The entire world is like a huge Hospital!
We get admitted into it when we are afflicted by the “Disease” called “ajnAna” (i.e. ignorance of Knowing what we are in truth – disembodied brahman). This disease manifests with many symptoms – unique to each patient. There is no other place in the whole Universe where one can work to rid oneself from his/her disease.
There are many specialists, doctors, nurses, ward boys and so on to help the patients to administer a medicinal antidote suitable for each so that they may get rid of their disease. But each patient has to take his/her medicine. Just looking at others or listening to the talks of their caregivers and wishes of their well-wishers will not work, however beautiful may be the doctors or however enthralling their words and blessings may be. Howsoever superhuman a patient may imagine the caregivers to be, they are still a part of the Hospital only.
After all, none has really lost his/her health! Everyone is eternally Healthy (swasthata). But that health got “infected.” None need to acquire “Health.” Each patient just has to lose ‘the infection.’ His/her normal health will automatically be back and s/he gets discharged (liberated) from the Hospital. One cannot cleverly manipulate a discharge, for, one surely comes back to the Hospital with a more severe relapse of the disease!
Be Healthy Ever.
[guru pUrNima day – 07/03/2023]
Death is for many of us the gate of hell; but we are inside on the way out, not outside on the way in.
George Bernard Shaw
A Treatise on Parents and Children (1910)
Shishya, you left out the inference that follows with a typically impish Shavian twist: “Therefore let us give up telling one another idle stories, and rejoice in death as we rejoice in birth; for without death we cannot be born again; and the man who does not wish to be born again and born better is fit only to represent the City of London in Parliament, or perhaps the university of Oxford.”
In the course of a conversation at the end of his life with Devadas Gandhi, the youngest son of Mahatma Gandhi, Shaw reportedly gave expression to his belief in Punarjanma – rebirth and to his desire to be born in a Jain family in his next birth. I suspect that Shaw’s understanding of Jainism was selective and somewhat shallow. Shaw was notoriously contrary and many of his opinions were deliberately provocative. But his vegetarian, naturist, ascetic and pacifist views, his wandering multi-sided opinions, show a Jainist tendency that survived the collision of the opposing ideas of the twentieth century.
Thanks, Rick…I did leave out the swipe at the University of Oxford.
Hope Dennis will allow the link below…
https://youtu.be/Crl-RHQwlSM
George Bernard Shaw speech in 1930, felicitating Einstein
“There’s an order of men who are makers of universes. They are unstained by the blood of any human on earth.”
Bernard Shaw’s witty speech was of course was pre- Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Though Einstein did not participate in the Manhattan Project itself—the government judged him a poor security risk for top-secret research—his letter to Roosevelt proved to be the crucial turning point in the weaponization of E=mc2. Thus Einstein, lifelong pacifist like Bernard Shaw, might fairly be described as the father of the atomic bomb. Einstein himself recognized the irony, viewing his own role in ushering in the atomic age with a mixture of regret and resignation. In 1954, the last year of his life, he admitted to an old friend, “I made one great mistake in my life—when I signed the letter to President Roosevelt recommending that atom bombs be made; but there was some justification—the danger that the Germans would make them.”