The problem of causality is of great importance: medicine and medicine medicine, psychology and sociology compete fiercely in attempts to find out the true causes of certain manifestations of the disease and cure the patient by eliminating them. They associate some causes with pathogens, others with events of early childhood, methods of education or working conditions. Anything is considered to be the sources of the disease – from the lead content in the air to social problems.
It seems to us that this approach leads both medicine and psychology to a dead end. Of course, the answers to the question “why?” you can find as many as you want, but putting it at the forefront and making it an end in itself, we must admit that the reasons found are no better or worse than others, because any of them is a link in an endless chain. For example, the occurrence of an infection can be associated with its causative agent, but then the question arises about what activated it (and, by the way, why exactly this?). Maybe it’s all about the weakness of the body’s defense system? But then what is the reason for this weakness?.. The game can be continued as long as you like, because any “main reason” always only sharpens the question of what brought it to life, that is, about the “cause of the cause”…
In practice, a doctor or healer stops at any arbitrary point and pretends that “the world originates here”; returns back to meaningless collective phrases about “reduced resistance”, “bad heredity”, “weakness of internal organs”, etc.
But by what right do we arbitrarily break the chain and designate the extreme link of the break as the “main” one? After all, it is clearer than clear that it is impossible to find out anything in this way…
You can get closer to understanding the problem with the help of the concept that we have already talked about. Its main postulate boils down to the fact that the disease is caused not only by the past, but also by the future. With this approach, the second aspect of the disease is clearly manifested – its purpose and meaning.
Why does a written phrase appear on paper? Because there was paper and a fountain pen on the table? Because there is an alphabet in the world? Or is it because the author of the written phrase had a very specific purpose: to convey information? I think the answer is obvious…
It is not difficult to understand: due to the fact that we are limited to some material processes and events of the past, something significant is lost. Any phenomenon has a form and content, consists of parts and is enclosed in an image. Any phenomenon is defined by both the past and the future. Illness is no exception. Behind each symptom there is an intention, a content that uses every opportunity to be realized at the level of form. Therefore, the disease can use any causes. It is at this point that the working methodology of medicine fails. She believes that by eliminating the cause, she will eliminate the disease itself, not taking into account the fact that the disease is cunning, resourceful and able to find new reasons to manifest further.
Judge for yourself: if someone has an urgent need to build a house, it is unlikely that he will be stopped by the fact that someone stole the bricks brought to the construction site – he will make a house out of logs. A person will abandon the intention to create a home only when he realizes that all the materials he gets are being methodically stolen. But at the level of the disease, “this number will not pass”: after all, in order for the disease to no longer find itself a “building material”, it will simply have to deprive the patient of the body.
In our book, we deal with the final (that is, target) causes of the disease and try to complement the traditional approach due to the missing second pole.
It should be emphasized that we do not deny the essence of the material processes studied and described by medicine, but we do not agree with the opinion that they are the only cause of the disease.
As already mentioned, the disease has a purpose, which we have so far described in its absolute and general form as the return of wholeness to a person. If we decompose the disease into many symptomatic forms of expression, which represent a sequence of steps on the way to the goal, each of the symptoms can be examined for its purpose and the information contained in it in order to understand which of the steps is currently being implemented. This is the question you need to ask yourself when studying any symptom. Meaningful meaning, as well as functional conditionality, can always be detected.
So, the first difference between our approach and the classical approach to the study of psychosomatics is the rejection of the choice of symptoms. We believe that everyone matters, without exception.
The second difference is the rejection of the model adopted in classical psychosomatics, focused on finding the cause of the disease in the past. For us, the causes of the disease associated with the past are secondary, whether it’s bacteria or an evil mom. As you understand, there can be as many of them as you like, and they are all equally important or equally unimportant. Our approach can be described with the help of “final causality” or, even better, with the timeless concept of analogies.
A person has a being independent of time, which during time he must realize and make conscious. This inner pattern we call “I am”. A person’s life path is the path to himself, to this “I am”, which is a symbol of wholeness. A person needs time to find himself – that wholeness that is present from the very beginning… We call this path “evolution”. Evolution is the conscious realization of an always (that is, out of time) existing pattern.
On the way to self-knowledge, there are mistakes and difficulties when a person cannot — or does not want to – see certain parts of his sample (shadow). In the symptoms of the disease, the shadow shows its presence and materializes. Space and time only make it difficult to understand its meaning: a person, instead of comprehending the meaning of symptoms, begins to look for reasons in the past and shift the blame on them.
If we study the symptom in terms of its meaning, we can see part of our own sample. If we focus only on the past, then there, of course, we will find the most diverse forms of expression of this sample: yesterday and today are parallel, adequate forms of expression of the same range of problems.
To implement their problems, the child constantly uses parents, brothers, sisters, teachers. Adults – their partner, children, colleagues. External conditions do not lead to illness, but a person uses every opportunity to put them at the service of his illness. Man himself turns phenomena into causes of illness.
A patient is a criminal and a victim in one person. He suffers from the fact that he cannot realize himself. This is a simple statement of fact, there is no assessment of anyone in it, because each of us has a shadow (except for the “initiates”). I would like to warn you against trying to perceive events by assigning yourself the role of a victim. By taking on this role, you deprive yourself of the opportunity to change.
The disease is not caused by bacteria or radiation from the Earth. The person himself uses both as a tool to realize his illness. (Just as a painting is created not by paints, but by a person using them as auxiliary means.) Now we need to formulate the first of the important rules that we will need in the second part of the book. So,
Rule No. 1: when interpreting symptoms, causal relationships at the physical level should be abandoned. You can always find them, it’s true. But they only complicate the interpretation. We are dealing with the symptom itself in its qualitative and subjective form, and it does not matter to us what physiological, morphological, chemical, neurological and other chains were used for its manifestation. For content analysis, it is important that something exists, it is important in what form, but it does not matter at all what was the possible cause.