The Art of True Healing
by His Divine Presence,
Avatar Adi Da Samraj
Avatar Adi Da describes how to take personal responsibility
for one’s own psycho-physical well-being—through healing practices,
through living a disciplined life, and through the sacrifice (or letting
go) of the separate “self” in response the Fundamental Divine
Reality.
Healing is an Art
True healing must involve right responsibility on the part of the one being healed—such that, after the healing takes place, he or she enjoys a greater level of responsibility for his or her total psycho-physical life. Any process that does not involve such a responsibility-transformation of the one being healed is not real healing. Some symptoms may be removed for a while, so that the individual can return to the activities of his or her ordinary life—but, unless the individual has realized a greater level of responsibility for bodily well-being, he or she will simply persist in the same patterns as before, and imbalances and negative symptoms will reappear.
A symptom is a condition of disease that has become so acute that one has started to notice it—but the disease exists long before the symptom appears. Obstructions in the organs of the body accumulate long before exaggerated symptoms arise. At what point is one’s condition said to be disease? It might as well be said that one is diseased from the first moment one does something that will ultimately have a negative result relative to one’s psycho-physical life. That event is, in fact, the onset of the disease. The failure to practice right life is the disease. The failure to fulfill the Law of “self”-surrender is the disease. Once an individual begins to act in violation of that Law, it is merely a matter of time before symptoms appear.
People usually do not even begin to entertain the possibility of taking responsibility for disease until the disease has already manifested as symptoms. Some people who are more sensitive to their psycho-physical systems than others may do something about a symptom as soon as they notice it. Others wait until they are already seriously disabled before they will take any first measures. When such people are finally suffering a terminal ailment, then, all of a sudden, they want a “miracle cure”. This childish approach characterizes most people’s relationship to the practice of health. Even if something extraordinary were to happen, such that the disease disappeared, the individual would continue in the unconscious, irresponsible, and un-Lawful pattern that originally led to the disease.
Therefore, the “miracle cure” is not even desirable from the perspective of conscious life.
There is a scene in a motion picture that makes this point. A man without hands has gone with a crowd to pay respects to St. Simon Stylites, who stood for years at the top of a pole in the desert. The man, who has come with his children and his wife, is humble and sorrowful. His wife asks the Saint to heal her husband. Simon says, “Well, all I can do is pray.” The people kneel and pray with the Saint while the man holds up his stumps. The next thing you know, two hands have appeared at the ends of the man’s arms! But what does he do? He pulls down his arms and tells his children, “C’mon, let’s go home.” He just walks away, ready to go home and watch television!*
* Avatar Adi Da is referring to the movie Simon of the Desert, written and directed by Luis Buñuel (released August 27, 1965).
Extraordinary “miraculous cures” that relieve one of all responsibility also (thereby) bypass all personal responsibility for conscious living, and (thus) bypass personal responsibility to remain in the Fundamental Condition of Communion with the Living Divine Reality-Truth—and, as such, are false cures, hallucinations, and hype.
Through true healing, the individual becomes responsible, clarified, and intelligent relative to the entire affair of his or her ordinary life. Lawful and True life does not depend on extraordinary “methods” and “experiences” to relieve one of suffering. Rather, Lawful and True life is a process whereby a person becomes more and more responsibly responsive to the Living Divine Reality- Truth.
The devotional (and, in due course, Transcendental Spiritual) relationship with Me influences the approach of My any devotee to physical “problems”. In illness, My devotee cannot dramatize the usual strategies, including bodily habits, emotional games, and general life-strategies. In illness, the accumulative, binding activity that the individual tends to engage is frustrated and brought to a crisis, brought to a point of conscious responsibility in the midst of constant devotional “self”-sacrifice in My Company. By contrast, the conventional practices of medicine—both naturopathic medicine and conventional Western medicine—do not address the fundamental human activity that is ultimately responsible for the lack of well-being. Certainly, how you treat the body, how you manage your diet and your routine of living, affect the state of your health. In any case, you must be responsible for managing these aspects of your life. However, the fundamental ego activity of “self”-contraction, which I Criticize, is essentially the “root” of every form of disease. The ego is your disease. The ego is suffering. The ego is your most primitive activity, the “self”-defining contraction that creates the constant, separative, isolated sense of “me”. Fundamentally, the ego creates all limiting conditions—hence your many colds and other illnesses! The diseases that you suffer are the result of a fundamentally misguided approach to “experiential” life.
One in whom there is no “self”-contraction is essentially free of the limitations of this great machine of “experiential” life. Such a person need not be concerned about the millions of factors that might pattern any momentary disease that comes from without. My devotees—who live the Reality-Way I have Revealed and Given— will not necessarily be immune to all disease, because many influences affect your presence in the “world”, regardless of the degree of your “self”-understanding. Nonetheless, one in whom the entire “program” of “subjectivity” is undone also secondarily observes that the conditions of life are not as they seem to the usual person.
Fundamentally, everything that people are doing all the time is killing them. People fear death and feel guilty about death and about their fear. The most fundamental reason death is not acceptable to people, the most fundamental reason that adapting to a “world” in which there is death is difficult for them, is that they have not understood that the principle of life is sacrifice. When life is understood to be endless, vast sacrifice, then life becomes obvious as the life-giving process of ego-death.
To those who do not understand, there is life and there is death, and they are inimical to one another. It is presumed by such people that if you are alive, death is the opposite of your condition. And if you are dying, life is the opposite of your condition. Truly, however, life and death are a single process, which is Real Life— which does not exist apart from “self”-sacrificial activity, or love. Therefore, when death is viewed in Truth, then the life-drama lived by the usual person is already undermined. You must become a sacrifice while alive.
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