Living Well, Growing Fully
Insights into holistic health, self-development, and Ideal-centric living.
Health is presented as a fundamental necessity for life and growth. The human body is considered a singular fortune in the scale of evolution, offering golden opportunities for infinite self-development, which presupposes the need for a healthy, strong, efficient, well-balanced, ever-active physical system. It is said that “It is our body that verily form the basis for following Dharma”.
Defining Health: Physical, Mental, and Spiritual Hygiene
Maintaining health involves three key aspects: physical hygiene, mental hygiene, and spiritual hygiene.
Physical hygiene includes keeping oneself clean, washing hands before and after eating, regular bathing, keeping toilets clean, and avoiding food cooked or served by those who do not follow hygiene principles. It also involves judicious adjustment and use of clothing, dresses, decorations, and cultivating a sense of beauty consistent with individual distinctiveness, aesthetic taste, and health rules. Avoiding foppishness, excess, and artificial sophistication is also part of physical hygiene. Furthermore, man is connected to his family and environment, so striving to make the family and environment clean, enlivening, and chaste is essential. Occupation and association should also be existential and delighting.
Mental hygiene involves moulding and directing thoughts, perceptions, emotion, will, sentiments, and purposefulness to consolidate one’s own being and becoming, as well as that of others. It means developing a healthy, normal, enthusiastic, robust mind and creative efforts, while avoiding mental perversion and deviation. Good thoughts and benign urges must find apt expression in active conduct to maintain mental health.
Spiritual hygiene is defined as maintaining untottering adherence to the Living Ideal and following Him.
Factors Contributing to Physical Health
Several factors contribute to physical well-being:
Diet: A balanced, nutritious diet is crucial. Balanced food means a combination of ingredients that promote the all-round development and strength of the body, including carbohydrates, protein, fat, sugar, mineral salts, and different kinds of vitamins. Under-nutrition due to lack of these can lead to physical, mental, and intellectual problems, as well as various diseases. Neither insufficient nor excessive food is helpful; one should consider physical labour and digestive power when eating. Overeating may cause more deaths than starvation. Specific beneficial foods and herbs mentioned include hydrocotyle leaves (thānkuṇi pātā), Helencha, Kolmi, Pudina, Dhanepata (coriander leaves), Supo, Kulekhara, Amlaki, cucumber, guava, Panthabhat, Rice with gruel, groundnut, and sesamum. Unscientific food habits and tastes that are hostile to health should be removed. Women, in particular, should be practically trained about the efficacy, merits, and demerits of food items, plants, herbs, and healthy cooking methods.
Non-Vegetarian Food: It is suggested that non-vegetarian food can be a source of many diseases, accelerate cell-division, aggravate passionate excitements, shorten longevity, and weaken sense organs. It can create unnatural excitement and unusual depression, making it difficult to work with tenacious continuity. Fine sensitivity, keen concentration of brain cells and nerves may be impaired by gross animal food, potentially hindering the ability to reach fine thinking, perception, and realization. While controversy exists, existential, regulated, nourishing, pure, and clean vegetarian food is generally not considered injurious to health.
Food and Feeling: Food carries the mental condition of the one who serves it. It is suggested that food should be received in a way that allows receiving higher feelings. Food that brings on hatred, aversion, uneasiness, or unsteadiness of mind breaks down health.
Activity and Exercise: Regular physical activity through practical engagement and spiritual practices is encouraged. This includes regular and regulated walking, sports, exercise, and work – in short, physical exertions. One characteristic of sound health is the ability to engage body and mind in work without uncomfortable body-minded consciousness. Exercise should be enjoyable, and collective games, dance, and devotional songs combined with dances are suggested. Specific exercises should address individual physical deficiencies. Yoga postures, massage, agriculture, and horticulture are also suitable. Accustoming oneself voluntarily to extra strain increases physical and mental endurance. Ease-loving tendency handicaps progress. Military training for youth can make them healthy, hardy, disciplined, and ready to face situations. It is important to overcome the distorted mentality that makes educated people averse to arduous physical labour. Avoiding idleness is also encouraged, as sickness may take hold otherwise.
Exertion and Sweat: To receive nourishment, clearing out waste substances from the body is essential, and appropriate exertion, at least until one perspires sufficiently, is invaluable.
Rest and Sleep: Proper rest and sleep are necessary. Sleep is described as the twilight of life, the dome of rest, and the midway between life and death where life is dormant.
Sex-Life: The manifestation of sex-urge at the proper age is normal. While it can be employed, substituted, or sublimated, repressing it forcefully can lead to perversions and physical/mental diseases. Proper and compatible marriage at a proper time is beneficial to health. Conjugal love and adjusted sexual union can enhance physical development, beauty, glow, mental equilibrium, peacefulness, and longevity. However, unadjusted wanton sex-life and adultery are injurious to health. Sex relation with a hostile wife can damage the husband’s nervous system.
Will to Health: The will-power operates behind health, illness, and death. Will to health and life is the first requirement for being healthy. Will to illness can be inherited or developed through life’s struggles, disappointments, and irregular habits. Overcoming this attitude is difficult.
Environment: A pure environment is essential for health and mind, as impurity can vitiate both. Dwelling houses and surroundings should be salutary to mental and physical health. Huddling in unspacious, unhealthy dwellings lacking water, air, light, and open space is deleterious. Engineers and planners should consider health, psychology, and aesthetics. Domestic peace is the first necessity for good health. Homes should have proper ventilation, light, and good water. The general social and political environment also impacts health.
Factors Contributing to Mental Health
Mental health is intimately connected with the body.
Ideal-centricity and Dharma: Sincere active responsive adherence to the Ideal is crucial for mental well-being. Love for the Ideal makes one unwilling to act against His wishes. Dharma is the fundamental basis of living and growing. Dharma signifies pursuit of truth and actively striving to make one’s existence untottering. Observing Dharma helps maintain the धृति (dhṛti) of the individual and the collective. Enthusiasm and inclination to work are signs of soundness and wellness. If these deteriorate, it indicates advancing toward illness.
Overcoming Negativity: Many illnesses originate from mental impurity. Mental purity is the foremost necessity to rescue health from illness. Passions exist as protectors and nurturers, not foes, but they can become unruly. Behaving under the excitement of passions can impair physical organs and nervous systems. Forcibly suppressing passions can also lead to physical and mental diseases. Proper and judicious adjustment, control, and existential use of passions is needful for physical health. Selfishness, inferiority complex, hypocrisy, and compromises with wrong are the greatest adversaries of mental hygiene. Frustration and fatigue often cause health to deteriorate. Anxiety, insecurity, lack of purposefulness, conflict of ideologies, emptiness, hypocrisy, restlessness, excitement, domestic unhappiness, indiscipline, extreme poverty/over-abundance, hardship, unbalanced enjoyment, struggle, mental agony, pricks of conscience, and alcoholism are linked to nervous debility and mental/physical diseases.
Practices for Mental Hygiene: Repetition of Holy Name and Meditation are essential. Self-examination, self-analysis, self-correction, association with holy persons, study of good books, pursuit of knowledge and excellence, healthy conversation, high thinking, loving expansive efforts, inventive tendencies, research, and concentric selfless service are also very important. Following and fostering honesty, righteousness, and social justice constitutes observance of mental hygiene.
Social Interaction: Simplicity in speech and behaviour that instills cheerful progress in others is important within a family. Avoiding fault finding and cultivating mutual appreciation, praise, serviceableness, and effort to contribute to mutual happiness in family life are essential for improving health. Aversion to fault-finding and effort to make up for deficiencies are characteristics of someone who does well. It is said that if one realizes another individual is a contributing agent to one’s own life and growth, one cannot maintain personal health while allowing the environment to remain unhealthy.
Will-Power (Revisited): Will-power stems from love. When love is centered on an Ideal who embodies universal love and active fulfillment, life gains meaning and purpose, leading to infinite thoughtfulness and inspiration for serving the environment. This spiritual urge kindles vital power, making the will and urge to live and help others live irresistible, enhancing life, strength, longevity, energy, and efficiency.
Spiritual Health and Practices
Spiritual hygiene is rooted in untottering adherence to the Living Ideal.
Name and Meditation: Repetition of Holy Name and Meditation with a concentric mind can generate energy, urge, and heat in the body. They have efficacy as supplements to food and medicine. Spiritual practice makes energy lively and overflowing, brings enthusiasm, and helps recovery by stimulating vital powers. Repeating Name while touching a sick person’s body has been associated with revival and energizing. Name and meditation excite brain cells and adjacent regions, potentially improving the function of endocrine glands, which quickens physical health, intelligence, and psychical nature.
Penance: Penance is mentioned as a way to remove the mental cause of illness by pursuing and discovering it, and by controlling food, medicine, and thought. Observing systems like the Chandrayan penance (gradually increasing and decreasing rice intake with the moon’s phases) is suggested as beneficial for health and life.
The Interconnectedness of Health Aspects
Body and mind are intimately connected, like two sides of the same thing. Mental health is necessary for physical health, and physical health is needed for mental health. An infected spine can hinder the systematic erection of the body. A disturbed or depressed mind indicates irregular physical function. Feeling is an indication of physiological function and inner health. Adherence, unchaste living, and incompatible food intake invite both physical and mental unhealthiness.
The Role of the Ideal
Adherence to the Ideal is central to health and well-being. Following the Ideal, who is an embodiment of love, helps deeply realize the connection between everyone’s happiness, misery, good, evil, progress, and deterioration. Living and growing according to Dharma, based on Ideal-centricity, is the foundation for health. Loving the Ideal generates the will-power and vital flow necessary for health and resistance to disease. It is said that if someone loves the Ideal, they will try their best to do things that benefit the Ideal, regardless of external recognition or criticism.
Societal and State Responsibility
The health of a nation is linked to its political, social, and economic life. The state should create a plan to increase the health, efficiency, and longevity of people. This involves preventing and curing diseases and increasing people’s resistance power. The government should combat food/medicine adulteration and excessive profiteering. Population control through promoting self-control, good principles, and scientific knowledge on procreation is also mentioned, considering health, food, economy, education, employment, transport, culture, politics, housing, land, and population distribution. The state should encourage people to acquire and apply knowledge about health, food, and social environment adjustment. The crisis of civilization, with its complex issues like unadjusted marriage, uncontrolled procreation, stressful environment, lack of idealism, anxiety, etc., contributes to widespread diseases and nervous issues. A radical change in thought and philosophy of life towards God-centreness is needed to save humanity from these issues.
Health for Service and Growth
Being healthy and efficient allows one to engage in work and serve the Ideal and others. Health is necessary for pursuing the “Dharma of becoming so” in any area of greatness. An “elevating engagement” that brings fulfillment and never causes degradation is important for maintaining health. Service and support to surroundings, regulated effort, and physical exercise contribute to physical and mental upliftment.
Healing and Cure
Some deaths are considered curable, especially if organs are not damaged, such as from heart failure, drowning, or cholera. A patient’s sincere desire to get well and actively pursuing steps towards recovery is crucial for healing. A doctor’s strategy and ability to gain a patient’s willing cooperation and excite their will to health are essential for lasting success in treatment. Doctors need knowledge of the action of drugs, but also an understanding of individual patient characteristics and needs, gained through extensive experience. Sympathy for the patient is also vital; a doctor needs insight, which opens up with compassion. Instead of blaming a patient, one should make them cheerful, inspire hope, and discern their path to cure with intelligence and service. Thakur demonstrated healing through faith and touch, attributing apparent “miracles” to cause-and-effect principles understood through spiritual practice and observation.
In essence, health, as depicted in the sources, is a holistic state rooted in righteous living (Dharma), adherence to an Ideal, proper physical care, mental purity, and harmonious interaction with one’s environment. It is not merely the absence of disease but a dynamic state enabling service, growth, and existential fulfillment.
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