The Mental Will and Its Influence on the Health and Well-Being of the Body

By now most people have heard of the ‘placebo effect’. Yet, they have not gone into the significance of what this implies. Studies have shown that as much as 30% of a group given an ‘inert’ treatment have similar healing outcomes to those given an actual targeted treatment. The individual given the placebo does not know he has received an inert treatment. The mind of the individual adopted the sense of being aided and undertook to create a will to heal. What this statistic does not do, however, is provide information on what percent of those who actually received the targeted drug or other type of treatment were benefited by a similar “will to heal” regardless of whether the drug or treatment was helping them or not! It has become clear that the mind, the mental will, plays an enormous role in the healing of the body.

On the flip side of this healing scenario there is the question of hypochondria, where the mind imagines that the body is suffering from some disease or disease condition and through dwelling on it, the body actually responds and exhibits symptoms of illness. There is also the factor of fear weakening the vital envelope and thus, allowing entrance to a communicable disease. The mind accepts the suggestions about the disease, manifests the fear, and thus, the disease becomes something of a self-fulfilling prophecy!

We can also observe different results depending on the intention of the individual. Thus, an individual may undertake a fast, start a diet regimen, or simply not have food available, and thus, be subject to starvation. In all 3 cases the individual is not eating. Those who are fasting with intention tend to report an increase in energy and focus. Those who are dieting tend to report a struggle to maintain the diet while working to overcome temptation, with a focus on the process not the ‘side effect’ of increased clarity that the fasting individual reports. The person without food suffers from starvation and focuses on the ways to acquire sustenance. Of course, when any discipline, such as fasting or dieting is taken to extremes it can have negative consequences on the body similar to that of starvation, but that is an extreme result. In the short term, 3 individuals, none of them eating food, have 3 different results and mental frameworks, and their bodies tend to respond differently.

In his Autobiography of a Yogi, Paramahansa Yogananda described meeting with certain individuals who ate very little, or nothing at all, for various spans of time. These individuals had a spiritual purpose, a strong energetic action and a radiant glow about them despite not relying on material sustenance.

We tend to believe the mental conception that the body requires physical sustenance and thus, we expect it to break down when food is withheld. This may, however, be seen as a ‘habit’, albeit a very deeply entrenched habit. The question arises whether there are states of consciousness where the body can find support and nourishment through some other form of conversion of energy into matter, possibly bypassing the transitional steps that lead to the creation of food that needs to be eaten in order to then convert it back into the energy and building blocks of substance needed to sustain and operate the body. While this may not be a reality for most, if not all, in today’s world, can we not envision the possibility of a future formulation of being that is able to construct and maintain a body through direct action of consciousness and force? At the moment, solar energy is absorbed by plants, and through the process we call ‘photosynthesis’ they produce material substance that converts that energy into a solid form and makes it bio-available for the plant’s own needs and for animals and human beings to consume and convert into sustenance and energy for their needs. We thus see energy converted into a form of matter, and then matter converted back into a form of energy through the action of the plants. If an individual could gain the power of directly tapping into the solar energy without the intermediate steps, a whole new paradigm of existence, bodily health and well-being and growth could be envisioned. Changing this ‘habit’ or limitation in the mind, and developing a new form of relationship to energy through exercise of the will, could remove the expectation that lacking food inevitably leads to a breakdown of health.

The Mother writes: “The yogi or aspiring yogi who does asanas to obtain a spiritual result or even simply a control over his body, obtains these results because it is with this aim that he does them, whereas I know some people who do exactly the same things but for all sorts of reasons unrelated to spiritual development, and who haven’t even managed to acquire good health by it! And yet they do exactly the same thing, sometimes they even do it much better than the yogi, but it doesn’t give them a stable health… because they haven’t thought about it, haven’t done it with this purpose in mind. I have asked them myself, I said, ‘But how can you be ill after doing all that?’ — ‘Oh! but I never thought of it, that’s not why I do it.’ This amounts to saying that it is the conscious will which acts on matter, not the material fact.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Powers Within, Chapter V Will-Power, pg. 52