Body Electronics – Every Thursday
From 7pm to approximately 9pm, Body Electronics begins. This is an intensely holistic group practice described in the book Body Electronics by Thomas C. Chavez. When fully learned and integrated, Body Electronics becomes a lifestyle that leads one on a path of sanctification. Here on Thursdays we engage in Christ the Healer’s most demanding practice: the table work part, also known as “pointholding” . Everyone who wishes to participate is welcomed and supported in taking responsibility for their own experience — no one comes to just watch.
The incredible healing practice called Body Electronics has been lived and experienced by some members of Christ the Healer UCC since our community first got started. Its effectiveness as a way to maintain and/or restore health has at times been called miraculous. But this practice is far more than a way to heal, it is a way to touch our own deepest truth with unmistakable clarity and foster spiritual growth with remarkable swiftness. We invite others to learn how this work is done and bring its benefits into their lives.
If you want to know more, read this:
HEAL US NOW! and HEAL US ONE & ALL
An excerpt form the opening text a new book subtitled:A Radical Workbook for Rejuvenation of
your body – your mind – how you feel
Let’s start with a simple statement: No matter what ails you, no matter how serious your complaint, chances are remarkably good that when you have learned everything contained in this workbook and diligently followed the steps outlined for you within it, that ailment will be cured. Cure means more than “the symptom went away”. It means that the problem went away, and it won’t be back because the underlying reality that caused that symptom to show up is now gone.
“How” you may ask, “will I know the difference between the banishment of symptoms alone and the eradication of their cause?” And you might add, “Is there a context within which these distinctions can be clearly understood?
Well, yes there is and learning about and understanding that context is how you will know. A great many implications from Biblical wisdom are reflected in this context and understanding, not through repetition of sacred names or the replication of ancient rituals, but simply because pragmatically observed functions that mirror deep truth are more effective and powerful than pragmatically observed functions that do not.
In all likelihood, no one ever told you that there are six fundamental “Laws of Cure” that let you know whether a symptom or complaint has been cured, swept under the rug or exchanged for something worse. Nothing limits the effectiveness of any treatment or therapy as thoroughly as an inadequate grasp of these laws. And just like you, most conventional doctors, most alternative doctors and most practitioners of healing don’t know what these laws are. Therefore, “The pain is gone”, “I feel less upset now” or “The rash went away”, is the universal limit of how success is gauged.
This overly simplified treatment goal and/or guide to therapeutic “course correction”, is all too likely to lead both sufferer and helper astray. Where did that rash, that upset or that pain go? What are the causes and sources of those symptoms doing now? If we can not answer these questions confidently and clearly, any particular course of treatment, no matter how effective, may be creating a life-pattern of increasingly severe diseases. The kind of pattern that is so often camouflaged behind the passing of years as the specter of “aging”.
A common pattern taught in Naturopathic medical schools, and noted by homeopathic doctors the world over that might illustrate this point goes something like this: Jane Doe, age three, has an undiagnosed milk intolerance which causes an inappropriate immune response that includes a high volume of mucus production accompanied by irritated mucus linings. One unpleasant feature of the irritated mucus linings is that the mouth of the eustachian tube that opens into the back of the throat and keeps the air pressure even on both the inside and outside of the eardrum, swells shut. This causes a vacuum to form behind the inside surface of her tender young eardrum. She experiences this vacuum pressure against the thin membrane of her middle ear as a painful earache. Plastic tubes are surgically inserted through the little girl’s eardrums, the pain goes away and the child develops dust and pollen allergies.
By the time Jane is fifteen she has been on a regimen of “allergy shots” which further disorder the body’s natural immune responses for several years. As her allergies fade, she discovers that she has asthma for which she takes medication for the next twenty-five years. At the age of forty, she discovers that early arthritis, a common form of autoimmune disease, is settling into her knees. This pattern of progressive degeneration (and many others like it) goes on and on.
Making Distinctions
In addition to what has been outlined above, there are two vitally important reasons to distinguish “cure” from “the symptom went away”.
First, though the symptom is always the reason for an individual to seek treatment, that symptom itself is almost never the illness itself, nor is it the underlying issue. Just to state this a bit more strongly, if we are not talking about traumatic injury where the force-stress bearing design of a human body has not been exceeded, then the symptom is never the same thing as the illness. Confusing the symptom with the underlying problem leads us to do the health care equivalent of “mowing down the dandelions” season after season instead of digging out the roots. As all skilled gardeners know, that course of lawn care guarantees that the dandelions win. The logical equivalent in terms of our health care is just as disappointing. In that case, it is our illness that wins.
Here are three relatively simple illustrations of how many of us get symptoms confused with causes and where that disordered understanding leads:
Illustration 1.) Human beings develop fevers because those enzymes, which are carried on our white blood cells, that are meant to “eat” invading bacteria, do their work faster when they are warm. Oh yes it is true that during a disastrously high fever, where a thermometer placed under the tongue reads 104 degrees or greater, the temperature inside of our liver will reach 116 degrees or greater. At those temperatures, some of the enzymes in the blood start to deform and become useless. It does not take many useless enzymes reaching the brain before there is the onset of alarming symptoms such as delirium or even seizure. But this danger is much like a “cliff-edge” situation. The still safe temperature of 103 is as close to that cliff-edge as we want to risk going, but there is no danger at all before that.
Yet many of us take aspirin, sponge bathe our bodies with cold water or wear ice packs as soon as we notice the first sign of fever. In so doing, we risk giving the invading organisms a free ride. And in most cases it was some health care professional who lead us to this misunderstanding in the first place.
Illustration 2.) Some among us develop depression because powerful inner needs seem impossible to reconcile with our life situation, the world we live in, or the very pattern of reality. These apparently irreconcilable conflicts force those of us who react this way to exhaust ourselves both mentally and emotionally and then take refuge in the stupor of immobility that such exhaustion brings on. Yet if depressed we take drugs which either artificially excite our nervous systems and so exhaust ourselves further, or stupefy our ability to perceive our own inner conflicts by blunting our capacity for thought, so that our outer appearance betrays no hint of the now (apparently) absent inner turmoil.
Illustration 3.) Some of us develop high blood pressure because an otherwise appropriate volume of blood is forced through narrowed arteries. This narrowed condition is due to two main factors: the build up of plaque on blood vessel walls, and the chronic tightening of those vessels as a result of chronic flooding with excess adrenaline (think of this hormone as if it were a naturally occurring “speed” or amphetamine) in response to constant anxiety or nervous tension.
Let’s consider that chronic arterial tightening first. This unnaturally prolonged constriction does not produce a smooth and uniform narrowing of the vessels, but instead makes the blood paths “lumpy” as if lined with corduroy, and slightly twisted. This in turn causes turbulence in the blood flow, which the body attempts to smooth out by depositing a plaque made from the waste products of bio-chemically foolish, but culturally absolutely “normal” food choices. An additional reason for the body to plaster the inside of already damaged arteries with plaque is the effect on enzymes that have been commercially flash heated in excess of 1500 degrees as happens in the homogenization milk. These delicate, spring-like protein catalysts become un-sprung under such conditions and their broken “spring ends” form “claws” that catch the fat molecules in the milk much as a pet tabby may get her claws snagged in a sweater. This snagging effect keeps the fat from separating and rising as cream, hence the commercial popularity of the process. These same claws incidentally scratch along the inside walls of the arteries of anyone who drinks that milk, making a circulatory system-wide cholesterol band-aid something of a necessity. This “plastering over” of the vessel walls narrows the blood channels still further, and makes them far less flexible.
The result of all this narrowing or occlusion is called high blood pressure or hypertension. What most people do about this is take medication that artificially reduces the normal blood volume during the time that the medication is operating in their body. When the medication wears off the symptom of hypertension returns. On the other hand, taking the medication results in a continuous escalation of the need for that symptom, so that more and more must be taken as time goes on or the blood pressure gets high anyway.
The second vital point is a corollary of the first. It is also the single most meaningful statement that can be made on this subject. Since the symptom is not the problem, simply making the symptom “go away” has no necessary relation to the illness or to its relief. To phrase this another way, we can point out that turning off the fire alarm has no effect on the fire. It is therefore possible for us to temporarily feel better following an illness and be no better off, or to feel better and actually be more diseased.
Since, under these circumstances, we are still fundamentally ill, it is only a matter of time before our bodies find new ways to sound the alarms. These new alarms tend always to show up as deeper and more life-obstructing symptoms.
If you or I want to orient ourselves reliably toward cure, a number of highly specific points must be kept in mind. These are both points of fact and specific patterns of relation among those facts. Taken together, it is these points that are regarded as the Laws of Cure. A list of these six laws, clarified with brief illustrations follows:
| 1.) The objective of health is most usefully and simply described as being equivalent to the idea of freedom. The better the health of an individual, the greater the freedom of that person to both express and experience the fullness of life within the natural design perameters of that life. |
Here are four very simple examples designed to illustrate this point regarding four different levels of life:
Example A.) Healthy arms and legs are free to act within their complete range of motion, with full muscular power, with full range of precise and intricate neurological control.
Example B.) A healthy digestive system is free to digest the full spectrum of appropriately selected foods, in the optimum amount of time, providing the body with the complete range of available nutrients.
Example C.) An emotionally healthy person is free to respond to any event with a complete range of feelings and yet not be enslaved to those feelings as they experience them. As well as be able to change his or her response and resultant feelings as the facts of the event in question and/or her or his own relationship to the event changes.
Example D.) A mentally healthy individual freely relates any fact or event to any other, in any pattern she or he may choose, with no consideration other than the facts or patterns themselves.
| 2.) Health (read this as freedom) is made greater by the extent a person accepts, embraces, loves, expands in the presence of, turns “on” to the reality she or he lives with. Or it is made less so by the extent he or she resists, denies, rejects, hates, contracts in the presence of, turns “off” to the facts of what “is”. |
Law of Cure # 2 is simultaneously one of the most critically important, and one of the most “counter-intuitive” concepts offered to you in this workbook. We always fight against things in our environment that seem wrong to us. The idea that we make our world, our health, our relationships and our selves better by resisting, denying, rejecting and hating the “bad” parts of the reality we live with is deeply ingrained in our culture, our linguistic patterns, our literature, our popular songs and in our personal psychologies. So much so that hoards of sincere Christian believers have spent centuries “fighting the devil” and violently campaigning against the wrongs of the world in direct contradiction to the admonition given to them by Jesus himself in the Sermon on the Mount (his core teaching) to “resist not evil.”
One way to try to understand this difficult concept is to explore a corollary statement that in one form goes: “That which is resisted persists.” Or in another “You fight it, you got it!” A simplistic example: please remember what it was like for you in school those days when you did not have your homework assignment finished. Who was the first person called upon to show what they learned? And on those days when you had been diligent and knew your stuff backwards and forward, who was never called upon, or called upon only after the unprepared had been called out and embarrassed?
Staying simple, has anyone ever changed your mind merely by yelling at you? Even where you have, later on, discovered that you were in the wrong? Have you ever overcome a bad habit by simply “beating” yourself up? How does it work to “beat up” other people with bad habits? Does it make it easier for them to quit? Have you ever noticed that enemy nations seem to hold each other up like the two sides of an A-frame building, and hold each other locked into their positions through the opposition of each against the other?
Law of Cure # 2 is based on the observation that this counter-productive phenomenon shows up everywhere in life, and most particularly where our health and comfort are at stake. On the one hand, everything alive – including infectious microbes and the dysfunctional parts of our unconscious selves – fights back when attacked. This inevitably turns every non-loving, resistance-centered effort at “cleaning house” into a war. That’s one expression of it.
On the other hand, we also seem universally unable to let our difficulties pass away until we don’t unconsciously “need” them to fight with anymore. This mean that an issue that arouses a person’s hateful feelings will stay “in his or her face” for as long as they hate it. Just as an individual who self-identifies as a “problem solver” must attract problems in order to stay recognizably her or himself, a person who hates (resists) something or someone must have the object of his or her hatred within sight (whether externally or through internal representation) in order to maintain their self-perceived identity.
When a condition that used to be experienced as a terrible situation can at last be loved, embraced (managed in an “on” manner) it can also then be solved and/or resolved as if it were nothing more than a puzzle.
| 3.) When it comes to health, a person is best understood as a single, unified stress management system for all areas of life. Because of this, more effective “on” management of difficulties and impediments (as cited in law # 2) translates directly to better health. What can be termed “off” management translates directly to restricted health.
This law refers to health throughout the full spectrum of physical, emotional, mental and spiritual functions for individuals when considered separately as well as psychosocial health when looking at that same individual inside her or his social and interpersonal contexts. |
In this situation, the word stress refers to any event, situation, object or internal representation that must be overcome, negotiated or adjusted to in order to maintain health (again, remember to read that as “freedom”) and avoid a symptom-dominated (read that “damaged, sick, hindered or incomplete”) state of being.
Because we function as single, unified management systems, it is most useful to view stresses as cumulative, regardless of where they came from or what kind they are. Therefore a broken leg, a broken heart and a food intolerance all impact upon our same “self” and if all three happen at the same time our stress burden of the moment will be made up of all three. Note that our entire stress burden will now be compounded from the sum total of our previous stress load plus these latest three stress factors.
Whether the source of stress is chemical pollution, poor nutrition, lack of adequate sleep, prolonged exposure to extreme physical environments, viral, fungal or bacterial infection, accidental trauma, the failings of other persons, or our own unbalanced emotional state or “negative” thoughts, each of us is potentially able to manage the load in an “on” manner. Symptoms only show up when there is an overload, which means that the individual gave in to the temptation to manage his or her stresses in an “off” manner.
Successful (loving, embracing, “on”) “stress management” in this context is directly equivalent to successful “self-management” in relation to that stress, when our self-management is both applicable and complete enough to ensure continued freedom.
Here are a few examples that can help you appreciate the point expressed as Law of Cure # 3:
Example A.) A healthy individual with an infected foreign object, such as a splinter or thorn, in their flesh will experience a localized fever that speeds the rate of white blood cell effectiveness. This is followed by a rapid buildup of pus at the site of the infection. That thick fluid eventually floats the object free of its embedded position, then the wound bursts open to allow the object to be washed free.
Example B.) A healthy individual who suffers a loss grieves thoroughly and quickly, with no obstructing thoughts such as “It can’t be”, “Its not true”, or “I can’t believe it”. She or he is then free to get on with life sooner than one who unconsciously tries not to grieve by denying facts.
Example C.) A healthy individual who finds him or herself imminently threatened with the loss of both life and home due to sudden natural disaster, can think clearly of what must be done, including the possibility of sacrificing the home, with no interference of whatever fear, grief, or anger she or he might otherwise feel.
| 4.) Each and every person’s symptoms, no matter what they show about how “off” they may be, must be considered as that individual’s best possible response to the overwhelming stresses of the moment. This is specifically true only when it is seen as the “best possible response” given these three variables: his or her environment, level of vitality and available skills. |
Relevant meanings for the terms environment, vitality and skill as used in this context are considered below:
A.) In this context, environment refers to an individual’s choice of nutrition, air available to breathe and any pollutants therein, water available to drink and any pollutants therein, personal hygiene, home architecture and maintenance and other geophysical surroundings. Equally important are her or his level and kind of education, family and work situations, friendships, emotional and physical history, social class, sociological commitments, political involvements, religious and community affiliations, even taste in entertainment.
B.) In these circumstances, the word vitality refers to the innate strength of a person’s life force, as well as his or her will to live.
C.) Skill in this case, means the use of “on” management techniques like stress reduction procedures, physical exercise, good nutrition, willingness to ask for help, conflict resolution, self-acceptance, positive attitudes. As well as the ability to distinguish between self-control within her or his environmental context (loving self-management) and addictive attempts to control the environment around him or herself instead. Plus the wisdom to employ the curative skills of others when necessary.
Change any of these three factors in a person’s life and her or his symptomatology (symptom burden) changes automatically. Improve any major element of the environment and he or she will start to cure. This is why good dietary choices can make such a difference for so many, since what a person eats can be the most intimate part of his or her physical environment. Increase her or his vitality, or expand that individual’s available skills, as you are starting to do for yourself even as you read these words; and symptoms will reflexively improve and freedom will increase.
On the other hand, exaggerate any of the stressful factors in that person’s environment and symptoms inevitably get worse. The same is true if one were to weaken an individual’s vitality or restrict her or his available skills. These acts always result in less freedom and an increase in symptoms.
| 5.) The experience of changed symptomatology that reflects real cure rather than palliation (sweeping symptoms under the rug) or suppression (exchanging current symptoms for something worse) always follow Hering’s Law. |
Constantine Hering was a brilliant young medical doctor who, early in the nineteenth century, found himself assigned by the British Medical Association to study the upstart medical practice called homeopathy and debunk it, thus strangling conventional medicine’s budding competitor in the increasingly lucrative field of health care in the cradle. What happened instead is that Hering converted and then went on to become the second most important name in the development of homeopathic thought after Dr. Samuel Hahnemann, the originator of this form of medicine.
In 1845 in a preface to an English language edition of Hahnamann’s The CHRONIC DISEASES: Their Specific Nature and HOMEOPATHIC TREATMENT, Hering published for the first time in book form an extract from an earlier essay “Guide to the Progressive Development of Homeopathy” which breaks down nicely into Hering’s Law of Cure.
This comprehensive understanding has stood the test of time exceedingly well. It is now (early in the Twenty-first Century) recognized by all of those practitioners within every organized healing art who, all over the world, work hard within the limits of their disciplines to practice in a truly curative manner. These arts include, but are not limited to the traditions of homeopathic, Naturopathic, Chiropractic, Chinese (acupuncture and Chinese herbs), ayurvedic (traditional Hindu), Tibetan, botanical (plant-based) and anthroposophic (Rudolph Stiener created) systems of medicine. Though the tools and practices of these various systems differ remarkably, those practitioners within each tradition who understand and pursue true cure are all of one mind as to what cure looks like.
One over-simplified paraphrase of the insight described in detail by this law that has been handed to patients by many non-conventional doctors and healers who hold an inkling of the difference between cure and other forms of relief is this. “Symptoms have to be ’screwed out’ in reverse of the path taken as they were ’screwed in’”.
This pattern of cure described by Dr. Hering is also referred to as “retracing”, “healing crisis”, or for practitioners of homeopathy – the homeopathic “aggravation”. For all intents and purposes, it was the first reliable and universally applicable Law of Cure.
It was early in my first year (1978-79) as a practicing homeopath, as a result of an effort to review the results of my work with my first forty clients that the rest of the sixLaws of Cure began to take shape. To the best of my knowledge there was no unified system before that time. If I had not been concerned about the efficacy of my own work, there would have been no foundation laid for the system that is put before you now.
You see, of my first forty clients, twenty-five were women. Of those twenty-five, twenty left their husbands or boyfriends during the first six weeks of treatment. I found this rather disturbing and set out to understand why.
In homeopathic circles of the time, it was already held as a truism that whatever a client’s symptoms might be, those symptoms were the best that client could do. A homeopath just needed to increase their available vitality by selecting the correct homeopathic remedy, and the client would do better. Since every one of those twenty women was showing progressively better health in every other way, including their “presenting symptoms”, it was possible to postulate that the sum total of the changes that they were making in their lives was the best possible response that each of them could make. But why was dumping her relationship (some legally obligated, some not but of long standing nonetheless) the best possible response for each of these women?
After extensive follow-up interviews, it was possible to see that when the vitality level of these women changed, they each had more strength to deal with the same environment, (her relationship) using the same skills, (put up with it or leave). None of their relationships had worked well for some time, but each woman had felt herself too “weak” in one way or another to do anything about it. None of those relationships was working now, but each of the women felt much stronger now, so they left. I immediately began looking for ways to add the skill of “skills trainer” to my repertoire as a healer.
Careful observation over many years, showed that the three-cornered outline of what is here listed as Law of Cure # 4 holds consistently true. Thinking about health as freedom, was a teaching device used by master homeopath George Vitoulkas of Athens, Greece. When I started to consider that there might be a unified pattern of laws of healing, it became obvious that that would be Law of Cure # 1. The other laws began falling into place as I continued to observe my clients and learn from healers and doctors of every school. The most important of these mentors, Dr. John Whitman Ray will be discussed in greater detail later on.
| A short description of the four “vectors” of change that together determine the fundamental guiding pattern described by Hering’s Law now follows:
A.) Cure progresses from the top down. Examples of this would include resolution of symptoms previously experienced in the arms accompanied by the experience of more or less equivalent symptoms in the legs, and the same kind of movement from brain toward heart, heart toward lungs, inside of the mouth toward stomach, stomach toward colon, upper spine toward lower spine and so on. B.) Cure progresses from the inside out, meaning that mental symptoms which effect the mind, core of an individual’s sense of “self” will tend to cure before emotional ones, and emotional before physical. (See Law of Cure # 6 for amplification) In physical terms, this means that the digestive tract will cure before other internal organs and all of these before muscle and bone and virtually everything before the skin. C.) Cure progresses from the most delicate life-sustaining physical organ to the least delicate life-sustaining organ. In essence, this means from the brain through every other organ, heart before lungs, lungs before liver, liver before spleen and so on, again ending at the skin. D.) Cure progresses from the most recently appearing symptoms back through all previous symptoms in reverse order of their appearance. Remember Jane Doe, the example used right near the beginning of this workbook? She started out as a toddler with a milk intolerance and was left in early middle age facing arthritis. If Jane found a way to initiate cure right where we left off reading about her, she would start off with the symptom of the moment (arthritis) and finish up with the earliest symptom on record (milk intolerance). In slightly more complex terms this might mean that when an individual now in his or her fifties, whose presenting problem is a painful and frightening shortness of breath, starts to cure, she or he may find their breathing eased yet experience a short-term recurrence of the nagging sinus problems he or she had successfully suppressed in their thirties. When her or his sinuses finally clear he or she may discover that the symptoms of venereal disease that seemed to answer so well to antibiotics when they were twenty-three has now come back. Or a person of thirty-five, struggling with skin lesions, may find him or herself suddenly re-experiencing a painful pattern of skin reddening in the same bathing-suit configuration they once suffered in sunburn while a teen right after the lesions fade away. A third illustration could refer to a person in her or his twenties with severe emotional difficulties finding that as their emotional dysfunction resolves the asthma endured in their teens resurfaces. Then, as their breathing at last heals for good, the warts that once covered his or her hands during early childhood, long since burned or frozen off, reappear. |
None of the scenarios cited in the foregoing paragraphs are designed to represent or even suggest a universal pattern of “the way cure works”. Every human being is different, with different health histories, genetic predispositions and initial levels of vitality, and true cure always proceeds along an individualized, often circuitous path that takes all of the vectors described within Hering’s Law into account.
| 6.) Emotional symptoms, just like physical ones, are briefly re-experienced as the underlying reasons for their existence are healed. In the therapeutic re-experience of past emotional postures, truly curative response takes place only as a person moves up the “Emotional Tone Scale.” |
In terms of variety, emotions can easily be compared to colors. Everywhere we look there are seemingly endless distinctions, some glaringly unlike one another, some amazingly subtle in their difference. If we have no schema that allows us to see each one in relation to each of the others as well as to the whole, we can enjoy them, reject them, be affected by them, but still be unable to understand what causes them to be as they are, or what they mean.
The simplest outline of the schematic that we call the Emotional Tone Scale is like a chart of primary colors. It comes nowhere near to exhausting the subject, but without it, any attempt to discussion the technicalities of the topic will be simply a ramble through chaos.
Because we are examining the course of cure as it runs though the “background states” of emotional consciousness, not launching a full-scale investigation into all of the qualities of consciousness that can be labeled in reference to an emotional tone, a look at the simplest version of the Emotional Tone Scale is in order. To emphasize the direction taken during cure, we’ll start describing each station on the scale from the bottom up. So we’ll start labeling at “G” (alphabet position, not musical note) and work upward to end at “A”.
It is useful to remember that these are chronic states of consciousness. They can best thought of as representing prevailing “climates”, “color tones” or background shades that typically permeate whole eras of an individual’s lifetime. Human beings can flit momentarily up and down an acute or “weather” version of the same scale while never altering the tone that serves as background climate for their lives. Though emotional climate like emotional weather can change over time, the time scale is vastly different, often decades as opposed to hours or minutes.
First, we will briefly examine each emotivelly named level or state of consciousness in isolation. This will seem unaccountably unsatisfying for many readers. Then, we will look at how each state devolves (de-evolves by breaking downward) from the level of consciousness above it. At this point, the purpose of having such a scale will start to make sense.
| G.) Unconsciousness: This is a state of consciousness characterized by minimum awareness and an inability to fully experience almost anything. Though we are not literally speaking of a condition like coma or drugged sleep, this is a state of consciousness where the person involved is totally at the mercy or effect of his or her environment and is unable to be truly aware of that effect.
An unconscious individual may go through the rote motions of life, but they can contribute little toward helping themselves attain cure. It is however one-step up from death, which is a state that gives one literally nothing to work with. Luckily, the deepest levels of unconsciousness are states that must be deliberately maintained, thus providing intermittent, brief interludes each of which can be seen as an opportunity for an individual rise “above her or himself” and begin the long road toward healing. Some typical word-patterns vocalized by persons operating at this level of consciousness are – “Huh?” “Don’t bother me.” “Go away.” “Leave me alone.” “Hmmph.” F.) Apathy: This is a slightly more lively state of consciousness within which an individual is still at the mercy of and in fact defeated by whatever elements exist within his or her environment. Unlike the person who is functioning unconsciously, this individual is aware of his or her defeated condition yet is unable to care, feeling that there is nothing she or he can do about it. The hope here (far from an ideal hope) is that apathetic individuals can be pulled along by the will of others. E.) Grief: This is a state of consciousness within which an individual is conscious and “vital” enough to care, even care deeply, but nevertheless they are still already defeated. His or her attention is fixed primarily on the damaged, sometimes “mythologized” past, not on their present life-as-it-is and what can be done now. Because they are “alive” enough to care, people at this level of consciousness can easily be led to attempt cure because it involves recovery of lost health. Some typical word-patterns vocalized by persons operating at this state of consciousness are – “I’ve lost it.” “It’s a crying shame.” “Never again.” “If only.” “Terrible loss!” “Isn’t that just the way things go?” D.) Fear: A state of consciousness in which the person is not yet defeated by their environment or elements within it, but perceives him or herself threatened with imminent defeat. Her or his attention is fixed primarily on the looming specter of an uncontrolled and therefore unpredictable future. The content of what or who is to be feared can be considered by other people to be logical or illogical, likely or unlikely; it maters not at all. At this level of consciousness he or she is vital enough to expend much energy on efforts to gain control. Persons operating in fear have enough strength to initiate a course of cure for themselves if only they can find appropriate information. On the other hand, they may not believe that information if they come across it, because in the fear-filled interest of “perfect” self-protection many such individuals find themselves unable to trust any information that is not thoroughly vouched for by powerful authority figures. Some typical word-patterns vocalized by persons operating at this state of consciousness are – “I wouldn’t dare.” “I can’t look” ” But what if…?” “I’m scared.” “It’s not worth it.” C.) Anger: A State of consciousness within which defeat is not a question. The individual’s attention is fixed not only on present time, but also upon a particular element (usually a person or group of persons) present at that time. Unfortunately, the quality of this attention is primarily one of blame and enmity. The reasonableness or unreasonableness of this blame, a factor that diverts so much of our time and attention when sorting out the aftermath of anger really have nothing to do with this state of consciousness at all. At every level of consciousness below anger the world seems to happen to the individual (this is called being “at effect”), at anger and above, he or she happens to the world (this is called being “at cause”). The state of consciousness labeled anger is the least alive, least effective state of being “at cause”. Therefore, changes actually caused in the outer world by an angry consciousness are likely to be unhelpful. Even so, persons operating at this level of consciousness have ample vitality to pursue a full course of cure if only they focus their attention on what is needful rather than on blame and retribution. Typical word patterns vocalized by persons operating at this state of consciousness are: “You did this to me!” “Go to hell.” “I hate you.” “You G-d damned (take your pick) monster, devil, infidel, heretic, fool.” “I’ll kill you!” B.) Pain: A state of consciousness even more intensely alive than Anger, less potentially destructive to others, but just as problematic. This individual’s attention is focused entirely upon the present in terms of her or his own person. Where a man or woman in a state of Anger is looking outward in present time, an individual functioning in pain consciousness, will be looking inward in present time. Almost no human being willingly maintains a pain consciousness as the background climate or tone of her or his life for long, so most of what our culture says about pain is gleaned from fleeting, acute “weather” experiences. The impression one gets from such lore is one of debilitating damage, emotional paralysis and a driving need to escape into sedation. Yet individuals have been known to “rise above” the intense nerve-signal that both accompanies and characterizes this level of consciousness and play harder at sport, fight more selflessly in war, take upon themselves a saintly mantel in martyrdom, and think more clearly while working in the fields of science and/or philosophy. An individual genuinely existing in the state of consciousness represented by pain has enormous vitality available to quickly make the most of any healing opportunity and achieve complete cure vary rapidly. A.) Enthusiasm: A state of consciousness representing maximum awareness and vitality. The word itself comes from the Greek - En-theus-asmos – which refers to being filled with or possessed by God. Just as there is a line separating “at cause” from “at effect” drawn between the state of consciousness labeled anger and all those below; there is an even more important line dividing enthusiasm from all qualities of consciousness below. This delineation separates those exalted, less well understood states that all together are labeled enthusiasm, in which it is natural to “accept, embrace, love, expand in the presence of, turn “on” to the reality an individual lives with from all others. These other, lower states of consciousness represent less life-filled conditions of existence in which it seems natural to resist, deny, reject, hate, contract in the presence of, turn “off” to the facts of what “is” in a person’s life. And so invoke the specter of Law of Cure # 2 and its unwelcome “You fight it, you got it,” corollary. |
When first born, humans have only two states of consciousness. Enthusiasm is the primary state in which newborns exist. That is why nearly everyone likes to be in their presence, most of the time they simply radiate divine love and acceptance. The other state of consciousness available to the newborn is Pain.
When the infant experiences pangs of hunger, feels the urine that she or he has deposited in his or her diaper grow cold, or (worse yet) has a rash or irritation develop under that diaper because it is not changed soon enough, she or he will feel pain. Eventually, occasionally within hours, sometimes after weeks of attentive parenting, baby’s howls of pain prompts his or her harried tenders to provide too little relief too slowly and he or she develops a third state of consciousness - Anger. Most people who have been parents are well acquainted with the difference between baby’s hurt cry and her or his raging one.
This three-consciousness existence goes on for quite some time, but almost universally ends during the period between eighteen months and thirty months of age; a developmental stage popularly called “the terrible twos”. This is a time when baby is big enough and aware enough of her or his surroundings to deliberately cause serious damage either to him or herself, or to her or his parents or to their home if they feel angry enough.
The time-honored answer to this danger has been to install, through training, a psychological “program” into the toddler’s mind, which causes him or her, whenever she or he becomes angry, to attack her or himself. This program is called guilt. Alternatively, it can also be dubbed shame. For the purposes of this description, the difference between a “guilt centered” self-attack and a “shame centered” equivalent, is simply a matter of perspective. Here we use the word shame to denote this self-attack phenomenon in cultures where children are taught that “face” before others is the ultimate measure of human worth. Guilt covers this same self-attack phenomenon in cultures where children are taught that an individual’s respect for him or herself within her or his own eyes is the ultimate measure of human worth.
The additional stress of self-attack reduces the vitality of the child, driving him or her down into the next level of consciousness below anger, which is called Fear. Both culturally and pragmatically there is a reason for this, and on the surface that reason looks good. A human being of any age operating at a fear level of consciousness is infinitely more tractable than one functioning in anger. I have witnessed a number of courageous personal experiments where gentle, idealistic parents have refused to instill any guilt programming at all in their offspring. In every case the outcome was worse than disappointing. The results were in fact uniformly appalling.
An eight-year-old child who can still operate in pure infant rage is a merciless tyrant capable of any outrage in order to have her or his way with the world. Where the installation of guilt (or shame) is destructive because it requires an act of violence of parent against child, simply doing nothing is equally if not more destructive because it permits acts of violence from the child against everyone else forever after.
Both strategies (guilt/shame on the one hand and doing nothing on the other) involve resistant, hate centered “off” management ways of problem solving. Guilt programming resists baby’s resistance to unwanted parts of his or her environment, anti-guilt “permissiveness” simply adds a third layer of resistance to the problem. Permissiveness dogma resists our culture’s resistance to baby’s resistance. Fortunately, it truly is possible to rear babies and children in a “move up the Emotional Tone Scale” manner that neither beats irate kids down into fear nor lets their anger run amok. This technique will be discussed in the section called HEALING CHILDREN - If Not Guilt, What? [NOT INCLUDED IN THIS EXCERPT]
In traditional Euro-American culture, female children have in historical terms been left at this fear level, resulting in such popular characterizations as “Sissy” meaning sister, as a taunting epithet for a male who suffers from overriding fear.
In more recent times, girls as well as boys are subjected to continuing culturally mandated stress during childhood resulting in falls first to the level called Grief where they mourn the many “cruel necessities of life” and even sentimentally oppose them. Then on to Apathy where they find that they can participate in those same “necessities” with grim practicality. Not only is this no surprise as millions have passed this way before, it is no surprise because at apathy, individuals do–however reluctantly–what they are told to do and little more. Because of this the industrial “good worker” functions at apathy, as has traditionally the “good soldier”. During the last three or four generations women have become increasingly industrialized, and during the last couple of decades, good soldiers as well. At the time of this writing, females make up fifteen percent of the US armed forces and no one can say that these women do not consistently do as they are told.
If an individual finds that living a life of apathy is still too stressful to be sustained, he or she may develop “coping mechanisms” which restrict awareness and vitality still further, such as the use of opiates, alcohol, amphetamines, cocaine, barbiturates. Or they may employ “lesser” drugs and/or equivalent awareness-restricting devices like marijuana, tobacco, coffee, excess food, compulsive exercise, obsessive sexuality, constant television viewing, excessive reading or sleeping. The state of consciousness that results from the use of such mechanisms is called Unconsciousness.
The state of consciousness reached when we push ourselves downward from unconsciousness is called Death, a state wherein all vestiges of purposeful activity stop, our tissues dissolve and cells return to their constitute elements.
MAKING CURE HAPPEN
A great many more details about the above listed tone scale system for understanding the differing levels of consciousness will be made available to you later on in this workbook; but for now just this outline is necessary for our purpose. The next step is to wonder, “Ok, so those are the Laws of Cure. How do I put this new understanding to use in my life? How do I use it to realize the hope contained within the opening statement: ‘No matter what ails you, no matter how serious your complaint, chances are remarkably good that when you have learned everything contained in this workbook and diligently followed the steps outlined for you within it, that ailment will be cured.’?”
The answer to this is contained within a carefully constructed system of radical healing called “Body Electronics” that I, the author of this workbook, have practiced on and off for the better part of nineteen years. While the Laws of Cure that we’ve just finished outlining apply equally well to all and every practice of health care, they are especially useful in helping people “get a handle” on what happens when they involve themselves in a program of Body Electronics.
Multi-Dimensional Corkscrew Path
What an individual experiences as a result of diligent practice in this system is not easily described in a single, linear “first this and than that” way. The personal process of curative change through the use of Body Electronics is experienced instead as multi-dimensional. At its best, it also does not remain strictly personal, but a cooperative, trans-personal – almost “communal” practice that does not lend itself well to the doctor / patient way of doing things we are all so used to.
Here, we can use the term multi-dimensional in two highly instructive ways. First is the familiar (to those who have studied other alternative forms of healing) list of physical, emotional, mental and spiritual. Body Electronics produces cure on all of these levels, and as stated above includes a fifth level: social.
Two generations ago, Americans recovering from the immediate effects of WWII, looked around at their fragmenting social matrix and told each other: “What we need is to discover a moral equivalent of war.” Meaning that it would be great if people could find a reason and a way to pull together in absolute support of one another that did not result in fifty million dead in six years. No such equivalent was ever found, and the phrase went out of fashion. The practice of the Body Electronics program as a group effort creates for the people in that group a truly viable “moral equivalent of war”.
The second use of “multi-dimensional” refers first to the three standard spatial or geometric dimensions (height, width and breadth) represented by the physical body. A fourth dimension through which healings take place is time, both in terms of duration and in terms of history. A fifth, exceedingly important dimension is consciousness.
Curative responses can be said to “cork-screw” through both sets of five dimensions at once, for a full, dizzying complement of ten. This can make relationships and implications among these responses hard for an individual to track without a tool such as the Laws of Cure to provide a template to aid clear understanding. To help you perfect this understanding, this workbook is laid out in much the same, corkscrew manner. Each subject, therefore, is likely to be described many times, from a number of different angles.
Body Electronics was created by a profoundly dedicated researcher of health and healing, Dr. John Whitman Ray. Dr Ray was a brilliant and intensely curious man who spent over twenty-five years investigating every alternative form of healing that he could find that could claim to produce “medically impossible” cures, or miracles. He found that though a surprising number of miracles did happen, no method or “modality” then in existence could claim a rate of medically impossible cures much greater than one or two percent.
Discarding all methods he could not verify as miracle producing, Dr. Ray began to synthesize the numerous modalities that he had investigated and found worthy into a unified system that addressed a large number of variables in a way that seemed to “surround” the underlying sources of disease so that they are eliminated altogether. This results in medically impossible cures becoming frequent and common rather than rare and unusual.
Iris Diagnosis in Perspective
A major tool for selecting which modalities to blend together and in what order or pattern was iris diagnosis. Dr. Ray found that when the right combination of healing methods were used in the right pattern, medically impossible but easily seen and photographed changes would show up in the iris of the eye right away. Medically impossible changes in the body’s physiology and function were sometimes just as instantly obvious – yet at other times didn’t show up at the whole body level until other parts of the miracle had fallen into place. For most people, it is reassuring to see changes early. Thus iris diagnosis became an integral part of how he taught this healing method. Even the way subjects were lined up for explanation during the seminars he gave on this work was determined by how those subjects fit in with the best way to explain how to read the iris and what each diagnostic indication might mean.
This “how to read the eye” consideration resulted in unsuspecting seminar-goers who had come to find out about the miraculous effects of Body Electronics having to listen to hours of discourse upon the perils of fluoridation and the damaging effects of ice-water and hot coffee to the teeth, before having a chance to learn about anything else. This bewildering agenda came about simply because the logical way to read the iris of the eye starts with the alimentary canal first; so a teacher has the choice of beginning at one end of the food-tube or the other. Being confronted first off with a disquisition on the causes of hemorrhoids and associated dysfunctions would of course have been even more off-putting.
I have eliminated most of such unpleasant choices by de-emphasizing the centrality of iris diagnosis, since its most pivotal value was realized during the research phase of Body Electronics development. And while it can and does still render great service, that service is still available when this diagnostic tool is used in a less central role.
An additional reason to de-emphasize the central place of this skill is the way it can be misused as a sales tool, prompting over-anxious people to buy large quantities of herbs and other supplements at times and in ways that are less than optimal. In the worst case, a commercial iridologist may find him or herself tempted to recommend the particular supplemental aids she or he has available for purchase rather than inform his or her clients about the full range of curative options that can be found. And of course, an individual practitioner who has not adequately informed her or himself about the six Laws of Cure and their implications may unwittingly make recommendations that include options that are palliative or even suppressive in character.
Herbal Nutrition in Perspective
Yes, for health to be restored, especially to those of us who show the physiological marks that come from carrying decades of compounded-stress-burden, herbs, supplements and other nutritional elements can all play an enormously important role. But they need to be attended to in proper proportions and combination and in the right sequence to do their part of the work efficiently, effectively and economically. Far too many people have wasted time, money and hope on inadequately thought-out regimens of supplementation. The additional lose for the world, is that the experience of those individuals has caused them to tell others that perfectly valid nutritional therapies are useless. So this workbook will show how to reliably discern (using knowledge, iris diagnosis and other tools combined) what those optimal elements, their sequences, combinations and proportions are for you.
Facts about which nutritional enhancements you can profitably put into your body and how, plus what other actions uphold its health have an important place in this workbook. As well, as you might expect, as facts about which not to use and when, and about “poisons”, dangerous choices and behaviors or dysfunctional attitudes to avoid in order not to burden your life with excessive stresses that promote disease and hinder cure. Yet there is another area of learning that is at least equally, and to my mind, more important.
Spiritual Discipline in Perspective
As odd as it may seem, to those who think of Body Electronics as a healing modality, the way I teach this work is as much about spiritual discipline as it is about your body, your mind and the biological basis for how you feel. I am well aware that the word “spiritual” can raise flags for many of us. First, for those of us who’ve been taught that reality is limited to what they know through sensory data, tossing out everything else as “non-sense”. Second for those of us committed to a specific religious or devotional path (Christian or other) and worry about being led astray. These are always valid concerns.
Never the less, our flags can be re-furled. What is important here is to understand that what you hold in your hands is a workbook for the practice of a discipline and the fact that it turns out to be a spiritual one is simply a pragmatic fact, not a matter of doctrine.
This workbook, practically speaking, is simply a description of what works. We are all free to use this information or not. Followers of many spiritual paths on the one hand, and devotees of no path at all on the other have successfully used this program to remarkably better their health and improve the quality of their lives.
Read this workbook carefully and when you’ve made the choice to live out the principles described in these pages, live well.
Bio-Electronic Body Work
Originally, Dr. Ray chose to call the combined package of health care modalities that he selected to mix and match into a single system – The Ray Program. He then used the odd sounding term “Body Electronics” to describe the unique rationale behind a single, central element of that system (also called “point-holding”) that was only used inside his program, and serves as a climax-point in the undertaking.
Over time, that uniqueness has remained the hallmark of the work and how in fact, the majority of individuals practicing the discipline choose to refer to it. I find it preferable to follow this democratic usage now that Dr. Ray is gone and there is no great value to be had in personalizing his discoveries. His genius is best honored through the continuation and careful expansion of his work.
Body Electronics is named as it is because Dr Ray discovered that under every acupuncture point, at the location of every “Reflexology” spot, at the site of all injuries and around many joints (especially along the spine and in the sutures of the skull) are tiny deposits of “crystal”. Photographed through an electron microscope these crystals look just like heaps of miniature needles.
These crystalline mineral deposits, composed predominantly of calcium, but including every trace element known to biology act like electrical resisters in a wire and impede the flow of a specific form of healing energy (in this case a micro-bio-electric current) along what Chinese medicine calls the “meridians”. The modification (decrease and/or increase) of electrical flows through the use of crystalline resisters, is of course a perfectly valid description of the science of electronics. So the fact that people who practice the Body Electronics program change (reduce and eventually get rid of) the resisters in the bio-electronic system of the body, gives the work its name.
Three other original and relevant discoveries made by John Ray is that these bio-electric resistant crystals can be made to melt under very specific conditions, what those circumstances are and how to faithfully create them. When these crystals have completely melted away, so have all dysfunction, illness and disease.
At the time that these facts and their associated bundle of “how tos” was unearthed, it was arguably the most powerful and important healing discovery to be made in at least a thousand years. A large number of complimentary discoveries have been made by many others in the years since Dr. Ray came to this understanding. And an ever-increasing number of such findings are being made even as we speak. The true extent of their impact on the field of health will depend upon how well that complementarity is realized in each case.
Though any of us who wants to, can start growing new crystals that represent our current patterns of resistance right away, the old crystals and therefore the old symptoms they caused and maintained do not come back to us. We are free from what used to ail us to the extent (and only to the extent) that we melt our crystals.
At its foundation, Body Electronics is a program designed to provide and maintain those “melt-away” conditions.
All together, Body Electronics is far more than that. The full implications of the total program go much farther. These implications effect our life and function, our experiences of love and pain, our acts of healing and renewal, as well as our relationship to consciousness and “reality” as well as to our species at large. It may in the end provide an opportunity for all of us to become “human” in the most ideal sense of the word. But let’s start building each of our programs from the foundation up.
CRYSTALS & MINERALS – PAIN & MEMORY
The human body is permeated by electrical flows in much the way a wetland is made up of countless currents, meanders and eddies of water. Up until recently very little attention was given to this simple fact or to its extraordinary implications.
Long ago, early scientists were fascinated by the effect an electrical jolt could have upon surgically separated muscle tissue, and eventually discovered that nerves deliver electrical signals to muscle fibers in order to cause those tissues in living bodies to contract. For a while there was speculation that the purpose of the nervous system was to electrically operate the entire body.
A number of wild electrical experiments involving arcane appliances were attempted in hopes of finding previously unsuspected keys to health and healing. But it didn’t take long to find that the electrical impulses coming down the nerves were not continuous but interrupted at every synapse. Whatever signal was being transmitted from nerve to nerve had first to be translated into a chemical code before that message could reach the next nerve along the track. The partial “breaking” of these chemical codes eventually led to new ways to modify human mood and behavior through the manipulation of neurotransmitters in the brain. The professional use of experimental “electric healing” appliances was abandoned as a dead end.
A Second Look
In one rather simplistic sense, the intuition of those early experimenters reflected something very real. More recent investigation has shown that at least one form of electricity is in fact a huge part of the body’s control equipment that governs self-maintenance. Therefore a lack of flow may be viewed as equivalent to a lack of health and freedom. Yet there was plenty of reason to abandon those experiments because the wattage, amperage and rate of oscillation available for introduction from the outsidedid not match the micro-bio-electric energy that the body uses and needs on the inside. Imposing unneeded, unnatural electrical jolts upon the body’s circuits could easily do far more harm than any good that could be hoped for.
Many decades passed before serious science took up the matter of the natural place and usage of electricity in the function and health of the human body once again. During the last twenty years or so it has been shown that electrical “circuits” are everywhere in the human body. Dr. Robert O. Becker in particular began publishing his results in popularly accessible form in 1985, with The Body Electric, the title of whose book has tended to both validate the idea of and confuse the understanding of Body Electronics, for casual observers.
Among the many things that Becker and others have shown, is that even every bone in the human body has its own internal current. It has been demonstrated that if the micro-current passing through a bone’s internal circuit is inadequate, a break in that bone will not heal. Because of this, several competing designs of electrical stimulation devises are now used in modern hospitals to artificially speed the joining of non-healing bones. This is again from the outside-in and unnatural, though the understanding of how electricity is naturally used by the body for its own healing is now a bit greater, so potential damage from these devices is much less.
Because of the work of Becker and a few others, the use of electricity for healing purposes is being revisited. In fact, even as I write these words (2002-03) local media outlets all over the world are trumpeting the success of still another modernized revival of those wild late nineteenth – early twentieth century experiments. Seven years after sustaining major trauma high up on his spinal cord, actor Christopher Reeves is showing remarkable (read that as “medically impossible”) though limited signs of improvement, because doctors have been electrically stimulating the muscles of his body. News stories report that for one hour three times a week Reeves sits on an exercise bicycle while electrical stimulation jolts, obviously in a well modulated way, his leg muscles into pumping the pedals. Other muscle groups, say the reports, are also stimulated in the same manner.
The popular actor, who portrayed Superman in a full-length motion picture just a few years before the accident, was thrown from a horse. He landed on his helmeted head, breaking his neck at the level of the second cervical vertebra, high up under the skull. At least seventy-five percent of the nerves in the spinal chord were destroyed at that point. No medical hope was offered for recovery. He deteriorated for five years before this experimental therapy was begun about two years ago. He is far from recovered, but he has feeling back in his body, some limited motion and life is better for Mr. Reeves now. He is quick to express gratitude and renewed hope for further recovery. This story, while worth noting, illustrates in only a small, quite incidental way something about how vital electrical flow in the body can be.
More to the point, is the fact that each and every flow of electrolytic fluid (in the simplest sense, this is any store of water with minerals suspended in it) in the human body has its own associated micro-bio-electric current as well. These flows can easily be measured with off-the-shelf devices for detecting and monitoring electrical movement, such as a sensitive Ohmmeter.
Body Wires
Practically speaking, our physical construct is made entirely of such “stores” of fluid. Some of these are little “puddles” like our individual cells, some are open-ended “tide pools” like our interstitial fluids. But often enough, these stores are in tubes tiny enough to be compared to hollow wires of water with organic mineral-salts suspended therein.
The single most extensive network of such “liquid wires” is the peri-neural fiber. This is a hollow fiber filled with an electrolytic fluid (identical with the cerebral-spinal fluid that surrounds both brain and spinal cord) that is wrapped, with no interruptions, around every nerve of the body for the entire length of nervous system.
When acupuncture charts were first coming into the US and being examined by conventional Western doctors, a common response to the depiction of the meridians upon which the points are located was: “We know what this really is! This chart is just a simplified schematic of the nervous system.” Then the most incautious would try sticking a pin into a nerve right about where the chart indicated that a point should be. This never brought the same kind of response an acupuncturist would get. Needling an acupuncture point should be nearly painless; needling a nerve is anything but. It now seems clear to me that the flows of energy that the meridians are said to trace, are in fact synonymous with the flows of micro-bioelectricity that move along the liquid wires provided by the peri-neural fiber that wraps the nerves.
Ideally, micro-electric impulses sent out along this multi-branched pathway can flow without a break anywhere in the body, as the wrap around the nerves stops for no synapse. One of the things Dr. Ray was able, through his research and experience to establish beyond any doubt is that the presence of such uninterrupted flows will allow cure to happen with miraculous speed. But unfortunately in practice, there are many breaks in, or at least impediments to that micro-electric flow. The bio-electronic “resisters” called crystals.
Crystals
These crystals are compiled from deposits of mineral salts that have precipitated, molecule by molecule out of solution each time an individual “contracts” in the face of an event, situation or fact of his or her life. When she or he falls, in short, from enthusiasm past pain into perfectly “ordinary” consciousness. This utterly ordinary progression of events opens the door to extraordinary consequences.
First, resistant, “off” management of any issue, regardless of its “obvious” and normal character never produces more than partial results and those only in the narrowest, short-term sense. In terms of wider and underlying, curative concerns, deep and lasting change only happens in the presence of love, the language of life that speaks from the state of enthusiasm.
Second, every precipitated molecule of calcium or other mineral is keyed to a fragment of resisted memory. It is impossible to know for sure if that memory is simply encoded in the pattern of molecules as they form the crystals themselves (this is Dr. Ray’s preferred theory) or if the pattern of crystal formation involves some chemical or other resonance with memories stored in the brain. But everyone who practices Body Electronics experiences the identity between crystals and memory. As the crystals melt, long buried memories of resisted (denied, resisted, hated, “off” managed, contracted in the presence of) experience are released. So we find that it is as if the resisted event never really goes away, but is “as if” happening forever in crystallized form deep in the body.
Third, unless melted away, these crystalline recordings of “resisted life experience” keep on resisting the flow of physically restorative, bioelectric energy in that individual’s body - for the rest of his or her life. While there are a number of ways to approach cure that have shown a various degrees of success, Body Electronics is the only health care modality that is designed specifically to melt away the crystals that lurk behind disease.
Are these crystals imbedded in our bodies, which keep resisting the flow of bioelectric energy for the rest of our lives, a serious concern? Let’s go back for just a moment to the explanations made earlier in this workbook about the Laws of Cure and their implications. We see here the outline of a particular (very simple) “corkscrew path” showing how the ignorance of how to work with Law of Cure # 2 results in downward pressure in terms of Law of Cure # 6 culminating in a restriction of vitality as described in part B. of Law of Cure # 4. All of this leading to a loss of health and freedom as described in Law of Cure # 1.
In case the assault to health and freedom is not yet clear, let’s look at the resulting situation described in this way: With each accretion of new material the resistance factor of the crystal becomes greater and the physical flows of bioelectric energy that the body uses to heal and maintain itself becomes less powerful, less effective and less life sustaining. Eventually parts of the flow cease altogether and elements of the body die. All of which culminates in time, with the death of the body as a whole.
Can we, using Body Electronics defeat death altogether? Many of us who live and teach this work, observing the depth and extent of some Body Electronic cures have found ourselves forced to wonder. But so far there is no evidence upon which to make such a claim. Even so, the extension of lives, and the reversals of damage that have already been experienced by thousands of everyday people who practice this discipline remain wonderfully suggestive.
De-Crystallization
So how do we get these bio-electronic resistance crystals to melt away? And while we’re at it, let’s ask – How hard is this meltdown to accomplish?
• Those of us who practice Body Electronics start the process by substantially altering the ambient biochemistry of our bodies through changes in what we eat, what and how much we drink, how we relate to sun, air and other environmental factors, as well as what additional supplements we ingest. There is in fact, an absolute minimum level of nutritional preparation for doing a program of Body Electronics.
This minimum involves taking in the appropriate measure of the right minerals and the right enzymes. What these specifically are and why we get picky about which preparations are right and which products are not will be detailed fairly soon, so just keep reading.
• Because living and healing at minimum does not produce the best or quickest possible results, we learn (and are invited to apply) a great deal more about nutrition, what foods promote health and freedom along with what foods do not. As well as about excellent non-nutritional health practices on the one hand and various ways our culture encourages us to ruin our own health on the other.
• We learn more about consciousness, more about the emotional tone scale and a great deal more about loving what is, no matter what it is. Then we start putting what we’ve learned into practice, making carefully coordinated efforts to change how we think, orient and manage ourselves and our stresses through life.
We learn constantly about “that most active element” of the consciousness called enthusiasm on the emotional tone scale called “love”. Love, as we use the term in Body Electronics can at first, be quite disconcerting for many people who subscribe to the various and confusing sentimental, preferential or romantic usages current in our culture. For now, let it suffice that for our Body Electronics purpose “real love” is contingent on neither approval nor liking, but represents an underlying “spiritual” state of being as all-pervasive and non-personal as gravity. Pieces of this understanding will be referred to as a part of many other topics. On top of this, an entire section will be devoted to this conundrum later on in this workbook.
• Along with learning about “love” as an active condition, we learn about loving where we are in consciousness. Loving our apathy, loving our grief, fear, anger and so on.
We learn about the issue of pain in particular, as pain is the borderland that divides for us the experience of living in a consciousness world of enthusiasm and choice, from living in a world of damage and reactivity. A distinction often disparaged as the difference between an impossible but pleasant fantasy, and the concretely brutal “real world”.
This disparagement turns out to be nothing more than a specific expression of our ever-present tendency to run from pain. A tendency which causes each of us to run, however inadvertently, away from enthusiasm (the embrace of God) as well. With Body Electronics we now have a concrete, replicable and reliable means of crossing that divide between that up to now difficult to maintain world of enthusiasm and choice, and our apparently natural realm of damage and reactivity, thus making that better life unconditionally “real”, and available.
This better “real life” turns out to be neither impossible on the one hand, nor much like the indolent fantasies that are concocted by unhappy people in resistance to the actual lives that they do live on the other. A real life of choice and enthusiasm is still a life of challenge, effort and accomplishment. The irreducible kernel at the center of learning to love what is, is loving the pain of that is.
Our eventual goal is to utterly love what is “in real time” so that no residual resistance to what is happening now either damages or sickens us ever again. This is the crowning achievement of what might be termed a Body Electronics lifestyle. To get there we “practice” on the “is” that has already happened, resisted events obscured by resisted memory all painfully recorded in our crystals.
Even getting at the memory of each resisted event requires facing and going through the memory of the resulting pain that we instinctively used to mask our too keen awareness of that unwanted, hated, “off” managed event in the first place. Dr. Ray often reminded his students of this vitally important psychological fact by stating “Pain is the capstone of memory.”
• We learn about the reality referred to earlier (part B of Law of Cure # 2) in this workbook as “vitality”, also referred to as chi by the Chinese, ki by the Japanese, prana by Hindus, orgone by students of Wilhem Riech, fires of the Holy Spirit by Christians and non-bio-electric life energy. We examine how it works, how it is organized, and what its relation is to the flow of micro-bio-electric current that resister-crystals slow or even cut off.
• We learn the details about the means by which negative genetic heritage, painful family history, personal illness, physical and emotional trauma, emotional resistance and psychological impediments all resolve down into embedded physical crystals. As well as what happens when those crystals in the body, along with all associated states of consciousness and the thoughts and feelings that mark that consciousness disintegrate.
• Finally we perform “table work” or “point holding”, which is the element of the program that was originally labeled Body Electronics as I explained earlier. This is the recurrent, punctuating moment for everyone who practices the program. It is during table work that all that learning comes together.
To engage in point-holding, we first sit or stand around a message table with our fingertips, knuckles or in some cases elbows pressing on spots that mark crystal-points on the bodies of others in our group. If there are five point holders around the table, each of us holds points five times to earn her or his place as appointee. Under most circumstances, (Body Electronics seminars being the notable exception) only one table session happens per gathering. So it may take weeks, but eventually each of us takes a turn at being group “appointee” (the one everyone else has their fingers stuck in) ourselves.
It is during this practice that we learn in absolutely inarguable ways about how well we’ve learned to love what is. Because the less well we love, the more the recorded pains that are elicited from the crystals under those points, and the associated memories that are released as the crystals melt - hurt! There is no way to emphasize this strongly enough. It is also important to emphasize that the pain that is felt is pain that was already there, buried in the body. Holding points does not add pain to an individual’s body; it releases pain from it.
No individual can imagine the amount of unacknowledged pain that is stored in his or her crystals until it has at last been experienced and released. On the other hand, those fragments of pain and memory that are fully loved under these conditions cease to be subconsciously resisted (as well as cease to be crystals) and are no longer a factor that drags down the vitality of our lives and health ever again.
• Then we keep it up. Taking turns around the table for months or even years at a time. And life keeps getting better.
An answer to that second question, “How hard is this meltdown to accomplish?” is far less clear cut. Let’s try comparing two opposite ways of looking at it.
• Measured against an inevitability of dying younger than necessary, it is not hard. Measured against permanent enslavement to one’s own reactive patterns, it is very little trouble. And measured against suffering the ravages of premature aging, deformities, psychological scaring, physical and/or emotional paralyses, damaged limbs, “senile dementia”, disintegrating organs, migraine headaches, difficulty breathing and all the rest of what “this flesh is heir to”, the effort is utterly negligible.
• Measured against a stroll in the park, an evening of gossip with old friends or sinking placidly into decay – it is a lot more effort than most of us ever bargained for.