The

Healing Arts

Ishwar C. Puri

The

Healing Arts

Ishwar C. Puri

Published by: ISHA

All rights reserved.

This book is published under a CC BY-NC-SA license, which means that you can copy, redistribute, remix, and freely distribute sections of the book, as long as any derivative works or new resulting creations are not used for any commercial purpose and as long as you give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.

License details: creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

Copyright 1988

Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA)

Digital Edition 2014

ISBN: 0-937067-10-5

The

Healing Arts

INTRODUCTION

The Institute for the Study of Human Awareness encourages individuals to know and understand themselves in the manner of the Socratic theme of “Know Thyself.” This knowledge permits us to better understand others and the world in which we live. The Institute provides resources which lead to the investigation and discovery of one’s real self.

These publications are compilations of taped lectures by Ishwar C. Puri. Due to the varied formats and lecture subjects, some information may be repeated. We hope that you would experience the love as if you were there, and we invite you to experience the reality of your true being.

Ishwar C. Puri is an international traveler and lecturer on a wide variety of subjects. Presentations by Mr. Puri include art, religion, human relations, science, philosophy, human awareness and consciousness, and many other topics. The lectures are motivating, enlightening, and reflect the highest flight of philosophy and human understanding.

Mr. Puri retired in recent years from his official duties with the Indian Government Services and is presently employed as the senior consultant for the Vegetarian Health Society, based in Chicago, Illinois.

As founder and principle speaker for the Institute for the Study of Human Awareness, Ishwar Puri continues to donate his time and resources to others through this nonprofit organization.

THE HEALING ARTS

There are healers abounding, especially in the West, especially in the United States. All over, from city to city, you find a lot of people doing strange things, passing their hands and looking in a strange way and it is all going by the name of healing. It looks like it is very popular. People want to be healed by means other than going to a medical doctor. What is spiritual healing, and why is it becoming popular? The answer can be found by first addressing ourselves to these issues: Why do we need to be healed? Why are we sick? Why do we need treatment either through medicine, or through surgery, or through spirituality to become well? Why are we unwell? If we can find out why we are unwell, then we can find out what kind of treatment would be best for us.

This question of why we are sick has been considered by philosophers, scientists and doctors for thousands of years, and their theories are quite different based upon the special interest or philosophy to which they subscribed. For example, the medical student (whether the contemporary medical student or one who studied medicine from a witch doctor 400 years ago) thought these ailments came from different dispositions of the body—from different viruses and germs that can afflict the organs of the body and that this was a physical phenomenon; that just because certain balances were not there in the body, therefore we felt sick. So, we needed to correct those imbalances, and then we would be all right. The medical system that emerged from this philosophy of the material physician was based upon correcting the imbalances of the physical body in order to make it healthy. There were many reasons given for why the balance of the human body could be upset—such as bad food, bad environment, bad relationships, etc.—which had to be corrected through various means, and this was called the process of healing.

It was after a long time that a physician in Germany named Samuel Hahnemann discovered that we were sick because of the vital force within the body. This living force took on a certain reaction to what was happening, either inside or outside, and therefore exhibited symptoms of sickness. Then medications or other systems were used to remove the symptoms and signs of ill health. It was Samuel Hahnemann who first discovered that the symptoms are not illness. He said, “No doctor, no medical man, knows what illness is. We only know what the symptoms and signs are which take place in the body and from that we start jumping to the conclusion that we have found out what the illness is.” He said for us to consider the symptoms and signs of the illness as only the language of the illness, but not the illness itself. This man later invented a new method to solve the problem of sickness, which was healing by the process of similarities. This method is still being used in some countries, including the United States, under the name of homeopathy. The principle adopted was: it is not altered pathos that will cure, but similar that will cure similar. That means, if you can artificially create symptoms or illness language in the body by any means and those symptoms are similar to the language of real illness, the illness will disappear. The principle is very simple: if you take the deadly night shade plant (sometimes called belladonna) from which atropine is extracted, and take an excess of it, your face will get a red flush and you will get a fever and a headache—sometimes a headache in one side of your head (you will be more affected on the right side). This will happen to any person who takes an overdose of the deadly nightshade. What Hahnemann found was that, if the vital force was afflicted with similar Symptoms, and if belladonna or deadly nightshade was given in a small quantity, the symptoms disappeared and the person became healthy. Thus, he found that sickness is a result of the life force—the vitality in the body—not functioning in exact natural contour, and therefore, if you can do something to help the vital force to correct itself (just a very little push if you give it rightly), it will correct itself. So the body was actually healing itself—it just needed a little push once in a while.

The discoveries of Dr. Hahnemann and his philosophies are contained in his book, called The Organon. His philosophy was shared by others and this led to the introduction of preventive medicine. If you could provide a cure by giving in minute doses of something that causes ill health, then why could it not be given in advance to prevent ill health? We would not have to wait for the onset of sickness to provide the cure. Immunizations began, and smallpox was eradicated. Diphtheria, tetanus, and many other diseases that were fatal and killed people in the past were taken care of by following this program of immunization based upon that principle. Immunization programs are still used and are based on the same principle; however, the principle stated that the curative agent is not the medication. It is neither the medicine nor the immunization, but is the vital force being urged to the recovery of the body.

Another system was called allopathy. Allopathy means a change of pathos, an altered pathos, the altered feeling or state of a person. If a person has a fever and is hot in the body and in the head, give something that will cool that person. Put some ice pack on the head. Give internal drugs, medications, herbs, whatever you like, which create the opposite of the state in which the person is in. Thus came the treatment based upon the allopathic principle, or the principle of a different pathos and this system prevailed for a long time. Even until today, modern medicine is relying mainly on this. But since what was used to alter the pathos often itself created a fresh sickness, there were then questions raised about the efficacy of such a system. If you gave a drug to a person to cure that person, then the patient could become sick from the drug! This healing has been quite popular because it is so objective—it doesn’t even require our own participation. A doctor can give a prescription and we can go buy it at a drug store and feel that this is all right for getting rid of ill health and for healing ourselves.

The history of medicine also includes the popular science of surgery. Because physicians often prescribe long slow cures or temporary cures with medicines, people found it simpler to go to the surgeon and have the sick part of the body removed or cut out. Even with his training and education, the surgeon was thought of by some, to be a licensed murderer. Some people went to the surgeon and never returned; still others believed that the surgeon mutilated the body in order to heal it. They considered that there must be something more natural than surgery; hence came naturopathy.

People wanted a more natural approach to healing. They believed that we should live as nature intended us to live. This often involved the use of natural materials such as dirt, mud, leaves and other coverings on the body. Yet others asked, “Why should we put these things on our bodies? The human body is a perfect thing.” Because we haven’t understood what cures people, the healing arts have included many philosophies and practices.

There has been reluctance for many years on the part of contemporary or modern medicine to accept the principle of the vital force—the living, healing human force. Improved technology allows a closer study of the body and body systems. On the one hand, people are looking at the healing process and life in a philosophical way, a religious way—that life comes because of the motive force of the soul. When the soul leaves, the body and intact systems are dead; i.e., the soul can cure the body and it is the soul that suffers when there is a distortion or disturbance of the vital force. On the other hand, modern medical people have rejected this philosophy, preferring to go by the empirical sciences. They did not want to go into religious concepts, and so they began to look for other ways in which the body’s vitality could cure it. There was, of course, the discovery of the antibodies in the human bloodstream. As recently as 1986, cameras and technology have been developed which can take pictures of the human cells. They can now observe and record the movement of the cells and corpuscles. But there are no antibodies visible—they don’t know where they are! Medical scientists can inject or introduce an illness, an intruder, such as a virus into the bloodstream. It can then be seen that (from nowhere) a large number of network-like antibodies materialize and attack the virus and provide a cure. All of this can be filmed.

There were two books recently published which show the photos of these antibodies manifesting. These books are “The ABC’s of the Human Body” and “The Incredible Machine.” The antibodies are not visually apparent until called upon by the body. Similarly, there is presently a huge study effort taking place because of the problem of AIDS—the acquired deficiency of the immuno-system, the system of antibodies. In part, these studies include a study of the human vital force. One set of medical explorers are now trying to find out which is the better method or healing art to encourage these systems of antibodies of the life process to attack an illness and destroy it. Another set of scientists subscribing to the more philosophical and religious or spiritual beliefs, believe that healing must come from within, and can be created by no other means such as the introduction of vaccines, drugs, or medicines. They believe, for example, that there must be something else to which the human vital force should respond in order to combat the AIDS virus. These persons are correct also. It has been found that even a suggestion, the making of a verbal suggestion, to another person will affect that person. You can tell another person, “Look, you will be well,” and if that person’s vital force responded, it would begin to make the person well. It has, in fact, been found that the mind plays a very important role in our sickness. In an analysis made some years ago, it was discovered that about 90% of ill health was not caused by external attacks on the body, but by the internal attack of the mind—that most illnesses were psychosomatic. That meant that the body was being affected by the psychology of the patient. Hence the discovery of treatment using suggestion, placebo treatments, and hypnotic suggestions to cure illness, in order that the psychology can correct its own imbalance. This has been attempted by doctors throughout history.

There are also a series of reported miracle cures being done in the churches. Several of these are on the television so that people can see the miracles and send more donations. All of these happenings pinpoint the fact that the curative force continues to be the vital force in the human body—the life force or the soul force which makes one alive and aware. Whether you subscribe to the healing art of medicine, science or to the more spiritual belief (all arise from the suggestions and psychological input), all rely upon the same thing in the human body for healing to occur.

Over the course of many years, there have been numerous approaches and cures experimented with and practiced. There are those people who said, “To cure a person, we don’t have to treat the whole body. The soul must be located in the head; therefore, if we can manipulate the head at different points, we can cure any disease in the body.” Others then said, “The head is hard to control because of the cranium and bone structure, so let’s go on to something better.” Some would work with the human spine, others would grab the feet—hence chiropractic practices, reflexology, and many other systems of manipulation were developed. The Chinese practiced the method of acupuncture. All of these differing practices were attempted in trying to trigger the response of the vital force in the human body in order to correct the malaise or illness.

It is very easy to see how hypnotic techniques were introduced for those who believed in the power of suggestion. Through hypnosis, they believed that they should be able to help people. Hypnosis too, was thought to be a scientific development by the religious and spiritual groups. They said, “It isn’t necessary to use these mundane, down to earth temporal methods when the vital force is spiritual. We must use a system that is spiritual.” And so they began to use forces that they thought were spiritual. But they didn’t know what spiritual was. Some believed spirits meant ghosts and they sought the aid of ghosts. This led to witch doctors and witchcraft as a cure for illnesses. It is easy enough to see these things happening in the Middle Ages, but in many parts of the world today these practices continue—even in some civilized countries. There are still many practices of voodoo, witchcraft, cultist suggestions, ghosts and entities, because it is believed that these disembodied spirits are better qualified to cure people than we who are in physical bodies with all our limitations. Of course, to still others, by spirits is meant the kind of spirits that you can buy in a bottle to drown your worries. Look how our pubs and liquor shops have grown. Other drugs similarly alter the mind, without a cure for the body.

Even today, a large number of people believe that spiritual energy which we possess can be transmitted to be used for the healing of others. They further believe that only gifted persons have this energy or the use of it for healing others. Some people can evoke this spiritual energy and these experiences and they are then employed to cure others. They find that these energies and experiences arise from various parts of the body and they have, in the past, turned to other countries to learn more. They turned to China, to India, and to the East and Middle East to find the sources of special energies and they discovered yoga. For some, yoga meant turning upside down or locking the body in strange lotus positions, serpent positions, and other animal positions. Sometimes this would work on the principle of allopathy, as the yoga took attention away from the illness. In their quest for learning, others were advised that yoga was a mental exercise only—the gathering of attention through energy centers called chakras. A very great interest was awakened throughout the world particularly the western world. People began to practice yoga of the energy centers, or chakras, so that they could become great healers. To experience the radiation of energy at these centers is a subjective experience. It has been done for thousands of years in the East. Now, these forms of energy were discovered and used for the power to heal. It was found that these energy healers could gather energy and use it willfully—with volition—for healing others. But they also found that when the sick person was healed, to some degree, the healer became sick, as if there were a transfer occurring. They were not really curing others, but simply sharing ill health through the psychic and mechanical transfer of energy.

The study of yogic practices raised further questions as well. They wanted to know wherein was the cure? Whether was there any advantage for anyone, the sick person or the healer? Why are we sick? Is sickness, suffering, pain and ill health in the mind also? Is it in the sensory system or astral system? Where exactly is it? Where do suffering and pain come from and who is responsible? Who makes us sick? Does God make some of us sick and others undeservedly healthy? People then went to the gurus, to the priests, to the yogis, the swamis, and asked, “Who is responsible for illness and pain?” The answer came unanimously and was, “You are responsible for your own sickness.”

Now, the people who had thought illness to be cured on a spiritual basis asked, “If our illness is caused by one’s self, then how can it be cured by another person? How can we know the cause of our own illnesses?” They were instructed by spiritual leaders that our actions alone are responsible for our suffering and illness. When they asked, “Are you sure? We don’t recall doing anything bad to deserve this illness;” the reply was, “Are you sure or have you forgotten? Can you remember what you had for breakfast seven years ago? Then how can you remember what you did to have incurred the illness? Go back even further.” The seekers of the answers then asked themselves, “Let me see last year I did nothing truly bad; nothing five years ago, not even ten years ago. We can’t remember doing something wrong fifty years ago, or seventy years, or eighty years ago.” When asked, “How old are you?” one replied that he was but sixty years old. “Then, how can you remember something from eighty years ago?” In a few cases, these strange answers gave rise to the fact that one could remember beyond the present lifetime, and this was in line with the popular theory of reincarnation. This belief included the fact that this life is not confined to the present physical body, nor is sickness confined to what we can remember in this present body. There may be actions for which we are responsible that have taken place prior to our taking this body, and the consequences of these actions do not die with the body, but continue to the next incarnation. Past-life readers then made a lot of money with their readings. You could pay fifteen dollars for a reading and not be able to check or to confirm what you had been told by the reader. From these past lives, every problem that you might have could then be explained; problems including illness, financial problems, marital problems, worries and mental problems. Everything was found to be based upon past lives, and this was called your karma. As you sow, so shall you reap! Since you sowed the seeds in a time that you cannot recall, you have now eventually come to reap the consequences of your former actions. This popular theory was recorded as early as the Vedas, which have been dated by some back to 10,000 BC.

Although karma operates in a series of life times, karma can also be repaid in the same life time in which it was incurred. We can do something in this life and become sick because of it. We can also become cured of it in this lifetime. Sometimes, the question arises, “Why are we so stupid as to continue to do these things?” Maybe we didn’t know that we were going to have another incarnation. Perhaps we didn’t know that these actions, our karma, are being recorded somewhere. Some people believe that we live simply for today. When we do things, we sometimes feel that because these are our own personal actions, that no one is watching them—nobody is recording them. But there is a record being maintained of our actions. Our actions and our thoughts are recorded in order that one sequence can lead to another in a continuous chain of action and reaction. Karma becomes our destiny and destiny includes additional karma, which again becomes destiny. It is a continuous cycle occurring. The yogis and mystics were asked, “Have you proof of these things? Or are you just speculating to keep us a little happy? Do we give cause to something that we cannot have access to?” The yogis answered, “No, you can have access. You can see the process fully.” But very few people have access to the areas where karma is recorded. Most persons cannot even recall what they had to eat three weeks ago, but if certain input, information, and instruction were given to them, they could clearly remember.

Some call this area of consciousness that we don’t remember, the subconscious—below the wakeful daily level of consciousness. Some call it the area of unconsciousness. Still others refuse to call this area the subconscious because it implied a sublevel or subordinate level of consciousness. They believe the area of total awareness to be a superconsciousness. Do you have any idea about it? The yogis have used meditational techniques to discover the reality of their own consciousness beyond the reality of their bodies and minds. They have found that the mind and body were simply responding to what was recorded as karma. They further found that we are continually adding to our karma. When the yogis delved deeper into this matter, they found that the body chakras previously thought to be spiritual centers were not really spiritual centers at all. The chakras were not responsible for consciousness, nor were they responsible for karma. There is no record of karma maintained at the chakras, and the chakras had neither created nor cured any sickness or illness. This had been a great disillusionment for the many people who had practiced the yogas of the chakras. These people now learned that the chakras are only energy centers of the body and are reflected from the levels of higher consciousness. These people then had to learn techniques of ascending to higher levels of consciousness and higher dimensions of experience. When there, they discovered that the six chakras did not represent the higher levels where the human vital force existed. You too, can find that the physical level is the experiential level where it is necessary to suffer pain and to experience happiness. It is in this physical body that we can make decisions, create karma and avoid karma. In this human body, we can accept the Lord or reject the Lord, and even become ourselves a divine person. It is only the human physical body that provides these possibilities. Look at birds, animals, plants, and other bodies and see that in the entire creation, it is only the human body that affords this experience. Sickness and ill health come from karma, and there is no other form in which karma can be created. An important clue in this discovery is the fact that a human being has the only form in which a decision can be made to do this or to do that. Responsibility and free will belong to no other species or form. So, you see that ill health or distorted vital human force is a direct result of the decisions taken by the human being through the mental process. This process is then called karma! Karma is created only when we deliberate and make a decision. It is our consideration of what is good and what is bad—our discrimination. What is happening around or about us is happening of itself, without our decision, and for these things we are not responsible mentally. This also explains how readily the human mind can create karma, transfer karma, and take up karma. It is a mental game and not a physical game at all. It is not the body that goes through karma, but the mind. It is the mind that creates karma, suffers karma, creates a distortion of the vital force—thus creating sickness and ill health. When you can go within and see the link between the mind and the total pattern of karmic creation, you will also find everything recorded there.

Even reading the record of karmic creation is not a spiritual experience. This remains an experience of the mind and any healing that takes place at this level is not spiritual healing. For real spiritual healing, one must go beyond the realm of the senses and energies into a spiritual region where the mind cannot go. Most people still ascribe their ill health to the bodily changes without realizing that the body changes according to the vitality that also changes within it. The vital force also changes according to the shadow of karma falling upon it, which comes from the mind. This explains why autosuggestion helps in healing and why hypnosis and psychic things can also affect our health. Do you know what can happen if you go above the levels of the mind and karma? There is a state of being at the higher levels called love, and it includes intuition and perfect knowledge. If you look at the teaching of the Perfect Masters, you will find that they have taught the same thing. They have said, “Don’t go after the little tricks of the six chakras below, of these energy centers. Don’t be fooled by the beautiful colors and experiences and think this is a spiritual experience. Don’t waste your time. You have not gone higher, but lower to the energy chakras.” We are already awake and our consciousness is operating from behind the eye center. Look out through your eyes and know that you are already at this level. Don’t go downward from there to find spirituality and truth.

For now, we have to pay our karma by going through these processes of ill health and we should cheerfully pay for it. If a physician charges us a fee, we then owe it to the physician and we should quickly pay all of the bills and get well. In this way, we can pay off our karma and be rid of the sickness. A yogi in India used to say, “I don’t want to go through seven days of medication. I will pay seven times the fee to the physician and get well in one day.” He also said, “I am not paying the physician for the medicines, I am paying him for the karma.” While we are here, we have to do the best that we can according to the norms for healing and the healing arts set around us, as part of karma. This karmic healing has been accepted as an axiom of the process of falling sick and the process of healing and has been used as a philosophy to expound the healing process in the Eastern tradition for centuries. The Western students have looked to the East in recent years for several answers to their questions, including answers regarding spirituality. Western students have found yogis, swamis, mystics and men of enlightenment who, just by giving a small piece of ash, could cure the seemingly incurable and chronic diseases. Many of these students believed that maybe it was the power of the mind that was the spiritual healer. They then began to practice in this country the tradition of psychic healing and healing by forces other than the material medicines that were traditionally taken to correct imbalances in the body. These people then began a very popular practice of using psychic powers, conscious powers, and the movement of their hands upon the patient’s body to create what they thought were the processes of real spiritual healing. I have met many of these people. Some look healthy, but most of them look ill and unhealthy themselves. The thoughts came to me, “Physician, heal thyself. Healer, heal thyself.” Before you can go out to heal someone else, you must first heal yourself. If you were to privately ask spiritual healers in this country this question, “Why are you so sick?” Many would tell you that they do a lot of healing and that a lot of energy transference takes place. They say that a lot of karma from the patient comes back upon them as healers and that they must suffer for it now. Some very important and well known spiritual personages who can perform miracles have told me that when they heal someone through psychic powers, they themselves become sick. They believe that if the patient does not pay for the karma with the sickness, then someone else must pay the karma and become sick. What kind of spiritual healing is this? This is not real healing, but many people feel it is easier, does not require visits to a physician, nor does it cost any medical bills. The healers pass their hands, they pray, and they think they have healed someone. The convenience of this sort of practice contributes to the popularity of the practice. Can another human being simply manipulate energies, think well of another and cause healing to occur? Where did this myth about spirituality and healing come from?

The truth is that, spiritually, one can heal. Upon this earth, from time to time, have walked those who are called Perfect Living Masters (great enlightened beings in human form) who, though ordinary like us, were extraordinary in their love, their awareness, and their knowledge. These Masters or special beings when they came in contact with us with their great love, would flush out even the karma itself and the karmic effect from our bodies. These Masters could come and actually destroy the karma from our life and thus heal us through their love and higher awareness. They did not come and operate from the level of psychic powers. They did not operate from the vital force. They, further, did not operate from the chakras to cure us, but from the highest level of consciousness. They operate from the level of love. When you are touched by their love, you are healed. It is this secret that we are trying to use in calling the psychic experiences as spiritual experiences and the psychic healing as spiritual healing. When a person uses love of the highest order as did these mystics, one does not take on any karma, but destroys the very basis of karma.

Actually, the basis of karma is the existence of a causal system in which we feel that we have free will. The law of karma includes the notion that we are under an illusion of free will and that we can make our decisions and perform actions of our own volition. When we make decisions based upon free will, we then begin to create and accumulate karma. Actually, it is untrue that we have free will, but since most of us believe that we have free will, we believe also that we have karma, and so the effect of karma comes our way. The whole package is an illusion, but we go through it as though it were real. It looks real. Free will looks real and certainly the lack of health and sickness looks real. When we try to operate within this illusion, we have to use illusion against illusion to get rid of an experience. When these highly evolved Masters come, they operate above the laws and level of karma. They come and they touch us in their own spiritual way through love. It is in this manner that they destroy the basis of the illusion which creates karma, free will, and ill health. Spiritual healing cannot be attained by simply attending a few workshops and courses, or by a self-initiated course of studies. Spiritual healing means the healing with the spirit, with the soul, and not with the mind. One cannot heal with the planning of intellect that says, “I can do this. Let me plan how to do this. I will make a decision to heal.” Remember that the part of us which plans and makes decisions is the mental or intellectual apparatus. That part of us cannot heal spiritually because it is not spiritual itself. Only the soul in a human being is spiritual, and only when the soul operates through love, intuition, joy and happiness, can there be real spiritual healing.

People have often asked me, “If you feel that spiritual healing is really a spiritual phenomenon and arises from the soul, what can we now do? We have been in the healing business for a long time. Can we now change and do something more real?” My answer has always been, “Yes, give up healing through your psychic powers and start healing through love. Start healing through the spiritual force of your own soul, which is expressing itself in the form of love all the time.”

We have a strange dilemma that when we operate in this physical world, we do it only through the mind. And the mind uses its own ego and intellectual apparatus to do everything. When we decide that the mind is not the real instrument of healing, that there is something else in us that ought to do the healing, we again use the mind to pull that something else out of us and use it for healing. Thus, we play a mental game with ourselves and with our patients, who we think are getting the benefit of our healing.

If we really want to practice spiritual healing, we must first be our own spirit and not our mind. One cannot be a spiritual healer unless one has access to one’s own soul or one’s own spirit. Unless one can know one is spiritual, one cannot be a spiritual healer. Therefore, let us give up all this sham of being spiritual healers, when all we are doing is just using certain psychic powers—just using powers of suggestion—powers of the mental faculties. Let us give up all of this and become real spiritual healers by healing with love. One who can heal with love alone is a spiritual healer. And only that person can be a spiritual healer who has realized his own spiritual self, and can therefore experience real love and real spirituality.

How does a person become a spiritual healer? How does one know one’s own spiritual self? One has to go to the spiritual Masters in order to find one’s spiritual source, one’s own source of soul, one’s own spirit—beyond the physical body, beyond the senses, and beyond the mind. On our own, we cannot do it. Nobody has ever done it. Go around the world and see. Has anybody, by thinking about it, overcome the problem of the mind, the senses and the body, and become spiritual? Has anybody, by reading books, become spiritual? Nobody has become spiritual by these means—they have only added on more superstition and more doctrines, more philosophies upon themselves, and moved away from spirituality. Only those became spiritual selves who went within themselves and found that the body was not the real self, that the senses were not the real self. When they discovered within themselves the secret of who they really were, they became spiritual healers. And only by that process can one successfully perform spiritual healing.

So, if you want to have true spiritual healing, you have to look for somebody who is real, who is able to go within and find spirituality and then heal. But this is not possible unless one has met with and gotten directions in healing from a spiritual Master. What should one do in the meanwhile? There are such few spiritual Masters of such perfection (who we call Perfect Living Masters). We do not know where to find them. Somebody in the East said to me, “You cannot find a spiritual Master because if you could find Him, you don’t need one.” He is like an ordinary person, and his extraordinariness is only experienced through our own readiness for spiritual knowledge. That is why there is that saying in India: When the chela is ready, the guru appears. When the disciple is ready, the Master appears. Which means that the Master comes into our life when we are ready.

How can we find such Masters? The process of being ready may take lifetimes; may take years. We do not know how long it takes because our mind has deluded us. Our senses have taken us astray. We have become victims of the five pernicious vices that afflict us in everyday life. And therefore we are not able to overcome this problem of being involved in this world on our own, and we can’t find a Master. How can one become a spiritual healer?

The answer given by spiritual Masters is that if you cannot find spirituality yet within yourself and you are in the process of healing, then follow the methods that actual spiritual healers do. That means heal by love. Don’t heal by power, and don’t heal by psychic power. Heal by love. There is a big difference between healing by power (which involves human ego) and healing by love (which involves humility or the absence of ego). If you do find a person trying to heal by using excessively the egoistic “I” (I can heal you. I have this power. I’m going to do it. I’ll work for you.), that person is not doing spiritual healing at all. On the other hand, if the person identifies with the object of love (the beloved, the patient, the one for whom compassion has put him is such a state that he forgets himself and becomes the patient), then that person can heal.

The most significant sign of love is that you start identifying with the beloved. The rest is all attachment. The rest is only involvement in emotions and infatuation. Real love is when you can identify with the other to the exclusion of your ego. When you do not know who the “I” is, but you do know who the other person is, then you can truly say that you are having an experience of love. This experience of love can take us into a state where we forget the “I” and with an identification with the other, heal spiritually. Until we have actual spiritual knowledge of our own self, until we find out who we are spiritually, if we want to continue our spiritual healing, we should pretend the experience of love.

One Indian mystic has said beautifully that love and devotion is very difficult to acquire because it is not a mental exercise. But if you haven’t yet experienced love and devotion, pretend you are having that experience. The pretension of identifying with someone else—of actually identifying with someone else—will give you a feeling of love like nothing else. Therefore, until we find our own spiritual truth and soul, we cannot really become a spiritual healer. But we can have a makeshift arrangement of healing people who are suffering, out of compassion, by pretending that we are in love with them.

How do we pretend that we are in love? By doing the same thing that one who is actually in love would be doing—which means identifying with that person. This identification process is the key to love and the key to healing by love or the key to spiritual healing. If you have a feeling for somebody, put yourself in the place of that somebody. Think you are that somebody. Consider that you are there; what you are thinking of, what your feelings are, are the feelings of the person for whom you have love, for whom you have concern. When you can identify yourself so much with the other person, then at that time, you are truly experiencing the pretended love. That person will get the benefit of healing, if you do nothing else but identify with them.

There have been cases where someone has gone to a sick person and just listened patiently without saying anything—just listened to what the other person was saying—and the person was healed. Such healing through love would be called proper spiritual healing. Psychic healing, tantric healing, healing through psychic or mental powers is not real healing. The real healing is when you can experience love for somebody and heal. That is spiritual healing.

So, I would conclude by saying that when we look at the history of the healing arts and we come to spiritual healing, we find that the best spiritual healing available today is the healing through love. And since we don’t really have love—we call attachments love—we have to look for somebody who can teach us the nature of love, who can tell us the distinction between attachments and love. The mystics speak of that love which makes you forget yourself, which identifies you with the beloved, which makes you go into those higher regions, which puts the mind in second place, which puts the ego in second place. If you want to experience that kind of love, go to the mystics and learn it from them. We can’t learn this love from those who are not experiencing it. We must experience this love in the presence of the mystics, who themselves are not only living in the consciousness of love, but in whose company we can experience that love. And when we experience that love, it flows from us also. The more time we spend with the mystics, the more we are infused with the spirit of love. Then we can call ourselves healers, not before that. And before we go out healing other people, we should first heal ourselves with the same love. A person who cannot love himself or herself will not be able to love anybody else. A person who constantly condemns himself or herself will not be able to extend love to anybody else. Therefore, stop the condemnation. If you want to condemn, condemn your mind, but don’t condemn yourself. You are the soul, the spirit, which is so pure and beautiful. You haven’t seen it. It’s full of love in each one of us. There is no exception to this rule.

When we rise to our own reality and discover our own selves, then we find the love within which heals us and heals others. I would verily say to all of you: There is no spiritual healing except the healing that comes by love. Forget all the other healing arts. If you want to take part in the healing, heal with love.

For a list of further publications, recorded lectures, or for more information, contact:

Institute for the Study of Human Awareness

PO Box 991

Palatine, IL. 60078

Email: Isha.info1@gmail.com

Website: www.ishanews.org

Ishwar Puri has lectured throughout the entire world on a very wide variety of subjects including: art, human awareness and human relations, morality, science, philosophy and religion, health and wellbeing, human consciousness, plus a long list of other subjects which cover the entire scope of human experience. The delivery of each presentation is eloquent, motivating and enlightening. By them, we are encouraged to know and understand ourselves in the truest sense of the Socratic theme “KNOW THYSELF.” And the higher knowledge, which results from self-realization, permits us to better understand other people and the world in which we live.

As founder and principle speaker for the Institute for the Study of Human Awareness, Ishwar Puri continues to donate his time and resources to others through this nonprofit organization.

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION

THE HEALING ARTS