Friday, May 6, 2022
5:50 a.m. Let’s see if I can take up Nancy’s suggestion to see if another thread’s health issues are affecting me. Guys?
Your health and specific manifestations of health or ill-health are the result of many factors. If you can prevent yourself from closing down merely because this affects you personally, we can look at it. Set your switches.
Done.
Remember, it’s all mind-stuff. But that doesn’t mean (as you are often tempted to think it means), “You can do as you want, because it is only mind-stuff.” Au contraire. Because it is all mind-stuff, it all follows the same rules. Granted, the rules are not what people think they are; nonetheless, all created beings follow the rules. How could creation be anarchy? It is true that the rules incorporate possibilities well beyond material necessity: still, they are rules. They inhere from the nature of the 3D, which is slowed-down non-3D.
Meaning you are subject to the same rules in non-3D?
Subject to the same rules as they apply in a looser configuration, yes. This unconscious idea of the non-3D as unchanging and perfect (always according to one’s particular ideas of what perfect is, of course) is terribly limiting to your ability to see straight.
Enlighten us, by all means.
- It doesn’t exist. So how can a physical condition be unrelated to all the rest of your life? Do you believe that a mental or emotional condition can be unrelated? Then why should you think a “physical” condition could be?
- Besides, what is a “physical” condition? Isn’t it a manifestation in 3D of many interrelating factors, connections of many systems and relationships?
- You yourself in 3D are individual only in a manner of speaking, as you know. You extend in time to other beings along various threads. You extend as physical patterns inherited from your ancestors. You are psychically linked in many directions: to your society, to your relatives, to your friends, to others known and unknown with whom you share threads now.
We know all these things, and I recognize that you are reminding us that they apply in this context.
Yes. You could know them in one mental bucket and not think to apply them in matters of health, or in other contexts. We have gotten into the habit of repeating ourselves lest we allow too many connections to be unnoticed in a given context.
Specifically in terms of health, certain variables apply: attitude, nutrition, exercise, and what we might call benign vigilance, or let’s merely say mindfulness applied in the context of you as higher mind having stewardship over the body as lesser minds. We do not mean “lesser” as less important, nor less worthy, certainly. We mean, the body’s mental processes are of a different order than yours, one appropriate to its function.
So:
- Attitude. You know how a mood will color your day? In a sense, your conscious and unconscious attitude toward the fundamentals of your 3D existence is the equivalent of a mood, assisting or hampering the function of the body. Just as continual stress will have a harmful effect, so will continual discouragement, or discontent, or sense of resentment.
- Nutrition. People make rules about nutrition as if the body were a mass-produced item. It isn’t. Every body is unique in that every soul is unique. “Unique” doesn’t mean that everything or even most things about it are different from all others, but it does mean that the total product is one of a kind. Henry Ford never got around to mass-producing human bodies. Each one is still a custom product. Therefore, each one may (or may not) have special needs. As a small indicator, consider allergies. What one body may take in with impunity, another may reject.
- Exercise. Similarly, different bodies reward, enable, prohibit, discourage, thrive upon, or are injured by, an identical regime. Look on any rule of exercise, just as on nutrition, as a guideline, an advisory aimed at the middle of the bell-curve. One size – have we mentioned this before? – never fits all.
- Mindfulness. This is probably the only idea here that may need to be spelled out a little. The degree of mindfulness any one person can exert will of course vary according to the amount of mindfulness they bring to life in general.
I’m getting that you are meaning, if we are here, now, we will have greater ability to tend to our responsibilities to the body.
Refocus, for we move into new territory here.
Okay.
First, remember what you concluded, rightly, in your little book about health: What people think of as perfect health is not necessarily appropriate for every life.
I didn’t exactly say that, but I can hear it.
How could a person be sentenced to a life of struggling with ALS, or polio, or Parkinson’s, or anything? Could it happen by chance, when there is no such thing? Could it be a punishment, when life doesn’t work that way? And, if not accident and not punishment, what? A design flaw in the universe? A lesson to be learned?
I might flirt with that last possible explanation. We do learn from adversity.
But perhaps the learning is more side-effect than main event.
I sometimes think of illness as an individual taking on the unfinished business of the shared subjectivity for some reason.
Ah, the old scapegoat theory. Hang our sins on the scapegoat and drive it out of town, and suddenly we’re pure again.
I’m smiling. You know that isn’t quite what I mean.
It isn’t – but it is what lies beneath the thought, yours or anyone’s. It is another variant of the “illness comes from sin” theory.
I see that. This idea of our having to atone for our sins is pretty deeply ingrained.
That’s your culture. It is one more result of eating that apple.
So, first, perfect health is not the goal. If not, what is the goal? Experience? What good is a lifetime’s record of physical suffering? Ankylosing spondylitis, for instance? Leprosy? Emphysema?
The suffering can have good effects if endured in the right way.
Again, you are considering a beneficial side-effect as if it were the reason.
Okay, so the right way of seeing it?
We keep saying it: It’s all mind-stuff. It doesn’t happen by accident. You are not cursed by your genetics, nor by your environment, nor by the results of your actions. But if not by accident or carelessness, and not for reasons of character-training, what?
I don’t know. Seems to me you have eliminated all possibilities.
What if it just is?
I’m getting, vaguely, that you’re saying disconnect the idea of good and bad.
Yes! Yes, that’s it exactly. In considering your health or your ill-health or your occasional issues of health, it is natural for you to have an idea of what is right and what isn’t; hence, what is good (closer to right) or bad (farther away from right). Hence, you see, emotion enters into it. “I have a right to health,” or, “What have I done to be cursed with this problem?” or “God (or life, or nature, or whatever) has it in for me.” The latter is rarely said, but pretty often felt.
But – I can hear anyone with a persistent condition object – that means that living with perpetual migraines, or pain of any sort that cannot be escaped, is acceptable? We’re supposed to grin and bear it?
Try not to let your emotions intervene here. Said to anyone reading this, because it is a nearly unavoidable temptation. The vocalization would be, “That’s easy for you to say!”
Yes, it will. But what’s your response?
We can’t go into it in ten words or less. Let’s begin here next time.
All right. Today’s theme?
“Factors in health”? Maybe, “It’s all mind-stuff even when it hurts”?
Very funny.
Not funny, actually. That might get people’s attention before they begin reading, which might be a good thing.
I’ll consider it. Our thanks as always.