Four years ago I, a practicing physician and cardiologist, was into heavy gymming. It was my passion to have a muscular physique. I had a young trainer who was a terror in the gym and used to make us work out beyond our tolerance levels. One day I was almost done with my workout when the trainer came to me and asked me to check a person who was feeling uneasy after his workout. The trainer told me that he had made him do a lot of abdominal exercises which he normally didn’t do.
The gentleman was in his 40s. On checking I observed that his extremities were cold and pulse was feeble. An exercising body will always be warm and this was contrary. So I told the trainer that it’s not any kind of strain or gas and he needs to take an urgent ECG.
The two of us got him inside my car and he was taken to my hospital and an ECG was done. It was a frank myocardial infarction (HEART ATTACK). He was immediately rushed to a tertiary care centre where he underwent an angiogram and angioplasty after which he survived.
This gentleman after recovery came and thanked me a lot and he told me that I was a GOD SENT ANGEL who saved him.
WOW! I thought. It was a great a feeling having saved somebody outside my hospital hours. I would often narrate this incident to whoever would care to listen to me, feeling great about myself. I believed it was me who saved him and that had I not been at the gym that morning, he would have collapsed.
I am sure many of my fellow cardiologists feel this way every time a patient walks in with a critical condition and walks out of the ICU hale and hearty. When they thank you as if you were God, some even say that you are God to them, it gives a great high.
A year after this incident I met Yogi Ashwini ji and started with practice of Sanatan Kriya under his guidance. Within months, I started getting spiritual experiences, things I could not explain as a scientist or a medical practitioner. I saw a patient, whom I personally knew to have 20 year migraine history, walk out of a havan at Dhyan Ashram, with the migraine disappearing for good. Seeing all this, I understood there was something beyond and started engaging myself in seva and sadhna, to be able to access it. People around me started telling me that I was a changed person, I looked younger by 15 years, my face glowed and I was more calm and stable than ever.
Coming back to the gentleman’s case (the one with a heart attack in the gym), I realised that I was the biggest fool to think that I saved him. When an almost dying patient survives, you will hear the doctor say “I SAVED HIM”. But if the patient is unable to make it, you will never hear him say “I KILLED THE PATIENT”. The fact is—we cannot save anybody. We are just instruments discharging our karma. The result is never in our hand. Result is with the divine. It is avidya that leads us to think that we can control things. We have no control on our own breath, then how will we control somebody else? The gentleman was destined to suffer a heart attack and live and I was just an instrument in his journey. That’s it!
To explain it like a surgeon, in surgery tools are what come in contact with the patient’s tissues. But if the tools start thinking that they are responsible for success of surgery, it would be foolish. Tools are instruments at the hand of surgeon, similarly the surgeon or doctor is an instrument at the hand of God.
So let’s not be fools and self inflate our ego by the positive things that we become instruments of.
In the GITA it’s clearly said:
Karmanye Vaadhikaaraste Maphaleshu Kadachana
This means we just do our karma and result is with divine.
Auhtor: Dr Prasan Prabhakar
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