Illness and the Power of Suggestion

The body consciousness responds to suggestions whether they come through the mind, the vital or directly act upon the physical level, whether consciously noted or not. This has the potential to cause illness in the body if it happens to be a negative suggestion, or to cure illness if it is a positive suggestion.

A researcher at Jipmer hospital in South India was researching cancer in mice utilizing Kilian photography as a tool of observation. He found that he could provoke the development of tumours in mice through subjecting them regularly to a frequency/vibration pattern of mice who had cancer. He was able to chart the progression of increasing illness among the mice he used for his experiment. he then subjected these same mice to the frequency/vibration pattern of healthy mice, and was able to show a systematic reversal of the cancer and the returning health of the formerly sick mice.

For the most part, we do not recognise the power of suggestion on our health and wellness. In this case, by using mice, he avoided the implication that there was somehow a mental suggestion that was creating the result in either direction. There was a direct vibratory force upon the vital envelope and the physical body and this was the condition for either creating, or healing illness.

Homeopathic medicine relies on extreme dilutions of a particular substance that would create a condition in the body at full strength, to reverse that condition. The exact mechanism is unknown to Western medical researchers, who fail to appreciate the value of homeopathy working at an extremely subtle level. While they try to explain away the results by attributing it to a form of “placebo effect” caused by the mind adopting the idea and sending a suggestion to the body, they cannot account for the success homeopathic practitioners have had with horses and dogs, where the question of mental intervention is not involved.

Sri Aurobindo related a circumstance when his brother was extremely ill and feverish. It so happened a wandering naga sannyasin came by and learned of the situation. He asked for a glass of water, which he infused with a mantric force. The brother quickly regained his health after imbibing the water.

Sri Aurobindo writes: “The suggestions that create illness or unhealthy conditions of the physical being come usually through the subconscient — for a great part of the physical being, the most material part, is subconscient, i.e. to say, it has an obscure consciousness of its own but so obscure and shut up in itself that the mind does not know its movements or what is going on there. But all the same it is a consciousness and can receive suggestions from Forces outside, just as the mind and vital do. If it were not so, there would not be any possibility of opening it to the Force and the Force curing it; for without this consciousness in it it would not be able to respond. In Europe and America there are many people now who recognise this fact and treat their illnesses by making conscious mental suggestions to the body which counteract the obscure secret suggestions of illness in the subconscient. There was a famous Doctor in France who cured thousands of people by making them persistently put such counter-suggestions upon the body. That proves that illness has not a purely material cause, but is due to a disturbance of the secret consciousness in the body.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, The Hidden Forces of Life, Ch. 3 Hidden Forces Around, pp. 72-73