The shape of healing

Healing is the first thing most people ask this material about, and the material notices that. Early in the contact the questioner asks for it directly, is given a training instead, and then asks again for the laws of healing. The answer he gets is short, and its first move is to say what kind of thing healing is.

Figure 01

A distortion of the one law, inside one being

Healing is described as a distortion, not a service

One of the primal distortions of the Law of One is that of healing. Healing occurs when a mind/body/spirit complex realizes, deep within itself, the Law of One; that is, that there is no disharmony, no imperfection; that all is complete and whole and perfect.

That is a definition rather than a comfort. Healing is not described as a force that passes from one person to another, or as a technique that reliably produces an effect. It is described as a distortion of the one law: a particular way the whole appears, and one that a being grows out of rather than masters. The sentence that follows is the one worth remembering, because it locates the event inside a single being. What changes is that being’s own realisation, and the distortion is named as healed when that realisation is complete.

This is why the material can say, a few paragraphs later in the same session, that healing is not even required for the thing a reader actually wants:

It is to be once again iterated that healing is but one distortion of the Law of One. To reach an undistorted understanding of that law, it is not necessary to heal or, indeed, to show any manifestation but only to exercise the disciplines of understanding.

The same claim, made twice, in two registers. If the point of the whole exercise is an undistorted understanding of the law, then the ability to produce healing effects is one expression of that law among many, and not a qualification for it.

The healer is a catalyst, which is a smaller role than it sounds

The healer acts as energizer or catalyst for this completely individual process.

Energizer and catalyst, in the material’s vocabulary, are both words for something that meets a being from outside and invites a response. Neither is a word for a cause. The healer’s work is to make something available and then to get out of the way of a process the material calls completely individual.

That has a practical consequence which people who read this passage often miss. If the work is individual, then the most useful thing a person can do for another is not a technique but a state of being: a channel that is clear, uncluttered, and not asking anything of the person being helped. Ra says as much elsewhere, in language close to the Gita’s: the action is offered, and the fruit of it is not the actor’s to hold.

The third area, where the sequence closes

The training Ra does give is three areas in order, and the third is the one that ties the other two together.

The function of the spirit is to integrate the upreaching yearning of the mind/body energy with the downpouring and streaming of infinite intelligence.

The image is a magnet with two poles, and it is doing real work. The mind and the body reach upward. Infinite intelligence streams downward. The spirit is the place where those two movements meet, and the material’s word for the meeting is integration rather than attainment. Nothing is added to a person by it. Two things that were already moving are allowed to be one movement.

That is also the shape of the whole sequence: mind, then body, then spirit, each one a discipline rather than a technique. We write about the first of the three in the disciplines of the mind, and the material’s own framing of the body’s disciplines is narrower and stranger than most readers expect, having to do with the balance of love and wisdom in the body’s ordinary functions rather than with regimens.

One limit worth stating before any of this is carried further. Every passage this essay quotes comes from session 4, and from three consecutive answers within it — 4.18, 4.19, and 4.20 twice. That is a short stretch of one conversation, on one question, put to the contact by people training to heal.

So the material here is concentrated, not general. It is the corpus’s most sustained treatment of the healing question and it is four answers long, which makes it a strong piece of evidence about what this contact thought when asked directly — and a weak basis for a claim about what it thought in general. A reader who takes 4.x as the settled position of the whole material is reading a conversation’s middle as a conclusion.

And the rest of the contact is not quiet on healing, which is worth measuring rather than assuming. Counted over static/data/archive/sessions — 106 sessions, 2,632 records — the whole-word search for healing or healer returns 118 records, spread over 55 sessions; 24 of those use one of them three or more times, which is more than a passing mention. So the record returns to healing often — session 66 as much as session 4.

That cuts both ways, and honestly it is the weaker of the two facts. Session 4 is where the material is asked about healing and answers at length; the other 117 records are overwhelmingly situations in which healing is one topic among several. This essay has surveyed the sustained treatment and not the rest, and a reader who wants the corpus’s occasional view — which is not the same as its considered one — will not find it here.

What this community does and does not do

This is the point at which a study group has to be explicit, because healing is the word that turns a reading circle into something else.

We do not offer healing. No session includes energy work on a participant, no one here diagnoses anything, and nobody in this community will tell you that your illness, your grief, or your circumstances have a spiritual cause. That last one follows from the material rather than from caution: if the work is a being’s own realisation, then a group claiming to know what a person’s body is for has taken the choosing away from them, which the material treats as the one thing that cannot be taken.

This is a charter boundary and it is published rather than assumed. The community page states it in full — including what a session is not, which is the same page now. If what you are carrying is medical, the room you need has a clinician in it. If it is psychological, the room you need has a trained professional in it. A study circle is neither, and a study circle that starts acting like either one stops being safe for the people in it.

What is left, and it is not nothing, is the part of the practice a person can do without anyone’s permission. Look at what the day did to you. Let the opposite of your reaction be as real as the reaction was. Notice what you reach for, and notice what you would rather not see. The material’s claim is that this inward, unglamorous work is the whole of the training, and that everything people recognise as a healing gift is a side effect of it.

If you want the sequence in order, the practice page sets out the four disciplines the material names and points to the essays that take each one seriously.