School Talk 49 - Health and Healing

(Audience participation in parenthesis)
Talk covers:
Suggestion
Association
Cancer
Anxiety
Putting people at ease

First we’re going to talk about health. Now we’re not gong to talk about injuries and traumas. So first off, what we’re talking about has nothing to do with if you’ve been injured, or you got broken bones and so forth. This doesn’t enter into our discussion of health today. It might enter into healing after a while; but right now it does not enter into the idea of health.

Health is a state that the person “gets in” from “whatever’s going on”. Now number one, everybody always says to you. “What caused this?”—as though if they knew what caused it—it would suddenly make it go away. I don’t think that has a whole lot to do with it. It might help to find some idea if you were going to indulge in treatment or something; but if you’re interested in just being healthy, having a desirable state of health, it really doesn’t matter a lot.

Now there are four factors, at least, that we are all “involved with” at every moment of our existence.
We have an environment.
We have inner feelings.
We have activity, and
we have nutrition.
Now if all of those factors—environment, inner feelings, activity and nutrition were in an optimum state, your state of health would be optimum. But inasmuch as we live on planet earth where very few things are optimum at any one time, human beings are subject to having conditions that are not the most desirable.

From the environment, of course, are sudden changes in temperature. At times there are extremes of temperature. There is noise and there is dirt. Today there is a very prominent word—pollution which even makes the trees sick and lakes die. So pollution is in the environment; and, of course, that’s a very necessary thing. There is also bacteria, virus, and various other sundry things. There are also concussions of forces of the environment that we run into. Now when anything in the environment is beyond a considerable distance from optimum, the body must adapt to it. Now adaptation takes the form first of unusual cellular activity. A certain number of cells in the body begin to do something they don’t ordinarily do; and that sometimes produces a discomfort of one form or another.

Now when that occurs, if the person understood it, and said, “this is an adaptation; and I’m thankful it’s going on,” it would probably end rather shortly. Furthermore, we could see that we could make our environment as desirable to us as possible—as optimum as possible.

We are in a room here at this moment; and we have air conditioning—outside it’s approximately 95 degrees or maybe even a wee bit more. The humidity may be up a wee bit today; but inside the humidity is down. So we have arranged for the kind of environment in here without an extreme temperature.

Now if we lived in unsanitary conditions, we would be inviting a lot of germs and so forth to be around; and so most of us mop up a little bit here and there.

As my friend Corita said, “My house is clean enough to be healthy and dirty enough to be comfortable.” I think if a person became so obsessed with keeping all the germs out of sight and devoid of virus that you could probably have yourself an “inner state of being” that was in a very decided state of anxiety. The nicest and most wonderful thing about the body is that human beings can adapt to stressful situations.

From the environment, we can adapt; and we gradually, over the years, build up a lot of immunity to various and sundry bacteria and virus because it seems that one or the other invades the body from time to time; and it does require a bunch of adaptation. If you don’t do some weird things to try and prevent or end that adaptation, then antibodies are built. So those particular bugs won’t get to you anymore. I think somebody invents some new ones every few weeks and turns them out, but we can adapt to those also.

And the next thing involved, for a “state of well being” is one’s “inner feeling”. Now inner feeling is something we all have--at all times. We always have some kind of an inner feeling; and it seems to me that as we study about ourselves; that one thing “we can do”, is arrange to have a pretty desirable inner state most of the time. There is enough nice things going on around us at all times that we can be thankful for--and thankfulness or gratitude is a very desirable inner state.

There’s enough interesting things going on to be somewhat enthusiastic or at least vitally interested about most of the time. Now not all of the time—sometimes we’re involved with bores; but even they are interesting. It’s not every day that you can find some of them as boring as others. So you can make jokes out of it sometimes. And so, consequently, one can pay particular attention to one’s inner feeling--or shall we just simply say, attitude.

My dear friend John says that he is always miserable; but some days he’s just more miserable. However, I have noticed, over the years that even that can be looked at as a joke. He’s not quite as miserable as he claims to be at times. But you know, why not, he’s got something unusual going on. So we can always take charge of our inner being; and we can also take charge of a considerable amount of the environment around us.

Now we can take charge of our activity. We can sit or we can move about a bit. Now apparently, we need to move a wee bit in order for the body to be in good working order. I resist it a considerable amount of the time; but nevertheless, it does a little better if I do a certain amount of activity—physical activity. Now I’ve told people you need to move every joint and muscle in the body at least once a day—one good stretch will do that; but maybe two or three stretches would be even better. Maybe you can take a little walk or maybe a little manual effort—a little physical activity might even increase our inner state a little bit, but certainly that’s something that we could do.

And nutrition is something that we indulge in to some degree, at least, every day. I’ve never missed very many days—one or two I was broke; and I didn’t eat. However, I took care of it the next day all right. So nutrition is something that we are all involved in.

Now there’s one common denominator amongst all of these four aspects; and that is that we take charge. Most people don’t feel that they can be “in charge” very much. They feel that they’re a victim of circumstances; and that everything just happens to them--and there isn’t anything they can do about it.

Of course, as long as that “victim feeling” is there, the person is apt to have a rather undesirable state of health. You know you always have health—it’s just that some of it is desirable and some of it is undesirable; but we always have health. It’s a sure thing just like weather. We always have weather--whether you like it or not--health is the same thing. The only difference is--is some of it is desirable and some is undesirable.

So if one wanted to have a desirable state of well-being, they would take notice of that one common denominator. Through all of these (environment, activity, inner feeling and nutrition), one takes charge of one’s own state of being. You take charge of as much as you can in the environment—now you can’t take charge of 100% of the environment because there’s a lot of other people lives in it. It’s remarkable when you decide to take charge of your environment, just how much of it you can take charge of. Now as long as I never thought of “taking charge”, it seemed like I couldn’t take charge of anything; but once one begins to look, we find that we can take charge of the temperature that’s around us most of the time. We can have the temperature in the house like we want, can’t we? You can have the temperature in the car pretty much like you want it; and if you go in a place that has a temperature not like you want, you can turn around and walk out, is that right?

I went in a place at noon today and the place was obviously not air conditioned. They had some fans turning around up there. A little waitress came and said, “Are you too hot.” “Not particularly, I like being warm.” She said the air conditioner was broken down. It was hooked through a computer in San Francisco; and that somewhere between San Francisco and Scottsdale, Arizona, it was screwed up. The people were going to have to fly from San Francisco to the Phoenix area, and then come out to the Scottsdale area to fix the air conditioner. Now you can make things as complicated as you want; but it’s simple enough to put a little widget on the wall, and put the air conditioner on the roof or somewhere around and fix it easily. You don’t have to hook it to a computer in San Francisco. As wonderful as computers are, and as wonderful as air conditioning is, it seems to me that that was unnecessarily complicating the situation. So now we can blame the computer—that’s why it’s down--there’s nothing we can do about it. You know I never saw an air conditioner that couldn’t get started if it’s not burned out. It’s got a computer in San Francisco hooked on it. I don’t know what that’s for except “high-tech.” The only thing I would know is that shows how complicated things are getting in this world. But nevertheless, we can have a reasonable degree of taking charge and keeping the temperature about like we want it.

Furthermore, we don’t have to live in swamps. We don’t have to live in highly congested areas unless we choose to. Some people like it that way. That’s all right. So we can take a considerable degree of charge of our environment. We may not have enough control of it to keep it optimum, but it won’t be very far away--and we can adapt to a certain amount. That’s the whole nature of the human being--we adapt.

Now we can certainly “take charge” of our “inner state of being” once we decide to. Now we have given it away to everybody else, and let them control how I’m going to feel.

I let everybody in the family determine how I feel.
I let everybody on the street, and I everybody in traffic determine how I feel.
I, also, let the newspaper and the TV news determine how I’m going to feel.
I even go to movies which will make me cry, feel fearful, angry and other emotions.

Certainly we can take almost 100% charge of our inner state of being and our inner feeling; and, I might add, that that is the one that possibly has the most to do with health in this area--the U.S. where we live. Now we don’t live in Ethiopia where we’re starving. So where we live in the United States, we can take almost 100% charge of our inner state of being. We certainly can take charge to a great degree of our activity. I don’t know of anybody else that can move for me, do you John?

(No sir.)

Only I can do it. I can’t move for you. I can’t move for anybody else at all. I can only do it for me.

Now nutrition comes down the line; and again, this is an area where I’m almost 100% in charge of what I eat. Now I eat in restaurants every once in a while; and I think sometimes they play little games; but if I don’t want to eat in a restaurant, I can sure cook it myself. I don’t have to eat anything that I think is tainted or is not going to agree with me because I’m in charge of what I eat.

So we can look and see that we are in charge or can be in charge. I’d rather not say that we are; but we CAN BE IN CHARGE. Then we can be in charge of our state of inner health because health is a normal adaptation to these factors we are just discussing—environment, inner feeling, activity and nutrition. And if I choose to do so, I can take charge of those to a sufficient degree—all of them—so that I really have no reason to be ill.

Now if I do not choose to take charge, obviously those are going to be rampant; and then I can have all the illnesses and have all the diagnoses and have pitiful subjects to talk about to anybody who will listen about my health. I can use such phrases as, “I have lost my health”, “I have done this”, “I have done that”. So in that case, it appears we have very little charge of it, and that’s if I choose to be a victim.

Health is no great mystery. If we want to go down the street over here, why we will hear find out that the human body is subject to diseases which are called things; and that we’re victims of them—they have attacked us. But that is a game that one doesn’t need to be involved in. If one chooses to observe how it works, we see that it is a complete fallacy--that all this stuff goes on but that nobody has to be involved in that. You really don’t need it.

Now we’re told that certain people are victims of arthritis; and they’re victims of cancer; and they’re victims of appendicitis, and they’re victims of heart attacks, and they’re victims of high blood pressure, and they’re victims—you don’t call it high blood pressure when you’re a victim of it—it’s arteriosclerosis. Ordinary it is said that people have high blood pressure; but when you have a diagnosis, you no longer have high blood pressure, you have arteriosclerosis. And of course, you can do all the wonders including getting you an artificial heart and all these wonderful things because disease has attacked you.

But if you pursue this, you’ll find that there is no such thing as disease. There is a word that is called dis-ease; and it is in all medical dictionaries and it means simply, not at ease. Now anybody can agree with you that there are times they’re not-at-ease because they have become stressed for one reason or another--either from the environment, from inner feeling, from activity or nutrition—more than likely a combination of all the above. Taking a pill or taking medication or having a piece cut out because it’s has been adapting doesn’t quite make sense to anybody who is really interested in making sense. But if you’re interested in having a topic for conversation, you have plenty of those; and there is plenty of people who will aid and abet you in studying about all these things.

So health is something that when an individual decides to take charge of it, they can begin to have a desirable state of health. As long as they just hope that they have health and listen to the peddlers of health insurance, they will not be in charge. The peddler’s use statements like, “You never know when disease will strike”. If you want to listen to that; of course, you can get yourself in the state that you’re sitting around in a decided state of anxiety least a disease comes crashing down out of the ceiling on you. It floats around up there on the ceiling and it says, “There goes Mary, I think I’ll bite her today.” And then another day or two it says, “There’s John, I’m gonna bite him.” But more than likely if one “takes charge”, one can be at ease. One can take charge of as much of the environment as possible; and certainly you can take charge—totally—of you’re inner feeling or practically 100%. You can take charge of your activity in a certain way; and you take charge of your nutrition--then you wouldn’t have disease very often and certainly we’d never have disease to talk about. Health is the natural state of a human being that is adapting to the everyday living process--of being a conscious individual involved in the environment, and the inner feelings, activity, and nutrition.

This information has been a well-kept secret from most everybody--very few people have ever even had the idea of considering that they had anything to do with their state of health other than experiencing it happening. That’s about all they ever thought of because they never thought they really had a lot to do with it. However, human beings are beginning to wise up a little bit and more and more people are beginning to see they have a responsibility for determining how they feel. Now that’s coming by slow degrees.

So today, physical fitness is a “biggie.” A lot of people are working on physical fitness. You see runners, and you see the gyms having a lot of people in them, and you see walkers. That is a very commendable thing, but they haven’t heard that their inner feeling has as much to do with it as much as the physical fitness of the body. They have heard of nutrition, and so activity and nutrition are pretty well considered now; but everybody is a victim of the environment; and everybody is paying very little attention to their inner feeling.

Now having worked in the healing art a bit--some thirty five or forty years--I know what most people do when you tell them that their inner feeling has anything to do with their state of health. They tell you right quick—“Are you saying I’m crazy.”

“No, you’re not crazy; but there’s a hell of a lot you don’t know about yourself. Now would you care to sit down and listen a minute.”

Most of them don’t want to listen to that. If they do sit there, they’re glaring belligerently and turning off every word one says. But I don’t think anybody would have to observe very long to discover that if you go through a big state of anger, or continual anger, it’s going to affect health. Now blowing your top once in a while never hurts anybody--we have that much adaptation level. But some people stay continually in a state of temper. They’re always ticked. If it’s not about one thing, it’s about something else. Some people worry—if there’s not one thing, it’s another.

I used to hear my dear old mother say, “I know something terrible is going to happen because everything is going so well.” She couldn’t find anything to worry about, so she was worried because something terrible was going to happen because everything was going all right.

So you can worry. If nothing else, you can worry because you worry so much. It’ll probably make you ill after a while.

ANXIETY IS NOT HAVING MY WAY RIGHT AT THE MOMENT. There is plenty of anxiety in the world, and there’s plenty of “what if’s” and all these emotions. Many, many people stay in a state of anxiety or worry or fear or anger or hopelessness just about all the time. Now it doesn’t matter what the circumstances are outside, they’re going to find something to be concerned and upset with.

Adapting with Unusual Behavior

So without taking charge of the inner feeling, one is going to adapt. The adaptation has nothing to do with whether the person is insane or not. As a matter of fact, having worked in a mental hospital one time, I found that people that are in mental hospitals generally don’t have any physical disorders. They get along remarkably well because they’re working all their stresses off with their “unusual behavior”. By the same token, most old drunks don’t ever get physically ill until they fall dead someday. They’re quite all right. They get along fine enough. You don’t hear anything about them having this illness and that illness—they are just alcoholics. One diagnosis is enough. So they can adapt by “unusual behavior”, which is ordinarily not considered a health problem. I think that’s called a moral problem or a society problem or something else. But it’s just another way of adapting to the inner turmoil instead of having stiff joints and holes in your belly from operations and other illnesses. It’s a way of adapting--having “unusual behavior”.

As I tell people, I carry no grief for either side of the coin—either adapting in illness or unusual behavior; but you get less scars if you do it by “unusual behavior”. You have fewer friends probably, and you have less people who will sympathize with you; but nevertheless, it’s easier on the human body, apparently, to indulge in “unusual behavior” than it is in “unusual cellular activity”.

Adapting with illness

Now what we call symptoms of disease, of course, are very natural things. They are adaptations that the human body undergoes to attempt to relieve the stress from the environment, from the inner feeling, from activity or from nutrition. The first thing, as we said a little while ago, is that there is a change in function in at least some group of cells. Now it depends on you as to what group of cells works that way. So one person will have it in their belly, another will have it in their head, another one in their muscles, another one in their joints and so on down the line, it doesn’t matter. But they still will have this unusual cellular activity which always produces an “unusual sensation”.

Now an “unusual sensation” is usually referred to as pain or soreness or stiffness or fullness or whatever; and then the person has an “unusual feeling of anxiety” about that experiencing -- is the usual case? And so then they go around this vicious cycles again; and this time, of course, it takes more “unusual cellular activity”-- more of the body is brought into the adaptation; and if it’s kept up over a long enough period of time, the cells finally begin to either break down or are altered over this “unusual cellular activity”—so it’s something these cells are not supposed to be doing at all; but in adapting to the anxiety, fear, anger and so forth, they’re trying to save the body at that moment.

So, then, you have pathology. Now when one has the pathology, of course the appropriate thing to do, (as any knucklehead knows), is to go have it cut out. You don’t need those organs—not realizing that they’re trying to save your life; but one thinks or gets advice of “Let’s cut it out”. Well, you cut it out, but one keeps all the anxiety and everything going on so the adaptation moves over to the next convenient organ. You cut out the appendix, and then the gall bladder does the adapting. You have the gall bladder cut out, and then the adapting moves to the small intestines; and you have a nice little loop of that cut out--and you can have a lot of beautiful scientific names for all these things—but all the adapting continues on because nobody looked to see where the stress was originating or WHAT WAS GOING ON in the first place. We have a question “what’s going on here?” So the “what’s going on here?”in this case is that there was an adaptation going on all over the body to restore it to balance—to save the body.

Now if the person should take charge and begin to check out their environment, their inner feeling, their activity, and their nutrition, they no longer need the adaptation. So then the adaptation begins to subside. When the adaptation subsides, you’ll find that the person is now in a desirable state of well-being. This well-being can go on as long as the person cares to be in charge of themselves.

I’ve read somewhere that nature makes a man, but it takes a little assistance from the man to become a master of himself; and that’s about the only thing that we’ll ever be “in charge” of is ourselves—if we do that. It really is the only thing we do need. I don’t want to be in charge of anybody else—just me. And if I’m taking charge of “what’s going on with me”, I don’t have to worry about the rest of the people and what they’re doing.

Ok, who has a question here? Anybody got a word to say? John, have you been involved in the health question for a number of years. You got a comment here?

(Well yes, is not only relates to health, but may be just in general. What is the difference between taking charge and taking control?)

Same difference—I’ve read somewhere that nature makes a man, but it takes a little assistance from the man to become a master of himself; and that’s about the only thing that we’ll ever be “in charge” of is ourselves—if we do that. It really is the only thing we do need. I don’t want to be in charge of anybody else—just me. And if I’m taking charge of “what’s going on with me”, I don’t have to worry about the rest of the people and what they’re doing

(So maybe when we try to take control of something externally, that’s when the problem…)

Oh, that’s when everything goes awry all over the place because I try to control you. I would think, knowing you fairly well, that you would rebel; and we’d have a big old fight, and then we’re both in a mess. I don’t want to control you, I want to control self, not other selves. I can take control of only a certain amount of the environment. We can set the thermostat where we want it to be in here, huh? If I don’t like to drive on Scottsdale road, I can go over a block or two and drive on 75th Street or some other street that doesn’t have so many people on it. That is if I don’t want to be up there with all the good folks. So that is taking charge or self control; but not control of everything and everyone else around us.

Now the general misconception is, of course, that if I controlled everybody else and had them all doing what I wanted them to do, wouldn’t it be wonderful—no, you’d be a slave. I saw a man one time with a chain on a prisoner; but he, also, had a chain on his own wrist. Who’s in charge? I don’t know? Who can run the hardest?

Healing

(I have a couple other questions.)

Ok, let’s have the next two questions.

(The four elements—environment, inner feeling, activity and nutrition—how would you rate them percentage wise?)

Well, I think rating it on percentage wise is according to where we live. If we were in Ethiopia today, I would probably rate nutrition very highly—that’s if we were in certain part of Ethiopia--not where the government officials are, but where the poor folks are, I’d probably rate it about 95%, ok? Where we live, I would probably rate inner feeling as about 50%, and split the others up in between. The fact that we eat enough is not necessarily good nutrition because a lot of times we eat things that are not what the body requires; but what we have developed a taste for or been conditioned to eat.

Activity, I think is probably on the “low end” here, and need is a little greater because people drive for thirty minutes so they can get a parking place two door’s closer to the store so they don’t have to walk as far.

In this country, I would say that possibly I would rate inner feeling as very high. Most places in the civilized industrialized world, I would probably rate inner feeling highest in the percentage. It really doesn’t make a lot of difference as to which one is which because if they’re not all four somewhere towards optimum, the person is not functioning optimum anyway. I’d rather be optimum, so I’ll take charge of all four, ok? One’s as easy as the other one to move in that direction. Does that help answer your question?

(Yes.)

(Well, I what I wanted to say is really not a question. When you talk about taking charge it goes back to your tape on “I’ll Show ‘em,” Boy, that has helped me so much.)

Right, because you had to “take charge” in order to show ‘em. Is that right?

(That’s right.)

You work to get in charge. You got to control self, right?

(I’ve kind of been in a rut, I’ll put it that way. I retired.)

It’s trouble retiring, isn’t it?

(Yes, it sure is.)

You get in a rut awful quick; and a rut, they told me, is an elongated grave, and I don’t want to be in one of those yet.

(I don’t either.)

There’s a lot of other things I want to do first, ok?

(I got one other question.)

Ok, fire--I like questions. Ask all you want--that keeps me from having to work so hard.

(Once in a while I get a glimpse, but then suggestion comes it. The suggestion seems subtle.)

Right.

(And yet it appears that it is a very very powerful force?)

That’s true, and suggestion always influences your inner feeling, if you choose to look at it.

(But we’re unable to really see, consciously, just how dramatic the affect of the suggestion is.)

Well, we maintain that the human being is 100% subject to suggestion 100% of the time, and so you better be paying attention.

Suggestion

Now a suggestion always comes with a certain attribute. It says, (number one) that you are going to be in danger if you don’t do so and so; and you’re going to get a great reward if you “believe and do as I tell you”. In addition it tells you you’re gong to be in terrible trouble if you don’t do what I tell you.

So in order to have a suggestion to affect me, I must establish “authorities”. In other words, if I make you an authority, then anything and everything you say is true to me. Now I haven’t decided that it is factual—probably don’t even give it a second thought. I haven’t checked it out to see if it’s true or even questioned the idea or ideal. So I am subject to suggestion from you because you would be an “authority” to me. Aren’t we conditioned this way with parents?

Now the first thing I think any person (who would care to look at things very much) would change is to establish that there will be nobody that is an authority over me. There may be some officials out here such as police or judges. We can’t avoid those. We don’t have to like what they do. As long a I do it, I won’t get shot or put in jail.

The point is, that if we accept somebody as being an authority, and somebody comes along and gives you a very frightening story or a frightening suggestion—then I am in a state of fear over what you said and I haven’t checked it out. Most people have given the written word authority; and so we read in the newspaper that if you eat bacon, you’re going to get cancer—then we are fearful.

You remember our pickle experiment a few years ago? The suggestion was that everybody that had died in the last two years had been eating pickles sometime or other in their life so there was bound to be a connection between them. So we don’t want to just blindly accept suggestions from anyone or anything..

so you want end being controlled by suggestion, the first thing you do is become enough of a “smarty” that you drop having any authorities—then nobody can suggest anything to you. If there’s no authority, nobody can suggest anything to you. He can say all the words in the world, but it will have no affect on you, ok? So that’s the first thing to do is be such a “smarty” that you’re not having any authorities, ok?

(Which means you consciously just have to say it.)

(from Marsha. I have found that I can decide whether to consciously say out loud “that is just a suggestion with a whole lot of implications around it” or to just be aware of it. If I consciously say it, I can find myself in a big defensive debate. I have found it of value to not respond outwardly or just make cooing sounds. It saves a lot of contention over some insignificant statement.)

Right. I’m not having any authority. You don’t know anymore of what you’re talking about than the man in the moon. The guy that comes up and gives me suggestions is usually just trying to establish a belief in me or lay something on me; and he figures that I will be frightened of this or that--I will be greedy for that; and so then he can offer it, and I will go along with it. So let’s drop it.

Another thing that frequently comes along is that there is what people call free--floating anxiety. They can’t think of anything to really be anxious about, but the solar plexus is having a fit. That ring a bell, John?

(Yes, I’ve experienced that.)

You’ve run by that one, ok? First off is that it’s somewhat of a habit to be anxious. Sometimes we recognize we haven’t been anxious enough lately; and that makes me anxious. I’m anxious because I haven’t been anxious or “on guard” lately. Believe it or not, that is the biggest source of it.

Now the other source is if you have an irritated stomach for any reason. You might have just eaten something that didn’t quite agree with you or there’s some other little something going on. Perhaps you’ve been drinking some strange water. Maybe we drank too much coffee last week or had too many highballs--whatever it is, the stomach is a little irritated. When it irritates, it has a tendency to flutter. When it flutters, we associate that with anxiety. We feel that flutter, and then we feel anxious because there is a flutter.

Now if we can have the flutter without feeling anxious about it, we don’t have the anxiety because not every flutter in the belly is necessarily anxiety. It will give you that feeling because we associate the two together.

Association

Now association is a very powerful subject. One of the things that affects the inner feeling very decidedly is association. As a way of explanation, I will try to use an experience.

One time I went into a little restaurant on the corner and had a piece of custard pie and a cup of coffee--that’s all. Somewhere in the night, I woke up deathly ill with food poisoning. That piece of pie was tainted which I didn’t discover until the last bite, and I spit that bite out. Well, coffee and pie was what came up in no uncertain terms. It was what is called pulsing vomiting—way out there--violent like a fire hose. This went on for hours and coffee was mixed with it. I’m sure the coffee wasn’t tainted, just the pie, but they went in together so they came out together.

So coffee is the thing that’s most common, and from then on I could not go into a restaurant for months without suddenly feeling extremely nauseated and having extreme diarrhea because I could smell coffee. I could drive down the street in my car with the windows up and smell coffee coming out of houses all up and down the street. I’ve never done that before in my life. In other words, I became hypersensitive to coffee. It took quite a bit of doing before I could ever drink coffee again; and it was a very potent thing. Now that was an ASSOCIATION.

Now whenever your tummy is a little bit upset, it is associated with anxiety; and you can have the whole feeling. You become anxious because you’re anxious; and that gets the whole thing going around in a vicious circle.

If one observes my stomach is jumpy and reminds me of some times I was very anxious; and I had a very similar feeling to this time; you can, after you recognize it for “what it is”, usually bring it under control.

There is no such thing as anxiety just shows up and sits on someone without something going on. Most often it comes from an irritated stomach a wee bit. There isn’t anything really wrong—just got an upset belly a little bit. It will, however, give you that same general feeling as anxiety.

I ate something just a few weeks ago and it didn’t set quite exactly right in my stomach. I’m going to learn someday not to eat in very many restaurants unless I run them. But anyway, I got a little of some food and began to experience an anxiety feeling. I knew I wasn’t anxious or anything--it was just simply that the stomach was a little agitated and upset. So does that help answer any your question.

Any other questions? I just rather have questions the rest of the day. It suits me. You got one?

(What is cancer?)

What is cancer? Cancer is an adaptation that has extended to the place where adaptation has been going on. There has been unusual cellular activity until the cells are altered. They are altered in that they multiply more frequently than usual and are larger than usual. Then they take up so much space that they don’t get enough blood supply, so they begin to break down. The breakdown of it is so toxic that it destroys life in the individual. Now somewhere along the way---if you could prevent it—it would be much easier than to try to get rid of it after it’s well established because it’s too potent. It’s so toxic that the body is destroyed.

It is a normal adaptation up to a point. The adaptation is that the stress and the anxiety is still going on and it’s been over a length of time. Now I’ve had occasion to talk to many people that I knew were setting themselves up to have what’s called cancer--that form of adaptation. I have tried to get them to give up and quit noising over the conflicts in them. I have known it to be over little dogs. I have known it to be over a lot of lesser events, ok? The person gets themselves in such an ungodly state over something—can be dogs, brother-in-laws, cats, anything under the sun that you can name.

Now let’s be at ease without those changing, ok? I know about that stuff. I’ve seen it, and I’ve tried to tell them that something terrible would happen if they didn’t; but I never told anybody you’re going to make yourself have cancer. That I won’t do because I’m “liable to be accepted as an authority by some people”, and I would not want to ever “offer the suggestion”. I’ve done my best of trying to reason down that it isn’t worth it, ok? So what. There’s a dog. Give it arsenic. They’ll probably get another one anyway, so what’s the difference. People do destroy themselves in their effort to “have their way right now”.

We go back to the four dual basic urges. I say look, that’s the “self” that needs to be controlled. When we say self-control, we’re talking about controlling the four dual basic urges within. We’re controlling the complainer. We’re controlling the sticker up for rights. We’re controlling the blamer. We’re controlling the pleaser that says, “I got to please somebody even though I don’t want to.” We’re controlling that which says, “believe and do as you’re told by authority.” We’re getting rid of authority, and we’re getting rid of that one that has “got to improve”. So that’s what you control when they say self control. You take charge of those little guys—those not “I’s”. Now they’re nothing in themselves. Maybe they even have a use, certainly did sometime or other in our existence; but unless something with an intelligence is in control of those. they run rampant and destroy everything in sight. They destroy relationships first off. They destroy friendships. They destroy health. They destroy bodies. They destroy fortunes sometimes. They go destroy all sorts of things—confidence, new directions, you name it. They destroy everything in sight.

So definitely one can see that there are many good reasons for having them under control. Life is like if you had two fine horses and a shay with a fringe on top. You better be driving those horses--otherwise they’ll get you in a mess—right quick.

Say you drive a fine automobile down the street someday. You take your hands off the wheel, put them behind your head, stick your feet out and see what happens? You’ll be dead in a few minutes because that automobile is a fantastic device, but it’s got to be controlled, right? The “self” is more dangerous than a car is. In fact, it’s about as dangerous as having a jet airplane up in the sky and you decide, “Well, this thing is doing so well, I’ll just turn on the automatic pilot and lean back and let her go”. You may go for a few miles, but you’re going to hit the ground eventually.

So when man begins to realize that his internal feelings and the Life principals are more potent than a jet airplane and has more power; but that something has got to be in charge—something has got to be in control—that is what we are referring to as awareness. If you don’t control it, it’s going to crash, and crashing most of us are not interested in. It’s all very nice to say, “Well, I was attacked by this horrible disease and that’s why I crashed,” Well, when the plane crashes on the ground, you can see that nose is all caved in and say that the engine exploded, and it burned the guy to death--so it was all the plane’s fault? No it wasn’t, the airplane is there just like a body, and it has to be controlled or else there is destruction. A mind is a wonderful thing, but without any control over it, it runs rampant. It will have you frightened. It will have you scared. It will have you sick. It will have you in royal messes in every conceivable direction.

Now we’ll talk about healing for a few minutes.

Healing is any effort that is extended that gets the person to see differently. In other words, what we’ve been talking about so far is healing talk. Now sometimes you can get to a person without saying a word to them, and that’s called spiritual healing. To me, it’s just you got the guy to look at things a little different.

People call me frequently to ask me to take care of something. Now I can’t take care of it, but sometimes I can get through to their head and get a little more peace going on in there. I can get to them that they can see it in a wee different light. If I can’t get through, nothing works. It doesn’t work! Now I have no ability to do anything except maybe I can get through to their head.

Now sometimes the only way I can get through is to wait until they’re asleep--sometime in the night, and maybe I can get through to their head a little bit. And if you do, and they see a wee bit different—they begin to see something like we’ve been talking about today--that there is a different way of seeing things--there’s a different way of understanding WHAT’S GOING ON. There’s a different way to value what’s around me. I can cease to put value on little dogs; and I can cease to put value on “what people say and/or don’t say”. I can change my whole value system; and then I’m not all upset about any little given thing.

When I’m not upset, the healing force is in the body and can begin—it’s already there. Life is running through this body; and it’s working constantly—that’s what all the symptoms are really about is the effort to get it to function under that adverse situation.

So if I’m telling Life, within this body, that I’m in great danger because there’s a red and white truck out the window there; and that that has some sinister horrible meaning to it, then I will be in a very bad shape because I’m reporting that I’m in danger, but there’s nothing really there. But if I get it around; and look at it--it’s just a truck sitting out there. Thank goodness it’s there instead of somewhere else because if it wasn’t, I’d be wondering where it was. But when I look at it a wee bit different, I’m quite all right.

Now if you make anything important, you become anxious—not free floating anxiety out of the belly, but you made something important, you’re anxious about it. Perhaps you made it important that somebody calls you today or that they don’t call today. Perhaps you’ve made it important that a certain thing happens today. Then you get all anxious, and when you get anxious, the body, X, Life, is trying to take care of it as though it really existed, and there’s nothing out there.

So healing is basically putting another person’s mind at ease. Now how you get that done is anybody’s bet, you know. I’ve done it by cracking a joke a few times in my life. I have done it at far distance by working someway on a person’s intellect or awareness in the middle of the night when they’re asleep--that they’re at ease when they wake up—they’re at ease mentally--they’re not all anxious about something. When you get that done, the body begins to repair very rapidly—in fact, it sometimes repairs so fast it’s unbelievable.

Now even if you use the usual physical methods of healing which is under the realm of healing also, about the only thing a doctor does that is really worthwhile—and we’re talking about non-trauma conditions, not trauma. Trauma means you get to straighten the bones up. You got to put a broken bone in line and put a cast on it and it’ll grow together—line it up if the bone is dislocated--get it back where it belongs--get it off of interfering with blood supply and nerve supply to the body and so forth—that’s a trauma.

But for the one that’s just an old adaptation to some erroneous way of seeing things going on, it’s what you say to the person and how you say it. Now I’m talking from the terms of the practitioner as well as their friends. How the practitioner talks and how he looks and how he acts has more to do with how the person gets well than it does whatever treatment he may use. If the practitioner makes it a conscious effort to put everybody at ease that comes in his door, he is known as a rather wonderful doctor. He’s a great healer because he really is--if he can put people at ease. He has a sense of confidence. He has a way of saying, “Aw, you don’t have anything wrong with you, so we’ll fix that up overnight.

Story of the old lady with cancer

That’s like a little old lady I knew over in New Mexico. She’s about 86, 87 years old. She went to see the doctor one time at the insistence of her daughter who was a registered nurse. She went to see the doctor, and the doctor told her she had cancer of the spine. The old lady said, “Well, I’m glad it’s nothing serious, I can take care of that myself,” and she took off out the door. The doctor was in a state, and was all torn up. The little old lady went on to live to be almost 100. So she had cancer of the spine--so what--she just didn’t see anything serious about that. So she had a sense of confidence, and she didn’t need one from the doctor.

Unfortunately in the past few years most doctors have had to be in the unfortunate situation of having to practice defensive medicine. This is due to the extreme malpractice threat. They have not been able to put anybody at ease because if they do, they are in jeopardy of the person coming up within the next five years saying he missed something--thereby having a grand lawsuit on his hands. So he can’t very well put people at ease anymore.

But nevertheless, this is the greatest healing there is, is that you can put people at ease. Now if you go back and read the literature through the ages of the great healers that have existed--the mystical healers or the mental healers--you will have to see that the major thing they did was they put people at ease.

Now that’s something that any one of us can do when we are around people. We can put them at ease. When people go into a place of business that they’ve never been before, they’re not quite at ease. They go into a hotel they haven’t been in before; they’re not quite at ease. They go to apply for a job; they’re not quite at ease. They go to buy something, and they’re not quite at ease, especially if it is a major expenditure of some sort. They’re not quite at ease, is that right Mary? You didn’t want to go buy a car by yourself because you needed an expert along or at least somebody you felt knew more about it than you did. So with someone along, you felt a little more at ease, is that right?

So when we want to do something that is a healing to anybody, and everybody around—let’s say we want to be a healing influence to wherever we are—we can make it a total thing that we can always do that—we can put everybody around us at ease. I discovered that quite by accident.

I used to be very ill at ease, and I thought that I was the only person in the world like that. I got to noticing one day, in spite of myself, that most everybody was ill at ease. I thought, “Well, I’m hopeless, I’ve been working on me for years, and I didn’t get anywhere--but I can make other people at ease, put them at ease for a few minutes”. So I forgot about me and began to put other people at ease; and the by-product was that I forgot about being ill-at-ease and I haven’t been that way anymore. So it has a reverse affect on you. So how about taking on as our little activity for this week that we will put anybody and everybody we come in contact with at ease.

If we go in a restaurant and the waitress is in a terrible state--we can put her at ease or at least ignore her, or we can crack a joke. You can hold back and let a guy get in a slot on the street when they’re closing up one lane. You can wait back and let them all get in—it puts him at ease to a degree. It’s so simple that probably we could say that “simple good manners” is probably the best technique of putting people at ease.

So, let’s take on as our little chore this week of putting people at ease, and forget about being at ease for ourselves. Let’s just work at putting other people at ease. You might find that it has a decided healing affect all around you. They’re might be some very ill people that you didn’t recognize that begin to feel much better by the simple fact that you put them at ease. By the same token, I’m sure it can have a very healing affect on us when we use it.

Ok is there any questions on the healing end of the discussions? Ok, it has been indeed a pleasure. Have a real good day....