In plain words
It will not drink even a drop of milk. It keeps to its diet with great care. But people scramble after idli and sambar even when they have a fever of 105 degrees. Seeing, hearing, eating, speaking and thinking what is bad spoils the blood and opens the way to a heart attack. In ancient times there were no diseases like cancer, heart attack and blood pressure at all. People lived healthy, sturdy of body and happy.
Today, starting at this age, people fall prey to bad habits such as worry over sense objects, worry over money, worry over the world and worry over family life. Because of loathsome thoughts, it is a shame even to call them human. So diseases, too, keep coming in new forms and afflicting them. Doctors, too, frighten people and make their diseases grow. They bring on diseases that were never there. If they say this ‘may be cancer’, it turns into cancer. Because they say that your heart is a little weak, that fright very soon brings on a heart attack. But you must not be afraid of anything. Winning the grace of God and making your self-confidence firm, you must face every difficulty as a hero, as a brave man.
They say a doctor's house stood right at the main gate of a village. One day the goddess Cholera entered that village. He saw her and asked, ‘How many have you resolved to take away?’ and she answered, ‘Only fifty’, so the story goes. But a hundred villagers died of cholera. As she was leaving the village, the doctor confronted the goddess Cholera: ‘Can you, too, tell lies? You gave me your word you would carry off fifty, and yet you have swallowed a hundred?’ he asked. Her answer to that: ‘I killed only fifty. The other fifty died of fright,’ she said, so the story goes. In just the same way, today diseases grow out of fear itself. The Jñāna of the Ātma alone is the ground for gaining fearlessness. Through it come the fortune of health and the fortune of Ānanda.