Consciousness and your health

Friday, September 17, 2010

I feel like this whole week has been a diversion from the exposition of the physical, mental, and spiritual influences on our lives.

In a way that is just what it has been, and for a reason. Sometimes we have to mark time until a propitious moment comes along.

And meanwhile you can let me wrestle with asthma, huh?

It hasn’t really interfered with anything. Does it ever?

Certainly feels to me that it has shaped my entire life by what it has rendered impossible or unlikely.

Another way to say that is that it has been a persistent bias, inclining your external life in a direction you otherwise would’ve had to find another excuse to follow, or might never have found.

Well, can’t we be done with it yet?

You can, provided you do one of two things: understand what it makes possible and give up that relationship, or understand it and find a more acceptable substitute. And this is true of one and all “problems” in your or anybody’s life.

Yes, say some more about that. It rings true immediately.

Anything that manifests – illness, poverty, discrimination, handicaps physical or mental or emotional or social, lack of opportunity, etc. – anything – is going to have physical logical causes. That is, nothing is going to look placed in your life against the grain. Everything will look like the result of something. This makes it harder to see, but just because it follows a line of opportunity, does not mean it is a necessary result.

I’m with you, but rephrase, please, for the studio audience.

You know them, you do it.

It’s like you said about genetics. Genetics never determines what is going to be produced, it only determines the outer ranges of what can be produced (by omission of factors that would be necessary to produce something beyond those limits). Or, a person-group in an environment is not determined, but its limits are determined by whatever isn’t there.

Yes. So, if you’re in a family whose physical heredity provides the opportunity for you to contract asthma, that doesn’t mean you will – any more than your brothers or sisters did – unless you choose it. It means only that asthma is one of the opportunities in your heredity. But perhaps schizophrenia or alcoholism or kleptomania or cancer or whatever (for they all look equivalent to us) are not.

Therefore, the fact that your condition, whatever it is, has antecedent causes does not mean that it was really caused by those factors. It means those factors allowed it to manifest upon your choice. And by now it should be unnecessary for us to add, “choice” is by definition not conscious choice if you do not have control over it.

Therefore, whatever condition in your life oppresses you – or, to put it more neutrally, affects you in a way that you do not want – it can be eliminated by your effectively choosing not to accept it any more. This, regardless of “causes.” Everything always has “causes,” though we see them not as causes so much as permitting factors.

Put not your faith in nostrums, nor in physical or mental or spiritual or emotional cure-alls. Put your faith, instead, in vision and consciousness.

Now what do we mean by that?

It’s simple enough, and here is the point of your robot work in connection with your own health, Frank, and, much more importantly, everyone’s potential to reshape their limits.

First you must see what is really going on. If you have conditions, what is the nature of them? How do they actually function in your life? What do they enable you to do, using enable in the conventional sense as well as in the mental-health sense. How have they gotten you to where you are?

Then, what do you really want? It isn’t enough to say, “I don’t like X and such, I want to be rid of it.” Do you want to be rid of it badly enough to give up the associated benefits? Do you know what various members of your person-group are getting out of it, and do you know what they want and need? Can you fashion an acceptable alternative that will provide the needs as well as eliminate or reinforce (depending on which you want) the bias?

Once you bring it all into consciousness – once you acquaint the strands associated with a given condition with the analysis of costs and benefits, you can decide – in the only “place” you can decide anything, the conscious present – what you want to do and how you want various components to function from then on. In other words, how you want them to chart your course, or provide your bias, or however you’d like to put it.

If you can accomplish this – and what it requires is mostly sincerity – your life will change to conform to what you want. It always does. The joker, as always, is who is “you.” Get your components of you working together, and all these limitations change.

I can feel it, just writing it out.

Yes, because your component cells overhear. But you still have work to do; more analysis, because you strongly want certain lines of approach to remain open to you; you must therefore provide for them in some other way, if it is going to be other than what you already have, that functions.

And for the purposes of illustration it has been handy to have me have a physical problem I couldn’t will away.

Correct. And who saddled you with that unfair burden?

Very funny. All right, I’m pleased. Thanks and till next time.