Alice Bailey & Djwhal Khul - Esoteric Healing - I - Uncontrolled and Ill-Regulated Emotion

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Esoteric Healing - Chapter I - The Psychological Causes of Disease

A. Uncontrolled and Ill-Regulated Emotion

Given these basic facts, it can be seen how wrong emotional attitudes and a general unhealthy condition of the astral body must be potent factors in producing discomfort and disease. This is due to the fact that the vital or etheric bodies of the masses of humanity are governed primarily and swept into activity through the action of the astral body. Agitation in that body, any violent activity under stress of temper, intense worry or prolonged irritation will pour a stream of astral energy into and through the solar plexus center, and will galvanize that center into a condition of intense disturbance. This next affects the stomach, the pancreas, the gall duct and bladder. Few people (and I might well ask who is exempt at this particular time in the world's history) are free from indigestion, from undesirable gastric conditions, or from trouble connected with the gall bladder.

The tendency to criticism, to violent dislikes, and to hatreds based on criticism or a superiority complex, produces much of the acidity from which the majority of people suffer. I would like to add in passing that I am here generalizing. So many people are prone to an inferiority complex [39] in relation to themselves, but to a superiority complex where their relation to other people is concerned! Stomachic physical plane effects are closely tied up with the desire aspect of the physical body, which finds expression in the eating and drinking of that which is desired, leading subsequently to those attacks of biliousness to which so many are prone.

I offer these above illustrations to demonstrate the effect of the prevalent wrong attitudes to life and people which today distinguish mankind and produce the above mentioned conditions.

The ills which are based on criticism, upon hatred, and upon the capacity to judge each other (usually unkindly) work through from the throat center to the solar plexus. This interrelation existing between the centers is one that has never been properly considered. The centers in the etheric body pass varying kinds of energies amongst themselves, and a great deal of the energy transmitted from one center to another is undesirable, flowing from the centers below the diaphragm to those above.

The physical body (etheric and dense) can be pictured as a house with two telephonic installations - one bringing in energies from without the house and the other being in the nature of a house telephone from room to room. The analogy is far more accurate than appears to the casual thinker. In every modern house, light and water and gas and telephonic interchange are brought.

Light, the symbol of the soul;
water, the symbol of the emotions;
telephonic interchange, the symbol of mind with its inter-communication of knowledges;
and gas, the symbol of the etheric nature.

It is interesting and saddening to note that that which at present goes out of the average house is the refuse that is undesirable - this is the correspondence to that which is [40] selfish and sad and the demand for the satisfaction of personal needs and desires.

It can be seen, therefore, why I have so emphatically impressed the need of harmlessness upon all of you, for it is the scientific method, par excellence and esoterically speaking, of cleaning house and of purifying the centers. Its practice clears the clogged channels and permits the entrance of the higher energies.

The emotional causes of disease and the mental attitudes which produce physical discomfort are at this particular time those which are the most prevalent. When they are persisted in over a long period of time, and are carried over from life to life, they cause the more violent aspects of the conditions referred to above, and from them serious and destructive diseases can emerge, necessitating, for instance, the removal of the gall bladder or those operations incident to the appearance of chronic gastric ulcers. Other diseases grow from a constant pandering to the desire nature, though sexual diseases come under another category. It can be seen from the above how desirable it is that the true healer should combine in himself, not only a measure of esoteric knowledge, but - until he is an initiate - something of psychology, something of the work of a magnetic healer, and also be a trained medical man or surgeon.

Much of the healing now done is worse than useless, because the three above mentioned conditions are lacking. Most doctors, especially those who are called general practitioners, are good psychologists and they have also a sound knowledge of symptoms and of anatomy and of curative measures which are usually lacking in the average metaphysical healer. But they are entirely ignorant of one great field of knowledge - that concerning the energies which meet and war within the human frame and of the [41] potencies which can be set in motion if certain esoteric truths are admitted in place. Until they work with the etheric body and study the science of the centers, they can make little further progress. The esoteric healer knows much about the inner forces and energies and has some understanding of the basic causes of the exoteric diseases, but his ignorance of man's mechanism is deplorable, and he fails to realize two things:

First, that disease is sometimes the working out into manifestation of undesirable subjective conditions. These, when externalized and brought to the surface of the human body, can then be known, dealt with and eliminated. It is well to remember also that sometimes this working out and elimination may well bring about the death of that particular body. But the soul goes on. One short life counts for very little in the long cycle of the soul, and it is counted well worthwhile if a period of ill health (even if it eventuates in death) brings about the clearing away of wrong emotional and mental conditions.
Second, disease is sometimes incident upon and part of the process of the withdrawal of the soul from its habitation. This we call death, and it can come quickly and unexpectedly when the soul withdraws with suddenness from its body. Or death can spread itself over a long period of time, and the soul may take several months or years for its slow and gradual emergence from the body, with the body dying by inches all the time.

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