FIRST OPINION

Wholistic Health Care in the 21st Century

by Dr. Barbara Condron

Awareness is a giant step toward realization, just as desire is the major component to attainment.

An Intuitive Health Analysis reveals the metaphysical and physical transformations that will ensure wholeness and health. Most people readily respond to the suggestions for the physical body. They procure the vitamins or herbs, adjust diet, seek the suggested health practitioners. These do give symptomatic relief. This is the movement from awareness to realization.

How readily people respond to the mental and emotional parts of the analysis depends upon their readiness for change. Some are ready to take greater control of the life, some are relieved to discover “why”, some are tired of fighting. The depth of the analysis’ insights are guided by the individual’s willingness to become self-aware. This is a challenge for anyone. It is a challenge to be met by the serious aspirant, the courageous, the one who is prepared to enter a new realm of self-discovery. Intuitive Health Analyses fully used, elevate your awareness thereby lifting you to your next cycle of growth.

Responding to suggestions for mental and emotional change also depends upon the individual’s desire for permanent healing for it is eliminating the disorder where it begins that cures. Freeing our spirits of the demons that sometimes take up residence in the corners of our minds need not be frightening or even arduous work. In fact the mental condition necessary for spiritual healing to arise is actually one where hope and love have replaced fear and doubt.

The role of spirit in healing is witnessed every day, in every culture. The word spirit comes from the Latin spiritus meaning breath. Spirit is breath, life, vitality, vital spirit, soul, consciousness, psyche. It is the attitude, thought, idea, inspiration, feeling, inclination, impulse. Man has created all manner of mechanical devices to maintain the physical body, to keep it nourished, to keep it breathing. But when the spirit of the person is absent, only the shell remains and when artificial life support systems are removed, the soul is finally free to continue its journey. The inseparable link between the state of one’s soul and the state of one’s body is a testimony to the Universal Truth thought is cause and the physical is its manifest likeness. The connection between spirit and body has been professed religiously for millennia and debated in scientific circles for fifteen hundred years. Religion seeks to live that Truth, and science seeks to define It. Their quests lead to the same destination although few today recognize that truth.

Universal Truths are illustrated in the parables and allegories of every Holy Scripture of the world. From the Koran of the Muslim to the I Ching of Confucianism, from the Jewish Talmud to Native American Indian prayers and lore, all cultures have a philosophy that ministers to the spirit, guiding thinking toward wholeness. Thought is cause is one of these Truths that are universal, applying to anyone, any time, anywhere.

When the Jew or the Christian speaks of “purifying his temple” he is not talking about vacuuming his church. He means praying to cleanse his mind and fasting to cleanse his physical body, the temple of his soul. The Hebrew prophet Isaiah wrote, “Wash yourselves, make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes. Cease to do evil, learn to do good. Seek justice, correct oppression.” The evil of your doings is any ill intent behind your actions. Thought is cause. Know your intentions, know your thoughts. Make them good, productive, helpful, cooperative, is the message for and about the spirit.

Accounts of the teaching and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth, in the New Testament of the Bible include many miraculous healings. Before he healed the sick he would ask his patient, “Do you believe?” Jesus understood the power of thought and he harmonized with the Universal Laws. An assertion of faith upon the part of the sick is necessary for healing to be permanent, thought is cause. Awareness is the first step toward realization. It was true two thousand years ago, it is still true today.

The Hindu’s challenge for wholeness appears in the form of the three principles of nature which manifest themselves in every person, the three great gunas: Sattvas or truth, Rajas or passion, and Tamas or indifference. The Hindu believe that when wisdom is present, Sattvas is the ruling guna. Thought is cause, and wisdom frees man from all manners of blindness and limitation. The Laws of Manu say, “The body is cleansed by water, the internal organ is purified by truthfulness, the individual soul by sacred learning and austerities, the intellect by true knowledge.”

For the Buddhist wholeness is personified as Buddhic consciousness, the illumined state of awareness. One who aspires to become enlightened comes to realize it is the action of the mind that determines the state of one’s consciousness. Thought is cause.

“It is like a painter
Spreading the various colors:..
That mind never stops,
Manifesting all forms,
countless, inconceivably many,
unknown to one another...
Mind is like an artist,
Able to paint the world:..
If people know the actions of mind
Create all the worlds,
They will see the Buddha
And understand Buddha’s true nature...
If people want to really know
All Buddhas of all times,
They should contemplate the nature of the cosmos:
All is but mental construction.”- Garland Sutra 20

The Universal Laws are described in every Holy Scripture on Earth. Truth is what makes them endure, generation after generation. Regardless of the generation’s virtue or vice, the Truth endures and so man’s descriptions of that Truth are ageless. Writings and oral stories embodying these truths are healing. They enrich the spirit, mind, and body.

Whether parable, myth, or allegory they are penned in symbols that strike the universal chord. They speak to everyone living now. They speak to those who lived five thousand years ago, and to those who will live five thousand years hence. Like family genealogies tracing physical roots, these holy works when studied in the language of the soul, which SOM researchers have named the Universal Language of Mind, reveal the origin and evolution of mankind and all creation in our universe. They tell us where we have come from. And they tell us where we are going.

For this reason every religion encourages Self awareness. Each delineates the path to enlightenment. The tendency for separation and division, a result of losing sight of the quest to manifest spiritual ideals, feeds religion’s descent into dogma. “My God is the only true God.” “Everyone must be converted, be saved, believe as we do.” “They are not like us and therefore are evil, are to be shunned, are destined to destruction, are appointed to die.” “There is nothing you can do to alter our lot in life.” The statements may sound extreme but they are the simple roots of what is harmful in man’s practice of religion. Such statements and the enmity they produce are a reflection of man’s own thinking, the limits of the ego of the masses. Within the individual they are the seed of disease.

Consensus does not create Truth. Agreement does not produce Truth. Soon we will realize this. Soon we will admit that Truth exists independent of man’s reason. The best part of religion is its capacity to summon the cornerstone of man’s imaginative power - faith. Faith in something greater than ourselves. Faith in what is good, what is right. Faith in a power beyond our own. Half of hospitalized male patients indicate religion helps them cope with their illness, one in five say religion is “the most important thing that keeps me going.”

Studies substantiate the healing impact of faith. Those who practice their religion have one half the risk of heart attack and lower blood pressure even after controlling for the effects of smoking and socio-economic status. Patients undergoing open-heart surgery who practice a religion are three times more likely to survive than those who have none. Religious beliefs counteract feelings of helplessness, providing meaning and order to challenging life situations and restoring a sense of control. Thought is cause. Cultivating rich religious beliefs, pursuing Truth that is universal, improves mental and physical health as well as spiritual well-being.

The capacity to believe Truth is only the beginning of awareness, not the end. Soon we will release the chains of prejudice, freeing our minds and hearts to live the teachings of the greatest masters who ever walked on this planet. We will realize believing is the mental preparation that gives us conscience while motivating us toward knowing the Truth. Living it. Becoming it.

Every religion teaches the Truth of how to get along with your neighbor. Most state it in the negative form, “do no harm...”, yet the idea of what to do is borne from the restraint of what not to do. We will see more insight and instruction in what to do in the coming centuries. As we mature beyond reasoning into developing intuition we will find wholeness in Self and among ourselves. Living peacefully begins by thinking peacefully. Thought is cause. We will love one another and by the loving realize the path to enlightenment is one path traveled by many.

The Truth is every religion teaches Self discipline, for from discipline comes Self control which leads to mastery. The great masters throughout our history have known this. It is how they lived and what they taught. Their teachings are universally true and that is why religions were borne from their teaching. The Truth is mastery is every man’s destiny.

In the 21st century we will witness a new respect for those who have traveled the path before us, and we will recognize there are those among us who are both farther along the path than ourselves and those who have yet to reach the heights we have attained.

This awareness, a significant destination on the path to enlightenment, is found where philosophy and conduct intersect, where religion and science unite, where thought is cause and the physical is its manifest likeness. For the past 1500 years, man has been pursuing a contemplation he calls science.

Although it has often seemed at odds with religion, science nevertheless owes its innovativeness and progress to man’s capacity to dream, to imagine, to think. The thinkers among us, apart from their paths in physical life, are the ones who display the genius needed to lead mankind. Unlike those who support the status quo, they are constantly moving beyond the perimeters of what already exists. While others prescribe drugs that do not eliminate disease or change ageless messages of truth to suit the tastes of today, these men and women seek cures to the ills of mankind. These people seek the Truth about health and healing.

And so at the dawn of the next thousand years, we find thought is cause appearing in more scientific journals than most status quo physicians realize. These visionary physicians have seen evidence of the power of thought to heal. Rather than ignore it or leave it to someone else, they are determined to prove the connection between faith and healing. They believe the answers will enable them to be better physicians to those in need. For instance, a 1988 study by Dr. Randolph Byrd of 393 patients at the San Francisco General Hospital coronary-care unit found those who were prayed for had fewer cases of congestive heart failure, less pneumonia, less need for antibiotics and fewer cardiac arrests than those who weren’t. A 1995 study at the Dartmouth Medical School of 232 patients who had undergone elective heart surgery found the “very” religious were three times more likely to recover than those who were not.

Of 300 studies on spirituality in scientific journals, the National Institute for Healthcare Research found nearly three-fourths showed that religion had a positive effect on health. “Research also shows four out of five patients want doctors to ask them about their faith, and one in two want their doctors to pray with them,” says the Institute’s president, David Larson. Yet only an estimated 10% of patients say their doctors talk to them about their faith as a factor in their healing.

The common consensus among scientists is that doctors who recognize the advantage of faith in recovery cannot instruct patients without faith to get it. There is no drug that can supply it. Scientists do not believe that patients who learn of the relationship of faith to recovery can suddenly develop the faith that they do not have. Even if most have not witnessed, and definitely haven’t experienced, the kind of quantum change man is capable of, at least science is moving in the direction that will eventually lead to this “discovery.” As C. Everett Koop, former U.S. Surgeon General, describes this truth is revealed through experience, “Having, for many years, dealt with people of faith in regard to their own illnesses and those of their children, I have come to understand some things. People of faith have a different world view from those who do not have faith. They believe in the sovereignty of a God who makes no mistakes, and they believe as Robert Browning expressed it - ‘Our times are in his hands who saith a whole, I planned; trust God see all, nor be afraid.’ It seems that connection like this is good for the body, as well as the soul.”

The reluctance with which such compliments are tendered reveals the enmity existing between the science of medicine and the philosophy of religion. Modern scientists and physicians have often been uncomfortable in the realm of faith. Yet with the undeniable connection between faith and healing, mind and body, both find themselves in this new milieu, seeking explanations in the scientific order already known to them. This is the heart of the School of Metaphysics’ research, going beyond the limits previously accepted to understand the wholistic nature of man and his relationship to his universe. Faith becomes a needed precursor to knowing.

More and more scientists are admitting that spiritual beliefs form a vital part of the way we view life and death. They shape the way we think and determine the condition of our hearts in a literal sense as well as figurative. These beliefs are the impetus, the cause, for how we live them, the religion of our lives. They give us some very important necessities in life:

* A sense of meaning and purpose
* A framework to set priorities and place stresses in perspective
* Comfort in the face of illness and crisis
* Support for a healthy lifestyle and avoidance of cigarettes, drugs, and alcohol
* Opportunities for social contact and to develop supportive relationships
* Reasons to be of service and help others
* Sense of being part of something larger and feeling connected to something outside of oneself

Religion at its highest manifestation is a wholistic philosophy of creation that pervades the consciousness and thus directs the life.

Science at its highest manifestation is an understanding of the cause and effect of creation that accelerates mankind’s soul progression.

By uniting the two we discover our past and our future. When man believes with the intention to know, he realizes the power of his mind. He is free to use reasoning and intuition thus multiplying his understanding. Intuition enables man to grasp the whole picture, reasoning gives him the ability to interpret the elements comprising the picture. For health and well-being he must be able to do both.

Because we stand on the threshold of the next evolutionary step, most of us are only now becoming more attentive to intuition in our lives. We have brief encounters with intuition that seem to come and go of their own bidding. Like children who haphazardly say a sound that meets with enthusiastic approval, we are just starting to use our minds intuitively, by accident. It was coincidence we say.

Intuitive Health Analyses elevate intuition above the level of chance. They represent years of study dedicated to understanding intuitive power, making it useful as a tool for health. Gratefully, they help us synthesize man’s fourfold being: spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical. With intuition we can see the whole picture, the connections of the elements. Like the child who is learning to put words together to express his thoughts, we are just beginning to realize our potential. For such a person, the Intuitive Health Analysis becomes a series of lessons in four dimensions.

Faculty and researchers at the School of Metaphysics seek to transcend any discord between religion and science, uniting their quests. The course of study cultivates potential through progressive, daily disciplines which focus the mind and relax the body. By exercising reasoning and intuition, students release prejudices that limit their creativity and begin to freely use the Universal Laws that govern creation, the laws described in the holy text of every religion known to man. The world then becomes the student’s laboratory; the place where his hypotheses are put to the test and new awarenesses are born. As the individual’s consciousness becomes enlightened a new phase of growth is initiated, one we describe as Spiritual, Intuitive Man. This unifying of the mind and body frees the spirit, accelerating individual and collective evolution.