FEATURE

The real silent killer-your own mind

Prof. B. M. Hegde,

hegdebm@gmail.com

“Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable.

Be honest and frank anyway.”

Kent M. Keith

Our medical scare system tries to rope you into their basket by frightening you with words like silent killer high blood pressure, silent killer diabetes, etc. almost daily. The truth is otherwise. The silent killer is your own mind. Where is the mind? All over you, indeed! Mind is your own consciousness.

Consciousness is fundamental and all else is derived from that was the opinion of one of the great brains in physics, Max Planck. Human body, is therefore, the extension of or the other name for the human mind. "Cogito ergo sum"- "I think, therefore, I am" was the right proclamation of Rene Descartes back in the eighteenth century, although he meant it for the opposite reasons to divide the human body into two parts-the thinking part (res Cogitans) and the other part (res Extensa ). That is where our curse began of reductionism-science started looking at bits and pieces to understand the whole. With all the wonderful advances in modern day physics of (w) holism medical science still looks at bits and pieces, becoming a bane to society.

Charles Sherrington, a Nobel winning physiologist, became the professor of physiology in 1899 when he admitted that "positive sciences do not and cannot answer the question "why"? That was precisely how silent killer hypertension etc. originated. Today with the understanding of (w) holism we are able to ask the pertinent question as the why does the blood pressure go up in the first place? Here

I am not referring to the disease secondary hypertension where we know the cause for elevated BP. I am talking of what modern medicine calls primary or essential hypertension. Similarly we now know why the sugar or cholesterol goes up, again excluding primary type I diabetes.

Now the reader will have to understand elementary human physiology. We have a healer inside us which is the most powerful healer and the best doctor in the world called the immune system. This has to be kept in its best mode all the time. While we were hunger gatherers in the forest our only cause of premature death was predation. Nature then endowed us with a very intelligent extra system called the autonomic nervous system which would keep us going when we are seriously injured as we did not have the intensive care units then. What the intensive care unit does was being done by the autonomic nervous system in a better way. If could close up cut vessels, make the blood clot there, get our blood pressure up when it goes down and see that the vital organs get enough blood by redistributing blood more efficiently. In Case we see a tiger the same system would make us capable of running away from danger by elevating our blood pressure, sugar, cholesterol and other sterols as life saving measure.

Now that we are in a (un) civilized world with our rat race to make money and get positions we have to deal with human tigers every day. Many a time these tigers live with us as our near and dear ones. We are yet to evolve to get rid of the autonomic nervous system and that might take millions of years of evolution. As of now we get the flight-fight-fright reaction of the forest tiger sighting with the same biochemical reactions and consequent altered blood parameters and BP rise. While in the forest the elevated levels used to be burnt up to give us energy to run. Today we cannot run away from the human tigers. On a chronic basis we accumulate these elevated blood parameters and become hypertensive, diabetic, and what have you. So it is not the tail, elevated blood pressure, which wags its tail silent killer. It is the abnormal consciousness of fear, fight reaction of human mind that does the trick. Unfortunately in reductionist medicine we do not look at the whole and try to deal with the end result, may be BP going up or cholesterol.

Cancer is another killer. .Cancer cells are normal body cells that fail to die on their appointed time by apoptosis (normal programmed cell death) and mutate to become rogue cells. They are bunch of jobless, aimless, wandering cells that might eventually become clinical cancers-weeks, months or even years after they get formed in the first place. So if we can screen for rogue cells all of us will have many potential cancers inside us every day. Why do these cells grow to be cancers in some but die away in the majority? Here again the culprit is our mind. Negative thoughts like hatred, jealousy, and anger and pride help the cells to grow to be cancers while love, camaraderie, sharing and caring (otherwise called spirituality) would try and destroy those rogue cells. Abnormal over eating is another trigger for cancer cells to grow. Frugal diet might not encourage them.

Modern medicine also is now recognising hostility as the main culprit in heart attacks and anger in haemorrhagic strokes. Depression with frustration does bring on cancer and all other killer diseases in their wake. We all know how to keep our body clean but many of us do not know how to keep our minds clean and devoid of all the negative dangerous thoughts. Every thought gets translated into a powerful chemical in the body to do all the damage or good depending on the thought being either negative or positive. How then do we do control our thoughts?

That is the job of the true educational system which, unfortunately we had completely destroyed in India thanks to our colonial masters who wanted to keep us under their thumb. Every new born child is a genius and a Godly person only to be converted into an idiot and a devil in the present schooling system where negative thoughts and competition are taught. From day one in school those innocent compassionate children are graded with ranks and marks and are made to be aware of their individuality. The altruistic "we" concept gets transformed into the dangerous egoistic "I"concept. That I leads to illness in later life while e WE would have encouraged wellness.

cation must make Healthy minds and not just wealthy careers. Healthy mind is defined as that which has "enthusiasm to work and enthusiasm to be compassionate". Indian Sanathana dharma, which goes back to times out of mind, has had all those beautiful ideas but was all but removed from the educational arena. We still follow the British model in our schools and colleges while Britain is slowly taking ideas from our ancient system. Schools in London are trying to teach Sanskrit, a fully developed ancient language of India. Let us be human and humane in our social intercourse for us to develop a healthy mind which is the best vaccination for all killer diseases and the mercury containing chemical vaccines that we load our children with. Another one of those reductionist ideas. Even Adam Smith had defined education as that rocks which trains a man to act "justly,

Skilfully and magnanimously under all circumstances of war and peace". This world runs through your consciousness. Matter comes into existence when observed by you. This new concept is called bio centrism, a brain child of that great thinker physician Robert Lanza.

“The truth can only offend those who live a lie!”                 

  -    Anon