The Way Toward Health - March 21 and 23, 1984

March 21, 1984

Those who look upon physical life as inferior to some other more perfect spiritual existence do a great injustice to physical existence in general.  Physical life is everywhere filled with the universal energy that is its source, so it can hardly be inferior to it’s own composition.

Again, corporeal reality is a brilliant segment of existence.  It cannot be inferior to existence.  It is because you so often view your world through a system of highly limited beliefs that you so often misread the implications of temporal life.

Such beliefs serve to limit your comprehension, until it seems often that physical life consists of a frantic struggle for survival at every level of consciousness.  Such ideas certainty do not foster feelings of security, health, or well-being, and they distort the nature of your physical environment.

That environment is not something separate from yourself, for you to control.  Instead, you and the environment support, strengthen, and fortify each other in ways that often escape you.  All portions of the environment contain their own kinds of consciousness.  They are aware of their own parts in the body of the world, so to speak, and they are aware not only of their own conditions, but of their relationships to all other portions of the world.  They add to the world’s health, in other words, and your own vitality – and that of your environment – are everywhere interrelated.

Chapter 4: The Broken-Hearted, The Heartless and Medical Technology

March 23, 1984

Many psychiatrists and psychologists now realize that a disturbed client cannot be helped sufficiently unless the individual is considered along with his or her relationship to the family unit.

The same idea really applies to physical illness as well.  It is possible, however, to carry this idea even further, so that a person in poor health should be seen by the physician in relationship to the family, and also in relationship to the environment.  Old-time family doctors understood the patient’s sensitivity to family members and to the environment, of course, and they often felt a lively sympathy and understanding that the practitioners of modern medicine often seem to have forgotten.

I am speaking of a deeper relationship to the environment, however, and of the environment’s symbolic as well as practical aspects in relationship to health and illness.  Your ideas about your own body, your mind, the universe and your part in it, and your relationship to family, friends, and environment are all connected to your state of health, to your sense of well-being, or your feelings of dis-ease.

In the next chapter let us look more specifically at the importance of symbolism in your mind, your body, and your environment.

Modern medical science largely considers the human body to be a kind of mechanical model, a sort of vehicle like a car that needs to be checked by a garage every so often.

As an automobile is put together at an assembly line, so the body is simply seen as a very efficient machine put together in nature’s “factory”.  If all the parts are in their proper places, and functioning smoothly, then the machine should give as excellent service as any well-running automobile – or so it seems.

All of the automobile’s parts, however, are alone responsible for its operation as long as it has a responsible driver.  There are, however, hidden relationships that exist between various parts of the body – and the parts themselves are hardly mechanical.  They change in every moment.

The heart is often described as a pump.  With the latest developments in medical technology, there are all kinds of heart operations that can be performed, even the use of heart transplants.  In many cases, even when hearts are repaired through medical technology, the same trouble reoccurs at a later date, or the patient recovers only to fall prey to a different, nearly fatal or fatal, disease.  This is not always the case, by any means, but when such a person does recover fully, and maintains good health, it is because beliefs, attitudes, and feelings have changed for the better, and because the person “has a heart” again, in other words, because the patient himself has regained the will to live.

Many people who have heart trouble feel that they have “lost the heart” for life.  They may feel broken-hearted for any of many reasons.  They may feel heartless, or imagine themselves to be so cold-hearted that they punish themselves literally by trying to lose their heart.

With many people having such difficulties, the addition of love in the environment may work far better than any heart operation.  A new pet given to a bereaved individual has saved more people from needing heart operations than any physician.  In other words, “a love transplant” in the environment may work far better overall than a heart-transplant operation, or a bypass, or whatever; in such ways the heart is allowed to heal itself.