Health and illness as indicator

Sunday, April 13, 2025

5:30 a.m. Perhaps we could say more about how our health challenges provide indicators of our – what should we call them? – moral deficiencies?

First let’s define terms a bit. We don’t want to leave things so loose that people fit our discussion into their theologies or philosophies rather than hearing what we are actually saying.

“Oh, that’s nothing but ….”

Exactly. It isn’t new if you insist on seeing it as old. And it can’t do you any good if it doesn’t let you change the viewpoint from which you define things. Ask any psychiatrist, there isn’t anything harder than leading people to see themselves differently. It is easy to provide ideas and facts, even to lead people to draw connections between things they had considered unrelated – but to change an idea, a concept, is different from changing a basic orientation. As long as the change is just in their head, nothing has really changed. But when that change reaches the core of the self, then there is the chance of something new.

To put it into Monroe-speak, they connect the mental body and the emotional body. And the energetic body, too, I suppose.

And the physical body. Yes, in that idea-system, they align the four bodies around a new way of experiencing life, and everything changes.

Or, as I have been putting it, they synchronize their emotional and mental spreadsheets so that data and the meaning of the data and the experience of the data interrelate.

The conceptual framework isn’t very important. What counts is the person’s willingness to engage, of course.

Sure. They have to be present.

In all senses of the word, yes.

So on the one hand, you are saying defining terms is important, and on the other hand, it isn’t.

Let’s say, it is usually important as a prerequisite; it is never important as a solution. You have to know what you’re doing, but knowing isn’t enough: You have to do it.

Okay. So what terms?

Health, indicator, challenges, and the difference between moral and – let’s call it wholeness.

• For our purposes, we will call health the smooth and efficient functioning of the 3D body in its circumstances, but with reference to the often unknown, even unsuspected, needs and possibilities of the non-3D component.
• A gauge, a diel, a tell-tale. Not a judge passing sentence or a doctor or guide warning of disaster ahead, more like an automatic weighing of the situation to provide data.
• This could be either of two things, or – usually – both, considered as they impact each other.
  1. A physical situation that is less than optimal – from occasional nuisance through perpetual fact of life to the immediately life-threatening. Of course, in this context, “physical” includes emotional and mental.
  2. The difference between what is and what the individual wants, or thinks it needs. This could be anything from concern over appearance to life as a cripple.

In other words, sometimes we are challenged by the difference between what we want and what we have.

Regardless of what is good for you, or even what matters, yes.

Now the difference between morality and wholeness is well known to mental-health professionals, not so well known to the general public.

I used to quote somebody – can’t remember who (Walter Cooper?) – who said that when we realized that it was better to be whole than good, we held ourselves to a stricter standard.

He knew what he was talking about. But that doesn’t mean that everybody reading that will understand it.

I take it to mean that morality comes from our sense of right and wrong, and wholeness is more a case of accepting all of what we are, like it or not. Therefore – I assume – you could say morality defers to wholeness whenever we admit to our conscious selves more of what is in the depths.

So let us look at the situation from outside the usual 3D framework, to better understand the limits of your viewpoints and the range of your potential. You do not have unlimited room to grow, but you do have room, and you cannot know what those limits are.

I’m wavering, here – speaking of health challenges.

A headache does no harm; a drop in energy does no harm. Giving up unnecessarily would, in a sense, do harm. Let us use this as an example.

Your headache and weariness seem to you external to your will. You didn’t ask for either, and you can’t wish either away. The normal response is to consider yourself a victim of the circumstance. (I use “victim” without prejudice here – I am not implying that you are tempted to scapegoat or to throw up your hands. I mean merely you feel your inability to change things by will or intent.)

And that is a mistake somehow?

It is, let’s say, a sliding away from possibility. Remember what Skip [Atwater] said when you got a headache in the black box [at Monroe], long ago.

“Welcome the energy in and ask what you can be learning from it.”

Well?

A minute. [Doing so.] Hmm, I get that I was splitting my consciousness, part wanting to continue, part begging off, saying “I’m tired!” In a way, the headache was there to tell me to pay attention and either work or quit but not continue self-divided.

Yes, but in a way the headache was there not for the sake of telling you, but as a natural result of the slight additional strain. You see?

It arose, and it is up to me to think to ask what’s going on? If I do, I learn something and the headache goes away.

It went away not because you learned what was causing it, but because you ceased to be divided, which removed the cause.

Yes, I see that. My ears are ringing loudly now, instead. I will do the same thing, asking. [I do so.] When I stop and pay attention, it seems as if the ringing serves as a reminder that I am functioning (for the moment) as if I were separate from the outer 3D world. The ringing is like a wall reinforcing that isolation. It nearly ceased as I paid attention strictly to it, then increased a bit and is still here.

[And, typing this, it is back. I am trying to think if I have ever heard ears ringing while I was writing fiction, and I don’t think so, but of course I may merely not remember.]

So, two fast examples of symptoms as indicators, you see. The gas gauge doesn’t cause the tank to become empty, or full, or half-full; it merely reports on what the situation is.

And if we don’t want to go around with an empty gas gauge, we need to fill the tank. We aren’t operating on the gauge at all, but it will automatically reflect the new situation.

True in that respect. But the situation is a lot more complicated than that, or everybody would be in perfect health except the ones who aren’t paying attention.

I’ve paid plenty of attention to asthma over the years.

You have paid plenty of attention to the situation as you experienced it. How much attention have you paid to what it was indicating?

I know that many people claim to have a cookbook that says, this illness is a sign of this or that emotional situation, but I am not convinced. I remember Skip used to use one such scheme with great success, someone’s cookbook. Can’t remember whose.

Louise Hay.

That’s right. Or, I think so. Anyway, that approach worked for him, not for me. could you have made your kidneys work if you had changed your attitude?

If I had spent less time being pissed off, you mean? What do you think?

I think, can’t be that simple.

It isn’t that simple, but that isn’t wrong. There was a reason why physicians used to divide temperaments into choleric, melancholic, sanguine and phlegmatic.

[For those interested, use your search engine; you will find plenty on the net.]

Now, this is enough. You are at about your limit, and this is a natural place to pause anyway. We can resume with a closer look at illness as indicator. There’s lots to say, because our common ground is that we look at 3D and non-3D interaction, not look at 3D as if it were separate. And once we get beyond illness as indicator, there is illness as facilitator. But enough for the moment.

Thanks for this. Our theme today?

“Health and illness as indicator,” perhaps. And you might leave people a situation report.

Meaning, headache went away and so did most of the ringing in my ears.

Yes. Till next time, then.

That’s my line. Thanks again.