S p i r i t ua l i t y S t u d i e s 3 - 1 S p r i n g 2 0 1 7 5 1 Swami Veda Bharati Combined with these inaccurately chosen emotional states, the general angers about life and people, the self-centeredness leading to individualism to loneliness and thus, produce heart ailments. Further, it is not often recognized that during an episode of angina pectoris and heart attack, half is the actual physical condition but the other half is the anxiety factor. “I am having a heart attack”, “I am going to die”, such fears and anxieties double the strength of a heart attack. Thus, the strength of a heart attack could be reduced by half if the population were trained to calm their anxiety levels by self-monitoring (aatmaavalokana) and self-regulation, self-calming, which is the forte of yoga. Nowadays some practitioners of yoga therapy think only in terms of physical postures, breathing exercises and such. Such postures and breathing exercises are often prescribed like medicines: this posture for this ailment, three times a day. The true therapy is in yama-niyama practices, and in oft ignored system of chitta-pra-saadana (Yoga Sūtra 1: 33), re-training the mind and emotions so that the mind becomes a pleasant, clear and stable place. The directions that a society or a system takes with a particular end-goal in mind, science, replaced emotional purification with “survival of the fittest”, aggression, training to “NO”. Now the same science discovers that the “angry” are more heart-attacked, co-operative communities with altruism have longer life span, than that meditation produces endorphins and holistic behavior, less hostile and aggressive. Thus, the new equation is objective study of symptoms of subjective states or self-preservation shows that it is better attained by not being so self-preserving, employing scientific altruism, merged with meditation together with the reunion of metaphysics and ethics can be called the preventive therapy (Keel et al. 2005). Often a society sets certain goals for itself and starts on its journey but at the end finds itself entirely somewhere else. The modern science stands to support the values that have been established in the urban-industrial civilization – many of those values being destructive of human personality (while many others have been highly beneficial). While the psychologists and sociologists have been extolling the virtues of individualism, there come other findings in sociology and neurology. Many of these findings support the “old” values. For example, one may have some hidden volitional force available within oneself whereby one may delay the onset of a heart attack. A statistically significant number of heart attacks occur on Monday mornings. One explanation for this is that one did not want to spoil everybody’s weekend and waited. We may have greater control over the timing of our deaths, postponing the same until a wedding, a festival, the birth of a grandchild, or whatever, has passed. It is now known that the people in those communities are found to live longer on the average where people’s attitude is of trust towards other members of the community, and a shorter life span is seen where people have an attitude of hostility or suspicion. It is also an established fact now that those with a highly angry temperament and attitudes of hostility suffer more frequent and more severe heart attacks than others. The correlation of eating disorders and anxiety disorders is being fully emphasized in the scientific literature of today. The role of stress producing hormones (better to say it more scientifically, the hormones that are correlates of the presence of stressful feelings), and of the endorphins in relaxation response and other meditative states, need not be elaborated here. The good, nonviolent thoughts, the sentiments of amity, produce endorphins (as seen in the researches on Mindfulness meditations). These together reduce the anxiety and stress level, and cut the frequency and severity of cardiac or autoimmune disorders. These, the new findings in endocrinology, neurology and in other sciences, bring us full circle to reject the “struggle for survival”, “survival of the fittest” model and reinstate the “survival of the amicable and the loving” model (Grewal 2012). Altruistic sentiments, the teachings of the brahmavihārās (maitrī–mettā, karuṇā, muditā, upekṣā), as in Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali (1: 33), though originally taught as principles of spiritual ethics, are now seen also as sources of health. The use of “now” in the last sentence needs to be challenged. The one quarter of Charaka Saṃhitā espouses the same philosophy. The adhis, “mental diseases” like anger and greed, etc., produce vy-adhis (grammatically, variations of adhis). Non-anger, therefore, is not only an injunction in spiritual ethics but the present day scientific findings, supporting the
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