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Part Three - The Fundamental Laws of Healing

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Part Three

The Fundamental Laws of Healing

We have now completed two sections of our consideration of the art of healing.  We have dealt somewhat cursorily with the causes of disease and have noted that they emanate as a whole from three main sources:  the psychological state of the patient, his karmic liabilities, and those which are incurred through his group relationship, environal, national or planetary.  I then dealt with certain basic requirements of conditions and attitudes which must be established between the healer and the patient, and finally I took up the subject of death.  I considered it as it affected the three transitory vehicles, emphasising its divine nature and its constructive purpose.  We now reach the section in which the Laws of Healing and the Rules which should condition the healing process must be briefly considered.

We have found that there are ten laws and six rules.  The tenth law will be found too abstruse for much elucidation; it concerns the life principle, of which we as yet know nothing, and is involved with monadic purpose.  All occult teaching, which emanates directly from the Hierarchy, contains within it the living seed of that which will follow later.  In The Secret Doctrine, for instance, H.P.B. (under my instruction) made occasional reference, very briefly and obscurely, to the antahkarana; she thus left the seed which, [522] when full grown, will indicate the requirements for those who—having achieved the higher initiations—can enter upon the Way of the Higher Evolution.  In this tenth law, therefore, I embody also the seed for a much later approach to the problems of Life and Death.

I would here remind you that a law is in reality the effect of the life of a greater entity as it encloses a lesser within its living processes.  It embodies that formulated purpose or organised will of an enfolding life, against which the expressed purpose or determined will of that which is enfolded is entirely helpless.  You might argue, brother of mine, that this statement negates the freewill of the individual unit thus enclosed or enfolded.  It assuredly does militate against the form aspect of manifestation—that aspect, for instance, of which a human being is pre-eminently conscious.  Therefore, this relationship of the higher or greater and the lower or lesser, will equally and assuredly dominate and eventually render futile the lesser laws of the form nature, those which today are called the laws of nature.

Equally essentially, however, the soul within all forms. is at war with those forms, and in its own integral life is conditioned by the higher laws which are the laws of its own being; these it freely obeys and follows, having no slightest wish to do otherwise.  There is, therefore, no essential infringement of the freewill of the subject; there is only resistance from that which we call the "not-self" or the material aspect.  This might be called the basic cause of all disease.

What we call the Laws of Nature were the highest phase of the divine life possible in the first solar system.  They are primarily the laws inherent in the life aspect of the form and have in them, therefore, the seeds of death.  The Laws of the Soul as they subordinate and render negative the Laws of Nature, are the highest laws to which humanity [523] (the highest kingdom in nature at present) can respond, and these—when fulfilled—will conclude the purpose of the second solar system.  The Laws of Life itself will finally supersede the Laws of the Soul and will completely offset and negate the Laws of Nature; these laws will be distinctive of the third solar system—the last personality expression of the solar Logos through the medium of the seven planetary Logoi with their varying forms and soul expressions.

Three Groups of Laws

We have, therefore, three groups of laws which govern the expression of the living purpose in this second solar system—one developed and another developing, with the third latent and relatively quiescent.

1. The Laws of Nature—the separative laws of the form nature.

2. The Laws of the Soul—the blending laws of group integrity.

3. The Laws of Life—the dynamic laws of Being itself.

It is with certain aspects of the Laws of the Soul that we shall now deal, for they concern the integrity and activity of the soul in form.  This must be most carefully borne in mind.  Disease is something which attacks the integrity or the harmony of the form nature which the inner spiritual man must use in order to make his contacts in the three worlds which constitute his environment when in incarnation.  The ten laws which we shall consider might, therefore, be regarded as ten subsidiary laws of the fundamental Law of Essential Integrity.  They constitute nine elaborations or aspects of that one law, and this you must have most carefully in mind.  It is with these laws that the true healer must ever work.

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The six rules deal only with the application of this realised integrity to the conditions and situation with which the healer is confronted.  Integrity involves focus, tension and expression (simultaneously realised, consciously generated and dynamically used).

Qualities Required of the Healer

In the laws and rules which I have given, certain necessary characteristics of the healer are mentioned and certain needed requirements are indicated.  These we should register first of all as they not only present qualities and attitudes which are essential to the successful practice of the healing art, but they indicate also why—up till the present time—there has been practically no successful or systematised healing of any patient under any of the current healing schools.  There has been what I might call "accidental healing," due to the fact that the patient would have been healed anyway, for his hour to pass over had not yet arrived.  Deliberate conscious healing, with full understanding, has only occurred when the healer was an initiate of high degree, patterning himself upon the life and the nature of the Christ.

Let us now look at the indicated qualities and attitudes.  I will briefly enumerate and comment.

1. The power to contact and work as a soul.  "The art of the healer consists in releasing the soul."  Think for a moment what this power involves.  The healer is not only in immediate and conscious touch with his own soul, but through that soul contact he can easily contact the soul of his patient.

2. The power to command the spiritual will.  The particular law involved in the healing act must be "brought into activity by the spiritual will."  This necessitates the capacity to make contact with the Spiritual Triad. [525] Therefore, the antahkarana must be somewhat in process of construction.

3. The power to establish telepathic rapport.  The healer must "know the inner stage of thought and of desire" of his patient.

4. He must have exact knowledge.  We read that he must "know the point exact through which relief must come."  This is a most important point and one entirely overlooked by the so-called healers in such movements as Christian Science, Unity and others.  Healing does not come through an intense affirmation of divinity, or by simply pouring out love and the expression of a vague mysticism.  It comes through mastering an exact science of contact, of impression, of invocation, plus an understanding of the subtle apparatus of the etheric vehicle.

5. The power to reverse, reorient and "exalt" the consciousness of the patient.  The healer has to "lift the downward focussed eyes unto the soul."  This refers to the eyes of the patient.  This statement implies limitation, because if the patient is not at the stage in evolution where this is possible, and at the point in evolution where he can contact his own soul, the work of the healer is rendered inevitably futile.  The sphere of action, therefore, of the spiritual healer is strictly limited to those who have faith.  Faith, however, is the "evidence of things not seen"; that evidence is largely lacking in the majority.  Faith is not wishful thinking or an engineered hope.  It is evidence of a well-grounded conviction.

6. Power to direct soul energy to the necessary area.  "The spiritual or the third eye then directs the healing force."  This presupposes a scientific technique on the healer's part and the right functioning of the mechanism of received and directed force within the head.

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7. Power to express magnetic purity and the needed radiance.  "The healer must achieve magnetic purity...and attain dispelling radiance."  This involves great personal discipline in the daily life, and the habit of pure living.  Purity inevitably and automatically results in radiance.

8. Power to control the activity of the mechanism of the head.  The healer must have "linked the centres in the head."  The true healer has established a magnetic area within his head which presents itself or expresses itself through a definitely recognisable radiation.

9. Power over his own centres.  The healer has to "concentrate the needed energy within the needed centre."  The centre in the patient's form which is nearest to the seat of the physical trouble has to be made receptive to the energy discharged into it by the corresponding centre in the healer's body.  It will be obvious to you, therefore, how much knowledge and energy-control is required by the true healer.

10. Power to utilise both the exoteric and esoteric methods of healing.  The healer will employ "methods of occult healing though the ordinary medical and surgical methods will not be withheld."  I have constantly emphasised the God-given nature of experimental medicine—which is a phrase qualifying medicine today, and qualifying still more metaphysical healing.  There is no need to call in a spiritual healer for broken bones or for those difficulties which orthodox medicine has already mastered.  However, the patient's general morale and condition can be justifiably helped whilst wise surgery and ameliorating medical knowledge are applied.  This the usual so-called metaphysical healer is apt to ignore.  Healers will be divided eventually into two groups:

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a. Those comprising definitely trained spiritual healers.

b. Healers with less developed power but with enough radiation and magnetism to aid in the ordinary healing process.  These will usually work under the guidance of the spiritual healer.

11. Power to work magnetically.  "Thus he can pour the vital healing force upon the patient."  This the healer does through a scientific coordination of his equipment, using the hands as a directing agent.  In this way the disease can be healed, ameliorated or worsened, even to the point of death.  The responsibility of the healer is therefore great.

12. Power to work with radiation.  "Thus can his presence feed the soul life of the patient."  This again is brought about through a system of coordination, but the agent of radiation is then the aura and not the hands.

13. Power to practice at all times complete harmlessness.  "The method used by the Perfect One...is harmlessness."  This, we are told, involves a positive expression of poise, an inclusive point of view, and divine understanding.  How many healers combine these three qualities and also work through love?

14. Power to control the will and work through love.  "The healer...must keep the will in leash."  This is one of the most difficult qualities to be developed, for the will of the healer is frequently so potent in its determination to bring about a healing that it renders the effort to apply that healing process entirely futile.  From the reverse angle, frequently the sentimental and mystical desire to love the patient negates all efforts to hold the will in leash.  Remember, brother of mine, the spiritual will must be present as a quiet [528] deep pool of power behind all expression of the energy of love.

15. Power eventually to wield the Law of Life.  Of this little can be said, for it can only be wielded by those who have developed or who are rapidly developing the consciousness of the Spiritual Triad—a very rare thing as yet.

In the study of these requirements there is no need for discouragement.  Such a study will serve to set a needed goal for all healers in the New Age.  It will also explain why the various healing systems which are practiced today throughout the world (particularly in the Anglo-American countries) have hitherto notably failed, in spite of their claims.  None of them—if they kept properly certified records which would be scientifically accurate (and practically none of them do)—would register more than the tiniest percentage of cures based upon pure spiritual healing.  The percentage cured is less than one in a million "cures."  These cures would have recovered in any case in due time, if left to nature or to ordinary medical and surgical science.

But today, so great is the spiritual stimulation in the world, and so vast are the numbers responding to it, that the moving forward of a large group out of the ranks of average humanity on to the Path of Discipleship is inevitable.  This moving forward will provide—during the next five hundred years—many healers who will fulfill to some degree the requirements which I have listed above.

The philosophies endorsed by the various systems such as Unity and Christian Science are basically sound and state the fundamental platitudes (the essential truths, nevertheless) which underlie all that I have said above.  People, however, are not healed by the enunciation of platitudes, by [529] the affirmation of divinity or by the statement of abstract theories.  They will be healed when the right time comes because of the ability of the healer in the New Age to express in himself and in his daily life the quality of divinity, to be spiritually capable of invoking the soul of his patient, and also to be magnetically pure, and through the power of a particular type of radiated energy to stimulate the patient to heal himself—through the medium of his own inner mechanism.  The healer in the New Age will possess the ability to make the following contacts with both ease and understanding:

1. With his own soul.

2. With the soul of the patient.

3. With the particular type of energy which is to be found either in the soul or the personality ray of the patient.

4. With any one of his own centres which is needed by him in order to act as a transmitting agency for energy to be sent into an area governed by some centre in the body of the patient.

5. With the centre in the patient's etheric body which controls the area where the disease is located.

This, as you can appreciate, connotes much technical knowledge.  Added to this, the healer must also possess that spiritual perception which will enable him to intuit the "karma of the moment," as it is esoterically called, and therefore to know if a cure is permissible, practicable, or impossible.  This is a form of knowledge which no healer in the world at this time possesses, no matter what his claim may be.  Again I say, this is no cause for discouragement.

What is truly needed, and what will be brought about as the decades elapse, will be that disciples and men and women of spiritual orientation will enter the medical profession [530] and perfect themselves in the techniques of orthodox medicine and in an exoteric knowledge of physical anatomy and of pathological symptoms, plus the orthodox remedies and modes of handling disease.  To this technical knowledge and understanding they will add a measure of esoteric learning, and they will then begin to combine, whilst practising their profession, both the exoteric and the esoteric wisdom which is theirs.  This will at first be purely experimental, but out of the experience gained in utilising both fields of knowledge a new medical science will emerge, based upon two paramount recognised factors:

1. A cumulative mass of knowledge and information anent the dense physical vehicle.  This has been accumulated by men of science down the ages and is largely proven and true.

2. A constantly growing understanding of the nature of the etheric body, of the centres, and of the transmission and circulation of certain controlled energies.

This combination of two aspects of truth will be greatly facilitated by the increasing sensitivity and almost clairvoyant perception of developing humanity.  One of the outstanding results of the recent world war will be found to be a tremendously increased capacity for nervous reaction.  This nervous receptivity is at present abnormal and the results are sad.  The reason for this is that the nervous apparatus of the average human being (and by that I mean his nervous system, plus the nadis which underlie it) is not yet adequate to the demands upon it.  Time, however, will adjust all this.

Both metaphysical healers and orthodox medical men at this time are apt to repudiate each other with much violence.  Taking it as a whole, the orthodox physician is less rabid and exclusive than the modern metaphysician.  They [531] know too well the limitations of their present medical attainments.  But the so-called spiritual healer recognises at present no limitations, and this definitely constitutes a weakness.  Both groups, in time, must become collaborators with each other and not opponents.  Both have much to learn from each other, and both must recognise that the particular fields of knowledge for which they stand are equally a divine expression and indicate the ability of the human mind to search, to record, to discover and to formulate truth, so that others may benefit thereby.

I would recall to your attention the fact that both groups have much to do—the one in penetrating into the realm of the subtle and the intangible (and this is rapidly being done), and the other in descending from its vague abstractions and impractical generalisations in order to learn to recognise the facts anent the objective and the tangible; this is not as yet being done; metaphysical healing, so-called, is lost amidst a mist of words and high-sounding affirmations.

The sincerity of the majority of those who belong to these schools of thought is unquestioned; their motives are almost uniformly sincere and good.  In both groups charlatans are to be found and also a small—a very small—minority of self-seeking and ignorant exploiters of men.  Among them are numbered both physicians and metaphysicians who are commercially oriented; they are, however, a minority.  In the sincere investigator and lover of humanity in both groups will be found the future hope of medical science as it seeks to meet the need of humanity—a humanity which is becoming increasingly sensitive and subjectively oriented.

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