I recently attended a metaphysical lecture facilitated by Guy Williams, a friend of mine who also happens to be a minister of Religious Science. After lecture, Guy opened floor for prayer requests, and one of attendees asked for healing for a family member who was experiencing a significant health crisis. In course of discussion, Guy asked if attendee was certain that her family member actually wanted to heal, observing, "Most people don't really want to heal. Most people just want to stop hurting."
Once again, an off-hand comment by Guy Williams completely rearranged furniture in my head. (If you'd like to see results of some of Guy's other off-hand comments, check out The Relationship Handbook: How to Understand and Improve Every Relationship in Your Life. The sections on forgiveness and anger are both inspired by Guy's wisdom).
Most people don't want to heal. Most people just want to stop hurting.
Most of us want to wave a magic wand and make pain go away. Most of us focus on treating symptoms: we'll take pills, injections, or have surgery. We claim that we want to heal, but we rarely choose to heal. We remain motivated as long as we're in pain, and once that pain has become bearable or manageable, we choose to return to our normal lives.
This is not healing.
For most of us, healing is a big, scary, and uncomfortable prospect. Healing requires that we do two very simple, yet incredibly unappealing tasks. First, we must accept that we are responsible for creating our own illness: Our thoughts, beliefs, choices and actions are directly responsible for imbalance and dis-ease we are experiencing in our physical bodies. Second, we must be willing to change our lives and eliminate thoughts, beliefs, choices and actions that created and supported imbalance and dis-ease, replacing them with new choices that support balance and health.
The process of healing really is very simple, and if we break it down into small, manageable steps, following process can also become easy as well. As with most challenges we encounter during our human experience, healing requires that we first become familiar with and learn how to master our egos.
THE CARE AND FEEDING OF THE EGO Let's begin by remembering who we truly are. We are each whole and complete, eternal, multi-dimensional beings, individualized aspects of All That Is. We are also each currently having a human experience, in third dimension of matter and form, on planet Earth.
When we begin our human experiences, we're given a very useful tool to help us to interact with third dimension: ego. The ego is entirely a third-dimensional construct. In a sense, we put on an "ego suit" so that we can experience and explore third dimension from a unique and specific point of view. The ego helps us to pretend that we are individuals; more specifically, ego helps us to pretend that we're not, in fact, connected to each other as a part of All That Is. Ultimately, our egos are designed to help us to remember where we left our car keys, and not much else.
The problem is that our egos don't know this.
Our ego believes that its job is to protect us from what it perceives to be a very cruel and dangerous universe. Since ego was created to help us maintain illusion of separation from Source, separation is all that ego knows. The ego feels lost, isolated and alone. In an attempt to protect us from pain of world, ego increases our sense of separation. Of course, greater separation, more pain. The more ego tries to protect us from pain of separation, more pain it causes.
The ego's single greatest fear is death. Everything ego does, it does to try to prevent itself from being destroyed. The ego _can_ be destroyed-it's a product of third dimension, and therefore it's fragile and finite. _We_, on other hand, are eternal, multi-dimensional beings who can never die or be destroyed because we are a part of All That Is. We get into trouble when we start to identify with our egos and forget our true natures. When we start to believe that we are our egos, we see world from our ego's point of view and experience fear and pain.
All fear comes from ego. All fear, in fact, is directly related to ego's fear of being destroyed. Fear can only exist when we believe that we are separated from Source. The more we believe ego, more we believe we are separate from Source, and more we experience fear.
Only two states of being exist: fear and love. We experience fear when we listen to ego and buy into idea that we're separate from universe. We experience love when we remember truth that we are whole and complete. It's not possible to experience both states of being at same time, although most of us are masters at switching between them almost instantly.