In order to accompany the process of healing in the best possible way, it is necessary to let the active desire for healing die. This may be a provocative statement. But let’s try to find out if it’s true or not by looking at the psychology of healing.
When we are very sick, a strong desire for healing and recovery can arise. We can also become aware of the preciousness of being alive. Often, in response, we wish nothing more than a past state of health.
Why is it salutary to let the active desire for healing die? Well, the question we need to ask first is whether physical or mental healing is caused or effected by human will – or whether a strenuous desire for recovery does not make us unreceptive to the subtle movement of healing. Does it require our thought and active will to bring about healing? What is the origin of the holistic movement of healing, balance and the restoration of harmony?
First of all, there is an imbalance in the area of the body or the soul (psyche), a disturbance in the orderly state of the body-soul system – a disease. External causes of such a disorder can be, for instance, a slow or sudden poisoning of the body or injuries caused by accidents. Internal causes can be psychologically caused by the current life situation or by past events, which in the present day express themselves as illness of the physical body. But also, seemingly external causes – such as accidents – may have been unconsciously provoked by psychological constellations.
How is our relationship to a disorder of our health?
Let us now assume that a disturbance has occurred. What is our inner relationship to this disorder? There are actually basically three possibilities.
One of the possibilities is that we are deeply afraid of the disease. This can lead us to condemn it, reject it and desperately seek reasons and explanations for it. Then there is the desire for healing or the longing for lost health. But all these reactions are merely a resistance against the physical-energetic fact of the disease.
A second possibility is that we are indifferent to the disease, ignore it, deny or trivialize it. This, too, is a form of resistance to the physical-energetic fact of the disease. In the case of mild illnesses, however, this can be accompanied by a disappearance of the disease.
A third possibility is that we observe the disease, like every other aspect in us, in pure awareness. This means that we are attentive to the impulses of the body and the psyche in loving attention, without wanting to give direction to the outcome of the disease itself. Such awareness, since it is unbiased, is free from the desire for healing. Such awareness, however, recognizes without judgment when such a desire rises in thought, is being formulated and becomes active.
Where do the healing processes originate?
Healing arises in the individual from the all-pervading field of universal order and love. It does not require our desire for health for healing to take place; rather, it requires our lack of resistance to this impersonal, dynamic order of the whole.
In order to recognize again and again what the ending of resistance means, a simple mind is required which, with insight, does nothing but become aware of the whole movement of what is. In this state, not only do the inner healing processes take place undisturbed but the unconscious can also be emptied into awareness. Intuitive understanding and impulses related to the external causes of illness can then communicate themselves. Out of that, intelligent action can arise.
Non-judgmental awareness means letting the sovereignty of personal interpretation, and hence desire, die. The I surrenders to pure, undistorted awareness. For it is the ego that creates around the simple fact of the disease the desire, the idea, the image of healing, which has, in itself, no actuality, no truth. In this state of desire, consciousness becomes insensitive to the fact that the movement of healing has already begun at the first onset of disorder.
Surrendering to awareness
Simple awareness does not mean “I perceive”. It means I leave myself to awareness. There is awareness of fear. There is awareness of indifference. There is awareness of the reaction from fear, from which the desire for healing arises. There is awareness of confusion. There is awareness of disorientation. There is awareness of desire to know. There is awareness of the desire for truth. Surrendering to this awareness ends the personal self that always corrupts the natural selfless impulse for healing. The truth is that these selfless impulses carry their own power of manifestation and unfold their own dynamic, free of the self, carried by wholeness. It is also true that these impulses are repeatedly absorbed and diverted by the Self and, therefore, cannot bear fruit.
The mystery of the spiritual aspect of healing is, therefore, the same as that of inner spiritual liberation: the complete letting go of the will of the self and the resulting receptivity and permeability of the human spirit for sacred order.
Ramana Maharshi puts it this way: “The other way is to kill the ego by completely subduing oneself to the Lord, recognizing his helplessness, and always saying, ‘Not me, but you, oh Lord!’, giving up every thought of ‘I’ and ‘my’, leaving it completely to the Lord what he likes to do with you. The devotion is not complete as long as the worshiper wants this and that of the Lord. True devotion is the love of God for love’s sake and for nothing else, not even to obtain salvation.” [1]
The end of emotional disharmony
Last but not least, we want to deal specifically with the inner injuries and “diseases” of the soul. The common mind believes that it must become aware of a cause for these disharmonious, emotional states so that they can dissolve. But that’s not really true. Every supposed cause that the mind identifies is only the result of another cause. The belief that one understands the problem by naming one of the causes arises in a self, which wants a quick and easy explanation to find peace.
The end of emotional disharmony is not the finding of a supposed external cause or explanation. It lies in the indiscriminate awareness of emotion itself, which neither wants the emotion to disappear nor that it remains. Such awareness of emotion is to look with the eyes of eternity instead of looking with the eyes of experience or knowledge and thus of time. Let us briefly go into it a little deeper in order to make it clearer.
The ordinary mind is only indirectly aware of the emotion, that is, by the content of its thinking. It thinks, for example, of past, possibly incisive events, which then seem to stimulate a certain emotion, but one which was always there latently. Then there is a level that becomes aware of emotion, but immediately wants to explain and classify it through thinking. Each explanation, however, is an expression of the temporal. But then there is also a level within us that sees only the quality of the emotion. It looks at the quality of the force of the emotion, free of thoughts, free of associations with events and memories of the past. Since this looking is free of the past and free of the expectation of a future, it is free of time. It is a looking out of the whole in the now. In this process of observation, an emptying of the previously subconscious takes place. For there is no longer any resistance that would oppose this natural, healing emptying of the subconscious. When this process takes place, it can go hand in hand with a complete transformation of “what is”.
An all-pervading order and harmony
The fact of physical and emotional healing is proof of the principle of an impersonal, all-pervading order and harmony. For healing is the re-manifestation of this order and harmony in a part of the whole. The fact of the disease, on the other hand, is proof not of the possibility of disturbing the all-penetrating field of sacred order and harmony, but of the possibility of separation from this field on a certain level. Here the hermetic principle is valid: as in the big, so in the small. As above, so below. For the collective state of humanity can be compared with that of a person suffering under a disharmony in his soul (psyche).
Inward dying in the sense of dying to the past, is dying of the resistance against the pure vitality of the eternal now. It is the death of resistance against the re-manifestation of the universal, all-pervading order and harmony. And one dynamic aspect of this universal order, among other things, is healing.
[1] Quoted in: Devaraja Mudaliar, Day by day with Bhagavan (conversations with Ramana Maharshi)
