The last few days have been a strange meditation on medicine, trees, fruits and health! Even this morning, my mind was all about medicine and health and trees! Where it ultimately led me to is to see how I perceive evil and that perception deciding how I deal with it. It's difficult to explain since there are several things floating in my mind and it feels like a baniyan tree with not just one clear trunk and a couple of branches. It is all a jumble of branches, trunks, roots...
However, one of the things that has been coming up over and over again in my mind is the notion of health. Most often we associate it with physical wellbeing. Sometimes also add mental well being. However, we think of health as something delicate, something that needs to be preserved and safeguarded. We rarely cherish it. Even when we say we're healthy, we mean that we are physically fit. But I think that's a very narrow understanding of health. Health is to be measured by growth, not absence of illness. And by the standard we measure health, so will our approach to it also be.
The same applies to evil - whatever that means and includes. Rather than try eliminating evil, why not strengthen the good? The medicine that we take when we are ill, if it is meant merely to attack the virus, is a very substandard and instant remedy. Rather if it strengthens my immunity, already existing capacity, then those antibodies within me do the work of tackling the virus. A twin achievement: strengthening the good and destruction of virus. The former achieves only the destruction of virus, leaving my immune system still weak and vulnerable.
However, one of the things that has been coming up over and over again in my mind is the notion of health. Most often we associate it with physical wellbeing. Sometimes also add mental well being. However, we think of health as something delicate, something that needs to be preserved and safeguarded. We rarely cherish it. Even when we say we're healthy, we mean that we are physically fit. But I think that's a very narrow understanding of health. Health is to be measured by growth, not absence of illness. And by the standard we measure health, so will our approach to it also be.
The same applies to evil - whatever that means and includes. Rather than try eliminating evil, why not strengthen the good? The medicine that we take when we are ill, if it is meant merely to attack the virus, is a very substandard and instant remedy. Rather if it strengthens my immunity, already existing capacity, then those antibodies within me do the work of tackling the virus. A twin achievement: strengthening the good and destruction of virus. The former achieves only the destruction of virus, leaving my immune system still weak and vulnerable.
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