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Medicine is something that everyone's vitally interested in. I have anecdotal proof every time I get something. For instance, when I was just in the UK, I was supposed to speak at an event called Rise. It was on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. I didn't speak on Saturday or Sunday; only a little bit on Monday. The last sound that came from my mouth was on Friday night, and the next morning, I couldn't say a word. My voice was locked up. For over two days due to the very kind-hearted nature of devotees, I had a little shelf in my hotel room with no less than twelve different kinds of medicine that were run up. Everybody said, "You take this; it'll knock it out in an hour." Of course, I'm never ever sure—if I take all of them—if it was a combination, or one of the other combinations or permutations, or if it was none at all and I just would have got better myself anyway.
But the idea of medicine—auṣadhi or rasāyana—is very appealing. The root word of medicine, med, is Latin; it means "to take appropriate measures." Everyone feels that if I can just adjust a little bit, if I just have the right kind of "goop," then maybe I'll feel better about myself. Some people take analgesics to the extreme because they feel it's really hard to feel good in this world, so they take chemical substances to feel better all the time. But then that doesn't work out because there's a limit to how much you can take; and then you don't get the same effect, and after a while, you just become addicted to it.
So, this is a conundrum. In the 1980s, there was a famous musician from San Francisco—so I could talk about him—his name was Huey Lewis. Huey wrote some famous songs. We met Huey once while we were waiting in line for an airplane. Unfortunately, he got a disease where he couldn't hear properly, so he can't sing anymore. But in his day, he wrote many hit songs, and one of them was entitled, "I Need a New Drug." In the song, the lyrics bemoan the fact that there are all these different kinds of cures and drugs—mostly drugs that have severe side effects. The kinds of advertisements we see for pharmaceuticals these days, even though there are billions of dollars put into the research, always have a disclaimer and a warning at the end. In fact, if it's a 60-second advertisement, 10 seconds talks about how good you're going to look after you take this, and the next 50 seconds is about how you might have bleeding ulcers from it and it could cause death.
This is a problem. 'Duḥkhauṣadham tad api duḥkham atad-dhiyāham.' Prahlāda Mahārāja says the medicine you get here in the material world is often worse than the disease itself. But in taking the rasāyana-kathā—the topics about Kṛṣṇa—into the ear, it very gently enters the heart.
satāṁ prasaṅgām mama vīrya-saṁvido
bhavanti hṛt-karṇa-rasāyanāḥ kathāḥ
Hṛt means the heart and karṇa means the ear. So you take the medicine here (the ear) and it ends up here (the heart). Taj-joṣaṇād āśv apavarga-vartmani—this means that very quickly, you're going to be on a different path in life.
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To connect with His Grace Vaiśeṣika Dāsa, please visit https://www.fanthespark.com/next-steps/ask-vaisesika-dasa/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=video&utm_campaign=launch2025
https://vaisesikadasayatra.blogspot.com/
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https://iskconsv.com/book-store/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=video&utm_campaign=launch2025
https://www.bbtacademic.com/books/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=video&utm_campaign=launch2025
https://thefourquestionsbook.com/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=video&utm_campaign=launch2025
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