This essay,
Transformation And Medication,
is the companion piece to
Crisis Of Faith.
Everyone knows that transformation has a dramatic impact on health, as
well as on our ability to create and generate health.
Are there any rules that go with transformation which manage and define
health? Are there instances when transformation supersedes prescription
medication? Should there be?
While we may not be doctors, we can create transformation. The work is
distinct. You and I, and only you and I, are responsible for our
physical well-being.
Having said all that (like a proviso, and in order to lay down a base
from which to speak further), I am not promising that sickness and
ill-health (whatever their manifestations) will disappear out of
bringing transformation to bear on them. However, I am saying that you
can invent the possibility of sickness and ill-health disappearing out
of bringing transformation to bear on them. Yes, we are talking about
miracles here.
And when you contemplate - as many of us have done - how one patient
can be completely miserable in the face of sickness while the next
patient can be completely at peace with and fully alive in the face of
sickness, you realize that what can certainly be disappeared, if not
sickness itself, are the rackets we have about sickness itself.
In my life, before I experienced Werner's work, I was what you would
call accident prone. Something was always happening with or to my body.
I often caught colds, and there was always
something wrong
in my physical well being. I fell off my bike. I broke my nose. I split
my forehead with my surfboard ... you know, that sort of thing.
I started to observe the condition in which I lived with regard to my
own health as if I was the cause of it, even if I did not really get
that totally, and what I saw while looking at it that way was very
interesting.
My father was a general practitioner, a family doctor. He always
provided the very best in patient care, and he loved taking care of
people when they were sick. So I started a racket by making myself sick
or getting hurt as a great way for me to get his love and attention.
Uncovering that I did that was a breakthrough for me, and from then on,
I cut that out. If I wanted his love and attention from then on, I
simply asked him for it.
I completely transformed my physical health. The spate of physical
injuries ceased, and today I do not even own a handkerchief.
Now: am I saying that someone who has AIDS will disappear it simply by
bringing transformation to bear on it?
Here's what I am saying:
Any racket associated with AIDS has the possibility of disappearing;
Having AIDS and taking responsibility for having AIDS presents a
whole new vista from having AIDS and not taking responsibility for
having AIDS;
Yes, there is the possibility of AIDS disappearing - and I say that
like a possibility, not like a promise. People disappear cancer.
Mother Teresa is about to be beatified because people disappeared
cancer around her. Yes, it happens!
For serious matters of health, it is prudent to refer to a doctor. But
if you take it on by yourself and look for the responsibility in
whatever is going on with you and your body, transformation is the
possibility of miracles, including miracles of physical healing.
You and I have the ability to transform our experience of any physical
condition. No, I am not saying we can raise the dead, and of course no,
I am not saying that transformation will make you physically immortal.
What I'm saying is simply that you and I have the possibility of
transforming our experience of physicality and whatever
goeswith it (as
Alan Watts
may have said).
That is what there is to take on. That is the realm of the miraculous.