within a small time scale. Drink contaminated water on Monday, sick
on Tuesday, dead on Wednesday. Once the link between water and
these diseases was established, we quickly learned through intelligence
to purify the water supply. Rapid connections are relatively easy to
identify and rectify. If you hit your thumb with a hammer, no one is
going to convince you the pain comes from anywhere else. Next time
you'll be more careful.
But what of the diseases that plague us now? Are they not degen
erative and operative over a very long period? And are not both their
avoidance and their cure highly problematic?
We nearly all recognize that there is some connection between the
way we live and such illnesses as cancer, heart disease, and arthritis, yet
since the process of decline is so gradual and the deadly payoff so long
deferred, we find it terribly difficult to make the necessary reforms in
our habits of life, even if, at one level, we are actually longing for them.
Take the case of AIDS. I have treated many AIDS patients in my
medical class right from the beginning of the epidemic, and so I know
the disease and its gradual devastation well. If death supervened the
day following our contracting the virus, there would be no AIDS epi
demic. Everyone would shun risky or dangerous behavior. But be
cause the onset of sickness is five, ten, fifteen years away, the pull of
immediate gratification proves too strong for many people to resist.
We find it very hard to change our patterns of behavior, however self
destructive, because of the very nature of the way mind, senses, or
gans of action, and the external environment work together.
These behavioral ruts seem impossible to jolt ourselves out of, but
as we shall presently see, through the understanding of consciousness
offered by yoga and the self-mastery gained through its practice, a sus
tained, progressive reform and change are achievable.
To state that the hereditary bias of mind and senses works often in
our disfavor is in no way to condemn this miraculous apparatus that
we possess. We must simply come to realize how fast, how powerful,
II K S I Y 1'. N 1; fill