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Esoteric Healing - Chapter I - The Psychological Causes of Disease
A. The Diseases of Mystics However, the disciple is seldom tubercular (except when karmatically conditioned), nor is he prone to succumb to the social diseases except as they may affect him physically through his sacrificial life of service. Contagion can affect him but not seriously so. Cancer may claim him as a victim, but he is more liable to succumb to heart complaints, and to nervous trouble of some kind or another. The straight mystic succumbs more to purely psychological situations connected with the integrated personality, and therefore incident to his being focused largely on the astral plane. The disciple is more prone to mental difficulties and to those complaints which are concerned with energy and are due to fusion - either completed or in process - of soul and personality. The first cause which I listed earlier in this treatise was summed up in the statement that disease is the result of the blocking of the free life and the inpouring energy of the soul. This blockage is brought about by the mystic when he succumbs to his own thought-forms, created constantly in response to his mounting aspiration. These become barriers between him and the free life of the soul and block his contact and the consequent resulting inflow of soul energy. The disciple reverses the entire situation and falls a victim (prior to the third initiation) to the terrific inflow of soul energy - the energy of the second aspect - coming to him from: [116] His own soul, with which center of energy fusion is rapidly taking place. His group or the Ashram with which he, as an accepted disciple, is affiliated. His Master, with Whom he has spiritual relation and to Whose vibratory influence he is ever susceptible. The Hierarchy, the energy of which can reach him through the medium of all the three above factors. All these streams of energy have a definite effect upon the centers of the disciple, according to his ray and his specific polarization in this incarnation. As each center is related to one or other of the glands, and these in their turn condition the blood stream, and also have a specific effect upon the organic structure within the range of their vibratory influence (i.e. the stomach, close to the solar plexus, and the heart, close to the heart center, etc.), you will see how it is possible that the major diseases from which a disciple can suffer (which are unique and confined primarily to advanced humanity) will be the result of over-stimulation or the inflow of energy to one particular center, producing excessive and localized trouble. To these conditions the mystic is not so prone unless he is rapidly becoming the practical mystic or occultist. This is a definite transitional cycle between the mystical attitude and that more definite position which the occultist assumes. I shall not therefore deal with the diseases to which mystics fall heir, except that I would like to point out one interesting fact: The mystic is ever conscious of duality. He is the seeker in search of light, of the soul, of the beloved, of that higher something which he senses as existing and as that which can be found. He strives after recognition of and by the divine; he is the follower of the [117] vision, a disciple of the Christ, and this conditions his thinking and his aspiration. He is a devotee and one who loves the apparently unattainable - the Other than himself. Only when he becomes the occultist does the mystic learn that all the time the magnet which attracted him, and the dualism which colored his life and thoughts and which gave motive to all he sought to do, was his true self, the one Reality. He recognizes then that assimilation into and identification with that one reality enables duality to be transmuted into unity and the sense of search to be transformed into the effort to become what he essentially is - a Son of God, one with all Sons of God. Having accomplished that, he finds himself one with the One in Whom we live and move and have our being. Next, I would point out that the lowest expression of the mystical condition, and one with which we are becoming increasingly familiar, is that which is called a "split personality"; when this condition is present, the personal lower self expresses itself through a basic condition of duality and two persons express themselves, apparently, instead of the integrated personality-soul. This necessarily creates a dangerous psychological condition and one which warrants trained scientific handling. That is largely lacking at this time, as so few trained psychologists and psychiatrists recognize the fact of the soul. I mention this as it is of value today, and will be increasingly so in the later years when it will be necessary to trace and comprehend the analogies existing in the human consciousness to great unexplored areas of awareness. The split personality and the mystic are two aspects of one whole - the aspect which is right, and along the line of high spiritual unfoldment, and the aspect which is a reflection and a distortion of that grade of development which precedes that of trained occultist. There are many conditions prevalent in humanity [118] at this time which can be subjected to the same reasoning, and one of the modes of healing which will be worked out later is the discovery of the higher correspondences to the lower difficulties and diseases, and the recognition that they are but distortions of a great reality. This leads to the transference of the attention of the one under the care of the healer to that recognized higher aspect. The whole Science of Integration is involved in this matter. This science, if properly understood, will open up an entirely new field of psychological approach to disease, whether physiological or nervous. A small beginning has already been made along this line by spiritually minded psychologists and educators. The system of helping people psychologically is definitely along these new lines, and might be expressed as follows: the average psychologist employs the method (when dealing with nervous cases, with those on the borderland, and with neurotically inclined people) of discovering the deep seated complexes, the scars, the ancient shocks or the fears which lie behind the experience of the present and which have made the man what he is today. These conditioning factors can usually be traced back to the subconscious by the process of unearthing the past, of taking into consideration the present environment, of reckoning with heredity, and of studying the effects of education - either academic or based upon life itself. Then the factor which has been a major handicap, and which has turned the man into a psychological problem, is brought (with his assistance, if possible) to the surface of his consciousness, is then intelligently explained and related to the existing condition, and the man is consequently brought to an understanding of his personality, its problems and its impending opportunity. The spiritual technique, however, is entirely different. The personality problem and the process of delving into [119] the subconscious are ignored, because the conditions which are undesirable are regarded as the result of lack of soul contact and of soul control. The patient (if I might so call him) is taught to take his eyes, and consequently his attention, away from himself, his feelings, his complexes and his fixed ideas and undesirable thoughts, and to focus them upon the soul, the divine Reality within the form, and the Christ consciousness. This could well be called the process of scientific substitution of a fresh dynamic interest for that which has hitherto held the stage; it brings into functioning activity a cooperative factor whose energy sweeps through the lower life of the personality and carries away wrong psychological tendencies, undesirable complexes, leading to erroneous approaches to life. This eventually regenerates the mental or thought life, so that the man is conditioned by right thinking under the impulse or the illumination of the soul. This produces the "dynamic expulsive power of a new affection"; the old idées fixes, the old depressions and miseries, the hindering and handicapping ancient desires - these all disappear, and the man stands free as a soul and master of his life processes.
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