Illness can come in a number of ways: generally through accidents, sometimes, through karma, and through the path. It’s very difficult to deal with. We have this body and we don’t realize the wider implications of it. We are locked in the five senses, and so, we don’t see what goes on beyond them. And therefore, it’s like there’s just this body, and if it’s sick, it’s a disaster, it’s terrible, it makes it really hard to do things, and it’s like your whole word is just this pain and this illness, and things that you used to do you can’t do anymore.

So, much depends upon how we face it, because it’s there. We can treat it as best as we can. Sometimes then, we have to let time take its course to repair it. But our attitude towards it is very important. And this is easy to say and not easy to do, but, we have to learn to suffer. It’s part of life. No one will go through this life without escaping suffering.

There’s a reason why illness is part of the path; because, we do our best, and in spite of it, we get knocked back by illness. And even being aware is painful, because you just become aware of this pain in the body. And it’s in those low states that we see other egos that we wouldn’t have otherwise seen, if we’d have been fit and well. And it’s in those states that we can be tested on our faith and our endurance. Because it’s one thing to keep going when everything is going well, and it’s another thing to keep going when things are really, really difficult, when you can hardly move, and it goes on and on, and on and on.

With illness, we see emotions; we’re tested on our actions. If we didn’t have this, we would never be tested on those things; we would never see those egos. To go through the path, we have to troll up everything that’s in our subconscious – everything has to come up. And a lot of it is on the dark side of the psychological moon; it’s stuff that’s hidden from view - it doesn’t normally come out in everyday life. And illnesses are one of the things that bring out the things on the dark side. That’s on the path and if we endure, if we stick to our purpose, then we pass that test – we’ve been seen to be trustworthy.

But there is also illness that comes from karma. Everything that we do has an effect, whether we see it or not. We see most of the effects here, the three-dimensional effects, but what we don’t see are these karmic cause and effect laws, which take place in the higher dimensions. We think that we live just this one life, but we don’t. We live a series of lives. And the karma is not just upon a single life. We don’t start usually with a clean slate - we have things from the past. Everything has to be paid for, even having a physical body has to be paid for. So if you’ve paid all of your karma, you still have to make payments every now and again for just having a physical body – often that’s illness, so you go through a little illness, and it’s back to work, you get better and all that. Everything costs; nothing is really free.

And we have this set of accounts over there. You know, it’s like money really. We got the payments that are due to us, and payments that we have to make, and they are to do with our actions. If we can progress up to the end of the first mountain, then ordinary karma really, we can pay off by then. And some can even be forgiven, because it’s negotiable. If we have deeds, we can pay off karma. Illnesses can disappear. You know, I’ve gone through so many illnesses, that when I went to a doctor, she tried to persuade me to write a book on overcoming serious illness! And she was just going on and on about this, even as I was going out of the door, and I was saying, “No, no, I’m writing a different book”! I’ve gone through so much in terms of illnesses, all kinds. If we can endure them, then we pay off the things that we need to pay, or, we go through the test that we need to go through.

So, illnesses are not just physical things. You know it’s really amazing that an illness is under such control from the other side. I’ve seen how when there’s been a certain point on the path, where an illness is part of it, exactly at that time that that part of the path started, the illness arrived. Exactly when I overcame something, that illness vanished; a big illness and it just comes and goes, because they’re manipulating things from over there. We can’t see the level at which things are being controlled here, but they are, from the other side.

And all of our actions are being put in the book. So somewhere there’s a book of [a student] with an illness in it, which came up at a certain time. And then you have to deal with it. Other illnesses we can provoke in ourselves. You know, if we go and drink a bottle of arsenic, well that’s not karma, we have no one to blame but ourselves, obviously. Then there’s katancy, which is a heavy karma, and that gets paid with very serious illness, or, we pay it with the work. So that goes on even if other karma is paid. So, there are different kinds of karma.

But, if we have an illness, then we need to do our best to treat it – whatever we can to treat it, and then, endure whatever we need to endure, because that’s what life has brought us. And we can either endure it in misery, psychological misery, or, we can endure it in the best possible state that we can be in. And as I said, it’s easy to say this, but difficult to do. But, when you realize that everything has a cause, and that the causes extend beyond this world, then you put that illness into its context. And if you take up the path, then an illness won’t stop you.