The Art of Healing – Steps 2-4

Note: This is a 2- part series. If you are interested, but haven’t read Gift from Mom – The Art of Healing – Step 1, I suggest, for coherence purposes, that you read it first.

The Art of Healing is based on certain principles or laws of existence that exist today and are shared truths between most of the world’s major religions from Christianity to Buddhism to Hinduism to Islam. In most circumstances I find that it is language that separates us, and the truths of existence that unify.

There are a few simple premises that this Art is based upon. If you do not accept these premises, this post will not make much sense to you. If you do, the post simply serves as a reminder of what you already know. I believe that the fact of the matter is that we all know these truths anyway. Some of us just don’t know that we know it.

These are the premises. Matter is an illusion. Matter is unreal. Those things in life that we experience with the five physical senses are in fact false images of our mortal imaginations. The recent findings of Quantum Physics have now illuminated this premise to the world even through scientific eyes.

All disease is the result not of germ, contagion, genes or age, but of negative thought.  Accident, injury, social injustice, marital problems, life’s difficulties follow suite. Cancer, AIDS, divorce, colds, war, financial depression, and all the rest of the negative etceteras all have their beginnings in mental mistakes or confusion of thought. There is no devil; there are simply human mistakes of thinking.

God is good. He or It is not a punisher, but instead 100% goodness and perfection – perfect principle, perfect life, perfect love. This Mind or perhaps set of the laws of existence controls all. Man is a reflection of this goodness and so man too is good, pure and perfect. We call this spiritual man to differentiate between spiritual man and the illusionary human beings that we seem to be. But in fact, we live this mortal life like we live our nightly dreams.  One day we shall wake up to our true state of existence. This mortal existence is a road to that day.

While on the road, it’s pretty confusing.

There are, however, certain principles that are at our fingertips that can illuminate the journey and solve the problems we face. It’s imperative that we practice this art of healing as we live this life on Planet Earth if we expect to grow, become aware, and find the path. I believe that this healing art is not just for physical disease, but for all the difficulties that life brings, or that we, in fact, get ourselves into.

In short, we need to practice. Ya’ wanna get to Carnegie Hall? Practice. Ya’ want a higher consciousness? Practice! Practice the Art of Healing.

Step 2: Uncover the problem.
Let’s start with the simple example of a headache and remember that the basic principles apply to all negativity. When we say uncover the problem, we don’t mean that we say to ourselves that we have a headache and then just leave it at that. The headache (the cancer, the broken arm, the divorce, the poverty) is not the problem. It is the result of the problem. The mental cause of the problem is what we’re after. Many of us skip over this first step fearing to really look at the mistake, even at the result of the mistake, but make no bones about it, this is the first step and it must be completed.

Look at the problem. Investigate the mistake, the error of thinking, the mental slip, and see the mistake for what it is – a mistake, an error. Often with a headache, it’s stress or it’s life moving too fast and us not being in the moment and becoming insensitive to the moment.  The headache is a result of our mental failings. Cancer is really the same thing. I think that cancer is simply negative thought that piles up and never gets attended to. The brain doesn’t know where to put the pile of mental junk so it stores it somewhere in the body and it just sits there and rots.  Hence cancer.

Heal cancerous thought. Uncover the mental mistake that caused the broken arm and you have taken the first step in healing the thought or the cause. Take away the cause and you can have no effect – no broken arm. Instantaneous healing.

Often the first step is all you need to take. The healing comes immediately because the cause is taken away. If you slap someone’s face, for him, it hurts. Take away the slap and you have no cause for the hurt – you have no hurt. It’s really as simple as that.

Uncover the mental cause. Face it square on. Look at it.  See it for what it is.

Step 3: Throw out the erroneous thought.
Often this happens immediately upon recognition. “Oh, I see the error of my thinking. I certainly won’t think that way again!” and voila, you’ve destroyed the cause.

But in many cases it’s tough to throw that beloved erroneous thought away. That’s what an addiction is. We fall in love with our crutch. We get duped into thinking that we can’t get along without it.

I knew a woman who fell in love with her cancer. She wore it like a badge. It was hers – her cancer. She would not let her cancerous thinking go.  She died from it.

I knew a person who fell in love with her bi-polar disorder. She wore it like a badge. It was her excuse for just about every problem in life. She got duped into thinking that it belonged to her or that she belonged to it. She could not let it go.

I knew a guy who fell in love with his weight condition. He could not let it go. He felt it was his lot in life. He mistakenly accepted that since his parents were over-weight in their latter years, that it was his lot too. He wore it like a badge, though it was a badge that he hated.  He was me.

So for some of us, this step is tough. We have to throw away the thing we love most. Hence the first commandment: “Thou shalt have no other Gods before me.” We need to really look at the error of our thinking and see it as it is – a mistake, and error – not some feared devil or Satan or evil demon, but a simple mistake of thinking.

Sometimes we have to counter world thought. That’s how we heal being at the result of epidemic. We have to go against the rest of the world. Now you might say, “How is that possible? How can one person buck the rest of the world?” Well, you can because that’s the power of good. The power of evil is only as powerful as the power you give it. Evil has no intrinsic power. It only has borrowed power. Give it no power and it has no power. If it seems to have power, take the power away mentally. Throw it away. Destroy the belief in the power and you destroy the seeming evil.

See the problem for what it is – a mistake. Then throw the mistake away. Just like you might erase the 5 from the blackboard when you add 2+2 = 5.

Step 4: Replace the error with the truth.
Now replace the 5 with 4. When you throw away the mistake, you often leave a hole.  2+2 = _. You need to fill in the hole. You need to declare aloud the truth. You need to see, to understand, to have faith in the truth of what was the mistake. It’s simple logic really. Dig the weeds out of your garden and replace them with daffodils.

Don’t just uncover the weeds and pull them up by the roots, but replace them with daffodils so that the weeds have no space to grow back. Sometimes you might miss a weed root or two, but if there’s a daffodil growing in it’s place, the weed root doesn’t have a chance. It dies in the earth.

If you throw away your favorite addiction, your bottle or your joint or your girlfriend on the side or your cigarettes or your food lust, you better replace those longings with something much more powerfully attractive or else you’ll just find yourself switching addictions or going back.

I healed my drug addiction a couple of decades ago by healing the want. I effectively realized the error of my ways and stopped cold because I healed the want and replaced it with a better life.

I healed my food addiction by looking at the mistakes I was making that made my life out of balance and resulted in the imbalance of what I was taking in to what I was putting out.  I made mental course corrections that resulted in a more balanced mentality. The result was that I lost 30 pounds and was never hungry while doing it, because I first healed the cause of the hunger – which, by the way, had nothing to do with food, but really more to do with selfishness.

So I healed the selfishness, the cause, and the weight, the result, went away. I replaced it, the imbalanced thinking, with stronger truths and that resulted in a far better life.

I’m now a much happier, more productive, better-balanced man, not because I’m 30 pounds lighter, but because I’m less selfish. I have a better balance of spirit to matter. I have raised my consciousness.  My material body is more back to normal and I’m glad of it, but the real healing was in consciousness and thought, not in body. The body change was just the result of a change of consciousness.

I love the glass of water example that Mom taught me and I shall leave you with that.

If you have a glass of muddy water and you want to purify it, there are two ways. The first way takes a long time and is really expensive. You can go at the water with a tweezers and pick out all the impurities in the water one by one, identifying them and then pulling them out of the water. That’s psychiatry or psychology.

Or you can simply pour in new, pure, clean water until the muddy water is no more. That’s prayer.

I think this is what Jesus did with the man with the withered hand. Jesus saw the perfect hand and the power of his thinking made it so. Perhaps he was so good at this, he went right to Step 4 to begin with and the strength of his goodness, the power of his understanding and the light of truth from God overpowered the mistake that the man’s mind had made.

Here is the power of truth evidenced. Jesus simply poured in the good water and refilled the glass with the power of his thinking and the rightful law of life. Instantaneously the hand was restored to its rightful thought, not its rightful shape, but to its rightful thought.  The shape was only the result of the rightful thought just as the withered hand was the result of misapprehension.

In summary, there’s a real process to Steps 2-4. Practice, practice, practice! Learn your scales. Get your fingering down. Mom always said, “If y’ can’t heal the headache, you’ll have a tough time with the cancer.

Better yet, get real good at Step 1 and you never have to get to 2-4.

For more inspirational music, thoughts and ideas from Peter Link,
please visit Watchfire Music.