THINKING AND DESTINY

Harold W. Percival

CHAPTER VII

MENTAL DESTINY

Section 19

Purpose of a disease. The real cure. About schools of thought to banish disease and poverty.

What parts of a thought will be exteriorized as the sediments which are to be the seeds of disease, is determined in each case by the thinker of the Triune Self to bring about a balancing of the thought by the doer and to align the exteriorizations with universal adjustment. Therefore the determination of what part of a thought is to precipitate as a disease is the result of reason and is of far reaching import.

The purposes of disease are to purge the body and the breath-form and to force the sufferer to learn. A portion of certain thoughts is exteriorized as a disease to purge the body, and thereby through the four systems in the body, to purge the breath-form. The purging of a body is accomplished by a process of boiling out, when time and condition and place form a juncture.

The condition is furnished when the gradual development reaches a certain stage. The time is fixed when it fits in with the cyclic recurrence of the thought. The boiling out is what is called a disease. The sores and ulcers and festerings are the visible scum brought out by the seething. Sometimes these outer signs are absent, as in sciatica and paralysis, but the purging goes on just the same. By these processes of disease the sediments are brought out and removed. Sometimes a disease causes death without all the sediments being removed. Then the sediments which remain have to be boiled over again in a succeeding life, until they are boiled out and removed. Then that part of the physical body is cleansed. The breath-form is reached through the system in which the disease appears, by that one of the four senses which manages the particular system. This sense reaches into the involuntary nervous system, where the breath-form lives, and effaces the blemishes on the breath-form as the physical body is being boiled out.

The other purpose of disease is to force the sufferer to learn some particular thing. Ailments are usually accompanied by pain, fear, weariness and despondency, by disabilities of various kinds, by discomforts and inconveniences. All this affects the feeling of the doer directly through the nerves of the body. The sensations give experience and compel observations and deductions. Thinking may result in learning; often it has no such result. In that case the disease will recur and the experiences be repeated until the lesson which the disease is to teach has been learned. Then the disease will disappear and not recur. The most favorable case is one where a lesson is learned when a disease has run its course once. Disease teaches the doer what not to think and what not to do. Its purpose is not to teach the doer what it should think and what it should do.

To cure the pains and disabilities caused by his disease is the sufferer’s dominating thought. Until these by-products of disease become intolerable the thought of cure is not uppermost, but even when it is not, it commands attention. This is the reason why schools of thought which offer quick ways of curing disease by thinking, have so many adherents, irrespective of whether these ways are right or wrong and regardless of future results. Yet if the cure is no real cure and the disease returns after a while, or if another disease is brought out when the first one is forced back, and if in each case injurious consequences are added to the troubles of the sufferer, a course of thinking according to the rules of these schools is inadvisable. Why such thinking is to be avoided will appear from a consideration of what a real cure is and how it can be effected.

A real cure is the complete elimination of the disease. This does not happen as long as the impression on the aia calls for the appearance of that disease in the physical body. The impression is called a sign, symbol, seal or signature, and it commands nature forces. Of course it is not physical. Every disease has its seal, that is, it is ruled by a seal. Nature forces obey the seal in the development and course of the disease. According to the seal some of them build diseased tissue and others build themselves into a disease.

It is true that many ailments appear, last for a while, and gradually disappear; but they are not cured. Such apparent cures are effected by the elementals working as the natural processes in the body if it is left alone, or by the use of roots, herbs and other simples, or by the treatment of physicians or by the operations of surgeons.

Surgical removal of tissues or organs may stop the pain and the spread of disease, but it is not a real cure, for the signature of the disease is still on the aia and even on the breath-form. Often surgical operations, no matter how skillfully performed, cannot stop a recurrence. This is the case if the seal compels a continuance.

Nor are medical cures permanent, because they are not real cures. The best that any physician can do is to alleviate conditions and to assist nature in her ways of healing. Whether the physician knows it or not, medicines work because they are elemental forces. When medicines touch human tissues, elemental action is compelled. It may be beneficial, ineffective or detrimental. Even if the disease disappears from visibility its immediate cause, namely the indication for it on the breath-form, remains.

Medicines may be remedial, because of elemental forces in them. These attract other elementals to the affected part, some of which aid nature in re-establishing health, while some drive out the elementals inimical to that part.

Those who are sensitive to nature forces and have a certain aptness can find in certain plants means to relieve afflictions. They make their way over meadows, along swamps, under trees, beside streams, amid mosses, in the clear sunlight or at certain phases of the moon, in dry or moist weather. They gather according to the signatures of the plants, leaves, stems, roots, barks, buds, flowering tips, mosses and seeds. They either use at once or preserve what they have collected. They mix at a proper time and place the ingredients in sympathetic relation, and give their medicines at the proper time. Sometimes they use also in their remedies fluids and parts of animals, and certain of the minerals. Some of those who are skillful in these ways can effect cures which seem magical. This is because of the direct action of the elemental forces in the removal and building up of tissue, and in the relief from fevers, swellings or abscesses, and the healing of scalds, burns, bites and poisonings.

Everything that grows could be used to advantage in relieving ills, if people only knew its signature and how to make use of its magnetic properties. The elemental virtue lies not only in the elementals composing the plant, but also in the magnetic power of the plant as a means to connect that which is to be healed with elemental influence which produces the cure. The meanest plant, or whatever object it may be will be effective or otherwise according to the time and place of its selection and preparation and the time and manner of its application. The seasons and the hours of the day or night have vastly different magnetic influences upon the same remedy, and so the same thing will produce different effects according to the times when prepared. Moreover, the application reaches different conditions according to the season and the hours when it is made, notwithstanding modern skepticism.

The failure of physicians to effect more cures, where these are possible, is largely due to their ignorance of and contempt for these matters. The part that elementals play is not generally known and, indeed, few are aware of their existence.

The most experienced of surgeons, physicians and healers by simples, know that their efforts are only aids to the processes of nature in effecting a cure. They also know that there is no assurance that any cure can be effected. Many times a case which appears plain and promises success, cannot be cured, and sometimes a case which appears hopeless, and where other doctors have failed, is cured at once and with little attention. The one who effects a cure is the “lucky” doctor, the others are “unlucky.” In no case can a real cure be had unless the complaint has run its course or the signature of the disease allows the cessation.

A rather unusual and permissible method is that of the laying on of hands. In this as well as in all other healing, elemental forces are brought into play to affect and counteract the elementals making up the disease. Healing by the laying on of hands is the relief of an affliction by the healer placing his hands on the affected part, or on a related part of the body of the sufferer. Such healing can be done by a person whose astral body is in touch with the form plane and serves as a channel through which these forces will flow into the body of the sufferer.

This gift is a psychic power and is often incident to a strong astral body and to personal magnetism. While such a surplus of psychic power and fitness must have been acquired through conservation of generative force in a prior life, there may be in a healer many vices in the present life. In that case he will lose the power sooner or later. Nor need such a healer be free from disease himself. But he must have had and brought over a certain desire to help and benefit others. Sometimes the power to heal runs in families. Sex or age do not matter much, nor is intellectual power required, but the healer must have some insight, be magnetic and be sensitive to certain forces of the form plane. He ought to feel in himself that he wants to benefit the patient and he ought to feel that he is an instrument which some intelligent power uses for its own purpose. This psychic power should not be used for gain.

The way in which such psychic healing should be done is by placing the hands successively in front and behind each of the four sections of the body, and then remaining passive and having the attitude of being a channel for the passage of the life force, through the healer’s own fourfold body, into the fourfold body of the sufferer. The healer need not know this nor anything of the process of healing. The healer must engage in no thinking, imagining, willing or believing at the time, because mental activities would interfere with the passage of the healing forces. While he remains passive these forces flow and thereby start the orderly rhythm of life in the body of the sufferer and re-establish proper functions of the elementals in its fourfold structure. The solid cells and organs are invigorated and adjusted to their finer counterparts, the sediments of disease are removed and the tissues repaired. Neither healer nor sufferer should engage in mental activities looking to a cure. This healing is done by psychic means. The sufferer need not believe, but he should not set his will against the method employed.

If a healer proceeds in this way and is merely passive, benevolent in feeling, and does not interfere by thinking, he will succeed. He will not be exhausted though he treats many persons each day. But if he assumes that he himself is doing the healing or if he tries to throw his own life force or magnetic force into the sick he will become exhausted, because he depletes his own reservoir of life. He may also then impart to those he treats tendencies to his own shortcomings.

The wish to be rid of disease is stronger even than that to escape from poverty. Around disease and want and their worries turn the wishes of most people. Even though it is not generally known how and why disease and poverty are exteriorizations of thoughts, it is becoming known that they can be driven away by thinking. In recent times schools of thinking in certain ways, so as to produce these effects, have gained many followers. They have this in common, that they want to produce immediate results by thinking directly at or against oppressive conditions so as to dispel them, and by thinking of and for agreeable conditions to get them.