The Way Toward Health - March 16 and 18, 1984

March 16, 1984

Before we can really study the nature of health or illness, we must first understand human consciousness and its relationship with the body.

You know that you have a conscious mind, of course.  You also possess what is often called the subconscious, and this merely consists of feelings, thoughts or experiences that are connected to your conscious mind, but would be considered excess baggage if you had to be aware of them all of the time.  Otherwise they would vie for your attention, and interfere with the present decisions that are so important.

If you tried to hold all of those subconscious memories uppermost in your mind all of the time, then you would literally be unable to think or act in the present moment at all.  You do more or less have a certain access to your own subconscious mind, however.  It is perhaps easier to imagine a continuum of consciousness, for you have a body consciousness also, and that body consciousness is itself made up of the individual consciousness of each molecule that forms all parts of the body itself.

It is sometimes fashionable to say that men and women have conscious minds, subconscious minds, and unconscious minds – but there is no such thing as an unconscious mind.  The body consciousness is highly conscious.  You are simply not usually conscious of it.  Reasoning takes time.  It deals with problem-solving – it forms an hypothesis, and then seeks to prove it by trial and error.

If you had to use that kind of process before you could move a muscle, you would get nowhere at all, of course.  The other portions of your consciousness, then, deal with a kind of automatic thinking, and operate with a kind of knowledge that takes no time in your terms.

You might say that the varying portions of your own consciousness operate at several different speeds.  Translations between one portion of consciousness and another goes on constantly, so that information is translated from one “speed” to another.  Perhaps you can begin to understand, then, that the whole picture of health or illness must be considered from many more viewpoints than you might earlier have supposed.  Many of you have been saturated by conventional, distorted ideas concerning health and illness in general.  You might think, for example, of the body being invaded by viruses, or attacked by a particular disease, and these ideas, then, may make you question.  You might well wonder why the body consciousness does not simply rise up and cast off any threatening diseases: why would the body allow certain cells to go berserk, or outgrow themselves?  The very concept of the immunity system suggests, at least, the disease invader against which the body’s immunity system would or should surely defend itself.

March 18, 1984

You usually think of your conscious mind as your ego.  It is directed toward action in physical life.  Many schools of thought seem to have the curious ideas that the ego is inferior to other portions of the self, or “selfish”, and imagine it to be definitely of a lower quality than the inner self, or the soul.

In the first place, it is really impossible to separate portions of the self, and we make such distinctions only in an effort to explain the many facets of the personality.  It is generally understood, then, that you do have an ego, directed toward exterior activity, and in those terms you also have an inner ego.  It is also conscious, and is the director of all automatic interior activity.

Most people do not realize that they can indeed have access to this inner awareness.  This inner ego or inner self should not be thought of as superior to your ordinary mind.  It should not be thought of, really, as something separate from your ordinary mind.  Your ego and your ordinary consciousness bring into focus all of your physical experiences, and make possible the brilliant preciseness of physical experience.

It is true that physical life represents only one condition of being.  You have other kinds of existence, then.  The conscious mind is one brilliant segment of your larger consciousness, but it is composed of the same universal energy and vitality that composes all consciousness.  There are ways of communicating with the inner ego or inner self, however, and we will discuss some of these very shortly.  It is important, again, to remember that this inner ego or inner self uses a process that is far swifter than reasoning.

When such communications are made, therefore, they often consist of inspiration, intuition, impulses, and deal with feeling far more than with usual logical thinking.