As an aid to exploring the varying roles of consciousness in healing, can we begin to develop a logical structure and validity by, broadly, classifying ‘healing’ modalities into the following three provisional categories according to the role in them of consciousness? This is important and your ideas are most welcome.
1. Primary methods which presumes that present disorders are caused by some past event which, though real, is also symbolic of the negative part of our essence and which, unless dealt with by an application of the conscious mind, will continue to haunt us medically, individually (and maybe collectively also) as it simmers in the unconscious or sub-conscious mind.
This could be called the realm of ‘miracles’- because the cure takes place as 'blockages 'in the metaphysical world, rather than physical world – and is potentially accessible by mind-exploratory techniques such as psychotherapy, dream analysis, figurative analysis, regression therapy, psychosomatic interpretations, meditation, and maybe other techniques yet to be found or invented and tested. They have no obvious side-effects.
For reasons which I presume support a modern, evolutionary view of consciousness, I suggest for healing it is important for individual consciousness to becomes aware (through the signals of pain and suffering) of the blocks in its personal history which are then neutralized or healed along with the unpleasant, but informative physical or emotional symptoms of the disorder. I hope this makes sense.
2. Secondary methods concern an intermediate category of qualities and consequences that lie between primary and tertiary methods and seem to function at unconscious or subconscious ‘energy’ levels – such as homeopathy, acupuncture, Bach remedies, reiki, reflexology and maybe ‘laying on of hands’ and others - and may require the conscious participation of the practitioner. In particular they also have no known side effects.
3. Tertiary methods function dominantly at the physical level – such as surgery, chemotherapy, chiropractic, diet etc. The role of which is usefully important in emergency or acute medical situations. At the present time, for chronic conditions, these methods are usually inaccurate, have undesirable or invisible side effects and usually do not lead to a permanent cure and, worst of all, call themselves ‘scientific’ when in fact they only pay lip service to the mind-body reality of Homo sapiens, and frequently seem to ignore the almost infinite complexity of physiology in regards to ingested drugs or the reality of human individual (also near-infinite) variations. Short or long-term side-effects should be faced in this category.
I shall start a clarification of acute and chronic in the next post.