Meditation and Healing

 

The question often asked by the beginner is: "what has healing got to do with true meditation practices?" The answer will always be the same by the enlightened one - "everything". Right meditation and esoteric healing are virtually synonymous terms, in that one is productive of the other.

         The application of the meditative technique must always be healing in its effect, if it is to be productive of the enlightenment-consciousness, of the true white dharma/ The effect is the elimination of everything within the consciousness and threefold personality structure[1] that is associated with, or causative of, disease, disharmony, and death. This takes time, much time, for many lifetimes of such conditionings are not easily or quickly eliminated.

         The energy that makes enlightenment possible pouring into the quiescent, "awakening" personal-I, automatically throws out the grosser substance (of disease) that offers resistance to it. The person must consequently deal with its effects in a conscious way. There are many overlapping cycles of such activity. Progress is made from cleansing the grossest aspects of the body, speech, and mind (physical, emotional, and mental substance) to the subtlest, until eventually the being stands transformed, transfigured, and consubstantiated with that which is fundamental and integral to being/non-being. (Which is an objective of the entire incarnation process.) Then disease or sickness, as we understand it, is no longer possible.

         The detail of this transfiguration process is given as a consequence of practical meditation. The important thing to note here is that the key lies in the attitude of impersonality and detachment achieved by the student. The nature of his mind patternings must change. One must decentralise one's entire thinking process away from the personal "I" or "me". This necessitates embracing concepts of the whole, of one's essential unity with the interrelated multi-dimensional universe, without making oneself the centre of attention therein.

         It implies the "turning about in the deepest seat of consciousness[2]” away from the "lower four" (the centres of consciousness, chakras, below the diaphragm associated with the field of desire, sensual sensations, and images), to the "higher three" above the diaphragm, (the Heart, Throat, and Head centres) wherein the enlightenment-consciousness will be found. The student will later discover that such terms as "higher three" and "the lower four" have many levels of interpretation and of application; for the application of meditation will lead him into many fields of experience, states of awareness, and learning procedures through contact and identification with Beings previously not known.

         The ‘detachment’ that is spoken of here is not that generally espoused in Vipassana type of meditation teachings where people are taught to eliminate all types of thoughts from the mind, and to concentrate upon the minutiae of the physical body. This is but a form of forceful denial of impressions coming from sources above and beyond that pertaining to the physical body itself. A forceful denial or denigration of certain types of thought processes deemed not desirable does not make true detachment. Wisdom comes by means of proper comprehension; through right acceptance and thence rejection of that deemed harmful or not necessary in one’s ultimate quest. Once, through wisdom, something is rejected as not necessary then true detachment is found.

         All forms of detachment necessitate discrimination. What indeed is right discrimination is what must be asked. In such a case the person may first discriminate what is outside the body from what is inside. Thence on the inside we have the discrimination of the organs from their cellular constitution, and thence the cellular constitution from the skandhas, etc. What is it that makes the ‘I’ or ‘me’ is generally the question posed in such techniques. By delving into the minutiae they can not find any reality to an ‘I’ or ‘me’. This is all fine, from one perspective; however, no matter how it is dissected in the mind the human body exists as an integral whole, and must bear the consciousness that does all of the enquiring in this form of meditation, therefore it must be properly fed to support its investigatory activities.

         Here ‘right discrimination’ necessitates the intake of the appropriate foods to facilitate the maintenance of good health, otherwise meditation will not be possible. The concept of detachment then produces an immediate problem to the enquiring mind. The question then becomes: ‘should one be detached to the type of food that one intakes into the system?’ Often we find this question answered very shallowly indeed, as the person generally forgets that right discrimination is always behind all concepts and actions associated with detachment, otherwise the person will not live long enough to gain any form of enlightenment. What one feeds one’s consciousness, the food intake, is very important. One may say that one does not care about food, (through the doctrine of being ‘totally detached’) that one will eat anything, or nothing at all, in order to stay detached. In other words choosing not to discriminate between poisons, harmful disease or sickness producing agents to the body, or whether his body is nourished enough for him to go on living. Then such a course can only lead to disaster for the human individuality. It is not the course of wisdom, and cannot lead to enlightenment, as the Buddha aptly demonstrated when he tried a similar severe form of yogic austerity.

         Another example of a form of ignorantly applied detachment is if one decided that he was going to be so ‘truly’ detached that he will not care where he walks at all; that is, to be detached to the nature of the outer environment. So he walks lazily across a busy road and gets killed or maimed, or causes others to injure themselves avoiding him. Such a person choosing this form of blindness may simply walk over a cliff and that will be the end of him for that life.

         Clearly right discrimination is an essential ingredient concerning ‘detachment’ right from the start. Therefore, right food intake, that which one feeds one’s sensory intake with, must be properly worked out from the start of one’s enquiry as to the nature of ‘self’, etc. The vegetarian ideal therefore must become a conscious choice. One cannot simply close one’s eyes and ears and remain blind and deaf when one is practicing the art of detachment, rather, one must be alert to all incoming sensory data and learn, through right discrimination, which to reject and which to accept, in one’s path to become ultimately wise and liberated from the vicissitudes of the sangsâra.

         One learns to get detached to things of the sangsâra that inevitably cause pain and suffering, or suffering to others; one gets to be detached to forms of illusionality. But is not true detachment when one can rightly utilise these illusional things for the purpose of helping all sentient beings gain liberation from suffering, without them becoming props for one’s own concept of ‘self-aggrandisement’? This is the basis to the ‘skilful means’ of a Bodhisattva. The sangsâra becomes a means or tool to help others gain mastery of phenomenality, and of themselves. One becomes detached as to what one does for oneself on this path of love, other than that it leads to liberation from sangsâra, so that the many can be helped. In other words, one cannot be detached to the white dharma but one must become impersonal in one’s dealings with the one and the all. How not to be attached in what one must constantly utilise becomes a constant meditation for all earnest Bodhisattvas. Inevitably, the meditation is upon how does one arrest the forces of friction, inertia, strife, and pain in the world as a whole; how to produce peace and harmony in the midst of strife and conflict. It is consequently the mode of healing of all pains in and out of the bodily consciousness that concerns the meditator.

         Meditation helps one to heal oneself, and ultimately, the surrounding environment, which is but the extension of one's life in all directions in space. Meditation is the expression of the law of karma, when properly unfolded, and is based on the paradigm of the laws of evolution, when properly taught. This means that the stages of the unfoldment of meditation progress in a similar manner as that undertaken by the greater evolutionary Space as a whole.

         Indeed, evolved Buddhas from long past world-cycles of evolution are in a state of meditation upon their Buddha spheres, which are but spatial universes. Such a Meditation-Mind works in, through, and envelopes all that is, and that which must come to be. If the individual on the path to enlightenment is to be freed from the bonds of space-time and the transience of his own personality nature, then he must learn to emulate the greater Meditation-Mind unfolding. Meditation is thus the key to eventual absorption into the spaciousness of the greater Clear Mind of Bliss. For this (and what lies ‘beyond’) we have no adequate terminology in any language, and of which the comparable Sanskrit terms, shûnyatâ and Moksha, simply translate out as the "Void". Later the Dharmakâya becomes the focus of awareness.

         The attainment of the meditation-mind, and the resultant internal experiences of one type or another, is concomitant with the number of previous lives spent in pursuit of the Mysteries of being/non-being. If, for instance, the person has spent a life in the past learning directly from the Buddha, and later from Jesus, then as the millennia progressed, under a number of other enlightened sages, this acquired experience will greatly assist him to quickly master the entire life process and obtain the enlightened Mind  in any future life. He would tend to quickly catch up where he left off in the past, though within the context of the new cultural and environmental situation.

         Such a person would already have been initiated into the associated Mysteries. He must recapitulate his former attainment, and thence pass the testings in the present life that will allow him to surpass the high point of the past.

         With regard to healing, it will be seen that the true spiritual healer will not ask for money, or any other fee for his healing service. He knows that a healer can not profit from another's distress, but will work on a donation basis through his example of giving, and generating the goodwill from his patients to meet all his future physical plane needs. Ideally, he knows of the karmic interrelationships between the healer and the healed, and that he must work with the laws of Love, colour and sound, and (at a later stage) consciously with the devas that embody all manifest life, to effect his healing. The true healer does not really "heal" as such, but rather, assists the patient to effect his/her own recovery, and will take pains to ensure that the mistakes that caused the illness in the first place are not committed again.

         Right education is always the true healing practice, and takes much wisdom and skill in action to apply. It should be better understood that the healing of the physical body of its various aches and illnesses is not the most important thing, but rather, the elimination of the deep-seated karmic causes and related inherited psychological and physiological tendencies from past lives (samskâras). The healer must begin to truly treat the entire personality and not just the symptoms. The emotional-mental causes of illnesses, specifically of how the emotions produce ailments such as influenza, cancer, and all inflammatory sickness, should be better analysed and treated. A quick fix, whether pills or herbs, is not the true answer, for then similar or worse ailments will crop up later.

         Everything must be viewed in terms of energy, as all things are constituted thus; but specifically so with all organisms that are "alive", and that have their own specific inherent vitality (Skt. Jiva). There can either be an excessive amount of Jiva or a dearth thereof. One category of organism (eg, vitamins) has vitality to give (of varying colourings) and another vampirises (eg., disease bearing micro-organisms). If the energy to be given is of the type needed by the body then we have a vital healthy physical body, if adverse to the well being of the body, then we have inflammatory types of disease (eg, influenza if the agent, such as some poisons, and bacteria, vampirises, then we have diseases of congestion, (eg, tubercolosis) as substance builds up, but the vital life is drained away.[3]

         Much error has crept into orthodox healing practices in the desire of the healer to keep the body (the form nature) "alive" at all costs, despite the clear indications of the indwelling consciousness to vacate it. Healers must learn to work with the factor of death as a healing potency, and not against it, and this necessitates much meditative insight on the part of the practitioner. Once healers begin to understand and accept the laws of reincarnation and karma, they will begin to see the absurdity of many of the quandaries created by such things as euthanasia and treatment of chronically ill, deformed, or totally (mentally) incapacitated patients. There is really no such thing as death, except possibly, the "death" of the human psyche, as a consequence of left hand practices.

         The true healer will thus recognize the healing factor in the death of all aspects of the personality, and the teaching value of all illnesses - for they teach what not to do. They are caused by the transgressions of the Laws of Love and Life and this the patient must be taught to recognize in himself. The karma always manifests in such a way so as to rightly educate the individual, and if the lessons are not learnt, then they will be repeated in another way, until eventually the person learns to do what is right.

         It is much like a child learning how to walk, he must fall over many times, sometimes with painful results, before the skill is learnt. Also, the child must first touch the heat of a flame in order to understand, that although attractive, it is hot and can burn. Millennia-long cycles of karmic unfoldment of sickness, disease, and suffering teaches the spiritual child how to walk in the realms of enlightened Being, freed from such ailments. He has fallen into sangsâric involvement and allurement many times, and has learnt to detach himself from such activity, to pick himself up from the realms of darkness, to enter those of Light. He has been burnt by premature tampering with psychic fires often enough to know what not to do. Consequently he has become wise and compassionate, recognizing the activities in others that cause sicknesses and the like, that he had formerly manifested and now has mastered. He can now rightly offer the cures to those that will listen and are willing also to undergo the disciplines that will produce mastery.

         Such enlightened understanding is obviously well-nigh impossible to the materialist and orthodox "healer", who will not look at the factor of karma and rebirth, and who generally manifests contempt and disdain at any suggestion of a subtle energy body, karma, chakra system, and devas as factors to be taken into account in the healing of diseases.

         It should be noted that, esoterically, we view physical plane incarnation as death, for then the indwelling vital Life "dies" to the bountiful spiritual realms it is accustomed to.

         The arrogance and blinded vision of those trained in western materialistic ethics and values is a major factor in propagating most aspects of sickness and disease in our societies. This is because true causes are not looked at in totality, only the symptoms, and secondary disease-bearing factors, as are the microbes and viruses, upon which the diseases are blamed. When "causes" are found, then only the most material concrete ones are examined, such as direct poisons, germs, carcinogenic chemicals, and the like. Other than direct poisons, such things, however, only produce effects after the subtle causes have been operating for quite a while, and bodily warnings have gone unheeded. After all, if one produces a cesspool of base energy fields in one's body, then the inevitable effect is the massive breeding of primitive forms of life that are vitalised by the energy levels of this "cesspool", and they are the germs (etc) responsible for disintegration and death, whilst the body has not the vitality to fight off the mass-invader.

         People have thus been conditioned to look at the wrong factors as the causes of their distress. Centuries of mass socio-political, materialistic indoctrination, have kept them in ignorance, thus laying the fertile ground work for the later concrete factors of disease-bearing organisms that concentrate symptoms at focal points within the body. This forces them to go to medical specialists (likewise indoctrinated) who utilise an increasingly sophisticated array of elaborate and costly appliances and technological contrivances to analyse the symptoms, dissect the body, transplant organs, apply chemicals, and the like, to effect their "cures". For this the patient must pay the increasingly costly fees demanded.

         Surely, true healing must be far simpler: as ordained by the same Laws of Life, Light, and Love found throughout Nature, engendered by its agents, who have construed the amazingly ingenious and wondrous human form in the first place. Such Laws have been in operation and incorporated in the perfectly integrated universe at large, long before the advent of modern science. Certainly, the many divinely inspired healers, knew and utilized them.

         Taking a pill may alleviate the symptoms, but will do naught to obviate the true causes; it only postpones the inevitable. There are no "miracle cures", except those associated with the disciplined self-cleansing activity and purity of lifestyle. In fact, it should be noted that the true healer knows that the healing potency comes not from himself; he is only the conscious channel for divine energies (prânas), having developed the needed understanding and capacity to do so. He adds this energy to the patient who is in the process of healing, and thus effects the cleansing of the diseased areas, or else takes the diseased prânas into his/her own body, cleansing them with the radiance of the aura he/she possesses. There are other healing techniques utilized by the true healer that space prevents delving into here.

         Beware of highly processed factory produced drugs, especially those derived from mineral substances. They are but corpses and skeletons of what was once vital and alive. They produce effects in the now, but postpone the inevitable. The karma of the postponed sickness will simply come out in another more virulent form in another part of the body at a later time, or in a later life. The true healers, here, are the greater devas (solar devas)[4] working via the "doctors", and they use these "corpses" as the foci for their work. The devas are the angels of Christianity, and the dâkinîs ghandharvas (etc) of Buddhism. The devas are omnipresent, and can be contacted consciously via right meditation techniques.

         The psychic emanations from "corpses" are effective in producing their own types of symptoms of disease, and in time must be eliminated from the living vital tissue. When done so, they will tend to affect further sicknesses. The patient goes to doctors for further chemotherapy, artificial hearts and the like, and so the cycle continues. True meditation techniques will give one conscious contact with these angelic forces, as the devas are always predisposed to work with those that care for the formed realms (which they embody) and their work is greatly facilitated by conscious cooperators in their work. Such co-operative endeavour is the way of the medical profession of the future.

 

         The main points to consider in meditative healing are thus:

         * Beware of the critical mind, irritability, fears, and all forms of emotional extremism, as they are major factors in devitalising the body (as energy is expended and dissipated in the emotional and vital bodies) and thus the production of illnesses.

         * Beware of the ingestion of chemicalised, devitalised, and highly processed foods, all forms of drugs, narcotics and stimulants. These either devitalise or poison the body, causing areas therein for the breeding of disease bearing factors.

         * Beware of the ingestion of animal products, too much fat, sugar, carbohydrates, and all forms of fast foods, fad foods, and high-priced gimmicks - vitamins, etc, with which many overload their digestive and eliminative systems. What the body can't properly digest or must utilize much energy to convert and store (such as fat) acts to devitalises it. The animal products also debase the body with low grade prânas that are antithetical to the production of refined higher states of awareness.

         * Eat simply and wisely the products that have ripened in the sun, and enjoy what you eat.

         * Listen well to the body, it will tell you when sicknesses are approaching, and learn to fast, abstaining from all solid foods, and especially to bouts of emotionality, when sickness approaches. Then you will learn to quickly heal yourself with a minimum of cost and maximum effectiveness. The fasting allows the body to put the sum of its vital forces to rectify the imbalances and disease in the areas of need - as that is what the healing factors in the body have been designed to do.

         * Work with the body's natural defences as much as possible, developing peace of mind, and a meditative lifestyle, knowing well that most sicknesses are but the effects of wrong actions in thought, word, or deed, and will pass, once the true causes have been ascertained and eliminated. Look specifically to the emotional body, for most diseases (especially cancers, inflammations, and fevers) stem from constant emotional activity. This concerns the continuous agitation of auric substance, (centred upon the Solar Plexus centre the endocrine glands and the areas of influence in the body that they control.

         * Specialised attention may, however, be needed in cases where long periods of bad eating habits, toxin intake, and "riotous" lifestyle, have caused major abnormalities to manifest in the bodily organism.[5]

         * Live as much as possible in harmony with all of the Laws of Life, which naturally govern all biological processes. The central factor of which is the Sun, with its life-giving waves of light. Light is the factor underlying all that we can come to know. Plants exist specifically to capture sunlight and convert it to the starch, proteins, etc, that animals need to sustain their lives. This is part of the reason for the need of a vegetarian regime in one's lifestyle if one wishes to avoid diseases, as plants offer a direct source of sun-like vitality needed for good health, whilst animals offer a debased secondary source, adulterated with its own oft diseased emanatory prânas, fears and associated toxins.

         * The law of karma is but an emanation of the rectifying influence of the greater Sun at the Heart of all Life, ruling over all of the imbalances of the energy equation in the environment, of the bodily nature of the Universe as a whole. To be able to heal oneself, in Truth, one must therefore learn (via a meditative lifestyle) to:

 

a)  Be serene enough to listen to the silent voice of the conscience (which is but a touch of revelation from this "Heart of Life") when it manifests, so as to be able to rightly avoid bad decisions that would be productive of karma that would have to be cleansed later.

b)  To be alert to the possibilities of the manifestation of the rectifying waves of karma, and thus offer no hindering action to their outcome (seemingly either good or bad as far as our personality desires are concerned).

c)  To be sensitively alive to the impacts of streams of vital health-giving light and revelations from higher sources that are healing in their effect.

d)  Thereby to watch carefully the effects of all one's actions in the material world that would sow the seeds of disease or disharmony that would sprout sickly weeds in the future.

 

         To be serene, alert, alive, and to constantly watch the effects of one's actions in the ephemeral world is one of the major outcomes of the practice of meditation, and we can clearly see here that a "healthy mind" really concerns the production of emanatory good health far and wide - to the sumtotal of all that the mind contacts and influences. This is more than just the physical body of the being concerned, it refers to every modulation in the fabric of life whereupon the energies and karmic streams associated with that mind must affect and effect. These streams come from the past and are modulated in the everpresent bath of energy impacts that is the eternal Now, and which the organising consciousness (that is the meditating mind) projects in such a way that future events mould the path way that the embodied form must follow.

         This "embodied form" is our personality structure, and if it follows without hindrance or resistance the pathway of the projected energy modulations, then perfect health is ensured, and such a being is deemed enlightened, a divine healer. If there is resistance to these modulations, then we have friction, heat, consequent pain; the grinding inertia productive of disease strife, the lack of conscious understanding of the way of manifesting ephemerality all around that is the normal way of those bound to the personality world. They are moulded by the past and resist that which the future ordains for them. Thus is ignorance fostered, and from ignorance comes the hosts of diseases, the world of suffering that people know well.

         What I have described here is really the background to the Buddhist concept of "the twelvefold formula of Dependent Origination", which is claimed to be the basis of the perpetual cycle of births and deaths, and has its basis in ignorance, (Skt: avidya) a non-recognition of reality and which is responsible for our present state of consciousness. The Buddha started, as Govinda [6]points out, with the simple question:

 

‘What is it that makes old age and death possible?’ And the answer was: 'On account of being born, we suffer old-age and death!' Similarly birth is dependent on the process of becoming, and this process would not have been set in motion, if there had not been a will to live and a clinging to the corresponding forms of life. This clinging is due to craving, due to unquenchable 'thirst' after the objects of sense-enjoyment, and this again is conditioned by feeling (by discerning agreeable and disagreeable sensations). Feeling, on the other hand, is only possible by the contact of the senses with their corresponding objects. The senses are based on a psycho-physical organism, and the latter can only arise if there is consciousness! Consciousness, however, in the individually limited form of ours, is conditioned by individual, egocentric activity (during countless previous forms of existence), and such activity is only possible as long as we are caught in the illusion of our separate egohood.

 

         The production of 'perfect health' is therefore the way that one can escape this wheel of Dependent Origination. It is a means whereby that which is not the 'self' can be identified and thence merged with. Eliminate egocentric activity and you eliminate the causes for disease, and thence the need for rebirth into cycles of suffering.

         When seeking for those who purport to heal human woes look always to the true motives of the healer concerned, what he gains personally, and what he does unselfishly, truly for the good of others. True humbleness and right motive zealously applied on the path of Love guarantees success, for humbleness leads one eventually to the highest teachings, and right motives to truthful Revelations. "Success" however, is not necessarily what the aspiring one imagined it might be at the beginning of his journeying.