The Power of Healing
“But when the multitudes saw it,
they marvelled and glorified God,
which had given such
power unto men.” Matthew IX, 8.
The story is told of a Maori in New Zealand who carried out unheard of healings. The man was a baptised Christian and he asked of those he was about to heal that they should give thanks for their cure only to the ‘Holy Trinity: – Father, Son and Holy Ghost’. He even threatened that the cure would fade if this faith he requested were to disappear in those he healed.
In Christian circles, however, the work of this Maori was regarded as a tangible confirmation of the dogma…
Then in Europe Mr Coué came on to the scene asking for nothing more from the sick than that they believe in the power of their own imagination; he was able to achieve no less ‘spectacular’ results.
And now another new report comes to us of a healer who is said to cause all sorts of sickness to vanish merely through the laying on of hands.
This time it is a Buddhist monk – apparently Chinese – who has through his healings aroused marvel and reverent awe in India, where they are accustomed to ‘miracles’.
Since he alone is no longer in a position to lay hands upon all those who come to him, he ‘transfers’ his healing powers to five of his pupils. – –
Reports in newspapers inform us that there can be no doubt about the reality of the healings and therefore – as is usual in such cases – we are confronted with a puzzle.
Although from time to time there are ample reports of wondrous things from East Asia, on closer examination often very little is left, even though there is never a lack of ‘trustworthy eye witnesses’ in the initial accounts.
What is reported about this Buddhist monk, however, is not really so miraculous that one would have to take the precaution of casting doubt upon it.
It is more remarkable that people constantly meet such healings with astonishment and are at a loss for an explanation. Indeed, in some circles they do not even want to accept the agreeable and sober Mr. Coué who is certainly not wrapped in any kind of magic cloak. –
Admittedly Mr. Coué spoke only of ‘auto-suggestion’, whereas we are talking of powers here of which only the chains are released by auto-suggestion. Yet the essential element remaining in his attempt to explain is his suggestion that powers contained in everyone bring about healing.
In truth, no doctor in the world can heal in any other way than by enabling these powers to take effect, regardless of the means by which he achieves this, whether he makes use of chemical or surgical interventions.
There is nothing new in this; people have always accepted the superficial insight that a doctor can only stimulate the healing power of nature, but otherwise can achieve little even with the best medicines or by removing diseased organs.
But there are other things at play here, and the sympathetically modest gesture of Mr Coué that he himself had nothing to do with the healing but only instructed the patient how to help himself, must not be taken as an incontrovertible statement of fact in any way, even if Mr Coué may be thoroughly convinced in the depths of his innermost being of the rightness of this view. –
The personality of the healer will always and everywhere be of vital importance, regardless of whether we are talking of the method of auto-suggestion made popular by Mr Coué and practised by the American ‘New Thinkers’(*)(*) Sometimes also known as Christian Scientists.for half a century now, – whether it is faith healing or the laying on of hands, – or of healing through medicinal or surgical intervention.
Certainly the will, particularly at its highest potency: as imagination functioning as the power of suggestion, can effect true ‘miracles’ in man; this applies also to the release of those healing powers which are present as automatically effective marshals in every human organism, but which are paralysed by the slightest protest originating in thought. Thus it all depends on how one can best remove the shackles created by this thought-inspired protest.
Furthermore we are speaking here – as with all manifestations of the powers of life – of two poles becoming effective, one of which is found in the instinctive will of the cells of the diseased organism to degenerate and the other in the spiritual will (not ‘wish’!) to cure.
In self-healing there is the unavoidable assumption that the sick person objectifies his will to be cured; he makes it, as it were, ‘strange’ to himself sothat the necessary tension emerges between the organ-based will to sickness and the spiritual will to regain health.
This is not always very easy and at times it is almost impossible when demands made upon the sick person are reduced to a last minimum as soon as the spiritual will to cure: – to bring order to what is disordered within the organism – exerts, at least initially, an influence upon him from the outside and stimulates through this influence his own spiritual will into the necessary activity.
This outer spiritual will may be a collective will, as is found effective, for example, in places of pilgrimage. It may, however, also emanate from an individual personality and is then conditional upon the inherent strength of this personality in transmitting this ‘healing’ will to others. –
It is well known that on innumerable occasions in the field of medical practice the experience has been made that certain cures in the hands of some doctor guarantee the most pleasing results, whereas other no less capable doctors cannot get anywhere with the same methods.
Depth of knowledge, even abundance of practical experience cannot offer a substitute for the innate aptitude to be a true healer. Therefore someone should only decide to become a doctor if: he has clearly perceived in himself this aptitude of being able to transmit the spiritual will to be cured from all disease to others. –
All purely scientific interest in the inner structure of the human organism and its possible pathological changes, however, only justifies striving for a vocation in pure research which can, indirectly, be of enormous benefit to the sick. In the field of medical science one should learn to differentiate most strictly between aptitude for research and aptitude for healing. – –
Both aptitudes are innate and can never be acquired in their distinctively genuine forms. However, some doctors, born to be researchers, must work as medical practitioners; they make a virtue out of necessity, for they want to heal out of a human willingness to help others. Now that they have been called to do this, they perhaps on occasions achieve significant successes in healing. –
The combination of both qualities in one person is so extremely rare that it can be justifiably ignored here. –
As the researcher is concerned with the study of the sick which is absolutely indispensable for them, it should be possible for actual practical healing to be left solely to the innate healer. –
We have enough among us who are innate healers, and if nowadays the most complicated mechanical methods are used to ascertain whether someone has the aptitude to be a train driver or some other technical profession, we should also be capable of ascertaining during the period of study whether the future doctor is best suited to be a researcher or to be a healer.
There would then be hardly any more cases of some obscure miracle worker gaining the reputation of being able to cure all imaginable diseases which the medically trained doctor was not able to cure because he just was not born to be a healer.
Such a healer will be successful in healing with every method; the knowledge he has acquired will continually be updated by his reliable intuition.
But before it is understood that a genuine doctor must be a born healer above all else, all new cures, every reform in the art of healing will only bring very limited progress. Time and time again, one will experience the whole world paying attention when some genuine healer appears on the scene. Meanwhile, trust in scientifically based medicine is increasingly undermined. –
At the root of this behaviour of the masses is a certain instinct which senses a power of healing in the person born to it, and is little concerned if such a person also has the scientific knowledge to control what he is doing.
The sick person wants to be healed and has absolutely no desire to be regarded as an ‘interesting case’; he may this be for the researcher, but must never be it for the healer!