A real incident:

Once a young man came to me and asked me to help him stop smoking.

I asked him how he picked up the habit in the first place.

He said, once he had gone out with a group of friends who were all smokers. He happened to meet his father on the road that day. Seeing him in the group, his father assumed that he too had been smoking. When he returned home, his father yelled at him, and refused to believe him when he said he was not smoking. The boy said that the next day he smoked a whole pack of cigarettes just to spite his father! In that way he gradually got addicted.

When he asked me how to drop it, I told him, ‘Don’t drop it. Go ahead and smoke. But don’t do it to prove anything to anybody. Don’t do it to spite your father. And don’t imagine that you have become mature and independent by smoking.

Every time you pick up a cigarette, do it silently. Be conscious of why you are smoking. Consciously feel the smoke entering your system. Be aware of how you hold the cigarette, how you put it in your mouth. You will realize on your own.’

After just a few days the boy returned to me. He said, ‘Swamiji, I am not able to smoke anymore! Doing it consciously, I started wondering how I could send so much smoke into my system! Also I realized that smoking is not that important to me after all.’ Then he added something which made me very happy. He said, ‘Swamiji, I realize now that I have been abusing my body all these days by pushing smoke into my system.’

There is no need to control the body at all because whatever we try to control will express itself in some other way.

When we become conscious of what we are doing, many things drop on their own. This is the only permanent solution. Of course it may take a few days to awaken the intelligence. During that time, the important thing is, not to lose hope and fall back on the borrowed intelligence that you have picked up from the society, from the moral codes set up by society. Have trust in the natural intelligence of your body, that’s all. There is no need to control the body at all because whatever we try to control will express itself in some other way. It will refuse to be controlled! The only thing needed on our part is awareness in every action that we do and the trust in our own natural intelligence. That itself will break the wall of conditioning that makes us do things unnatural to us and will allow us to live life consciously We have been taught that the center of our intelligence is in our brain.

The human body is a highly evolved distributed system of intelligence beautifully and seamlessly orchestrated.

We think that we control the body through our brain. Science has all along been saying that the brain controls respiration, digestion, blood circulation, and all such activities of the body. Now, cutting-edge research has given rise to a new field called epigenetics. One of the pioneers in this field, Dr. Bruce Lipton , an eminent biologist, has been doing research in the field of epigenetics for over ten years. In his book, ‘The Biology of Belief ’, he states that our brain does not control our body. In fact, there is evidence of intelligence in every cell, even in the cell’s membrane!

Recent research at Sandia National Laboratories, USA, supports cellular intelligence theory. Scientists there studied how cells responded to a harmful substance called an antigen that attacked the cells in the body. They concluded that even the cell membrane had a beautiful and complex structure to fight the antigen, and that the cell membrane was not as simple a structure as earlier believed. Our body is not a simple centralized system of intelligence controlled by the brain. The human body is a highly evolved distributed system of intelligence beautifully and seamlessly orchestrated.

source: Living Enlightenment