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CHAPTER II - Causes Emanating from Group Life - Part 2

The power of absorption with which the planet is endowed is very great within certain limitations; it is these limitations, [249] for instance, which promote epidemics as the aftermath of war.  Such epidemics have a serious effect upon the human race after the war cycle is over and after the consequent epidemic has spent itself.  Humanity, particularly in Eastern Europe, had not completely recovered from the epidemics, incident to the first part of the world war, when the second part took place.  The psychological effects continue; the scars and the results of the second phase of that world war will persist for fifty years, even though—owing to man's greater scientific knowledge—the epidemic factor may be kept surprisingly within bounds.  This, however, still remains uncertain.  Time alone will demonstrate how successful humanity is in offsetting the penalties which outraged nature is apt to exact.

Much good will be brought about through the growing custom to cremate those forms which the indwelling life has vacated; when it is an universal custom, we shall see a definite minimising of disease, leading to longevity and increased vitality.  The factor of resistance or the process whereby a form renders itself immune or non-responsive to the planetary pull and urge towards reabsorption requires the expenditure of much energy.  When the life increases in potency within the form and there is less reaction to disease-conveying factors, the soul within the form will have fuller sway and greater beauty of expression and usefulness in service.  This will be true some day of all the kingdoms in nature, and thus we shall have a steady radiance shining forth in the mounting glory of the Life of God.

3. RACIAL AND NATIONAL DISEASES

It must be apparent to you by now that I am principally concerned with indicating factors which are the result of the past history of the race rather than with giving you a specific and detailed account of the diseases which are allied [250] to the various nations.  This, in fact, it would not be possible to do, owing to the overlapping and paralleling which goes on in every department of natural life.  Above everything else, I seek to make clear what must be done along the line of preventive healing and what should be accomplished in the difficult task of offsetting conditions already prevalent on earth as the result of past misuse of the natural powers.  There must therefore be brought about a healing of those conditions which are present upon our planet on a large scale, and consequently my emphasis will not be upon the specific and the individual.  I am laying a foundation also for a discussion of our next theme—the relation of the Law of Karma to disease and death and to humanity as a whole.

In the consideration of racial and national diseases, I do not intend to point out that tuberculosis is distinctively a disease of the middle classes in every country, that diabetes is a major trouble among the rice-eating peoples of the world, and that cancer is rampant in Great Britain, whilst heart disease is a prime cause of death in the United States.  Such generalisations are both as true and as false as statistics usually are, and nothing is gained by labouring these points.  These difficulties will all be offset in due time through the growth of understanding, by the intuitive diagnosis of disease, and by the magnificent work of scientific and academic medicine, plus a truer comprehension of right living conditions.

I prefer rather to give still wider generalisations which will indicate causes and will not emphasise the consequences of these causes.  I seek, therefore, to point out that:

1. The soil of the planet itself is a major cause of disease and of contamination.  For untold aeons, the bodies of men and of animals have been laid away in the ground; that soil is consequently impregnated with the germs and [251] the results of disease and this in a far subtler form than is surmised.  The germs of ancient known and unknown diseases are to be found in the layers of the soil and the subsoil; these can still produce virulent trouble if presented with proper conditions.  Let me state that Nature never intended that bodies would be buried in the ground.  The animals die and their bodies return to the dust, but return purified by the rays of the sun and by the breezes which blow and disperse.  The sun can cause death as well as life, and the most virulent germs and bacteria cannot retain their potency if submitted to the dry heat of the sun's rays.  Moisture and darkness foster disease as it emanates from and is nourished by bodies from whence the life aspect has been drawn.  When, in all countries throughout the world, the rule is to submit dead forms to the "ordeal by fire," and when this has become a universal and persistent habit, we shall then see a great diminution of disease and a much healthier world.

2. The psychological condition of a race or of a nation, as we have seen, produces a tendency to disease and to a lowered resistance to the causes of disease; it can engender an ability to absorb evil contamination with facility.  On this I need not further enlarge.

3. Living conditions in many lands also foster disease and ill health.  Dark and crowded tenements, underground homes, undernourishment, wrong food, evil habits of life and various occupational diseases—all contribute their quota to the general ill health of humanity.  These conditions are universally recognised and much has been done to offset them, but much remains to be done.  One of the good effects of the world war will be to force the needed changes, the required rebuilding, and the scientific nourishment of the youth of the race.  National physical [252] ills vary according to the predisposing occupations of the people; the diseases of an agricultural race will differ widely from those of a highly industrialised race; the physical predispositions of a sailor vary greatly from those of an office worker in one of our large cities.  These items of information are again but the platitudes of the social worker in the many cities and lands.  Certain diseases appear to be purely local; others seem universal in their effects; certain diseases are gradually dying out, and new diseases are appearing; certain forms of disease are forever with us; others seem to be cyclic in their appearance; some diseases are endemic whilst others are epidemic.

How can this vast array of disease and forms of bodily ills come to be?  How is it that some races are prone to succumb to one form of physical ill whilst other races are resistant to it?  Climatic conditions produce certain typical diseases which remain strictly local and are not found elsewhere in the world.  Cancer, tuberculosis, syphilis, spinal meningitis, pneumonia and heart disease, as well as scrofula (using that term in its old sense to indicate certain forms of skin disease), are rampant throughout the world, taking their toll of millions; even though these diseases can be traced to certain great racial periods, they are now general in their effect.  The clue to this can be found if students will remember that though the Atlantean racial period lies thousands of years away, a great majority of people today are basically Atlantean in their consciousness, and are therefore prone to the diseases of that civilisation.

If a full review of the health of the world were to be undertaken and presented to the thinking public—taken in normal conditions and not in war time—the question arises whether there are one hundred thousand perfectly healthy [253] people to be found out of the billions now inhabiting the earth?  I think not.  If no actual and active disease is present, nevertheless the condition of the teeth, the hearing and the sight leave frequently much to be desired; inherited tendencies and active predispositions cause grave concern, and to all this must be added psychological difficulty, mental diseases and definite brain trouble.  All this presents an appalling picture.  Against the ills which it discloses, medicine is today battling; scientists are searching for alleviations and cures and for sound and lasting methods of eradication; research students are investigating the latent germs, and health experts are seeking new ways to meet the onslaught of disease.  Sanitation, compulsory inoculation, frequent inspection, pure food laws, legal requirements and better housing conditions are all brought into this battle by the far-seeing humanitarian.  Yet still disease is rampant; more hospitals are required and the death rate soars.

To these practical agencies, Mental Science, New Thought, Unity and Christian Science offer their aid, and seek quite honestly to bring the power of the mind to bear upon the problem.  At the present stage, these agencies and groups largely are in the hands of fanatics and devoted, unintelligent people; they refuse all compromise and seem unable to recognise that the knowledge accumulated by medicine and by those who work scientifically with the human body is as God-given as their, as yet, unproved ideal.  Later, the truths for which these groups stand will be added to the work of the psychologist and the physician; when this has been done, we shall see a great improvement.  When the work of the doctor and the surgeon in relation to the physical body is recognised as essential and good, when the analysis and conclusions of the psychologist supplement their work, and when the power of right thought comes likewise as an [254] aid, then and only then, shall we enter upon a new era of well-being.

To the various categories of trouble must also be added a whole group of diseases which are more strictly mental in their effect—the cleavages, the insanities, the obsessions, the mental breaks, the aberrations and the hallucinations.  To the various healing agencies mentioned above should be added the work undertaken by Members of the spiritual Hierarchy and Their disciples; it takes soul power and knowledge, plus the wisdom of the other healing groups, to produce health among people, to empty our sanatariums, to rid humanity of the basic diseases, of lunacy and obsession, and to prevent crime.  This is finally brought about by the right integration of the whole man, through a right comprehension of the nature of energy, and through a correct appreciation of the endocrine system, its glands and their subtle relationships.

At present there is little coherent and integrated work done in unison by the four groups:

1. Physicians and surgeons—orthodox and academic.

2. Psychologists, neurologists and psychiatrists.

3. Mental healers and New Thought workers, plus Unity thinkers and Christian Scientists.

4. Trained disciples and those who work with the souls of men.

When these four groups can be brought into close relation, and can work together for the release of humanity from disease, we shall then arrive at an understanding of the true wonder of the human being.  We shall some day have hospitals in which the four phases of this one medical and remedial work will proceed side by side and in the fullest cooperation.  Neither group can do a complete task without the others; all are interdependent.

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It is the inability of these groups to recognise the good in the other groups striving for the physical well-being of humanity which makes it almost impossible for me to do more specific teaching and more direct talking on these matters.  Have you any idea of the wall of antagonistic thinking and speech against which a new or pioneering idea has to batter itself?  Have you ever seriously considered the aggregated and crystallised thoughtforms with which all such new ideas (and shall I call them hierarchical proposals) have to contend?  Do you appreciate the dead weight of preconceived and ancient determinations which have to be moved before the Hierarchy can cause a new and needed concept to penetrate into the consciousness of the average thinking (or again should I say, unthinking?) public.  The field of medicine is a most difficult field in which to work, for the subject is so intimate, and fear enters so strongly into the reactions of those who must be reached.  The gulf between the old and established and the new and the spiritually demanded, needs much long and careful bridging.  A great deal of the difficulty is, curiously enough, to be found fostered by the newer schools of thought.  Orthodox medicine is slow, and rightly slow, in adopting new techniques and methods; it is at times too slow, but the case of the new mode of treatment or diagnosis must be rightly proven and statistically proven before it can be incorporated in the medical curriculum and method; the risks to the human subject are too great, and the good humanitarian physician will not make his patient the subject of experimentation.  However, within the last few decades, medicine has advanced by leaps and bounds, the science of electricity and light therapy and many other modern techniques and methods have already been added to the various other sciences of which medicine avails itself.  The demands of the intangible and the treatment of the nebulous—if such [256] peculiar terms are in order—are being recognised increasingly and are known to play an orthodox and recognised part in the newer approaches to disease.

The approach of the mental schools and cults, as they erroneously call themselves, has not proceeded so helpfully.  This is largely their fault.  Schools of thought such as Mental Science, New Thought, Unity, Christian Science, Chiropractic enterprise, the efforts of the Naturopaths and many others, hurt their cause, owing to the large claims which they make and to their unceasing attacks upon orthodox medicine and other channels of proven helpfulness and upon the knowledge (acquired over centuries of experimentation) of the academic schools of medicine and surgery.  They forget that many of their claims to success (and they are often irrefutable) can be classed under the general heading of faith cures, and this can be done correctly or incorrectly.  Such cures have long been recognised by the academic thinker and known to be factual.  These cults which are in fact the custodians of needed truths, need above everything else to change their approach and to learn the spiritual nature of compromise in these days of evolutionary unfoldment.  Their ideas cannot come into full and desired usefulness apart from the already God-given knowledge which medicine down the ages has accumulated; they need also to keep a record of their numerous failures, as well as the successes which they loudly proclaim.  I would here point out that these successes are in no way so numerous as those of orthodox medicine and of the beneficent work done by the clinics of our hospitals which—in spite of failures and often gross stupidity—greatly ameliorate the pains and ills of the masses of men.  These cults omit to state, or even to recognise, that in cases of extreme illness or accident, the patient is physically unable to affirm or claim divine healing and is dependent upon the work of some healer who works with no knowledge [257] of the karma of the patient.  Many of their so-called cures (and this is the case also with orthodox medicine) are cures because the hour of the end has not yet arrived for the patient and he would have recovered in any case, though he often does so more rapidly, owing to the remedial measures of the trained physician.

In cases of serious accident, where the injured person will bleed, the cultist (no matter what his cult may be called) will perforce avail himself of the methods of the orthodox physician; he will apply a tourniquet, for instance, and take the measures which orthodox medicine enjoins, rather than stand by and see the injured person die because these methods are not used.  When he is face to face with death, he will frequently turn to the tried and proved methods of help and will usually call in a physician rather than be charged with murder.

All the above is said in no spirit of disparagement, but in an effort to prove that the many schools of thought—orthodox, academic, ancient, material or spiritual, new, pioneering or mental—are interdependent; they need to be brought together into one great healing science.  This will be a science which will heal the whole man and bring into play all the resources—physical, emotional, mental and spiritual—of which humanity is capable.  Orthodox medicine is more open to cooperation with the newer cults than are the neophytes of the science of mental control of disease; they cannot, however, permit their patients to be turned into guinea pigs (is not that the term used in these cases, brother of mine?) for the satisfaction of the pioneering cultist and the proving of his theories—no matter how correct when applied in conjunction with what has already been proved.  The middle way of compromise and of mutual cooperation is ever the wisest. and this is a lesson much needed today in every department of human thinking.

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We shall now proceed to deal with our third and final section of thoughts around the basic causes of disease.  The theme of karma has been little considered and I shall deal with it in a way larger than our particular subject perhaps warrants.