532

THE PROBLEM OF WELL-BEING

In response to my request some years ago for a theme for a new series of the blue letters the strongest desire expressed seemed to be summed up in a general or over-all interest in healing and in my effort to meet the wishes of our company in this respect I launched on what I announced as an unordered or wholly inspirational survey of the factors involved in the basic well-being of man. I also explained my intention to help the inspiration by a loose review of my earlier consideration of the subject in prior blue letters, and by further analysis of the baffling intermixture of the real and unreal in experience. With this explanation for the later presentation of the series we continue the repetition of the original blue letters.

There are two essential elements in all being, and hence in all well-being. There is the real on which any true persisting of selfhood must rest, and no less an unreal from the experience of which every knowledge or possession of the real must spring. The occult is the analysis of the constructive unreal or the use of dreams, visions, revelations and general expansion of consciousness along tentative and self-liberating lines for the enhancement of the real in a root being. The general technique of the occult is to reverse terms and to consider the subjective and spiritual as actually real and outer life as essentially unreal. There is little difference in the final result but it is desperately vital that each seeker understand thoroughly his own use of terms and realize that the word real merely indicates the static foundation in his own point of view or that on which he can depend. Well-being is the sufficient conservation of the real to make life the contribution to its continuance rather than threat to its existence.

Health is the maintenance of a dependable real, material or spiritual, in balance with an expanding of consciousness to admit the dependable unreal.

533

HEALING IN DOUBLE REFERENCE

The basic difficulty in most healing work is the general lack of agreement on terms and the failure of mind to meet mind in the definition of both the well-being desired and the distortion of living function that remains in need of adjustment. If the life were to become wholly static in the perfect achievement of some ideal state then it necessarily would cease to be, and this shows that any healing will defeat itself when it is too thorough. By the same token, if healing is gained on a merely superficial basis it likewise will do great harm as in the case where for illustration a student succeeded in banishing painful symptoms that only testified to the deeper trouble and that in their banishment left unsuspected forces of destruction to proceed uninterruptedly with their work. There can be no real understanding of spiritual healing as such without some basic grasp of self at root.

There is nothing of more definite preliminary importance than that the seeker understand the double reference of healing or the double effort of life on which it depends. First there is the static and fundamental reality that in genuine well-being must be approximated but not gained, and then there must be a true participation in some sort of continuing threat to this or exercise of the powers toward any achievement of reality within the being in order that a realization of reality may have continuance and perspective. If this seems somewhat abstruse, we remember that we here are merely meeting our old familiar freedom and absolute order. In other words, healing can never refuse self-expression to individuality on the one hand, and cancel actuality of stable or fixed existence on the other. Man always must retain an adequate ill-being to remain challenged into well-being.

Any healing must be approximate, hinging on the dependable stability of the basic reality on the one hand and the choosing of the dependable unreal on the other.

534

WELL-BEING IS ATTENTION

The original manner in which the technique of healing or spiritual therapy was presented to the students was in the form of the necessary exercise of free will or a choice in fundamental attitude of self such as would arise from the realization that there must be actual and continued stimulus to a livingness through trouble or challenge to the will to live in one form or another at all times, and then also from the consequent realization that it lies in the power of this self to dictate what the nature of the basic stimulus to its effective living may be. The early students were told that since they had to have troubles in order to continue to be at all, they might as well achieve a more creative orientation in life by selecting the difficulties they needed for their greater unfoldment. Practically this meant that any willingness to shoulder responsibility or take trouble in some greater dimension of human interests than mere self-concern would cut off much necessity for the purely personal difficulties, and that these in consequence would tend to disappear or to take on greater significance.

At the root of realization here is the eternal principle of the good in all things, and so in illness, worry and every handicap of livingness. Disturbing things are not to be ignored, or denied in an ostrichlike blinding of self to the very self-sustainment of being. They are to be rejected however in their power to control or shape the nature of man's being or his happiness in living to even the slightest extent. By his failure to act in his own interest, or to sustain the attitude that is a sort of passive action, the aspirant makes a choice that can be made much better in positive fashion. But in any case he remains wholly responsible for the stimulations that keep him alive.

The aspirant, free to choose the direction of his expansion, moves toward responsibility for the eventual good no matter what the immediate difficulties.

535

ALL EVIL IS IN PERSPECTIVE

If there is ultimate good in all evil or if healing must be no more than a transfer of troubles and an adjustment in the being, then must it not be said that healing is wrong and that we ought to be content to take life as it is and make the best of it? Such is Eastern philosophy when viewed superficially, and such is the subconscious self-surrender of the average person when his first flush of youth has been dissipated and he is left to subjective self-justification. But nothing is further from the truth than this. Healing is the constant element in all growth whether physical or spiritual, and the more that the seeker advances on the Path the greater will be his need for healing. Healing thus is far more than an elimination of symptoms and is certainly more than a diminution of suffering. It is true aliveness.

Let us here define healing as a process of adjustment or a technique of self-orientation in the continual development of a need for man to make and receive contribution from his immediate situations on the various planes of being. Ordinary disease is the body's healing or attempted healing of its own functions and we must approach all disease as the activity to be helped to its constructive ends. Evils of other sort as financial, emotional and mental maladjustment we must handle in the same manner but with different tools and helps and every detail made intelligent and effective by a constant remembrance that a problem is a catalytic to inner or spiritual choice or the lack thereof. All evil is in perspective because as properly seen it shows itself an ultimate agency of good. Thus all healing truly is an effort to endow a sufferer with the point of view adequate to permit his full opportunity for making proper choices and gaining life anew.

Illness and trouble are life's attempts to bring adjustment on whatever plane of being, and healing is the process of facilitating this adjustment.

536

DISCIPLINE IS PERSPECTIVE CREATION

The ends of a valid occultism are twofold, or to further the tradition of an invisible fellowship in the White Lodge and to establish in every passing age the higher perspective and knowledge that endow the age with the racial perspectives by which all great achievement is possible. The backbone of occultism is discipline, and nothing is as distressing to the new student as the discovery that this is increased rather than diminished with progress on the way and that the nature of the higher discipline is if anything more trivial outwardly. What the advanced student comes to learn is that discipline is not the limitation but rather the perpetuation of a special choice and hence a creative agency by which perspective is heightened and livingness made an enhancement of the special or spiritual sensitiveness. Healing is fundamentally in this respect a definite self-chosen discipline and of effectiveness proportionate to its self-acceptance, and in consequence healing is never to be employed except for self or by the request of a conscious selfhood. Anything else is black magic or an effort to use something in a way contrary to its own nature and so destroy its light in the opaqueness of a lost perspective in self, as using pure psychic or animal-magnetism forces to contrive environmental changes, and this is at tremendous personal cost to the practitioner because of the distortion of the self's basic perspective or co-operation with the all.

Healing is especially a discipline in this matter of the approach to a given problem in terms of self. A mother has every duty of healing for her child, but the child is himself in terms of this practical reality. Actually the principle is simple enough, for what healing is possible where there is no direct relationship?

The healing discipline enhances creative powers by developing a heightened perspective and a sensitiveness to spiritual nuances.

539

COMPLETION OR CLEARANCE IN HEALING

There is nothing more human, and yet nothing more surely fatal to human existence ultimately, than the common tendency to abandon an aspect of the real for some greater promise of reality. It is the weakness caught in the old fable of the dog who drops his bone into the water in anticipation of capturing the greater mirrored banquet of illusion. We can see easily enough that the person with continued regrets over the past is handicapped woefully in present being, but we yet continue carelessly to condone and encourage every light dismissal of past obligations in an attempted healing of some present crisis and wonder why the healing doesn't come true. Regrets over the past will handicap the soul because the substance of being is left tied to older phases of experience and the self thereby is divided and held helpless in a measure of bondage to the alien. The dismissal of some relation to the past will come out in exactly the same way since a subconscious regret is implied in the very desire to cut off the given phase of the reality of life. Jesus taught this in demanding that if anyone found he had aught against his brother when he came to the altar of God such should first be straightened out since there must be completion in the past, not as dismissal but as clearance into the present.

We emphasize the necessity of clearance by means of completion in every chapter of life, and ask that the aspirant accept all reality in its own true terms and so build into personality the sum of surviving elements that he has brought into his experience or made his own whether wittingly or unwittingly. Man is not bound forever to an external actuality in which he once has had an expansion of consciousness but the essence of it has entered the eternal fiber of his being.

Clearance of a difficulty consists of the extraction and conservation of the immortal essence of the experience, and this rather than dismissal of the trouble is healing.

541

OUT OF THE MOUTHS OF BABES

Healing is a sublimation of conditions and not an agency for escape from some apparently insuperable situation. Healing never but most superficially is palliation of the intolerable but instead is the transformation of the factors in some given case so that it may be possible for the personality to extract its full essence of experience and for the self to proceed in an inclusion rather than exclusion of a phase in living potentiality. Healing helps the individual to growth and expansion and therefore is concerned first with the individual and in touch with him in terms of his experience rather than his being and transient or superficial interests. We have just had the case of the careless person who paid his short-term loan promptly but because this loan had been a favor from a friend and associate the borrower did not bother to pick up the note he had signed. Later the lender found occasion for offense, denied receiving payment and sued. Here the conditions were not primarily the falsity of claim as much as the need of proper fruits of experience. Loose ends in life are often betraying.

No matter how unpleasant many persisting factors in life may be they yet sustain our immediate experience of Source and we must contribute some exaltation of relationship to their manifestation however unnecessary this may seem to be. Otherwise we smart at the root of our being since we have entertained them in consciousness no matter how unwittingly. Nothing can be repudiated until its dismissal is in some way a blessing for the substance of it, either by contributing to a potentiality for others or by recognizing the essence built into the fiber of self. We learn here from a child's tenacious holding to his prior experience in the certainty at center from which wisdom comes.

Since experience is substance of the being, unpleasant factors must be transformed into factors that can dwell in consonance with the being.

544

HEALING IS ABOVE ALL NOTIONS

The root of all healing is a realization of the ultimate good that is furthered by whatever the ill condition may be, and so an effort to find a more gratifying or satisfactory procedure for achieving the same result. This is the fundamental principle guiding us in developing our healing effectiveness whether consciously taken in just this way or not. Working with ultimate ends is our cornerstone. It is very important indeed that the unhealthy condition not be justified thus bluntly or baldly to the individual in need of healing. He will have had more than his fill of the pressures converging on him, and it will destroy all chance to help him if the practitioner tries to bring him to an intellectual or emotional acceptance of his own deficiencies and bad judgment. He needs an inner strengthening or wholly tangible reinforcement in his efforts at self-realization, and thus an ill must always be presented in terms of opportunity and suffering in an aspect of quickening potentiality. Even a further modification in approaching the mind or point of view of one in need of healing will be necessary unless such a one has already gained a considerable degree of occult or inner stirring. It may be more than wise to make no apparent connection between the illness and the opportunity it indicates. The condition of sickness in body and mind is approached outwardly in what will be the most conventional and convenient method of treatment indicated by individual circumstances, but the practitioner will know that this is palliation and that it will prove to be efficacious only as an inner or permanent contribution is made to the eternal quickening that with development will sustain existence on a higher plane of being.

The healer renders unto Caesar that which is Caesar's.

True healing results from a recognition that illness is an opportunity to grasp a quickened potentiality and so spur the sufferer toward an ultimate good.

545

THE LAW OF SOCIAL INTEGRITY

No good can ever be achieved by the deliberate resorting to some ill in good purpose, and this leads to the so-called principle and law of conventionality or social integrity. No matter how exalted a man may be spiritually as the Master he yet must conform to those necessities by which the least of all men is able to maintain his confidence in the world about him. There are miracles in every story of man's religious development, but always there must be the intellectual loophole by which each doubting mind may hold to its own self-respect. Healing apart from conventional arts is possible and relatively common in the cases often classed loosely as hysteria but always there is the necessity that the confidence of the mass mind in the integrity of its universe be preserved. Hence there always is the question as to what actually took place and a chance for denial of the fact by the personality that in admitting it would deny its own reality. It is for the reason that should be evident that it is against the spiritual law for a healer to offer or attempt healing except in matters directly related to himself and definitely and directly threatening his own welfare, or in cases where he is asked professionally for his healing help.

Occult healing thus divides sharply in two classes. It is legitimate when there is a careful preservation of the intellectual loophole and it is used to recruit souls in spiritual service or in an effort at quickening spiritual sensitivity generally as illustrated by Jesus in his ministry, and it is legitimate when professionalized in a dignified fashion and given stability in a frame of race integrity, as a real school of therapeutics or as a means for giving individual help to those who are seeking to gain some control of their own destiny.

The function of spiritual healing is a stimulation to an awareness of one's own spiritual potentiality so that he may take charge of his own destiny.

548

ALL ROADS LEAD TO ROME

While it would be silly and suicidal to affirm that anything at all will serve as a healing method yet it is unintelligent if not equally silly and suicidal to deny that what is able to quicken an individual will have some measure of efficacy in giving him real healing help. The constant quarreling over methods of healing is due, at the core of the matter, to the frequent difficulty in maintaining what results may have been gained by the healing. In conventional medical practice there usually is a tangible agent such as the medicine or the organic manipulation or stimulation or even surgery, and this can hold in consciousness as living assurance. In spiritual healing the basic psychological need for self-reinforcement is no less marked and usually it demands unquestioned faith in the method. This at least is the case with the average person who is but slightly quickened to any true or immortal sense of absolute relations. Any threat to the integrity of the healing method is thus a menace to the healing itself, and with occultists generally there is a continual and flurried effort to bring all men to an acceptance of their method as a best or only and to neglect all consideration of the individual reality of the healing.

The extravagant wildness of some occult claims, by calling for extremes of faith or credulity, actually results in quickening the consciousness to the genuine mobilization of powers that ultimately are the basis of all healing. Consequently our uncompromising determination to find the good in all things is to be understood as root emphasis on the quickening potential rather than ultimate Tightness of whatever may enter human experience. Healing has justification as it meets immediate needs. Eventual clarifications follow in due course.

The method used in healing is the method that will best bring about a quickening of consciousness and a mobilization of one's own powers.

549

PHILOSOPHY BEGINS AT HOME

The great success in the healing work of early Christian communities was in the fact that their attitude was one of sharing and not one of the imposition of their ideas on their neighbors. Nothing is more indicative of the weakness of modern spiritual healing than an irresistible tendency on the part of nearly all groups to take command of the cosmos and almost issue orders to God to compel their notion on their total environment. Subconsciously they are seeking to preserve themselves within themselves just as they are and to gain help for the personal difficulties besetting them by a sort of bargain in which the effort they give to the cosmos will put the cosmos under obligation to them and so lead to their own healing. The early Christians differed from this primarily in the fact that they were intent on being worthy. They wished to be less selfish, less self-seeking, more generous in an immortal outreaching to others on the basis of each other's potentiality, more understanding and helpful in giving reality to every soul in its own genius. They lived in their realization that the environment and the world in which they lived would be more changed by their lives and their quality of act and attitude than by any political effort.

Healing is to help the individual fulfill the potentials of his own being and not to make him more comfortable or happy. When the healing effort becomes involved in the gratuitous assumptions of a paternalistic sympathy, then all healing is defeated by the underlying attitude of condescension. There is seldom a conscious idea that the self is better than those for whom help is asked, but none the less it is tragically true that the focus of interest has moved from the well-being of all-self to the well-being of the one self's private notions.

The healer cannot administer a healing. He can only reach out to the other in an immortal sharing through which the other finds the quickening he needs.

550

HEALING IS A SUPPLEMENTAL AGENCY

Everything considered, truly no one thing delays a man's spiritual progress more than the common but mad pursuit of panaceas or catch-all and infallible solutions for all the ills of mankind. This is assuming that individual difference is a mistake on the part of God or that the cosmos is devoid of all order or purpose in its normal and everyday outworkings. Spiritual healing is not something that if efficacious is thereby proof that nothing else has any efficacy. It is not to be taken as something such as is effective only if used in smug separation from any other possible therapeutic aid. Actually healing is spiritual only if like spirit it operates in and through all normal social realities. There is a distinction here between medical ministration and faith healing because the latter must have its substantiation in real transcendence of conventional ways, but the basic purpose of all faith healing is to provide special evidence of the presence of divinity in human affairs and the consideration is apart from the consideration of healing as a therapeutic agency available for all men in total independence of their religious convictions. Healing is really a supplemental agency, to carry on beyond or behind the objective aids to man's health and general well-being.

What objection there is to material medicine in esoteric circles is to the acceptance of drugs and remedies to permit relief in some abuse of self in body and affairs and so escape all need to bring about a better way of living within the being. If man may take something for a digestive upset and encourage himself to eat injudiciously and otherwise give free rein to his appetites he is helped to handicap his soul eternally by the crystallization of unhealthy selfishness.

Although there are many therapeutic agencies available, spiritual healing has as its major purpose a revelation of the divine in human and personal affairs.

551

MAN WALKS ON EARTH

If healing properly is a supplementary agency then there is a foundation apart from all spiritual procedures and this is normal living per se. Man is expected to breathe and to give himself breath of life on every plane of being. He is expected to eat and drink and meet the demands of his body naturally and normally. Whether this is so expressed or not, he is expected to be clean and to wear clothes in healthy and stimulating fashion. It is assumed that he will work and play with enthusiasm although using common sense. Thus he who asks a normal opportunity for self-expression in life should give to life the normality of inner living that makes him a real citizen of his worldly domain. So much should be clear to everyone. But what is not clear is the duty of an individual who seeks healing to co-operate with life in its social normality, and this includes the full use of conventional healing method. A stomach ache should be treated with soda or the convenient household remedies at hand, and spiritual healing then asked not as much for the amelioration of a momentary ailing but that the individual may be stirred or changed within himself and brought to new levels of understanding and participation in life about him. He will not view his ache as an accident but as true signature of higher meaning and turn at once to find out what the implication may be.

The occultist should no more yield indiscriminately to a doctor's diagnosis than to some healer's spiritual explanation but instead should act on his own very best judgment. When he is unable to check on a diagnosis he should check on the diagnostician's reputation among those competent to form sound opinions. Spiritual healing uses material medicine and all therapeutic agencies with discrimination.

After using all conventional methods of healing, one then seeks behind the illness for its spiritual implication and for the understanding that will restore balance.

552

THE OBJECTIVE AGENT

The actual operation of spiritual healing is through the consciousness of the individual in major part, and thus it is that the faith healing is so spectacular and so certain in cases of hysteria or actual distortion of pure consciousness and that spiritual consolation is so necessary when man gets out of tune in spirit or on the emotional and mental planes of individual experience. But to some lesser or less obvious degree the operation of spiritual healing also is through a manipulation in some sense of the environment itself. This is seen by all students in matters of finance or business and everyday affairs of society or the group. Every aspirant will observe before he grows too appreciably into immortal stature that the coloring of daily existence is almost wholly a matter of his own attitude and state of mind. But in strictly bodily healing we often fail to realize how far permanent results are through indirect as well as direct co-operation.

The normal occultist consults a doctor or dentist exactly as any other normal individual, but in his case he has an invisible guidance that will bring him to the particular person most able to cooperate with the inner or ultimate necessities. Occultism hardly exists to increase the aspirant's detachment from the reality about him. Instead it expands that reality through the objective realities in the general make-up of his environment. Occultism does not eliminate the baker but somehow creates luck in happening to find the good baker, or the best person in every line of community activity who may serve one. Occultism does not eliminate the doctor but rejects the varied notions or theories by which the human animal is made a victim of accident and subjected to experimental search for pure physical cause in human ill.

While healing is basically a matter of consciousness, it also involves modification of the everyday reality as this is indicated by the new understanding.

556

HEALING IS AN EDUCATIVE PROCESS

It should be apparent by now that healing is hardly some sort of turning on the faucet of a divine energy by the privileged one who is permitted to do the turning but is a reordering of the being by the patient as he is aided to some greater or lesser extent by the one to whom he has appealed. The aid may be entirely objective as in the methods of the many therapeutic schools whether medical or psychological or quite subjective as at the various healing shrines but usually, as far as we are concerned in developing a genuine occultism, it is an effort to gain and give aid in cases that are not at either extreme of the materialist catering to things of the flesh in daily existence and offering pills to afford the least interruption to a gratification for a gamut of untrammeled appetites or of the visionary interested in the magic of transcendental illusions of no greater immortality and giving a pseudoecstasy to preserve what is only a dream consciousness. Most of civilized and socially conscious humanity is found between extremes of whole-worldly and utterly other-worldly loss of real personality and for that majority alone do we have any needed healing or reordering.

Divorced from any extremism healing fundamentally is the appeal to the mind of whoever seeks it. It must operate through real comprehension of some sort or must in a sense create a magic at Source by expanding the potentialities of the focus of awareness or the basic pattern of attitude, and this becomes an educative process. Jesus as ever the superb spiritual healer made his educative approach by an extraordinary simple reference to underlying attitudes. Go, and sin no more. He might have stated, you have had palliation of surface symptoms. Now develop a changed attitude to prevent their return.

True healing is not palliation of surface symptoms, but a solicitation of the mind to stir toward a quickening to the potentialities of a changed attitude.

561

INTEREST IS SUBJECTIVE

No matter what the external or ultimate nature of an ill may be it has its deepest roots in some unhealthy set of mind, and for this reason all spiritual healing deals with the individual only. If healing is for the group or the race, and whether two or three or many hundreds or thousands or millions, the approach is through an individual who has achieved a legateship for his group and is concerned since the larger needs are brought to focus in his person. In every case a need must be articulated by the individual or because of an individual since healing cannot proceed without the request or expression of need in language. Occasionally the healing may be remote as in helping an associate or loved one but even in such an instance the need has focus in consciousness as originating in the primary party of concern. The mother seeks help for her daughter in superficial fact but in immortal reality she wishes to be of help and the healer save in superficial or everyday convenience of expression has no concern for the daughter but sees and helps the distress of the mother soul unable to function in a height of special and particular interest or concern.

Interest is the basis of conscious life and what we seldom succeed in remembering for very long is that interest functions in the self and not in the environment. Life gives life to itself as is realized in all biology and no situation or complex of relationship is dynamic or immortal enough in its own superficial reality to be author of life or destroyer of life in any aspect. Material actualities are co-operative in living and contributory in consciousness, but in their own nature they are necessarily nonentity. Interest is subjective or creative and sustaining and directive, and not objective or of chance.

Because the source of all ills is an imbalance in attitude, respect for the integrity of the other forbids healing except at his request.

568

TRUE HEALING ALWAYS SUCCEEDS

The triumphant nature of spiritual healing is its enduring impression on the minds and lives of those who have benefited from its ministration, and in true healing work and also in all preparation for healing and teaching about healing this feeling of triumph must be a prevailing element. Not only are individual healings destroyed but all possibility of healing is negated by the literal nature of unsound promises and expectations as these are encouraged in a superficial occultism or spectacular miracle-mongering. When healing is proper and its true nature is realized or when the nature of illness is clear and the constructive purposes of suffering are grasped healing never fails in even the slightest degree. But when students who lack discrimination are led to seek amelioration of conditions without extracting any essence of experience from them, or to gain the help of the cosmos for the furthering of their own plans or notions and this without willingness or desire on their part to be changed within themselves by an expansion of consciousness or a broadening in general point of view then truly does healing become a snare and a delusion. To an outsider and rather rightly from surface analysis it will seem almost to be begging the question when we insist in healing practice that nothing be put in healing consciousness or submitted by healing slip or made the concern of meditation until critically and literally it can be seen to be both an actual possibility and spiritual desirability as beneficial both to self and every other self related to self and to the race as a whole.

Reference in this is to tangible objectives and definite healing goals. Behind this as well as over and above it always is an implicit general healing in which the self asks eternal understanding.

Healing is efficacious when the nature of the imbalance is grasped, when there is a willingness to change the self and when it brings benefit to all concerned.

569

THE LAW OF HEALTH IS USE

In modern cultures and in deeper phases of occultism the test that those expecting any spiritual healing must pass successfully is in the answer given to the question, what will you do with yourself if your request for healing is granted? Not the things to be done in order to facilitate a healing are the matter of importance in the discussion of spiritual healing but rather the things to be done by those asking for healing in order that the healing be legitimate. The matter of legitimacy is the consideration of healing as fundamentally the problem of result in terms of worthiness rather than mere possibility. Spiritual healing in the larger view is never itself a problem because its operation has no limitation and needs neither healer nor method of procedure except as these are convenient dramatization and substantiation in the experience of the one receiving the help. This is not to say that therapeutic procedure does not advance the result but to show that the result is its own ultimate causation in the fact that reality in a basic readiness for healing will materialize the objective agency in one form if not in another.

The law of health is the necessity of use and whenever a difficulty in well-being arises on some plane of being there is behind it, as surely as life is behind every manifestation, some deficiency in living fullness of life and soul procedure. To attack problems on an external basis is the way of the world and is a proper method whenever their solving is within the boundaries of experience and capacity, but spiritual healing rests on a higher level of necessity and achievement because it is concerned with more than judgment in surface act and has its objective in a fundamental adjustment of the soul itself.

Ill-health is evidence of improper use of health and true spiritual healing takes place when one faces the necessity of adjustment of soul.

570

HEALING IS AN EMERGENCY

Knowing healing to be desperately important to the well-being and living continuance of occultism itself, since the assistance given to others and to the world is the sole basis of consciousness in an invisible fellowship, we are all likely to exceed our privilege and develop a busybody role as an effect of our attitude toward the cosmos in which we have our individual being. We fail to remember that this power of healing is given to us to meet individual emergencies, wholly apart from the practical necessity in our group work that we have some emergency to meet continuously in our efforts to serve our vision, and that the emergencies are not of our own creation or shaping.

The seeker who tries to activate his occult existence or heighten his spiritual awareness by approaching life with the keyed-up self-consciousness of one who invents an issue for every trivial incident, or who mistrusts all existence that is not characterized by some form of artificial excitement, is trading the calm reality of inner or eternal awareness of soul for the nervous irritability of flesh and an outer and totally superficial sensitiveness. Healing is an emergency and the greatest of all possible emergencies to be faced by man is the dangerous lack of poise of people who live to no purpose and act to no end. Sickness is an emergency but as a case of misfunctioning and so hardly a mere suffering of ill-luck as assumed in a thoughtless or superficial perspective that is all too common. The suffering provides the start of the healing and the emergency is the need to enhance this and direct the power of the suffering to the solution of financial and every sort of bodily or psychological maladjustment. Healing reaches every emergency of the soul-at-source in a common absoluteness.

Healing is to be used only in an emergency, for basic poise must be maintained by a refusal to give emergency status to every minor ripple on life's surface.

571

THE COMMON ABSOLUTENESS

It should be obvious to every student that any attempted healing will fail if it tends to separate the patient from Source, and such a separation surely is effected if the healer or the healing body as in the healing meeting has any conception of going over the head of the person to be healed by assuming him to be less in touch with deity or less in rapport with the reality at focus in all individual Source. Such condescension toward a patient entirely destroys the power to aid him, as does any sense of possession of superior knowledge. If there is certainty of special transcendent privilege or capacity there is an inevitable demoralization of opportunity to help others at core. The fact that spiritual healing is a divine function makes it necessary to keep Source supreme in every detail of operation, and this requires an unceasing ingenuousness or simplicity of attitude on the part of healing effort. Therefore real healing procedure is intellectual at base or a matter of transaction in pure or untinctured idea, but such needs emotional and even physical representations for the average mind quite closed to abstract idea and incapable of impersonal reasoning and as a consequence of this a healing procedure is most acceptable as a ritual or religious rite in which personality is of the group rather than the individual. The Sabian healing procedures are thus established ritualistically with the intellectual expressed inductively by affirmation and the emergency given its expression impersonally through the use of healing slips. Source comes to focus in the generalized meditations.

No matter what degree of exaltation we possess or claim, we cannot interpose our own spirituality between divinity and the personal Source of another. We must raise him in a common absoluteness.

The genius of spiritual healing is that it assists the other to a union with his own Source, and the process thus becomes a sharing in idea.

572

THE HEALER VS THE PROMOTER

The heart of an occult work is its healing ministry, and this only superficially in many if not all instances becomes its broad appeal to the public and its means for winning adherents and awakening the seeker to his opportunity for serving the immortal company. Many spectacular expressions of the occult have been unwitting mobilization to meet some need of the race, and all great religions have sprung out of such a phenomenon, but through most ages of man the current occultism has been a quiet and dignified quickening behind the scenes and as such has had great difficulty in developing sufficient healing work to keep itself in active existence. In the Sabian group we face this no less than every historical body that like us has sought to avoid identification as a definite cult competing with other cults and orthodoxies for popular favor and in doing so proceeding to exploit credulity. We face the fact of but two choices in building the healing ministry.

The way of the promoter is vicious and at the end it becomes top-heavy and self-cancelling. In his fear that this way might be forced on him against his will Jesus was careful for the major part to enjoin silence in connection with his healing and so to keep all at focus in the self and Source. By avoiding publicity and the miracle-mongering to which it would lead he sought to keep the work spiritual. The use of the spectacular to break the apathy of the masses as in the case of Moses may at times meet a need of the race but the immortal or transcendent consciousness of the great Lodge cannot be served in such a fashion and a better way must be found. Such can be a healing ever directed on beyond amelioration to the elevation of human anticipation in ideals projected far ahead of experience in some constant outreach.

True healing is not spectacular, but a quiet opening up of new and hopeful vistas ahead that will result in a renewed outreach.

573

HEALING'S END IS APPRECIATION

The purpose in healing is not to eliminate experience in this existence where all experience is of equal end value and where an element of value is wholly a detail of individual appreciation, but is to enhance experience and to broaden or unify values. Therefore that form of pseudohealing in which some escape is offered an individual is an injury to his eternal being for the reason that both experience and values are subtracted from his existence. There must be an enhancing or broadening of the being in all successful healing of the body or of its situation in the material or social complex. Because any illness is a primitive type of enhancement or nature's own healing that in any conscious crisis is revealed as inadequate to the awareness or to what intensified consciousness there is, the enhancing function of an inner and deeper and spiritual healing must be of a different sort. Indeed it always is and must be a transcendence, but a transcendence of what?

Healing lifts the being from a focal participation in an enhancement of a lower suffering and stirring in existence to a higher or more eternal and immortally potential self-awareness. This hardly can be a result of some lower stirring since physical things certainly are not determinants in superphysical realities but are merely the revealers or substantiators. Therefore we have to see that men make an appeal for healing not because they are ill or in difficulty but in an awareness of need that primarily is intuitive or of mental realization that is objectified most conveniently by the superficial ill. We are compromising with the basic reality when as healers we react to external symptoms more than to take them for this convenience or to show an operation of principle. Ever and directly we must respond to Source.

Healing does not cancel experience. Rather it enhances it so that the broadening of the being, of which the need is indicated by the difficulties, may be grasped.

574

THE PROBLEMS IN HEALING EFFORT

This long discussion of the principles underlying effort and interest in healing is fundamentally a recognition of the problems arising in the fact that a soul quickened to a higher destiny is first of all anxious to share what it has achieved and then is eager to continue its progress and hence often falls into the superficial error of seeing a better chance to further its greater ideals in the world than in and through itself. The urge to share is the one basis of our inner or eternal fellowship and most important, but we can share only as we possess, and quite truly and literally it is impossible to share an ideal. Better living can be shared with the world by living it since this is comprehended through our example in our determination to share the way of life we have found admirable, but the attempt to share by a denying to the world of the freedom of choice through which we possess what we would share is not to share in any respect but is only to take away what already may be possessed of what we would give. The simple principle here is that a good compelled on another is an evil for him. But the living of that good with substantiation in group experience is not a compulsion but rather a real sharing in mutual appreciation.

Healing is real as it avoids all compulsion, and no mere change of words or care in verbal expression will make the patronizing meditation or the healing concentration arrogating the right to choose for others anything but the presumption it is. To the extent we live in others who are our loved ones or partners in responsibility or in a way represent our interest or are represented by us, we have the right to do healing work for them provided we remember that basically we are at labor for ourselves and in that can live eternal truths for others.

Healing must be desired to be effective. The initiate so lives that his healing, available to all who are responsive, is a constant sharing in reciprocal appreciation.

578

ENHANCEMENT IS HEALING AT WORK

Whatever gives a continuing increase to life in any type of experience in which life for the moment is most strongly focused is enhancement and enhancement of any sort is healing at work. Truly it happens that in general the greatest factor in healing is suffering or intensification of emotional perception of reality, and the true healer is careful even in helping to give some palliation for pain yet not to soften or diminish the moment in experience. This means that high understanding does not as much spare the being as refuse to lose every chance to reach deeper in the being at its moments of issue. From an abstraction here a very practical procedure is gained. Times of real stress are soon discovered in clear seeing to be periods of potentiality. In the pioneer times of the Sabian organism I sought to save up work of particular importance and delicacy to do in days when I was in great physical pain or mental anguish, or failing this I would wait on moments of exceptional fatigue and make similar use of them. It will seem to some that if this is right then it would be well to create the valuable ill-health of fatigue deliberately, but as against it is that other great law of occultism since anything ulterior or attempted with remote objective outlined at the expense of the immediate end is self-defeating because not clean or clear in itself. The occultist cannot misuse his own body in the hope of gaining great power. Such is what normally is called black magic and it never is reliably effective.

Nature provides cyclic periods of special agony, certain especially in connection with reproduction or the continuance of group life, and these intensifications may be used properly to heighten perspective and clarify understanding because they occur normally.

The moments of physical or emotional stress are potentially moments of great insight and these should be used to clarify understanding.

579

HEALING IS WORSHIP OF ORGANISM

There can be no spiritual healing without a well-defined love of God, and this means that every healer must have a deep respect for every functioning aspect of organism in life about him before ever he can expect to have much success in aiding those about him. It can be claimed that spiritual healing whether professional in the sense of a life work for an individual thereby gaining richness and immortality in his own personality or whether a ritualized life of an occult group or outer indication of some invisible fellowship is a healing as man's own consciousness is actually self-renewal in some larger or universal experience of his soul. Frequently we question our own right to give or ask healing in terms of the worthiness of the patient, but there is no necessity other than that healer and the one healed have common and continual functioning in some definite natural organism together. We give invisible healing to our political rulers because we are citizens in a definite unit, and it is for no less and no more a reason that we work for the healing of our own family or circle of loved ones.

The love of God actuates us in all this because there is a recognition of our life situation as the group functioning in divine co-operation, and we know that God would wish for His creatures or His associates in the social function only the definite wholeness of every individual potentiality. But we know also that divine love permeates the world in which we live and that what seems evil to us must have an aspect of good in God's sight. We dare not condemn it and neither do we dare speak serious ill of any detail of human experience. Instead we reveal our faith in all life and know by the intensification of the living awareness of a sufferer we will aid the function of his pain.

Anyone in distress is worthy of healing, and the aspirant in his total respect for all God's creation seeks to aid all to an experience of self-renewal.

580

AIDING THE FUNCTION OF PAIN

As we draw to the close of this consideration of healing under the present schedule of reissued letters we should have achieved a real appreciation of its intangibility in its spiritual form and all perspective of it must necessarily be subjective. In contrast with a purely materialistic medical science it is essentially a mental method proceeding on the basic assumption that by directing the life into the path of its own inherent potentiality the ills of flesh and consciousness will disappear or somehow be sublimated or conquered by some form of compensation. We have seen that in the practice of a professional healing the contact with the individual must be direct in some way and the approach to his realization directly or indirectly must be a purely intellectual procedure. But we have seen also that healing is but most incidentally a school of therapeutics and that in a valid occultism all other convenient forms of therapy might be employed and that a seeker will not dissipate his resources of time and energy in requesting of spiritual healing what objective means achieve quite easily.

Above all other things we have seen that healing is that spiritual ritualization of life by which the self is held eternally in need of aid and never able to keep pace with its broadening ideals and so ever desperately seeking a higher awakening and deeper stimulation. We have seen that in the narrow compass of most superficial ills or in the everyday cases of souls somehow unaware of creative touch with the living environment around them the function of healing in the group or by individual appeal to the professional healer is a definite aid given the stimulating role of pain or frustration. Thus healing becomes in general a constructive harassment of unworthy acceptance.

As the aspirant pursues his spiritual way he has increasing need of healing, for as his ideals broaden his need of understanding becomes ever more acute.