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Esoteric Healing - Chapter I - The Psychological Causes of Disease
A. Wrong Mental Attitudes

I would like to deal, first of all, with the basic premise that disease and physical liabilities are not the result of wrong thought. They are far more likely to be the result of no thought at all, or are caused by the failure to follow those fundamental laws which govern the Mind of God. One interesting instance of this failure is the fact that man does not follow the basic Law of Rhythm, which governs all the processes of nature, and man is a part of nature. It is to this failure to work with the Law of Periodicity that we can trace much of the difficulty inherent in the use and the misuse of the sex urge. Instead of man being governed by the cyclic manifestation of the sex impulse, and his life, therefore, being ruled by a definite rhythm, there exists at this time no such thing, except in the cycles through which the female passes, and little attention is paid to these. The male, however, is not governed by any such cycles, and has broken in also on the rhythm to which the female body should be subordinated, and which - rightly understood - would determine the use of the sex relationship, including naturally the male impulse also. This failure to live by the Law of Periodicity and to subordinate the appetites to cyclic control is one of the major causes of disease; and as these laws are given form on the mental plane, one might legitimately say that their infringement has a mental basis. This might be the case if the race were working mentally, but it is not. It is in the modern world of today that there is beginning a widespread infringement of these mental laws, particularly of the Law of Cycles, which determines the tides, controls world events and should also condition the individual and so establish rhythmic life habits - one of the major predisposing incentives to good health. [90]

By breaking this Law of Rhythm, man has disorganize the forces which, rightly used, tend to bring the body into a sound and healthy condition; by so doing, he has laid the foundation for that general debility and those inherent organic tendencies which predispose a man to ill health and which permit entrance into the system of those germs and bacteria which produce the outer forms of malignant disease. When humanity regains an understanding of the right use of time (which determines the Law of Rhythm on the physical plane), and can determine the proper cycles for the various manifestations of the life force upon the physical plane, then what was earlier an instinctual habit will become the intelligent usage of the future. This will constitute an entirely new science, and the rhythm of the natural processes and the establishing, as habits, the correct cycles of physical functioning, will bring about a new era of health and of sound physical conditions for the entire race. I used the word "establishing," for as the focus of racial attention shifts into the region of the higher values the physical vehicle will gain enormously, and good health - through right rhythmic living, plus correct thinking and soul contact - will become permanently established.

There are, therefore, very few ills to which flesh is heir which are mentally based. It is exceedingly difficult to establish what they are. There are two reasons for this statistical failure:

  1. The fact that very few, relatively speaking of the race are mentally polarized and therefore thinking.
  2. The fact that the bulk of diseases are etheric or astral.

Another factor producing this difficulty is that the thinking and the emotional reactions of man are so closely interrelated that it is not easy at this stage in evolution to [91] separate feeling and thought, or to say that such or such ills arise in the astral or the mental body, or that certain ills are due to wrong feeling and others to wrong thinking. Speaking in terms of the entire human family, the thinking that is done in the world of today, is done by the relatively few. The rest are occupied with feeling, with sensuous perception and with the many and differing aspects of emotionalism such as irritability, worry, acute anxiety, aspiration towards some desired end or goal, depression, plus the dramatic life of the senses and of the "I in the center" consciousness. Few live in the world of thought and fewer still in the world of reality. When they do, the result is inevitably a better average of health, because there is better integration, and as a result a freer play of the life forces throughout the vehicles of expression.
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