence and infections arising from accidentally injury.
The rishis were greatly respected by the populace. It was common to see the local ones or those who constantly travelled between towns and villages talking to groups of people under a pipal or banyan tree. Even today, most villages have a special pipal or banyan under which the locals gather to listen to important announcements.
The subjects of the philosopher-scientists’ talks were discussed endlessly by the villagers, be it headman or labourer, and so quality information was shared at all levels and became public property. The time-honoured practice was a remarkably effective way of spreading news or increasing the knowledge base of the people regardless of their level of formal education or status in that society. In this way, the profound knowledge of the rishis was disseminated across the length and breadth of India and even beyond its borders.
Undoubtedly the most important knowledge imparted to the common people was that which related to diet. The rishis taught that the state of one’s health depended entirely on what and when one ate and drank. A proper diet consisting of raw or cooked seasonal foods prepared with carefully-selected combinations of spices and condiments was most often the only medicine necessary to ensure lasting good health. The rishis recommended that at least one meal a day should be eaten uncooked.
Personal hygiene was an important aspect of Vedic teachings. The rishis taught that a daily bath in running water was integral to prayer and ritual. Bath time was also time to wash one’s wearing apparel, which often consisted of only a piece of two of cloth, usually homespun cotton. In India’s relentless heat, the clothes dried quickly, often on the wearer’s body.
It is for this reason that the great rivers of India and even little tributaries in smaller towns and villages came to play such a great role in Vedic culture. A daily dip was essential before prayer and the preparation of food to be offered to the gods.
It had been observed through the ages that the seasonal ripening of local fruit and vegetables coincided with human dietary needs at particular times of the year. Citrus fruits such as lemons and oranges, which are thought to have originated in India, are good examples. These ripen at the end of autumn or the beginning of winter, exactly when the body needs the vitamin C that the fruit contain to build resistance to winter ailments such as the common cold.
The science of Ayurveda places as much emphasis on prevention as it does on cures. In much the same way, other fruit and vegetables were ready to be eaten exactly when the human body most needed the proteins, vitamins or trace elements that they contained.
From the beginning of man’s tenure on planet Earth, he was a vegetarian. Because the fruit and vegetables that he ate ripened exactly when his body needed the nutrients that they contain, vegetarian man remained perfectly healthy throughout his life.
This is the reason why it was taught by the rishis that locally-grown fruit and vegetables should be consumed in season. Because all living things share the same naturally-occurring elements such as proteins, vitamins and trace elements though in varying proportions, the nutritional elements in food are recognised by the body and easily metabolised. As stated earlier, these elements are available in locally-grown foods exactly when people and other denizens of that environment are likely to obtain optimum nutritional benefit from them.
Meat-eating was a much later development. It began out of sheer necessity when fruit, vegetables and herbs failed to grow after certain natural catastrophes such as massive flooding or unusually large volcanic eruptions. High velocity winds carried into the stratosphere pumice and other debris ejected by exploding volcanoes, as they did after the massive eruption of Krakatoa near Sumatra in 1883.
Thus scattered into the atmosphere at high altitudes, the debris prevented sunlight from reaching the earth below. Food crops failed to grow because of the diminished sunlight and widespread famine followed in many parts of the world. The only survivors in such cases are most likely to be those who had eaten meat.
Catastrophic disasters such as the Great Deluge some 10,000 years ago and the much more recent Krakatoa explosion cited above occur when humankind degenerates and becomes obsessed with maya and so forgets its essentially spiritual nature and hence the tenets of universal Vedic law. What men think, say and do in their decadence directly affects Mother Nature which is integral to all that exists.
In those difficult post-catastrophe times, the only alternative to starving to death was to eat the animals that co-existed and worked with man. Unfortunately what started as a last resort in the interests of survival became a habit. Isolated groups continued to eat meat long after prevailing conditions combined with survival instincts forced them to take that unnatural course. In time meat eating became widespread and in some communities, socially acceptable. This turned out to be a degenerative step in many ways.
The dentition of human beings clearly indicates that nature never intended man to be a meat eater. Eating animal flesh could therefore quite logically be considered to be unnatural if not harmful, not only from the physical and health viewpoint but also the spiritual and moral.
Through habitually eating meat, some of us have become susceptible to hitherto unknown ailments – and moral decadence. It is a short step from killing friendly animals to killing one’s fellow man. This was bound to happen when spilling the blood and taking the lives of animals became so commonplace as to become socially acceptable. It is small wonder that we have evolved into a violent and blood-thirsty species prone in these demented times to war and wanton killing.
Yet despite the current gloom and despondency in societies around the globe, there is growing awareness of the real causes of humankind’s confusion. Many are starting to see the futility and shallowness of the “modern” way of life promoted by a motivated media. More and more people are realising that science does not have all the answers, that there are serious shortcomings in the contemporary way of life. The selfish system of educating our youth for future lives of slavery is becoming increasingly transparent in these fraught times.
Steps have been taken, in the exploitative educational systems imposed on humankind, to obscure traditional knowledge of the natural laws relating to food and drink. Those who stand to profit the most from their sale control the trade in disease-causing chemically-tainted modern processed foods and drinks. They profit even further from the sale of spurious “medicines” to disguise and manage the symptoms of the diseases that arise from the consumption of these foods.. There are rarely any cures among the “medicines” used by the medical industry.
In recent decades, against a background of rising sales of junk and processed foods, diseases have proliferated to the extent of becoming epidemics. It has become painfully obvious that the rise in diseases is concomitant to the rise in the sale of chemically-tainted processed and junk foods.
There is now growing public movement away from food crops mass-produced on giant monoculture farms using chemical fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides. Tired of toxic, disease-causing fruit, vegetables and grains, people throughout the western world are going back to producing organic food crops in their backyards and rooftops even in great cities like New York and London. A new phenomenon, suburban community organic farms, are spreading from New York to London to Mumbai, Singapore and Sydney.
Using the most innovative ideas, creative people everywhere are learning and teaching how to use simple devices and methods to produce surprisingly large amounts of organic food crops in small spaces like neglected community parks and temporarily vacant lots between demolition and the start of new construction.
Others are collecting fallen leaves and organic waste to turn into compost even unobtrusively in community parks, school-yards and behind churches and even on islands on busy highways. There is growing interest in vermi-composting – using earthworms to produce an incredibly rich natural fertiliser. Home vermi-compost units are now available in most western cities and are odourless and convenient enough to be kept in a corner of a kitchen or scullery.
People everywhere are becoming increasingly conscious of the fact that their health depends entirely on the quality of what they eat. This is old Vedic knowledge in resurgence; it is manifesting in the west in the most imaginative and innovative ways. Creative people are finding amazing ways of producing healthy foods even in the most crowded cities. Even though it would have been difficult to imagine even ten years ago, the numbers of people going back to nature are growing exponentially.
The realisation that the health crisis in which humankind is now immersed has its roots in the quality of our foods has brought diseases, their causes and cures into sharp focus. In an ambience in which matters of public health have become the single most important subject of discussion and study, attention is being focused on western medicine and its efficacy. It has dawned on those honestly dedicated to improve public health that allopathic medicine might not be the answer to today’s health problems.
Liberal Medicine
There is now talk in medical circles, particularly in the United States and Britain, of “liberal” medicine which incorporates the best of traditional medical disciplines such as Ayurveda, Unani, homeopathy and naturopathy. Growing numbers of forward-thinking medical practitioners are already experimenting with the combination of allopathic drugs and natural, mostly herbal, medicines. Many believe that the medicine of the promised Golden Age would be a combination of Ayurveda and other natural disciplines and certain limited aspects of allopathic medicine involving drugs
All this goes to show that the human spirit is indomitable. It can be suppressed, manipulated and misled, but only up to a certain point. At that point, the soul consciousness awakens from its torpor and recognises the fact that others more cynically exploitative are benefiting from their inertia. The reawakening is now becoming increasingly apparent with growing numbers of people having access to the Internet. We are now in the cusp between the torpor of the past and the promised Golden Age that is dawning.
If the Internet is any indication, growing numbers of people are awakening to the fact that humankind has been misinformed and misled into a false way of life by a parasitic minority using the public media which they largely own. More and more people are becoming aware that much psychological study goes into the designing of commercial products of all kinds and their sale to the public.
The average advertising copywriter in all probability knows as much psychology as a psychiatrist would. Your sudden craving for a particular junk food item was insidiously planted in your mind by clever advertising in the magazine lying on your desk.
Even so, hope still shines amidst the gloom of this scenario. Humankind’s growing consciousness holds the promise of a critical mass being reached in the near future. In previous articles I wrote that when a certain critical percentage of the greater mass becomes aware, the entire mass could attain instant awareness.
This phenomenon has been observed in several species of animals including monkeys and other mammals such as deer and also fish, birds, amphibians, crustaceans and insects. Many spiritual adepts, clairvoyant and others believe that mankind is also susceptible to the phenomenon and that it could be fast reaching this liberating phase.
The general awakening is largely due to the Internet and news sources other than the mainstream media. More and more people everywhere are finding that they have common cause in the fight against exploitation by a shadowy few obsessed by the material sciences and their potential to attract wealth.
These sciences, after all, relate to only one small aspect of life on this planet. The inescapable truth is that we human beings are essentially aspects of the Spirit of the Universe embodied temporarily in earthly forms, even though our contemporary lifestyle belies that irrefutable fact. Blinded by the illusions of material things, we have temporarily forgotten that our greater purpose is to evolve spiritually and thus unselfishly advance the cause of the Supreme Cosmic Intelligence throughout the Cosmos.
In the arrogance arising from his scientific dabbling, man considers himself equal to the Supreme Cosmic Intelligence and seeks the God particle. Yet the truth is that the Energy his scientists seek manifests within all that exists in Nature. It is far beyond their frail, demented grasp. It can be found only though unselfish, unconditional Love for all that is, as all rishis know.
