QA215 QUESTION: I would like to ask you to comment upon the development of the healing arts – medicine and psychiatry – through the ages, the healing arts in the Spirit World, and the relationship that it has with what we’re doing today. How can we, in this era, take indications and directions that will help human beings?
ANSWER: As you may realize, my friends, every one of these questions about history would lend itself for many, many whole lectures and maybe volumes, so I can only touch upon the barest of outlines. And even then the answers have to be long so that we may not be able to take all the planned questions. And if we do not, my friends, you can save your questions and we can repeat this.
There’s no reason that this should be the last time we’re dealing with such questions. I was, in the past, reluctant to do so, because many people were prone to ask such questions in order to escape from themselves. Now, since there’s very little chance for this any longer, I will be glad to give you more of such answers. All right, my friend, I will try to answer your question.
Healing was, at the dawn of mankind, nonexistent, because mankind, at that time, did not comprehend the dynamics of the human structure, of the human biology, of the human essence, and of the human psyche. So there simply was no healing. If anyone became ill, that was that.
Little by little, man saw that sometimes illnesses would apparently heal themselves, that there was a process involved. And man became attentive to this process. Of course, you have to realize when I say man became attentive, that this was not just happening in an instant. This was going on over generations and generations. Maybe one saw something and then this point would be taken up later again and expanded. And sometimes sequences were made from one to the next person – what he saw was communicated. And then continued.
At other times, as it often is in Creation, the different people would come to similar realizations at almost the same time. Now, as these processes were observed, man began to wonder: “What is this process? What is happening that one person dies and another is healed?” In this wondering mind is always the fertile ground for creative perceptions, for research, for discovery, and for discovery of the world of matter and of the world of spirit, and of the interaction between the two.
Then teachings were given to some small extent – as mankind was ready for it – from the spiritual teachers. Through direct inspiration or through human instrumentalities, they taught some of the healing energies. They taught about certain herbs; they taught about certain matter that can be found in the world of matter to utilize for healing – minerals, stones, plants, different structures, different creations.
As mankind developed further and knowledge grew, little by little, the human anatomy began to be understood. Essences that grew in nature began to be understood and experimentation began. Of course, you can use your imagination and your knowledge of history to consider how this developed and developed and developed more and more.
In ancient times, healing was entirely associated with magic, with occult manifestations, because man then had no knowledge of the material creation he dealt with – neither the body nor the substances. Only little by little did he find that substances to be found in the world could be utilized for the substances of the body. And so medicine began to grow.
A similar parallel development occurred much later with man’s psyche. Of course, mankind was much, much older and still in its infancy compared to its total development, when the psyche was discovered as a reality. Again you can use your knowledge of the development of mankind in this respect to fill in the gaps I leave open here. I would only say this – that as more and more knowledge grew, this knowledge also became more and more separated from the spiritual reality.
Parallel with technology, so was the approach to the human person – a separated, disconnected approach that dealt with the parts rather than with the whole. So the pendulum swung from a magical approach, through sorcerers and magic and beings who possessed occult powers, which were then given the only power to heal mankind, to a mechanistic, separated, materialistic approach, not only to the body but even to the psyche.
This was also a state that mankind had to go through. Only now does mankind prepare itself to unify the two in an entirely new way, for both the spiritual and the material unification. So the body as well as the soul has to be understood as a whole, and has to be brought more and more in connection with the spiritual reality in order to fully perceive and discover the forces of healing that exist all over, within you and around you at all times.
Now how to utilize this in the future? I will only say I cannot possibly go even remotely into the detail, but I can put the weight where it belongs. The creative powers, the energies, are incredibly potent. But the potency of these energies that include healing forces – among many other creative forces – can only be revealed to man, not by any person who disposes this willfully, but by lawful interaction of cause and effect to the degree man is purified.
If man finds the power of these forces while his soul is unpurified – let us suppose he could do this – it would be extremely harmful, sometimes dangerous and destructive, and certainly not furthering for the evolutionary plan. It would be very, very negative. So what man finds in the creative forces, whether they are dealing with healing or anything else, must always be commensurate with his development.
It cannot be completely parallel, so there will be periods where he finds more than his spirit is capable of assimilating in a harmonious way. In such instances, it will come to a clash, to a crisis. This is why mankind undergoes so many crises. The development is not even, and he has maybe found more – technologically or in creative forces – than his spiritual being is capable of assimilating with his spiritual and moral and ethical development.
So the crisis must temporarily destroy in order to create a balance. In other periods of history, he may be more advanced spiritually, temporarily, than he is capable of finding or utilizing the creative powers that exist. Then the weight has to go more in that direction.
The latter is always the less harmful, or not harmful, and may only be apparently harmful in the sense that man feels there is more to know than he knows. But it cannot be abused, while the first alternative can be very harmful. If he knows more than he is capable of absorbing, the positive force will turn into a destructive force.
So mankind’s development is constantly finding a balance between these two alternatives – the development and the utilization of spiritual forces and powers and creative influx. Little by little the balance will be established. Anyone, therefore, who wishes to find the healing powers, more and more, as they exist, must do it and can do it safely only when the main emphasis is on the development. Otherwise, his ability to find will be very limited by natural law. Does that answer your question?
QUESTION: Yes. Also, can you comment upon healing in the Spirit World?
ANSWER: Well, in the higher-developed spheres, there is no healing, since all is well. So the healing we can speak about can only apply to beings who leave their body or who have recently left their bodies. And that healing is a spiritual healing in the sense that the consciousness has to gain knowledge and truth. So spiritual healing takes place mostly in schools. It is learning. It is developing.
There is only one exception to this rule, and that is when the fluid bodies, the subtle bodies, are temporarily injured when a being leaves the material body behind through sudden accidents. Then these beings are temporarily nursed in what may be an equivalent to your human hospitals.
These fluid bodies are nursed through all the energies available with all their different functions – their tremendous power and radiations, their brilliance in color, their harmony in sound, their depth in knowledge, in wisdom, their exquisiteness in scent and taste and other faculties, as I said before, of which you know nothing, which very specialized spirit beings know how to handle and apply.
The different facets of these manifestations of the energies are given to different kinds of injuries. These injuries, of course, must always be in relationship to the soul, to the consciousness that brought such painful, sudden disrupture about. It is an aspect in consciousness that has to be treated with truth, with teaching truth.
