Tao Te Ching
Richard Dadd
Health
Although the most obvious foundation for success, happiness, and the ability to accomplish almost anything; we so easily forget, ignore, and underestimate the importance of health. When problems make it impossible to ignore, it’s often too late. Like most of what’s valuable in life, good health develops tiny step by tiny step over a long period of time. Sudden bursts of enthusiasm followed quickly by neglect doesn’t help. The influence of unethical advertising on unthinking minds also creates huge health problems. The power of hypnotic advertising dramatically demonstrates itself in statistics showing what an alarming number of people still smoke cigarettes. The prevalence and overuse of drugs, alcohol, sugar, refined flour, soft drinks, chemically grown food, junk food, and food additives add to this list with cigarettes. Experimental placebo effect results also point to an overlooked but powerful influence on health. The Seventh Day Adventist approach make take this concept too far, but anyone interested in better health could learn a great deal from looking into how their attitudes, expectations, and opinions effect their health.
Quotes (124)
“When the moon begins to grow, blood and breath are at their fullest, tendons and muscles are at their strongest. When the moon is completely empty, tendons and muscles are at their weakest.”
“The whole of my teaching is simply making people recognize that what they mistake for conditions of health are really conditions of disease, that their virtues are really vices, that what they prize is really worthless.”
“The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, nor to worry about the future, but to live the present moment wisely and earnestly.”
“If you drink and eat immoderately and treat the body carelessly and cheaply, then illnesses will kill you.”
“For men to get all they wish is not the better thing; it is disease that makes health pleasant; evil, good; hunger, surfeit; toil rest”
“Birth and death, profit and loss, success and failure, health and sickness – the Master maintains his balance... he lets things go through their changes and stays focused on what is real.”
“Wellbeing is attained little and little, and nevertheless is no little thing itself.”
“The most High hath created medicines out of the earth, and a wise man will not abhor them... By these he shall cure and shall allay their pains, and of these the apothecary shall make sweet confections and ointments of health”
“Though bitter, good medicine cures illness. Though it may hurt, loyal criticism will have beneficial effects.”
“Fiery fevers quit your body no quicker if you’re clothed in expensive, embroidered clothes than if you’re only wearing a common garment.”
“After a long period of disuse, the spark of life dries up and vision collapses—a person can only feel their way around like a blind person using a staff.”
“Sickness may challenge your body. But are you merely your body? Lameness may impede your legs but you are not merely your legs. Your will is bigger than your legs.”
“Would a sick person be helped only by reading a medical book?”
“May I be the doctor and the medicine
And may I be the nurse
For all sick beings in the world
Until everyone is healed.”
“Realizing that fully-convinced 'knowing' creates suffering and delusion begins the healing.”
“Donning the impregnable armor of patience, I embarked in the vessel of my mind and confidently took possession of my body.”
“There is perfect harmony in realizing the nature of every experience but only with the vision of ultimate reality can you drink the elixir of immortality and be truly alive.”
“May they realize that the real nature of poison is the essential medicine.”
“For talk of medicine and surgery;
For he was was grounded in astronomy...
Ready he was with his apothecaries,
To send him drugs and all electuaries...
And yet he was right chary of expense;
He kept the gold he gained from pestilence.”
“Always panting for riches and never giving our souls or our bodies a moment's peace, we are thrown into a continuous state of misery and anxiety.”
“Iron rusts from disuse, stagnant water loses its purity, and in cold weather becomes frozen; even so does inaction sap the vigors of the mind”
“The body is not a thing apart but a house for the soul. The physician, therefore, must treat the two simultaneously and strive at bringing them into harmony which is the only true health.”
“Medicine is not merely a science but an art. The character of the physician may act more powerfully upon the patient than the drugs used.”
“The art of letting things alone… Remedies often make diseases worse… It takes a wise doctor to know when not to prescribe, and at times the greater skill consists in not applying remedies.”
“While deluded, one is used by this body; when enlightened, one uses this body.”
“Sleep is an infallible miracle drug but perfect sleep requires a peaceful conscience. First rest your mind, then your eyes keeping your health by dividing half your time to rest, have to activity.”
“Bodies act as though there were no souls and souls as if there were no bodies, and both act as if each influence the other.”
“Good artisans concentrating on one specialty, refuse to dissipate their mental energy. This gives strength to their bodies and they often live to be 70 or 80, healthy and skillful as in their youth”
“Drinking and gambling are curses that lessen any man’s mind and strength and waste his substance.”
“Sickness is a sort of early old age; it teaches us a diffidence in our earthly state.”
“Doctors put drugs of which they know little into bodies of which they know less for diseases of which they know nothing at all.”
“The art of medicine consists of amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.”
“The greater part of our ills are of our own making... Man, in the state of nature, can have no need of remedies, and still less of physicians”
“If a man thinks about his physical or moral state, he usually discover that he is ill.”
“The most essential factor in happiness is health... the greatest of follies is to sacrifice health for any other kind of happiness”
“We rest—A dream has power to poison sleep;
We rise—One wandering thought pollutes the day;
We feel, conceive or reason, laugh, or weep;
Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away
”
“To rise at six, to sleep at ten,
To sup at ten, to dine at six,
Make a man live for ten times ten.”
“our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment...Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man... hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.”
“If life and the soul are sacred, the human body is sacred;
And in man or woman, a clean strong firmfibred body is beautiful as the most beautiful face...
Who degrades or defiles the living human body is cursed”
“illness of any sort was considered in Erewhon to be highly criminal and immoral; and that I was liable, even for catching cold, to be held up before the magistrates and imprisoned for a considerable period.”
“The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want, drink what you don't like, and do what you would rather not.”
“Disease is the tax which the soul pays for the body, as the tenant pays house-rent for the use of the house.”
“The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes.”
“The doctor of the future will give no medicine, but will instruct his patient in the care of the human frame, in diet and in the cause and prevention of disease.”
“It is easy, as we can see, for a barbarian to be healthy; for a civilized man, the task is a hard one.”
“There is a whole round of maladies that can be cured by a new thought, a new sensation, new surroundings. A little excitement or a new experience often clears the cobwebs from the brain.”
“Man should not strive to eliminate his complexes, but to get in accord with them; they are legitimately what directs his contact in the world.”
“They came and gave an herb to me, the day-break star herb, the herb of understanding... all creatures saw it and in no place was there any more darkness”
“For every malady that doctors cure with medicine, they produce ten in healthy people by inoculating them with that virus which is a thousand time more powerful than any microbe: the idea that one is ill.”
“To believe in medicine would be the height of folly, if not to believe in it were not a greater folly still.”
“In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.”
“I had to do certain yoga exercises in order to keep my emotions in check. But since it was my purpose to know what was going on within myself, I would do these exercises only until I had calmed myself enough to resume my work with the unconscious.”
“One always has the idea of a stupid man as perfectly healthy and ordinary, and of illness as making one refined and clever and unusual.”
“I didn't know that being religious meant health and cheerfulness.”
“Modern medicine lays greater stress on cure than on prevention, i.e., endeavors to protect against unnatural conditions rather than to change the social environment.”
“Buddhist doctrine is a medicine solely directed to save the individual from burning, not in a future hell, but in the present fire of his own thirst... Buddhists never directly attempted to organize human society, thinking the wise man should leave the dark state of life in the world”
“Song brings us health, and color will heal wounds…therefore, I advise to keep more flowers. Plants wisely selected according to color are healing.”
“I stop drinking and take cod liver oil to lengthen my life... principally because of those who are my enemies—so that some regret may remain in their too perfect world... to make the so-called gentlemen uncomfortable for a few more days.”
“when you've struck the right vein, tiredness goes. It must be an effort, thinking wrong.”
“your body is the harp of your soul... [you] bring forth sweet music from it or confused sounds.”
“Disease served as your great enemy and also your greatest friend, the only one that stayed loyal to the death. It never permitted you to relax or remain where you were, never allowed you to declare: I am fine here, I shall go no further.”
“I would make health a required course in every year of schooling... have our physicians [teach] preventative health in the classroom... form follows function, functin follows desire, and desire is the essence of life.”
“I would ask our doctors to devote as much time to preventive as to curative procedures, and to put less curative reliance upon drugs and more upon natural cures by diet and physiotherapy”
“Freud's fanciful pseudo-explanations (precisely because they are brilliant) perform a disservice. (Now any ass has these pictures available to use in 'explaining' symptoms of an illness.)”
“The great majority of us are required to live a life of constant duplicity. Your health is bound to be affected if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, if you grovel before what you dislike, and rejoice at what brings you nothing but misfortune.”
“Uniformity and freedom are incompatible. Uniformity and mental health are incompatible too. . . . Man is not made to be an automaton, and if he becomes one, the basis for mental health is destroyed.”
“What’s in a name? — practically everything… We give the stuff good names—moksha-medicine, reality revealer, a truth-and-beauty pill. And we know, by direct experience, that the good names are deserved.”
“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
“You are looking for a cure while I am concerned with prevention. As long as their are causes, there must also be results... If you want peace and harmony in the world, you must first have peace and harmony in your hearts and minds.”
“A very large percentage of illnesses are the expressions of inadequate responses to the environment.”
“The anesthetic made possible fiendish human torments that transferred all the human pain to convalescence. With anesthetics, what was really new was convalescence.”
“Malady always arises from what is unnatural. Mental disharmony with nature hardens the mind, while unnatural physical care stiffens the body. To recover, one must lighten the heart and live easily—without strain... do nothing and simply return to the natural body of an infant, then your health will improve.”
“In the same sense that our judicial system presumes us to be innocent until proved guilty, a medical-care system may work best if it starts with the presumption that most people are healthy.”
“Sickness comes when people draw apart from nature. The severity of the disease is directly proportional to the degree of separation.”
“Doctors take care of sick people; healthy people are cared for by nature... The prime consideration is for a person to develop the sensitivity to allow the body to choose food by itself.”
“Dying is easy. Living is a pain in the butt. It's like an athletic event. You've got to train for it. You've got to eat right. You've got to exercise. Your health account, your bank account, they're the same thing. The more you put in, the more you can take out. Exercise is king and nutrition is queen: together, you have a kingdom.”
“The most important thing in your life is your health… you can have all the education and you can have millions of dollars in the bank, but if you've got headaches every day, if you're fat and you are out of shape - what good is your money?”
“If you get the message, hang up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does not sit with eye permanently glued to the microscope, he goes away and works on what he has seen.”
“Psychotherapy and liberation are completed in the moment when shame and guilt collapse, when the organism is no longer compelled to defend itself for being an oganism.”
“symptoms... say, anxiety, migraine, depression, alcoholism, phobia, or lethargy enable the person to control others without accepting responsibility for doing so.”
“What is sickness? What is health? Both are distractions. Put them both aside and go forward.”
“I'll champion indiscrimination till doomsday, on the ground that it leads to health and a kind of very real, enviable happiness. Followed purely, it's the way of the Tao, and undoubtedly the highest way.”
“Institutions are not pretty. Show me a pretty government. Healing is wonderful, but the American Medical Association? Learning is wonderful, but universities? The same is true for religion... religion is institutionalized spirituality.”
“Any part of the body can be used to treat the rest of the body, and that the topology of the points in each of these 'micro-acupuncture systems' was a holographic repetition of the whole body's anatomy.”
“Modern medicine is a negation of health. It isn’t organized to serve human health, but only itself, as an institution. It makes more people sick than it heals.”
“Keeping your body healthy is an expression of gratitude to the whole cosmos - the trees, the clouds, everything.”
“For every person who needs mental health care to be able to receive it close to his home, and to remove the stigma from mental health care so people will be free to talk about it and seek help. It's been taboo for so long to admit you had a mental health problem.”
“I heard a definition once: ‘Happiness is health and a short memory!’ I wish I'd invented it, because it is very true.”
“If someone thinks he doesn't depend on others, he is like a sick person who thinks he doesn't have to go to a doctor because he can cure himself with poison, or like a poor person who says he doesn't have to depend on richer people even though he has an empty wallet.”
“Physicians treat the illness, not the person... But healing requires no specialists, only those who can come to us out of their own center, and who are prepared to be healed themselves.”
“The path to true happiness is the same whoever, whenever, or wherever you are.”
“People are fed by the food industry, which pays no attention to health, and are treated by the health industry, which pays no attention to food.”
“Man sacrifices his health in order to make money Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health.”
“People like sickness because it gives them a break. The ultimate authority is that you're sick, and nobody can say, 'You can't do that.' If you're an employee, your first and best excuse is that you're sick—which is not a good idea. Don't buy it.”
“Because of the way we are born and brought up, most people squander away the health of their body and a lot of people squander away the health of their mind”
“Of course it’s also a lot easier to slap a health claim on a box of sugary cereal than on a potato or carrot, with the perverse result that the most healthful foods in the supermarket sit there quietly in the produce section, silent as stroke victims, while a few aisles over, the Cocoa Puffs and Lucky Charms are screaming about their newfound whole-grain goodness.”
“Fast food has hastened the malling of our landscape, widened the chasm between rich and poor, fueled an epidemic of obesity, and propelled American cultural imperialism abroad.”
“It is a strange world that Industry has made. Kind of a seething toxic harbor, opening out on a blue unspoiled ocean. Most people are swimming in it... If people like me would just keep our mouths shut, people like him would never suspect why they got cancer. They’d chalk it up to God or probability. They wouldn't die with hearts full of venom.”
“An estimated 11 million people in Africa will die of famine this year. Approximately, two-thirds of all adults and one-third of all children in the United States are now overweight; of these, nearly 50% of adults and 16% of children are obese. Though, we live in an age of globalization, our world still has incredible contradictions.”
“The problem is when that fun stuff becomes the habit—and I think that's what's happened in our culture—fast food has become the everyday meal. It's not enough just to limit ads for foods that aren't healthy. It's also going to be critical to increase marketing for foods that are healthy.”
“a cigarette robs 10 minutes from your lifespan, but.. withdraws all that time in bulk as you near the end of your life… a smartphone steals your time in the present moment, by degrees… you look up and you're 85 years old.”
“Diabetes and high sugar levels kill up to 3.5 million people annually, while air pollution kills about 7 million people. So why do we fear terrorism more than sugar, and why do governments lose elections because of sporadic terror attacks but not because of chronic air pollution?”
“In 2012 about 56 million people died throughout the world; 620,000 of them died due to human violence (war killed 120,000 people, and crime killed another 500,000). In contrast, 800,000 committed suicide, and 1.5 million died of diabetes. Sugar is now more dangerous than gunpowder.”
“Drinking lots of Coca-Cola will not make you young, will not make you healthy, and will not make you athletic – rather, it increases your chances of suffering from obesity and diabetes. Yet for decades Coca-Cola has invested billions of dollars in linking itself to youth, health and sports – and billions of humans subconsciously believe in this linkage.”
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