The moment you realise that you are a child of God, you will let nothing affect you. All you need to do is forget yourself—and realise your true self as a child of God. When we forget this outer self and transcend the phenomenal, material world, we draw closer to the real, inner self, which is peace.

What is peace?

I may tell you what peace is in many words, but all descriptions will fail to make you understand it until you have felt peace in your heart. Like love, peace must be felt.

Many of us often ask ourselves, “Why is there no peace in our hearts?” God has blessed us abundantly; we live in comfortable homes; we eat good food; we have enough money to spend on necessities as well as a few luxuries. Why, then, does peace elude us?

A few days ago, a woman from Mumbai came to meet me. She belonged to a well-known and well-to-do family. She requested for a private meeting with me; and when I met her, she began to shed tears. She said: “Dada, there is one thing that I can’t come to terms with. I have money aplenty; there are servants to carry out my every bidding; we have several cars and bungalows; my children are very attached to me and pay attention to my every need and comfort. And yet—and yet, I know not why I am so unhappy! I feel so depressed that quite often I shut myself in my room and weep bitterly. I cry out to God in grief and frustration, ‘Lord, why is it thus with me?’ For God has given me everything—except happiness. Why, Dada, why is this so?”

All the comfort is not enough

This is the condition of many of us. We have everything we need—and we are still unhappy. What is the reason of this pervasive unhappiness in the world? Friends, the secret to happiness is peace of mind. He who is blessed with peace of mind is always happy—even if he is penniless and he owns nothing in this world. Saints, great souls and renunciates have nothing to call their own; yet they are radiantly happy. Such was the dervish who said: “Nothing in the morn have I and nothing do I have at night. Yet there is none on earth happier than I!”

Lord Krishna tells Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita: “Arjuna, ashantasya kutah sukham? If man is not at peace with himself, how can he be happy?” The key to happiness indeed, the secret of true happiness is peace of mind. There is one way of achieving peace of mind. That is to attain the realisation that all that happens, happens according to the will of God.

God’s plans are perfect

Gurudev Sadhu Vaswani used to tell us, “God upsets our plans to set up His own. And His plans are always perfect.” If I have the faith that whatever has happened to me is according to the plan of the Highest, that there is some hidden good in it for me, I will not be upset! Gurudev also used to say, “Every disappointment is His appointment. And He knows best.”

Once you realise this, there is no more frustration, no more unhappiness. You abide in a state of tranquillity and peace. You may not be able to achieve this straight away. It is a process through which you must move. There are so many situations and circumstances in life that shatter our peace. But how long can we allow ourselves to wallow in sorrow and self-pity? The call of life is Onward, Forward, Godward! Men may come and men may go, but life goes on forever! Lives may come to an end, but life on earth must go on!

The post The secret to happiness is surprisingly simple appeared first on Complete Wellbeing.

Surrender means you stop fighting and start floating

You swim in water—you go to the river and swim. What do you do? You trust the water. A good swimmer trusts so much that he almost becomes one with the river. He is not fighting, he does not grab the water, he is not stiff and tense. If you are stiff and tense you will drown; if you are relaxed the river takes care. That’s why whenever somebody dies, the dead body floats on the water.

This is a miracle. Amazing! The alive person died and was drowned by the river, and the dead person simply floats on the surface. What has happened? The dead person knows some secret about the river which the alive person did not know. The alive person was fighting. The river was the enemy. He was afraid, he could not trust. But the dead person, not being there, how could he fight? The dead person is totally relaxed with no tension—so the body floats. The river takes care. No river can drown a dead person.

Trust means you are not fighting; surrender means you don’t think of life as the enemy but as the friend. Once you trust the river, suddenly you start enjoying. Tremendous delight arises: splashing, swimming, or just floating, or diving deep. But you are not separate from the river, you merge, you become one.

Surrender means to live the same way in life as a good swimmer swims in the river. Life is a river. Either you can fight or you can float; either you can push the river and try to go against the current or you can float with the river and go wherever the river leads you.

Surrender doesn’t need belief in God

Surrender is not towards somebody; it is simply a way of life. A God is not needed to surrender to. There are religions which believe in God and there are religions which don’t, but all religions believe in surrender. So surrender is the real God. Even the concept of God can be discarded. Buddhism does not believe in any God, Jainism does not believe in any God—but they are religions. Christianity believes in God, Islam believes in God, Sikhism believes in God—they are also religions. The Christian teaches surrender to God; God is just an excuse to surrender. It helps, because it will be difficult for you to surrender without any object. The object is just an excuse so that in the name of God you can surrender. Buddhism says simply surrender—there is no God. You relax. It is not a question of some object, it is a question of your own subjectivity. Relax, don’t fight. Accept.

The belief in God is not needed. In fact, the word ‘belief’ is ugly. It does not show trust, it does not show faith—belief is almost the very opposite of faith. The word ‘belief’ comes from a root ‘lief’, which means to desire, to wish. Now let me explain it to you. You say, “I believe that God is compassionate.” What exactly are you saying? You are saying, “I wish there was a God who is compassionate.” Whenever you say, “I believe,” you say, “I intensely desire.” But you don’t know.

Know, don’t believe

If you know, there is no question of belief. Do you believe in the trees here? Do you believe in the sun which arises every morning? Do you believe in the stars? There is no question of belief. You know that the sun is there, that the trees are there. Nobody believes in the sun—if he did, you would say he is mad. If somebody came and said, “I believe in the sun,” and tried to convert you, you would say, “You have gone mad!”

Once you know, what is the point of belief? Belief is in ignorance. If you know, you know. And it is good that if you don’t know, know that you don’t know—the belief can deceive you. The belief can create an atmosphere in your mind, where, without knowing, you start thinking that you know. Belief is not trust, and the more strongly you say that you believe totally, the more you are afraid of the doubt within you.

Trust knows no doubt. Belief is just repressing doubt; it is a desire. When you say, “I believe in God,” you say, “I cannot live without God. It will be too difficult to exist in this darkness, surrounded by death, without a concept of God.” That concept helps. One doesn’t feel alone; one doesn’t feel unprotected, insecure—hence belief.

Trust is simple. It is just like a child trusts in his mother. It is not that he believes—belief has not yet entered. You were a small child once. Did you believe in your mother or did you trust her? The doubt has not arisen, so what is the question of belief? Belief comes only when the doubt has entered; doubt comes first. Later on, to suppress the doubt, you catch hold of a belief. Trust is when doubt disappears; trust is when doubt is not there.

For instance, you breathe. You take a breath in; then you exhale, you breathe out. Are you afraid of breathing out, because who knows, it may not come back? No! You trust. You trust it will come. Of course there is no reason to trust, what is the reason? Why should it come back? You can at the most say that in the past it has been happening so—but that is not a guarantee. It may not happen in the future. If you become afraid of breathing out because it may not come back, then you will hold your breath in. That’s what belief is—clinging, holding. But if you hold your breath in, your face will go purple and you will feel suffocated. And if you go on doing that, you will die.

Surrender is a matter of heart

All beliefs suffocate. They deaden your being. If you exhale, you trust in life. The Buddhist word ‘nirvana’ simply means exhaling, breathing out—trusting. Trust is a very, very innocent phenomenon. Belief is of the head; trust is of the heart. One simply trusts life because you are out of life, you live in life, and you will go back again to the source. There is no fear. You are born, you live, you will die; there is no fear. You will be born again, you will live again, you will die again. The same life that has given you life can always give you more life, so why be afraid? Why cling to beliefs? Beliefs are philosophical; trust has nothing to do with philosophy. Trust simply shows that you know what love is. It is not a concept of God who is sitting somewhere in heaven and manipulating and managing. Trust needs no God, the infinite life, this totality, is more than enough. Once you trust, you relax. That relaxation is surrender.

Courtesy: Osho International Foundation • osho.com

The post The real meaning of surrender, according to Osho appeared first on Complete Wellbeing.

The placebo effect is a phenomenon where your symptoms can be reduced or got rid of, by an otherwise ineffective treatment, because you believe or expect that the treatment will work. Placebos are usually inert substances [like sugar or chalk] which by themselves have no medicinal action on the human body. But if your doctor tells you that these are real and effective medicines, which can cure you of your disease, and if you truly believe this, then they may actually work for you. This phenomenon cannot be explained on scientific terms, because the substance being administered is chemically inert and incapable of producing any effects. Such a substance, when given to others, does not produce the same effect, unlike a medicine such as aspirin or paracetamol, which will uniformly reduce fever and pain in anyone it is given to.

It has been postulated that when a person believes strongly that he will be healed by something, his own subconscious mind comes into action and cures him of the disease. Another explanation frequently given for a placebo effect is that the patient’s symptoms were psychological to start with, that the patient did not have any real disease as such, and hence when the patient was satisfied that he was getting treatment, he improved.

The commonest example for the nocebo effect is when a person bitten by a non-poisonous snake dies, because he believed the snake was poisonous

A nocebo, on the other hand, is again an inactive substance, which is not supposed to produce any effects or side effects. But again, due to the patients’ mindset or belief, even this inert substance when administered causes a lot of unwanted side effects. This effect too cannot be explained scientifically or duplicated. But because the patient is under the false belief that the substance being administered is some harmful chemical, his subconscious mind is activated and forces the body systems to react and produce symptoms. The commonest example for the nocebo effect is when a person bitten by a non-poisonous snake dies, because he believed the snake was poisonous. Technically, the snake has no venom and the bitten person should not die, but due to his belief in general that snake bites are poisonous and lethal, his body goes into a severe shock like response and he dies.

A remedy for anxious patients

The placebo effect is a handy tool for a doctor, when dealing with a hypochondriac patient. Every once in a while, doctors encounter patients who are attention seeking and though they do not have any real sickness, they imagine themselves to be sick. Such individuals often hop from one clinic to another, and do not accept the diagnosis that there nothing is wrong with them. They even go to the extent of subjecting themselves to expensive and extensive medical tests, and are often unhappy when told by the doctors that all their reports are normal. In such cases, many experienced doctors resort to giving such patients some harmless pills, usually sugar pills, and tell them that they will be fine when they finish the course. The patients are happy that their illness has been acknowledged. They willingly take the medicine, and since they believe that they are sick, they also equally willingly believe that they will be cured. And surprisingly, their symptoms do disappear with a placebo treatment.

Both placebos and nocebos ultimately produce their desirable or undesirable effects solely because the patient believes that they will. For instance, many have a mindset that allopathic drugs, mainly antibiotics, are harmful and that they must be avoided at all costs. If, by chance, such a person was forced to take these medicines for an illness, it is likely that due to his strong beliefs and conditioning, he will react with many side effects. If any patient is exhibiting side effects which are not normally known with a drug, a doctor could suspect a nocebo effect and must have a detailed discussion with the patient on his belief systems.

Spontaneous cures

Many magical healings and cures are reported to occur all over the world, either due to faith in a deity or due to a person who is a healer. In all these cases, it is likely that the healing happened because the person believed that he will be cured. The brain is connected to each and every cell and organ of the body with nerves and hormones. Once a particular belief or faith becomes imprinted on the mind, it can act through these nerves and hormones and produce the necessary effects. Placebos and nocebos work in the same way. Since placebos and nocebos work because of complete belief and faith, once the person being administered these substances knows that these are inert things, it is highly unlikely that they will produce any effect. The value of a placebo remains only as long as the patient does not know what it is, and actually believes the doctor and the substance to be true and powerful enough to cure him. The biggest advantage of the placebo in medicine is that, since they are inert substances, and are usually inexpensive and harmless, they can be used to cure a whole lot of diseases which originate in a person’s psyche. If the doctor is experienced and if the patient has 100 per cent faith in the doctor, this relationship can be positively exploited by the doctor to cure the patient using placebos.

Every doctor who has been practising for a few years will have a story to tell about the placebo and nocebo effect

There are many interesting examples of both the placebo and the nocebo effect in the history of medicine. Every doctor who has been practising for a few years will have a story to tell. When it was first discovered that germs are the cause of infections, many doctors did not believe this theory. It is reported that at a scientific gathering early in the nineteenth century, where it was being proposed that germs caused infections, the speaker had brought with him a glass of water contaminated with cholera germs. One doctor, who did not believe that germs existed, drank the entire glass of water. As a result of his strong belief, he never got cholera, although the water was filled with the germs. In another instance, a person was diagnosed with lung cancer. It was at an early stage, and with proper chemotherapy, he was cured. His doctors told him that he was lucky and that he need not worry, as his disease had been eradicated. But he did not believe them, as he always knew that cancer is a fatal disease. He continued with the belief that the disease would spread and eventually kill him. Six months later, he died. When the doctors did an autopsy of his body, they did not find a single cancerous cell, or any other disease that could account for his death. He had died because he believed he would die. These examples give a clear idea how placebos and nocebos work in human beings.

Experts who practise mind-body medicine firmly believe that all diseases start in the mind. When the mind is in disorder, with the help of the nervous and endocrine system, it transfers this disorder to the cells and tissues of the body, thereby producing disease. All mind body healing works like a placebo, by changing our beliefs and by raising our faith in ourselves and in the ability of our subconscious mind to cure itself and the body. If you believe something will benefit you, it will. If you believe something will harm you, it will and it does.

.

The post Placebo Nocebo: Pills of belief appeared first on Complete Wellbeing.