QA139 QUESTION: I would like to ask you about my mother, because she is suffering so much pain, and the doctor says that he can’t find any physical reason for it. I wonder if you have any message that I can send her, or anything you can tell me about what I can do to help her?
ANSWER: Well, at such a state, the body, the physical perceptions, are so confusedly intermingled with the psychic reactions, that it is almost impossible to separate the two. With younger people, this happens when a person has a so-called psychosomatic symptom or illness. But the word psychosomatic is also nothing but a label, which implies the truth – namely, that body and soul are one and the same.
There is not such a tremendous borderline between a so-called actual, organic illness and a psychosomatic illness. Now, when the individual is ready to shed the body, unabsorbed pain, misinterpreted pain, pains with which the individual has not come to terms during the lifetime, then manifest as physical sensations, which feel as real as any psychosomatic illness feels real, for it is real. It is real in a psychic sense.
Of course your mother is probably not able to understand this at this point, and it is perhaps not even necessary that she does, for the absorption of these pains is very unlikely possible during this incarnation. It will come later, and this does not need to frighten you or her or anyone. It is a natural process that applies to all human beings who are not actively involved in very rigorous self-confrontation on such a path. It is just a slower process, that is all.
What you can do is, perhaps you can feel out to what extent and – with all your intuition, with all the guidance you might request – in what manner you might convey a little bit of such thoughts to her, and see to what extent this may help her. But, on the whole, I think it is more likely that when the body will no longer be a disturbance, she will come face to face with these unabsorbed matters.
