True Health
Health does not mean mere existence. Keeping out of the hospital is not health. To be able to resist disease, to bear strain, to stimulate mental vitality, and to feel the body as a luxury—as a bird feels when shooting through the air, and as a child does always—is health.
The Magnetic Diet
What distilled water is to a wet battery, food is to the body battery. The Life Energy in the body battery is derived from Cosmic Energy through the medulla, and from food. It is the intricate task of the life force to distill additional life force from the nourishment taken into the body, by breaking up foods and converting them into energy. Therefore, one’s diet should be confined to foods that are easily converted into energy. Oxygen and sunshine should have a very important place in people’s lives, because of their direct energy producing quality. The more you depend on the will and on Cosmic Energy to sustain you, the less your food requirements; the more you depend on food, the weaker your will and the less your recourse to Cosmic Energy. The magnetic diet consists of such food substitutes as sunrays and oxygen, which can be easily assimilated and converted into energy. Magnetic foods give energy more quickly than solids and liquids, which are less easily converted into life force. When you are tired or hungry, take a sunbath and you will find yourself revived and recharged with ultraviolet rays. Inhale and exhale several times outdoors or near an open window, and your fatigue will be gone. A fasting person who inhales and exhales deeply twelve times, three times a day, recharges his body with electrons and free energy from air and ether. Practice the following exercise three times a day: Exhale slowly, counting from 1 to 6. Now, while the lungs are empty, mentally count from 1 to 6. Inhale slowly, counting from 1 to 6. Then hold the breath, counting from 1 to 6. Repeat eleven times. Just as electricity passing through a rod made of a conductive substance electrifies it, so life force derived from oxygen charges the body battery. People who perform breathing exercises always have shining, magnetic eyes. Each one of the many billions of cells within the human body is a tiny mouth taking nourishment. The life force identified with the body creates within us a desire to derive energy from meat and other foods taken into the stomach. The life force must be trained to draw energy from subtler sources. The body’s energy requirements can be supplied partly by sunshine and oxygen, which are absorbed by the pores. For this reason, the surface of the skin must be kept scrupulously clean at all times.
The Mental Diet
We must also remember that good thoughts are nourishing food for the mind, and thoughts of any other nature are poisonous to the body and mind. Have you ever analyzed your mental diet? It consists of the thoughts you think as well as the thoughts you receive from close thought-contact with your friends. Peaceful thoughts and peaceful friends always produce healthy, magnetic minds. Inner disquietude and worries, due to the wrong sort of friends or unappreciative relatives, produces an unwholesome, gloomy mind. If you are suffering from mental ill health, go on a mental diet. A health-giving mental fast will clear the mind and rid it of the accumulated mental poisons from a careless, faulty mental diet. First of all, learn to remove the causes of your worries without permitting them to worry you. Do not feed your mind with mental poisons of fresh worries created daily. Worries are often the result of attempting to do too many things hurriedly. Do not “bolt” your mental duties, but thoroughly masticate them one at a time with the teeth of attention, and saturate them with the saliva of good judgment. Thus will you avoid worry indigestion.
Acquiring Physical, Mental, and Spiritual Perfection
Eating spiritual, magnetism-producing foods and absorbing vitality-producing sunshine daily, you will physically reflect God’s everlasting youth. Eliminating all mental poisons and partaking of the divine nourishment of determination, courage, and continuous mental effort and concentration, you will learn to overcome the most difficult problems with ease. Eliminating ignorance by constant meditation on God and following the precepts of Yogoda and your spiritual teacher, you will attain perfect spiritual health. Once you learn to eat right foods, think right thoughts, and be filled with wisdom and joy, your body and mind will be spiritualized and experienced as dynamos of magnetic energy. Your body and mind, purified by this energy, will take on the beauty of the Spirit, and be a spiritual magnet, charged with the life of God, blessing all those it touches.
How to Remain Youthful
The careful man who follows health laws suffers rarely compared with the careless man who does not discriminate about his diet. Walk daily. Bathe your body in the bacteria-killing sunshine every day. When winter and its healthful outdoor sports are here, take time to go skating, skiing, and walking. Breathe the fresh, crisp, invigorating air of winter. By these means, disease will be dispelled. You must take care of your body machine. As the years roll along, do not give up—as so many people do. Always be interested. Keep the mind busy creating new things. The infinite powers are at your command. The ocean can help any wave to retain its form if it keeps pushing it from within its bosom. So man can retain youth by asking the everlasting ocean of Immortal Power behind the wave of his body to continue manifesting itself as that youthful, vital form.
Using AUM for Healing
Concentrate the mind on any weak or diseased part. As you mentally chant “AUM” fifteen times in that body part, try to feel that a warm electric force is filling it with healing energy.
Bathe in God’s Sunlight
When the sun shines, everything seems to smile with its halo of golden rays. Sunlight and ultraviolet ray baths are necessary to fill the tissues and pores with life-giving energy. They redden the hemoglobin, recharging it and making it richer and healthier. As an ordinary bath washes away bacteria and dirt from the human body, so the ultraviolet rays in sunlight cleanse the body of bacteria. Ultraviolet rays penetrate the homes of enemy bacteria in the fingernails and body pores, and scorch them out. If you do not have time for a walk, open your windows and let your life-giving friend, Sunlight, fall on you and bathe you all over. If you are afraid of catching cold, jump up and down to stay warm, but each morning bathe in the ocean of sunrays that God has created for you.
While walking every day, slowly inhale counting 1 to 12. Hold the breath for twelve counts, then exhale while counting 1 to 12. Do this twenty-four times every time you go for a walk. Take sunbaths as often as you can, from ten minutes to one-half hour, according to the strength of the sun. Do not overdo this. Be careful of severe sunburn, which does more harm than good. (The amount of time for sun bathing should be gradually built up to onehalf hour, and regulated according to your skin’s tolerance for sun rays.) Bathing in sunlight-heated or ultraviolet-ray-saturated water is very beneficial. Rubbing the whole stripped body vigorously and rapidly with the palms before taking a bath generates life force and is very beneficial. Occasionally holding on to two electrodes of a battery is a good method for supplying the body with free energy. (The electric current should be very weak.) If a weak man lives in the same room with a strong person, he absorbs some of the latter’s vital and mental magnetism. For this reason, young and old people should mingle and thus exchange magnetism. Try to discover new methods for drawing more energy and magnetism into the body. Ingredients of Health After school days, the days of exercise are usually over and the days of over-eating and its resultant sickness begin. Many people do not realize that uniform health depends on: proper eating, less eating, fasting, conservation of vital, proper exercise energy by self-control, fresh air and sunbaths, proper elimination, good thoughts and cheerfulness, calm meditation.
How to Fall Asleep
Sleep can be induced at will by lying on the back, closing the eyes, tensing and relaxing the body, and dismissing all thoughts. Try this until you learn to sleep or dream at will. With closed eyes, visualize a different room from the one in which you are resting, and fall asleep thinking of it. In this manner dreams can be induced.
For Healthy Teeth
Why disobey God’s little laws that govern the body beautiful? You take your lunch, give your lips a hasty napkin rub, and rush out feeling that everything is all right. But what about your teeth—why deny them a cleansing shower bath after they have worked so hard for you? Diseased teeth produce many ills. The Hindu pundits say to rinse your mouth with water ten times after each meal if you have no toothbrush handy.
Healthy Living
Besides exercise, pure air, sunshine, and right eating, the rules for happy, healthy living include the mental habits of heartfelt smiles, creative activity, concentration, good character, and keeping good company. Keep yourself mentally disinfected by the strong faith that nothing can harm you, that you are always protected.