Soul Soup

Dear Sadhguru, you mentioned in your previous discourses that most illnesses are created by the mind. What would be the emotional and thought pattern behind this?

S uppose right now your right hand starts acting funny – it beats you, pokes you in the eye, and pops around. Would you say you have an ailment? For sure, you have one. That is exactly what your mind is also doing. It gets up, pops around, hurts you, pokes you, makes you cry, makes you suffer. Too many people have this ailment – you can form an army of sick people!

This sickness in the mind will manifest in so many ways in the physical body. There is no question about it. Your whole chemistry will go through a change with every thought, every reverberation you create on the level of the mind. It has all been measured. If you think about tigers, you will create one kind of chemistry. If you think about flowers, another kind of chemical change happens. For every thought you generate, your chemistry changes. You are a chemical soup and how you stir it is what you become. But now, if your mind turns against you, do you know what kind of soup you are making? You are a lousy soup. Not just lousy – poisonous. If you are soaked in this poisonous soup on a daily basis, wellbeing will not happen to you. Today, we do not have so much control in the world as to what we eat, drink or breathe – all of it is somewhat poisoned. But if you are on self-help, depending upon how hard you strive, you will succeed.

Ancient societies always saw disease as something wrong. They were aware that a human being should not be in any state of illness. But modern societies have started treating illness as normal because there is an industry which thrives on you. One of the largest industries on the planet is pharmaceuticals because you have a nasty soup going within you. If you are willing, we can make you into a very wonderful soup, where the chemistry is fantastic, where being blissful is natural. If you do this, seventy percent of ailments will vanish from the planet. With the remaining thirty percent, there are too many external influences which are not in our control. You don’t know whether a bird, pig or cow is sitting next to you. Or in other words, you don’t know whether you are going to get bird flu, swine flu, or mad-cow disease. You can take care of this to some extent but not absolutely. But what you are doing from within, you can take into your hands, if you are one hundred percent willing.

If you are constantly creating a nasty chemistry within yourself, how is life within you supposed to understand you are seeking wellbeing? Life within you thinks, “He likes ailments,” and gives it to you. Some people may have a robust system, which can take a lot of beating. Others will fall at the very first taste of lousy soup they create.

I know when somebody says, “I am not well,” you are supposed to sweet-talk them, “Don’t worry, everything will be okay.” But I am not like that. I am not solace, I am a solution. If you are poisoning your system from within, how can you live well? Life doesn’t work like that. Unless you do the right things, the right things will not happen to you.

The most sacred source of creation is housed in the chemical soup of your body. If vegetable floats in a soup, we call it vegetable soup. Make yourself a great soul soup!