The physician of the earth today, takes pride in feeling that he is somewhat responsible for extending the span of human life. While this is quite true in some relative aspects, we must compare the statistics which state that man lives ten or twelve years longer than he did at some comparatively recent time. We must take these statistics on the analysis from which they were so compounded; they could be quite wrongfully slanted in a false interpretation. The great plagues of the past, such as the bubonic, or the epidemics of flue, smallpox, and various other types of diseases which decimated whole populations, have now vanished; but there have been other decimators of human population which are rapidly taking their place; these lie within the dimension of that which is called mental illness.
The mental illnesses in themselves are twofold in their destructive nature. An individual cannot be immunized against a mental illness, except through the induction of spiritual principles within his consciousness. This cannot be done with a needle, or with any other manufactured type of vaccine which might be contained and manufactured from a test tube in a laboratory.
The twofold nature and propensities of mental illnesses not only manifest themselves into the sphere of the consciousness of the individual in his mental faculties, but may in future generations, and in different ways, also remanifest themselves into his physical structures. Simply because a person is not incarcerated in a mental institution, and classified as having some paranoiac or repressive complex, does not mean that he is not mentally ill. Most of the patients who are lying in hospital beds and those who are somewhat partially incapacitated in their daily way of life, due to various aches and pains which are manifest in different conditions and concepts, are, in themselves, all directly related to the mental processes of the faculties of the human individual.
It is a general consensus of opinion among the physicians, surgeons, and psychiatrists in the world today, that at least 90 percent of those illnesses do stem from the mental processes of the individual; and he is linked to the negative aspects of life so that he becomes inductive in his relationship to the various types of physical illnesses in his body. So now we are beginning to understand the twofold nature of any type of mental illness which can be properly called a negative state of consciousness.
Just as in an obsessive or a possessive state of consciousness, these mental illnesses (and I shall call them psychic aberrations), in consequence, can make an individual become partially or wholly insane in some mental way, so that his physical deficiencies can be classified roughly in two dimensions. the thought-form bodies, incurred in this possessive way, may warp and largely destroy the mental concepts so that these bodies can be generated within the consciousness of the individual to such an extent that they can completely obsess his physical body. It is common knowledge that in hypnosis, a person can be autosuggestively induced into such a state that he will walk the rest of his life with a limp, although there will be nothing wrong with his leg.
A person as a child might incur some small accident which, in the sphere of the imagination, may create such a horror of the accident, that it could induce such a strong autosuggestive thought pattern, that the accident may permanently maim or cripple the individual for the rest of his life, even though the injury may have healed within a few months’ time after its inception; and the body was in consequence, just as whole and as functional as it ever was. However, the person by that time would have induced this strong thought pattern into his relationship so that he would go through life with this strongly induced physical malformation which did not actually exist.
Many of the leaders of the spiritual cults or expressions in life, who have become noted as spiritual healers, have somewhat capitalized upon this idea of liberation of self through the autosuggestive processes of man’s nature. In the temples or churches, these so-called and purported spiritual healers cry unto the persons that they are healed and the persons believe they are healed. They immediately cast aside and disengage themselves from this strong adhesive thought pattern, and suddenly come into the realization that there was nothing actually wrong with them. So they toss their crutches, or their braces, or their supports into the corner with the others and walk from the temple. Thus they cry that these healers are indeed great servants of God, for they have been healed; whereas they could have done the same thing for themselves many years ago and thus saved a great deal of time, trouble, and expense.
If you look about you in the institutions and in the highways and byways of your time and place, you will see many persons either in hospital beds, or partially or wholly incapacitated in their daily lives from these very strongly superimposed thought structures. Indeed it is sometimes very difficult for these people to liberate themselves. Some of these individuals are very masochistic in their nature, and are continually punishing themselves for their faults and misplaced conceptions which have given rise to great structures of guilt complexes. They are punishing themselves for believing themselves to be inadequate, or believing they have expressed some great sin into their concepts of life.
In India, there is a fraction of the population, called in their own concept, the Jains. Jainism is an extrusion of one of the concepts of Buddhism, as it is brought down through Vishnu, and into the lower caste orders of the different systems of Buddhism as they exist in India. These Jainists constantly punish themselves by running large needles through their cheeks, or they may variously impale themselves in different portions of their anatomy; or they may lie upon spiked beds to further torture themselves in almost fantastic proportions which are almost beyond the concept of your imagination.
And yet you, in your own civilized world, see people who are actually doing the very same thing in their daily walk of life. There is no difference in the attitude or mentality of the individual, for they are so consciously related that they express themselves in this conscious relationship in this self-inflicted masochism.
As every doctor knows, there are many patients in his experience who have come to him with nothing wrong with them physically, except that they have very strongly induced thought patterns which are so inducted in their nature, that they have actually made the individuals ill, and rendered them, as a consequence of this self-induced illness, wholly or partially incapacitated.
Excerpt from The Voice of Orion
See Part I here. See Part III here.