Second Opinions

We become ill not because of what we do or don’t do,
but because of who we are.
We create or perpetuate our own illness.
Radha Gopalan

Mr. Kiyosaki tells in his Fake book a bit about health issues which eventually led him to Dr. Radha Gopalan. Gopalan is a cardiologist, a super-specialist, who spends much of his time working with prospective transplant patients. Kiyosaki found his way to Dr. Gopalan in Arizona through a circuitous route after consulting a number of other physicians who did not fit his needs and inclinations.

The two worked together as Kiyosaki admitted to being a type A personality and overweight. He also had high blood pressure and was considered pre-diabetic. He wrote that his physician had “been nudging me for years to meditate, reminding me that doctors and medicine are fake health … and that inner spirituality is real health.”

Kiyosaki slowly discovered that, “Your spiritual health is found in your illness.” While most people simply want to be relieved of their ills, healing can require pain, suffering, and work.

Eventually, Mr. Kiyosaki turned to “nudging” his physician to write his own book and share his opinions. Gopalan then composed Second Opinion, basing his writings on his experiences in internal medicine and cardiology along with diverse studies in Ayurveda and acupuncture, chiropractic and osteopathy, homeopathy and herbs as well as yoga and meditation.

Second Opinion is a thoughtful composition that offers inquiring patients broad views of eight medical conditions by chapter: heart, liver, high blood pressure, stroke, kidney, obesity and diabetes, cancer, and lungs. Gopalan first looks at all of them from the angle of western medicine. Then, he takes them from the perspective of eastern medicine as well as other alternatives. Finally, he discusses You Power with regard to each ill.

Gopalan believes that “it is time that patients and healthy people concerned with maintaining their health and wellness get empowered.” Generally speaking, neither schools nor parents teach young people about health or disease. For that matter, medical schools teach next to nothing about health, only about disease. Then medical doctors generally spend very little time in teaching patients. That even though the very word doctor means teacher.

Then Gopalan remarks that, “If medicine worked, patients should not keep coming back for treatment of recurrent problems.” It appears that people are getting ill more frequently, then suffering common recurrences despite medical attention. The system is not about “health care” but rather “disease care.”

The doctor reflects that part of the problem amounts to our “fight” against illness and patients running out of energy or vitality to sustain themselves. On the other hand, Gopalan’s eastern medicine view recognizes importance of internal factors such as energetic influence, individuality, and emotions in maintenance of health as well as the development of disease.

For those who study his whole book, Dr. Gopalan covers much of the same territory in each of the chapters devoted to eight “conditions.” For those concerned with only one medical issue, his repetitions will not be noticed. That said, his most important repeat comes with the words: “We become ill not because of what we do or don’t do, but because of who we are.”

Dr. Gopalan studied widely and shares openly. But, there is much more territory to cover to get to You Power and to the Big Picture to which Buckminster Fuller and Robert Kiyosaki repeatedly point:

“You and you alone to the best of your ability need to determine the ultimate path that is best for you. So … the multi-million dollar question: How do we do that? The process starts by developing a simple, working understanding of ourselves.”

The Big Picture calls for considering the following issues which will be discussed in the following pages. Even then, we will undoubtedly pass over other elements important to human existence, health and happiness.

You have the power to create disease and injury. You also have the power to heal and to produce health as well as wealth and happiness – for your own benefit as well as that of family and neighbors.

Story and Meaning

It is all too easy for so-called experts of any ilk to look at humans who pass before us as “just another one of those …” Even though there are over 8,000,000,000 humans on the planet, we are all different. All beings are really one of a kind and all lives are uniquely lived. Even identical twins have individual souls, stories and destinies.

But orthodox medicine has neglected stories for long times because they are not considered “scientific” and do not lend themselves to being collected, measured, and quantified. Fortunately, that situation has begun to change as some medical journals are opening to anecdotal information and not just surveys and data points, laboratory studies and medicine by protocol.

Radha Gopalan discovered this simple fact for himself when he, a heart specialist, developed his own heart ailment which he details in his book: angina which prompted placement of stents in his coronary artery. That ill also caused him to look at himself more closely, reflect on his “story,” and expand his own already wide view of health and illness.

It seems to this observer that whole new worlds can be revealed when personal stories are offered for consideration. In the context of health, our opportunities and challenges are indeed quite singular. No two bodies are exactly alike. And certainly the same is even more true of minds and souls.

Each illness is a story in itself and also part of a larger story. Only the patient can really access and tell the full story. Western medicine too often falls flat from this angle – because protocols and paperwork, time and money among other forces stand in the way of storytelling. Spirit and soul find little if any place in orthodox medicine. They are easier to uncover in eastern medicine and alternative approaches.

But, recovering the story and telling it can be a daunting task. When accessed, spirit and soul can be allowed Presence. Then, the story can lead to the Great Physician within and true healing.

It should be remarked that the Story really belongs to the Soul. The Soul Story opens to chapters “written” by the persona of the times. The persona feels the pain and struggles while the Soul watches on with endless compassion. The Soul is ultimately in charge.

This writer remembers sitting with patients long ago and listening to their stories – or at least brief vignettes from them. In some ways, it was like individuals retelling their dreams. There clearly were in the dreams and incidents of the patients’ lives clues to their true ills which were much deeper than outer symptoms and discomforts. But, the medical system did not allow sufficient time or support interest in digging deeper. Nor would many patients dare to go there. Everybody has a story, but …

Yes, there are exceptions in the system and among medical doctors. Patch Adams comes to mind, as he tells in his book Gesundheit! Bringing Good Health to You about spending hours – not minutes – with patients on their first consultations with him long ago. Adams may no longer work in that manner as he teaches people to clown as a means to heal and be healed.

Let’s stop here to peer into a few of this doctor-writer’s own stories:

~ The toughest year of my life was during family practice internship at Fort Benning, Georgia. Early on instead of doing things the Army way, I tried to do too many things in my own way. That didn’t fit well with the PTB. So, I was sent to a psychiatrist who pronounced that, “He is not crazy, just opinionated.”

I was then placed on probation for six months, put my head down, and played the game. Along the way, my wife and I separated for some months. I moved in with a fellow intern for a time until Kathy and I got back together.

So, there was a host of stress from separation, probation, and medical surveillance. On my next to last internship rotation, I was placed on the Ear Nose and Throat Service under a physician whom I soon began to dislike. I thought him arrogant and distasteful to patients and others alike. I chafed at the idea of spending a whole month under his thumb.

But, there I was, a few weeks out from probation still looking over my shoulder, working under a “jerk” drawn into my proximity. I had spent recent months wondering and worrying. Then, I had recently returned to my wife while carrying ambivalent feelings about our relationship. The month had barely begun when I turned shades of yellow. My intern partner Dr. Ed then made the simple diagnosis of non-A, non-B Hepatitis. Simply put I turned yellow like a canary because my liver was acting up.

Several people knew my recent story – or parts of it – but no one set me down to talk about that distressing and depressing year. However over time, I came to my own understanding – that at least in my case – as the Chinese say, “The liver is the seat of smoldering anger [and fear].” I was holding onto so much frustration and resentment and fear instead of accepting things as they were and getting on with life. Whenever I was in the hospital and got a call or a page, I asked myself, “What have I done wrong now?”

Medically, I just had hepatitis. “Must have picked it up from some patient,” my colleagues would have said. But, I knew better than that.

So, I believe that the stresses and strains, fears and frustrations of a whole year culminated in the onset of the illness. For long, I had suppressed my feelings, tried to maintain my “cool,” accepted humiliations, and stifled my sensitivities. The angers and animosities as well as the yearnings to give and serve creatively came to a head in May. They vented through my liver, spread through my blood, and oozed through my skin. My whole being was demonstrating the inner crisis through which I had been passing. There was a “Big Picture.”

Yet, nobody really noticed. Nobody knew. I turned yellow because my external and internal, physical and psychic, objective and subjective, material and spiritual parts pictured me thus. It was an up-close-and-personal way to bring the wonder of human nature as well as human illness more and more clearly to my awareness. I was also helped to recognize that opportunities for learning can be found everywhere and in every moment. Remember Radha Gopalan’s words: “Your spiritual health is found in your illness.”

Fortunately, we get respite and relief for periods of time whether we learn our lessons or not. I got most of my 11th month of internship off to recuperate at home and work in my small garden thanks to turning yellow. You know, there are always consolations.

I am still in the healing process. I am alive and life is the great healer.

~~ Another instructive incident in my personal health life came several years later after I was divorced and discharged from the Army. I had been having a long-distance relationship with a woman named Suzanne. We were talking about her moving down to Phoenix after a summer trip. I traveled to Denver and we drove off to Chicago with her two young sons for a combined medical convention-vacation excursion.

By the time of our return trip, tensions were building and things just didn’t look promising for a shared future. A combined living arrangement was out of the question. I thought we would discuss the situation when we got back to Denver.

Well, we didn’t have to wait that long. My throat became sore and painful during a short stop along the way at my parents’ home. Looking in the mirror, I “diagnosed” strep throat. But, no penicillin for me. I did not, however, begin the much needed conversation. Suzanne did. She hit the nail on the head. She said we should let it go and part ways in Denver.

Thankfully, I was able to chime in. My blocked energy let go and my throat was clear within 24 hours. I had been a bit “choked up.” In this instance, another person was there to nudge open the gate. I, however, had to collaborate in the process and shift my consciousness.

~~~ The major health challenge of my life – which demands a longer story – came during the winter of 2001 at age 52. I had been preparing to take a long Walk from Montana to New York City the following summer. In early February, I began to have a heavy, oppressive feeling in and around my chest.

To bring things together for narrative purposes, I had by then adopted a logo of sorts for myself. The American flag with but one star in the blue canton and that star covered partially by a gold heart which I first painted on the wall of my Rocky Mountain Garage in Lavina, MT. Then, the symbol became the focus of a quilt which was used as a backdrop for stage performances at the Garage. Interestingly with each new version of the logo, the heart got larger until it bulged out beyond the limits of the star.

Then, the Walk seemingly “began” with a diffuse, nagging heaviness in my chest. There was no pain, but it gnawed and gnawed on me. The focus of the discomfort started on the right side of my chest and slowly expanded to the whole region. It wouldn’t go away regardless of what I did or didn’t do. If I rested, it was present. If I worked, it was still there. It didn’t interfere much with activity, but it was like a big sore thumb which was always present.

The only “therapies” I used were rest, work, and hot baths. For many years, my habit had been to “tough out” practically all ailments and injuries that have become my lot. I have been fortunate to have a thick hide. At the same time, I also have had jobs and living situations which allowed me to rest, recuperate and let Nature do its work when I became injured, ill or out of sorts.

The heaviness and discomfort persisted into spring. Then, I got focused on Easter. Reading stories from the Bible and other texts, I convinced myself that I was going to be “resurrected” from my ills at Easter. Nothing happened until Sunday when I was invited to the home of the Browns to join in an Easter get-together and meal. A claustrophobic feeling appeared, and I couldn’t eat, I became afraid that I would pass out and fall into the food. Worse than that, I came to think, “I’m gonna die.” It was a horrible, scary, no good, very bad feeling.

I got up from the table with the intention of walking home, but I only got as far as the couch. The Browns and the Hortons came to my rescue trying to help. “What can we do?” they asked, while Mr. Horton gave me a nitroglycerine tablet. I cooperated and took it.

“Call Ginger.” My intimate friend Ginger was at the time visiting her family in New York. Mrs. Brown got Ginger on the phone. I asked her to come back and sit with me. If I was going to die, I didn’t want to be alone. Ginger then checked with the airline. To get her ticket changed without extra cost required a physician’s report. After a visit to the clinic in a nearby small town, everything showed “normal” except how I was feeling. The doctor advised having a stress test at a cardiology clinic in the Big City. I thanked him, ignored the recommendation, and left with a note for the airline.

Synchronistically, my father back home in South Dakota was having his own chest problem. Months earlier, his physician had told him, “You probably have a hiatal hernia. Take these pills. Come back if you need.”

Well, he had need. My 89-year-old parent had progressive symptoms. At almost exactly the same time I was having my Easter ills, Dad’s problem got worse and he was admitted to the local hospital. He had fluid in his chest which they drained.

My brother called and told me about Dad. Despite my own ills, I decided I needed to go help out. I didn’t feel up to driving 650 miles, so Ginger volunteered to take me home. I slept in the back of her van during much of the trip.

We pulled into the hometown just as my brother arrived at my father’s apartment house with Dad in tow. It then became clear that my father had cancer and was entering his last days. Nonetheless, we had to go through the motions and take him to appointments and pass him through another hospital admission for biopsy which confirmed a malignant lung tumor.

My own discomfort was little changed except in crowds and inside the clinic and hospital. I recall helping my father stay upright while he had another chest Xray at the clinic. I feared that I might pass out and get rushed to the Emergency Room with scary results.

I was with Dad during all but a few hours of the last five weeks of his life. It was a trying but somehow magical experience. Strangely it took 52 years for me to realize how similar father and son were. I cared for him like a parent cares for a child. Fed him, bathed him, shaved him. Along with Dad’s chest problem, he developed weakness and diminished sensation in his legs. So, it was difficult for him to navigate. When he needed to move from one place to another, we seemed to “dance across the room.”

Eventually, he stopped eating and went to sleep for most of three days. He died in his favorite easy chair. His body was buried with military rites at the town cemetery next to mother’s grave after a church service where most of the family members spoke in remembrance of him.

Ginger returned for the funeral and drove me back to Montana. By then, I was feeling a bit better. Unexpectedly just a fortnight after Dad died, my chest discomfort disappeared. It “moved south,” transformed into pain in my right hip. It was like a figure 7 of energy had been passing very, very slowly through my body. However uncomfortable the hip pain was, I was relieved and thankful. “I’m not gonna die.”

While the chest problem lasted four months, the hip pain covered five more. Then, voila! Both were gone. No worse for the wear. But, I wouldn’t want to go through it again. “No, siree, Bob.” It had been, metaphorically, like giving birth. Nine months. To something? Well, the new me. Maybe with a bigger heart.

Speaking of the metaphor of nine months to be reborn, Susan Sontag’s 1977 book Illness as Metaphor fits into the flow here and can be a way to understand our stories and ills. Interestingly, Ms. Sontag wrote her book largely as an effort to refute the idea that illness is a metaphor. She seemed to believe that all diseases would eventually be explained and conquered by medical science.

But from this observer’s angle, Sontag gave much information to support the idea posed in the title of her book. Illness Is Metaphor, in fact, can be explained by drawing on Sontag’s own studies and research.

In Illness as Metaphor, Sontag spends a great deal of time discussing how people in past eras – writers in particular – tried to relate to tuberculosis and then cancer from the symbolic and metaphoric angle. In a later book, she made a similar effort with AIDS. If she were still alive, we might wonder if Sontag would take a look at the current epidemic of mental ills from a comparable view.

She remarks that, “Both clothes (the outer garment of the body) and illness (a kind of interior decor of the body) became tropes for new attitudes toward the self.” This idea will be discussed is some detail in the next section.

Sontag quotes the German philosopher Novalis who considered that, “The ideal of perfect health is only scientifically interesting,” while what is really interesting is sickness, “which belongs to individualizing.” In past days, illness tended to bring people together to “fuss over” and care for the sick one. In the present time, it is very common for the sick one to be carried off to some paid professional and imposing institution for evaluation, diagnosis, and treatment.

Then, the individual is often separated to a greater or lesser degree from family and friends. His/her “caregiver” becomes in fact a mercenary while the individualizing nature of the illness is blunted. The diagnosis puts John or Jane Doe in the same league as hundreds or thousands of others. In the recent coronavirus epidemic, separations morphed into mandated quarantines. Thousands died connected to machines, “cared for” only by medical personnel, and unable to be touched or held by loved ones in their last hours.

Ms. Sontag notes the romantic view that “illness exacerbates consciousness.” Health was a silence of organs, while disease their revolt. Illness as well as health give outer pictures – part of the Bigger Picture – of what is “going on” inside individual humans. Thus, Consciousness may be another name for Inside. Furthermore, there are no accidents – and there are no accidental illnesses.

“Illness reveals desires of which the patient probably was unaware.” Most of our ills arise from that inside place, the hidden, the unconscious which by definition and fact are quite invisible and unknown to most of us. Sontag does raise the issue and concern about moralizing illness. When thought of as an expression of the inner self, the moralistic, judgmental view of things becomes less likely.

She also brings up the modernistic problem of treating symptoms so common now. Sontag quotes Lord Shaftesbury in 1708, who suggested that, “The body politic should not be overmedicalized; a remedy should not be sought for every disorder.”

Ms. Sontag should be given credit for her willingness to look at both sides of the Ilness as Metaphor issue. She quotes the German psychologist Georg Groddeck, whose view is quite comparable to that of Radha Gopalan. “The sick man himself creates his disease, he is the cause of the disease and we need seek none other.”

Compare those words to Gopalan’s: We become ill not because of what we do or don’t do, but because of who we are. We create or perpetuate our own illness.

And to the even more stunning words of Thomas Mann in The Magic Mountain: “Symptoms of disease are nothing but a disguised manifestation of the power of love; and all disease is only love transformed.”

Groddeck insists that it is “because it is not pleasant to look within ourselves” that doctors prefer to “attack the outer causes with prophylaxis, disinfectants, and so on,” rather than address the real, internal causes. (The Book of It)

Holism

We are body, mind, and spirit. Or more accurately ordered; we are Spirit, mind and body. Humans are really spirit beings having physical experiences. So, rich or poor, we live multi-dimensionally – even though only the physical one is visible to all but a very few seers.

Two of the writer’s Wise Dads spoke to this subject in very similar ways. Paracelsus put it thus: “The spirit is the master, the imagination is the tool, and the body is the plastic material.” Edgar Cayce said, “The spirit is the life, the mind is the builder, and the physical the result.”

Modern establishment medicine has long treated human beings as bio-chemical machines – limiting the mind, imprisoning it in the brain, and placing it in the cranial vault at the top of the shoulders. Soul-spirit is all but ignored in orthodox medical training.

from Babbitt’s Principles of Light and Color

The Mind is in fact a field of mental energy – beyond measurement by present methods. It is broader and subtler, surrounds and interpenetrates the human being. The brain is its chief but not only means of exchange with the physical form and world. How often have we heard that we use only one tenth of our minds? Maybe that is partly because we have restricted its function to the organ which sits between the ears.

Neuroscience, which was the rage when the writer was in training, intended to crown the brain as king and show it to be the source of consciousness and ultimate arbiter in daily life. But like many expectations, this one has not been fulfilled. Scientists are still trying to explain by brain studies – but unsuccessfully – hosts of activities which lie in the realm of mind.

The writer is reminded of a moment long ago before graduation when he posed a question to his favorite mentor in words like, “How will I be able to determine if a patient’s problem has its root in body, mind or spirit?” The gentleman said something to the effect that my teachers and experiences would lead me to answers on individual bases.

Well, eventually the answer came in the fashion that: “All illnesses and injuries are multi-factorial and multi-dimensional. Every problem results from physical-mental-spiritual causes and will respond to one degree or another to physical-mental-spiritual influences. We are whole beings – or seeking to become whole beings, however unconsciously most of the times.”

As Above, So Below

– is a terse but expansive truism which dates to ancient times and is attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. It is one that has so many implications and applications in the context of the microcosm as well as the macrocosm. Within and without, we live and move as part of greater beings – even as our cells do within our own forms.

Babushka nesting doll

When illness occurs, we may be able to tune into some obvious cause. But, that cause is shared and mirrored by forces in other planes of life. Most often the best we can do is to support the whole being in its challenges. The modern biochemical-mechanical approach to illness is a scientized method which has gained the seat of power in recent generations. Its reign will give way slowly to one which focuses on body energies. This movement is already occurring in the West. It too will give way to more subtle perspectives in the distant future.

Holism is a no-brainer, so to speak. The brain is an instrument, tool, and effect of spirit and mind. Mind and consciousness empowered by spirit produce the worlds we experience as well as the bodies in which we live and move.

Another story comes to mind, that of holistic medicine and the American Holistic Medical Association. In the writer’s early years as a physician, he was attracted to holistic medicine largely through his studies of Edgar Cayce, sometimes called the Father of Holistic Medicine. That led him to join the AHMA which held its early meetings at La Crosse, Wisconsin. That was where the founding President, Dr. Norman Shealy, maintained his practice for many years. Shealy had a large effect in bringing “holism” into broader light in modern medicine. While it never caught fire, holism did make some inroads into medical thinking.

Norm Shealy was a key player, as were the McGareys at the ARE Clinic, where the writer worked for a time in the 1980s, in the formation of the AHMA. Shealy, although a small man of unassuming appearance, carried extra weight because he had both M.D. and Ph.D. degrees and had practiced as a neurosurgeon for many years. He wrote several books and developed the Transcutaneous Neuro Stimulator. Shealy was described as an “exuberant” leader. He knew how to organize and bring talented and stimulating speakers to the stage at annual meetings.

Attending a number of conferences Shealy hosted, this writer hoped that the next one would be as enjoyable as the last. As opposed to the dour brand of medical programs in which slide shows were the highlights, the AHMA conferences offered many expansive drafts of fresh air in the form of enthusiastic speakers, entertaining presentations, and even musically talented healers.

The topper of one trip to Wisconsin came in the form of a non-physician who shared an evening of healing with the medics in the crowd. Jim Turner was a musician from the Rocky Mountains who created music using all sorts of unusual implements: baking pans, wine glasses, wrenches and handsaws to name a few. He was good enough to catch Johnny Carson’s attention and appear on The Tonight Show. Jim apparently gave up that business because internet searches for him turn up close to empty.

While performing a number of songs on his Sandvig handsaw at one convention, he told about playing some of the same tunes on a recent return visit to a church in Colorado. At the end of that show, he shook hands with members of the audience who passed through a receiving line. An older woman got his attention and initiated a conversation. She told him, “The last time you played here, you gave me a bloody nose.”

Turner was a little embarrassed and at a loss as to what to say, so he tried to apologize. The woman stopped him and said, “Oh, no. It was really wonderful what happened that night.”

The lady related how she had grown up in a family in which expression of feelings was discouraged. She married a man who was much the same. So, she continued to hold things in even after her husband died. In later years, she developed high blood pressure which was not well controlled on medication. Her physician told her he was worried.

Turner’s first musical performance enthralled the woman. When he played Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring on his saw, she couldn’t hold her feelings back any longer. They broke through, not in tears but in a bloody nose. Her physician eventually told her he had been worried that her unrelieved blood pressure might some day result in a stroke. He was then pleased and hopeful because of the change that happened on her experiencing Jim Turner’s touching music.

Turner also told a healing story about a child at the other end of the spectrum of life. A young black boy, who had stopped speaking when his father was killed in front of him, appeared on the stage when Jim was doing a show at the child’s school. At one point, the youngster pushed himself forward when Turner was demonstrating how to play the saw. All was silent as the boy reached toward Mr. Turner and his musical saw. He grasped and gasped, “Saw?,” his first words since the death of his father.

With several hundred in an amphitheater setting, Mr. Turner concluded his evening session conducting the group as a glass harmonica orchestra. Everyone got a wine glass. Different sections had glasses with different amounts of water in them. As Jim played his handsaw, he pointed for groups to join in and drop out. All we did was wet our fingers and rub the rims of the glasses, each section producing its own wonderful tone to add to the unique symphony. The music was ethereal and the event truly memorable. Turner reprised his favorite tune, Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring, during the session. Thanks, Jim, for sharing those magical moments.

All moments at AHMA conventions were not so glorious. Still, they were often instructive. Another remembrance of Shealy’s leadership relates to the commonly accepted idea that we live in an age of “Scientific Medicine.” In preparation for that particular meeting, Shealy sent letters to the deans of all (about 100 at the time) American medical and osteopathic schools. In his letters, he asked a simple and direct question: “What is scientific medicine?”

Dr. Shealy received a handful of responses, most of which were on the order of: “That’s an interesting question. We ought to do some research on it.”

Those who replied to Shealy’s question were invited to address the convention on the topic. Five accepted. Yet, not one of them dared to address the subject directly at the meeting. Instead, they merely concurred that IT was an important issue before going off on tangents to talk of their school’s own particular interests and work. They were unwilling or unprepared to confront the issue head on.

But, really? Whether it is declared loudly or not, medicine clearly founds its practices on science – practically the whole medical curriculum is one “science” or another – and physicians claim to use the best of science and technology.

As an update, let it be noted that Norman Shealy passed away in 2024 at the age of 91. By that time, the American Holistic Medical Association had been absorbed and submerged into the Foundation for Alternative and Integrative Medicine to Shealy’s chagrin. Norm Shealy was a testament to how physicians can live and work holistically while treating their patients as the whole beings which they ultimately are. He continued in his latter days to be hopeful declaring, “Energy medicine is the future of our health.”

Vitality and Energy

Let’s follow Norman Shealy’s lead regarding energy medicine and healing. What the future holds is beyond telling. But in the present day, there are dozens of kinds of energy medicine in the likes of reiki and pranic healing, acupressure and acupuncture – favored by Dr. Gopalan, therapeutic and healing touch, matrix energetics and magnetic healing, jin shin jyutsu and jin shin do. Somewhat closer to “orthodox” medicine, chiropractic, osteopathy and cranio-sacral therapy must be mentioned. We even have the ISSSEEM – International Society for the Study of Subtle Energies and Energy Medicine established in 1989 by Elmer Green (famous for developing Biofeedback), T.M. Srinivasan, and Steven Schwartz.

While these methods and therapies are diverse, and derived from many nations and traditions, the most poignant and prominent in the West date from the work and teachings of Anton Mesmer – the first public magnetist and the re-discoverer of the universal fluid also known as ether, etc.

The idea of a universal force had been considered and discussed for centuries – Franz Hartmann has said that Paracelsus was the original discoverer of Mesmerism. Still, Mesmer brought it out into the open in Vienna and in Paris in the late 18th century. He did so working directly with the sick and injured. Mesmer also took the idea steps further by teaching physicians and laypersons alike how to use the energy through his Societies of Harmony. The Societies spread to England, throughout Europe, and even into parts of America. By the 19th century, animal magnetism and magnetic healing based on the universal fluid took root in France and England through Baron Jules du Potet and Dr. John Elliotson.

As “mesmeromania” was for several years in the 1770s the rage in Paris, it was reborn for many years thanks to du Potet and Elliotson. Du Potet traveled through Europe to demonstrate and spread the word and the healing. Elliotson focused his work in London through his hospital and medical school. After he eventually embarrassed too many colleagues, Elliotson left those institutions and promoted mesmerism and phrenology through his quarterly magazine The Zoist at mid-century for 14 years.

The essence of mesmerism and similar methods is that we are all composed of energy and that we all emanate energy. Our vitality – to which Dr. Gopalan often refers – can influence that of others for good and for ill, depending on time, place, and station. Mesmer taught his followers in a few sessions how to direct their own magnetic fluid – drawn from the universal and inexhaustible pool which circulates in and through us – into the aura and form of those in need. This often produces extraordinary changes – sometimes over several sessions, sometimes almost instantaneously.

It should be noted that hypnotism was an offshoot of mesmerism. Circa 1840, the Scottish surgeon James Braid assumed that Mesmer merely talked people into improved health. Believing so, he developed hypnotic methods which eventually were taken up by medical professionals and especially those who worked with mental ills. While Mesmer would have laughed at the idea of hypnotism, he certainly used positive words and suggestion to help motivate his patients. Dr. Mesmer understood that belief was a major factor in any substantive healing effect.

The self-proclaimed medical heretic Robert Mendelsohn said much the same: “Medicine is not based on science. It is based on faith.” William Osler said it a little differently: “Without faith a man can do nothing. With it all things are possible.”

James Esdaile (1808-1859), another Scottish surgeon who spent many years attending prisoners in a jail near Calcutta, India, wrote the following in regard to one of his patients: “There is good reason to believe that the vital fluid [force] of one person can be poured into the system of another, upon which it has various effects, according to constitutional peculiarities, the demand for it as a remedy, and the manner and extent to which it is exhibited in order to answer different purposes. Man is not as commonly supposed, shut up in that pent-house, his body, isolated, and impotent to affect his fellow-creatures beneficially by a benevolent will, and his own innate resources. A merciful God has ingrafted a communicable, life-giving, curative power in the human body, in order that when two individuals are found together, deprived of the aids of [medical] art, the one in health may often be able to soothe and relieve his sick companion, by imparting to him a portion of his vitality. To believe that we possess such a power is, surely, a proud and exalting idea, which I hope the public will entertain with pleasure; and intrust to be able to prove to the satisfaction of all dispassionate and reflecting minds, that this is no fond delusion of an excited brain, but a substantial blessing, daily at work for good, extending immeasurably man’s individual power of doing good by his unaided natural powers, and bringing healing and comfort to suffering humanity, all over the world….

“That he possesses such appears to me to be extremely probable, from the analogies of the animal creation, and the universal benevolence of the Deity to his creatures. It must be most important and instructive to discover what were, or, if not yet known, what are, the natural remedies of man; for by observing their effects we shall best understand the restorative processes of Nature, and be able to imitate them by art, with a certainty hitherto unattained by medicine.”

In his book Mesmerism in India, Esdaile gave an illustrative cases of magnetism utilized to anesthetize a prisoner patient being prepared to undergo surgery. It should be noted here that those cases and the following operation took place in distant India long before the advent of modern sterile technique and anesthetic drugs: “Teencowrie Paulit, a peasant, aged 40. Two years ago, he began to suffer from a tumour in the antrum maxillare [upper jaw]; the tumour has pushed upon the orbit of the eye, filled up the nose, passed into the throat, and caused an enlargement of the glands of the neck.

“I was very desirous to reduce him to a state of insensibility before operating on him, and for the last fortnight my assistants have all perseveringly tried it, but without inducing sleep even. Indeed, from the tumour obstructing his throat, he has hardly slept for five months. Having ascertained that he was easier when sitting, I took him in hand myself, to-day, and entranced him in a chair by the following process. The room being darkened, I suspended my spread hands over his head for some time, and then carried them slowly down, one in front, the other behind; the former dwelling over the eyes, nose, mouth, and sides of the neck, and the latter being applied over the base of the brain: both were then carried down the centre of the body, claw-like, to the pit of the stomach, where they were spread and gently pressed, one opposite the other; and I kept breathing on the head and eyes all the time. In half an hour, the man was catalepsed, and in a quarter more, I performed one of the most severe and protracted operations in surgery; the man – was totally unconscious.

“I put a long knife in at the corner of his mouth, and brought the point out over the cheek-bone, dividing the parts between; from this, I pushed it through the skin at the inner corner of the eye, and dissected the cheek back to the nose. The pressure of the tumour had caused the absorption of the anterior wall of the antrum, and on pressing my fingers between it and the bones, it burst, and a shocking gush of blood, and brain-like matter, followed. The tumour extended as far as my finger could reach under the orbit and cheek-bone, and passed into the gullet — having destroyed the bones and partition of the nose. No one touched the man, and I turned his head into any position I desired, without resistance, and there it remained till I wished to move it again: when the blood accumulated, I bent his head forward, and it ran from his mouth as if from a leaden spout. The man never moved, nor showed any signs of life, except an occasional indistinct moan; but when I threw back his head, and passed my fingers into his throat to detach the mass in that direction, the stream of blood was directed into his wind-pipe, and some instinctive effort became necessary for existence; he therefore coughed, and leaned forward, to get rid of the blood; and I supposed that he then awoke. The operation was by this time finished, and he was laid on the floor to have his face sewed up, and while this was doing, he for the first time opened his eyes.

“[Three days after surgery] – This is even a more wonderful affair than I supposed yesterday. The man declares by the most emphatic pantomime, that he felt no pain while in the chair, and that when he awoke, I was engaged in sewing up his face, on the floor; so that the coughing and forward movement to get rid of the blood, were involuntary, instinctive efforts, to prevent suffocation.

“[Five days after surgery] — The dressings were undone to-day, and the whole extent of the wounds in the face has united completely by the first intention. He is out of all danger, and can speak plainly: he declares most positively, that he knew nothing that had been done to him until he awoke on the floor, and found me sewing up his cheek; — and I presume he knows best.”

Western scripture tells us that, “Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” MT 4:4 The living Word may have layers of meaning, but we can safely suggest that the bread is in some ways synonymous with the universal fluid which gives life and breath, transforms and heals.

from Edwin Babbitt’s Principles of Light and Color

We must take a few more paragraphs to discuss Vital Energy. Prana is foundational to existence, human life, and mind-body function. The healthy body is known by clairvoyants to exist in a flow of pranic energy which appears as a spray or haze within, around and extending a few inches beyond the surface. These currents of energy are focused within the physical body proper to constitute the subtler parts of the body and its organs. The currents can respond to thought, feeling and will with extra-ordinary rapidity, and expand and contract with deep breathing, relaxation and changes of mood.

The currents of prana amidst the body are also subject to continuous interchange and interaction with the environment. Seers recognize thoughts as objective things. They say that “the human mental body is astonishingly open to influences from the thoughts of other mental bodies in its neighbourhood.” Furthermore, currents of ideas and thought are recognizable at the level of mind to those who have the eyes to see.

“Thoughts are things.”

Thoughts like the mind itself, can be seen coming and going, arising and dissipating from the minds of human beings. Some are powerful and persist for eons. Consider for a moment the simple thought that “God is Love.” Feelings which emanate from human beings also go forth and produce effects sometimes even more potently than thoughts according to their receiver.

Another way to look at this part of life is to consider Thought-forms. (See Thought-forms by A. Besant and C.W. Leadbeater) Human beings, like all other forms in and around us, are Ideas or Thought-forms created either by the Creator, the Great Ones, or human beings.

“Man, the Thinker, is clothed in a body composed of innumerable combinations of the subtle matter of the mental plane, this body being more or less refined in its constituents and organised more or less fully for its functions, according to the stage of intellectual development at which the man himself has arrived.”

All of us dwell in a whirlpool of our own mental energies. And the waves of our mental pools go out to nourish or disturb the seas around us – touching most directly those near at hand and of similar vibration. They can and do go on to affect the universal mental ocean (universal mind – collective conscious) in myriads of ways dependent on the individual and that one’s “equipment.” Habits and drugs, stresses and shocks play upon the mind. A Grand Holistic Picture could be painted here even without clairvoyant vision to show the state of mind and thence the bodily picture of any individual.

Let us not proceed without emphasizing the fact that we are all energetic beings and all swim in seas of invisible energies. We all emanate as well as receive if not absorb ambient energies. And, we all can and do effect each other energetically. Further, we don’t have to be “trained medics or healers” to have substantive beneficial influences on friends and family in need. Mesmer showed that publicly and dramatically with his Societies of Harmonies.

One of the great errors of the ages has been to pass on tasks of aiding and healing others from mothers and midwives, elders and wise ones to “university trained” and “certified” professionals. James Esdaile wrote of incidents in which he taught healing methods in India to visitors in minutes and saw them have effects on the needy in a few more minutes.

Chakras – Centers of Consciousness

As an experienced acupuncturist, Dr. Gopalan knows acupuncture first hand among other energetic forms of healing. He discusses the use of acupuncture for all eight of the conditions enumerated in his Second Opinions. But, he only mentions chakras once in that book. All the while, chakras are even more fundamental and determinative than the energies just discussed.

That is so because the chakras channel the subtlest of energies accessible to humans. They transduce and make them into the matter of life and experience in each individual.

Lama Anagarika Govinda covers a whole lot of territory in these words: “While, according to Western conceptions, the brain is the exclusive seat of consciousness, yogic experience shows that our brain-consciousness, is only one among a number of possible forms of consciousness, and that these, according to their function and nature, can be localized or centred in various organs of the body. These ‘organs’ which collect, transform and distribute the forces flowing through them, are called cakras or centres of force. From them radiate secondary streams of psychic force, comparable to spokes of a wheel, the ribs of an umbrella, or the petals of a lotus.”

Govinda explains further that, “They are the focal points in which cosmic and psychic energies crystallize into bodily qualities, and in which bodily qualities are dissolved or transmuted again into psychic forces. ‘The seat of the soul is where the inner and outer world meet. When they penetrate each other, it is present in every point of penetration (Novalis).’” Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism, 1975

Now, medics and anatomists have been hunting in the physical body for the soul for centuries without success. But, they have been using the wrong methods as they look for physical evidence. The soul, like the mind and body, is spread through the whole of the human being. It and the chakras pre-date and substand the physical form. Likewise, they take flight when death overcomes the human being.

The ancients understood the simple proposition of “As Above, So Below” as foundational for humans as all other manner of beings. Thus, it can be realized that, “There is no symbol quite so representative of the creative process as the human frame." (Alice Bailey, Esoteric Healing)

The human body is the greatest of symbols. Fortunate for us all, we have our own special symbol always 'at hand'. We have as our constant companion a great gift, a powerful tool – even a wonderful book (see the Revelation of John) to be opened and read and studied. The keys to the kingdom are right here because “the kingdom is within.”

The human body and being are reflections of our awesome Source. They have been described with symbolic language in all manner of religious scriptures, in every philosophic tradition, and in every book of truth that has been written: “Man was created in the image of God.” The hope of humankind is to know the Self as the Image in which we were created and of which we are part. As we become symbolists, ponder on our own symbolic nature, and rediscover the Great Inner Icon, we will know our Selves, demonstrate our wholeness, and express our purpose and unity with all things.

Modern medical technology is far from identifying the mind or the soul in which the human body dwells. But claims of their reality from various sources are not to be denied. Clairvoyants and seers, yogis and saints have given corroborative evidence over many centuries as to the 'physiology' of our inner nature, to the transmitting and transmuting chakras which connect the outer and the real Man, and to the symbolic character of these psycho-physical energy centers.

Like the Great Divine in which we live and move and have our being, we have our own Triune forms – Spirit, mind, and body. And, now we can add the seven-fold chakras or centers of consciousness which are analogous to the Septenate of planets – the centers in our Solar system.

While the chakras span all levels, they also demonstrate consciousness symbolically and can be great teachers for medical practitioners and patients alike. The following chart may give the reader a starting point toward understanding how the Centers of Consciousness transform energies through specific points in the human form to produce physical effects – in health and illness.

Correlation

Chakra-Center     Gland    Body Area    Element    Energy

Sahasrara-Crown    Pineal    Whole    Being    Unity

Ajna-Brow    Pituitary    Head    Mind    Wisdom

Visuddha-Throat     Thyroids    Neck    Ether    Expression

Anahata-Heart    Thymus    Chest    Air    Harmony

Manipura-Solar Plexus    Pancreas    Abdomen    Fire    Power

Svadhisthana-Sacral    Gonads    Pelvis    Water    Creativity

Muladhara-Base    Adrenals    Extremities    Earth    Security

In a quick attempt to bring the chakras – or at least three of them – into tangible sense, let’s draw upon the three illnesses of the writer mentioned above in Story and Meaning. First, the reader will remember that most intense and difficult year in my life occurred during my internship at Fort Benning. I had created and/or confronted all sorts of challenges in my training program as well as in my marriage. I struggled, was depressed, fearful and uncomfortable in my world and in my body.

It was obvious later, if not then, that I was emotionally distraught. My solar plexus center was cramped and congested. The liver and spleen and associated parts were then under significant assault. The power chakra – the manipura – was disturbed and misdirected. It should have been no surprise that I turned YELLOW, which color might suitably picture that center.

Then, there was the episode where I was slow to express myself regarding an impending life change. My throat became sore and painful over a brief period of time. I was called to “speak up,” which is usually not difficult for me to do. In any case, pharyngitis – in medicalese – took over until my intimate friend started a much needed conversation. Thereafter, the stifled energy let go and my throat was clear within 24 hours.

I had been a bit “choked up.” In this instance, another person was there to nudge open the gate. Chakra-wise, I was challenged at the throat center – the visuddha – which governs and channels energies of expression and creativity.

Then the big one – so far – in which I experienced chest heaviness, oppression and discomfort for several months prior to the death of my father who had symptoms similar to my own. This was the major health challenge of my life.

Now, this disturbance seems to have had much wider, deeper and longer implications. As it involved my father and his last days. Then, it occurred as I was planning on the biggest adventure of this life. The whole episode covered nine months and, it seemed, somehow to open my heart to larger vistas. The Walk occurred a year after the ill. Then, the five-month walk to New York City and the five-week time I spent caring for my father were the best things I have done in this lifetime. The whole episode centered around and through the heart chakra – anahata – that of sensitivity and sympathy.

This has just been a quick sketch of the chakras. The centers of consciousness – deserve much more attention. But, they also call for study and contemplation, like the stars in the next section, to bring useful understanding to any inquiring mind. Resource materials on the centers of consciousness are listed in the book’s appendix.

Stars and Luminaries

Before proceeding into this section, let’s note that astrology has gotten poor and even tainted press in recent times. Even though millions study and follow astrology, science discards it as “unscientific” because it doesn’t fit into modern measurable matter. But we only need to think, “As below, so above,” to begin considering these ideas. The stars and planets are worth study and can be great teachers for us. To bring that point home, we will have to set the stage drawing upon its historical roots in the West.

It has been said, “Even a stone can teach.” If so, then the gargantuan “stones” which circle the universe and the solar system surely can do the same.

“I am all:
From me all came forth, and to me all attained.
Split a piece of wood; I am there.
Lift up the stone, and you will find me there.”
Gospel of Thomas

So like the chakras in a higher turn of the spiral, the planets which surround and include Earth are in fact Centers of Consciousness in the body of the Solar System as Sun is in the Zodiac. This truism has been known for eons. But with the dawning of science and the “enlightenment of the long 18th century,” astrology began to lose its soul just as medicine began to lose its own. That even though, study of the stars and planets can give us a Big Part of the Big Picture.

Materialism, physicality, and technology gradually and steadily took rein of human activity, behavior and thought. Magic and mystery, soul and spirit as well as religion and the church took second, if not further, place behind scientific endeavors, innovations and inventions which popes and peasants could see changing and comforting their lives.

“Astrology declined not because it had ‘reason’ to, in the Age of Reason, but because God went out of the world.” Isaac Newton, “The Star” of the Enlightenment was himself a student of astrology and alchemy, but the mechanical nature of the science he inaugurated gave little space for higher, occult winds to breathe.

A story was told of Newton’s debate with Edmund Halley, the astronomer after whom the famous comet was named. While Halley was disparaging of astrology, Newton responded offhandedly: “I, Sir, have studied the subject, and you have not.”

Students of the stars and planets of past centuries surely saw these vast changes coming in essence if not in details. For, “Astrology is the oldest of the occult sciences. It is also the origin of science itself. From astrology are derived astronomy, calculation of time, mathematics, medicine, botany, mineralogy, and (by way of alchemy) modern chemistry, among other disciplines.” (Benson Bobrick, The Fated Sky)

Interestingly, the ancient Chaldeans called the planets the Interpreters – which seems to be fitting for centers which manipulate and transduce forces of consciousness. The Greek philosopher Plotinus considered the stars “the alphabet of God.”

Aristotle declared that, “the earth is bound up in some necessary way with the local motions of the heavens, so that all power that resides in this world is governed by that above.” In the days of the Roman Empire, all serious thinkers respected and honored the influence of the heavens on worldly affairs.

Over the centuries, popes, kings and generals bowed to astrologers and their works. In fact, astrology was primarily the concern of Court, Church, and nobility. Cities and monarchs employed their own astrologers – most Tudor monarchs (1485-1603) and their advisers encouraged astrologers and drew upon their advice. In the 17th century, all the cardinals of the Catholic church had their horoscopes cast. Churchmen in the likes of St. Thomas Aquinas accepted the fact that the stars “incline and allow free will.”

William Shakespeare appears to have been an expert in astrology. His works include many references to the stars, reflecting the popularity of its practice in Elizabethan England. Shakespeare's characters have differing views on the stars and their influence on human destiny. So, his own beliefs are hard to determine which seems to fit the actor’s own enigmatic and illusory existence. Suffice to say that much scholarship suggests that the real “Spear Shaker” was the Lord Verulam, generally known as Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626). Bacon, considered by many to be “the father of modern science,” dared not reject astrology, but called for it to be purified and to be put on a “natural basis.”

The great world navigator Sir Walter Raleigh (1552-1618) believed the stars to “have complete power over all the reasonless things in the inferior world; they have a definite influence on the disposition of men and signify at their births the nature of their mortal career….

“If we cannot deny but that God hath given virtue to springs and fountains, to cold earth, to plants and stones, minerals and to excremental parts of the basest living creatures, why should we rob the beautiful stars of their working powers? For, seeing they are many in number and of eminent beauty and magnitude, we may not think that in the treasury of his wisdom who is infinite that can be wanting, even for every star, a peculiar virtue and operation, as every herb, plant, fruit, flower, adorning the face of the earth hath the like.”

Christopher Wren, in his inaugural lecture as Gresham Professor of Astronomy in 1657, declared that there was “a true astrology to be found by the inquiring philosopher, which would be of admirable use to physick [medicine].”

Astrologers past and present stand with a daunting list of famous believers beyond those mentioned elsewhere in this essay: Alexander the Great and Lorenzo de Medici, Galileo and Kepler, Durer and Bosch, Dante and Chaucer, Goethe and Byron. In more recent times, famed followers of astrology include Schoenberg, Scriabin and Holst, Klee and Kandinsky, Henry Miller and W.B. Yeats, H.G. Wells, T.E. Lawrence, and Aldous Huxley, Fanny Brice and John Barrymore, Danny Kaye and Isadora Duncan, and even Charles de Gaulle and Ronald Reagan.

Let us not forget that the Father of Medicine to whom even modern medical graduates bow when reciting the Hippocratic Oath, firmly believed that, “A physician without knowledge of astrology has no right to call himself a physician.”

In the late Middle Ages, nearly all universities in Europe incorporated astrology into their curricula. Most Renaissance mathematicians were also astrologers. Furthermore, astrology was considered indispensable to the training of any physician in the diagnosis and treatment of disease. In the 16th century, the motto of the School of Medicine of the University of Bologna read: “A doctor without astrology is like an eye that can’t see.”

Our friend Paracelsus might have been thinking similarly when he said, “A physician must see what other men cannot see.”

The English physician Nicholas Culpeper (1616-1654) believed, “physic [medicine] without astrology is like a lamp without oil…. If you do not but consider the whole universe as one united body, and man as an epitome of this body, it will seem strange to none but madmen and fools that the stars should have influence upon the body of man, considering he, being an epitome of the Creation, must needs have a celestial world written in himself.... Every inferior world is governed by its superior, and receives influence from it.”

Many more noteworthy than Culpepper were indebted to astrology. Even America itself may owe a debt to her. Columbus attributed all he had achieved to the grace of God and “God-given” arts of astrology, geometry, navigation and arithmetic.

The Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (1506-1601) pushed the idea a little further: “We cannot deny the influence of the stars without disbelieving in the wisdom of God.” The German astronomer, Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) offered the relatively modern idea that the soul of each individual receives a “geometric blueprint” of the zodiac at birth. A child then born is “an image of an image” – a part of the cosmic forces of the moment.

In a similar vein, the Italian priest and philosopher Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) believed that one should “follow one’s star,” or go with one’s celestial strength: “The heavens will promote your undertakings and will favor your life to the extent that you follow the auspices of the lord of your geniture, especially if that Platonic doctrine is true ... that every person has at birth one certain daemon, the guardian of his life, assigned by his own personal star, which helps him to do that very task to which the celestials summoned him when he was born.”

Ficino brought astrology closer to home with these words: “These celestial bodies are not to be sought by us outside in some other place; for the heavens in their entirety are within us, in whom the light of life and the origin of heaven dwell.”

We live in a holistic universe, and humanity stands in the very center of the whole vast cosmos – midway between the tiniest atom and the greatest star system. Humans have attributes and elements of all the other kingdoms in their natures. The lower kingdoms of mineral, plant and animal are easily recognized. The higher ones of soul and spirit take more contemplation to be realized. That may be the reason that astrological facts are hard for materialistic thinkers to understand.

Generally speaking, it is acknowledged that the Moon has influence on the tides and weather. Primitives have long realized the same regarding conception and growth, whether of vegetation, animals or human beings. In the present time, even medical investigators have studied and found evidence of the effects of the Moon upon health and illness especially of the mental kind.

That the much greater and more impressive luminaries should have effects beyond light, heat and gravitational attraction should not be hard for most people to understand. So, dare we to imagine those “geometrical blueprints” governing human souls from birth to death. Then with the wonder of modern IT – information technology – let’s take the next step to imagine the powerful rays–waves–forces like wifi “shining forth constantly from planets and stars which surround Earth and our solar system.”

Then, we may recall the 16th century Welsh physician and mathematician-astrologer Robert Recorde who declared that, “There was never any great change in the world, neither translations of empires, neither scarce any fall of famous princes, no dearth and penury, no death and mortality, but God by the signs of heaven did premonish men thereof, to repent and beware betimes.”

Time and society, at least for the moment, have largely outrun astrology in the context of medical orthodoxy much like modern finance. Ah, but there are exceptions in the prominent likes of Evangeline Adams and Carl Jung.

Evangeline Adams (1868-1932) was debatably America’s most famous astrologer as well as a descendant of President John Quincy Adams. Ms. Adams helped to popularize astrology through her four books and 1931 radio show. Adams predicted the famous Windsor Hotel fire in 1899. In 1914, she was tried for fortune-telling in a New York City court and found Not Guilty after she expounded on her discipline and read a blind chart which turned out to belong to the presiding judge’s son. That jurist stated that Adams raised astrology “to the dignity of an exact science.”

Clients came to consult at her Carnegie Hall studios in New York City. They were a veritable Who’s Who of the era and included King Edward VII and Enrico Caruso, Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford, Eugene O’Neill and Joseph Campbell. A host of businessmen and bankers including two presidents of the New York Stock Exchange also consulted at Adams’s studio. Most notably, it is said that she helped men like J.P. Morgan and Charles Schwab amass their vast fortunes. Evangeline went on to predict the winner of presidential races as well as the stock market crash of 1929 and the United States’ involvement in World War II.

By the way, Evangeline Adams was taught her art by J. Heber Smith who was among other things a Sanskrit scholar and professor of medicine at Boston University. Smith was considered New England’s foremost medical diagnostician even as he drew upon astrological study.

Then, we have the hugely influential psychiatrist Carl Jung (1875-1961) whose teachings and writings of generations past still cast shadows. Early in his practice, Jung cast his own horoscopes. In 1911, he wrote Sigmund Freud that, “My evenings are taken up very largely with astrology. I make horoscope calculations in order to find a clue to the psychological truth. Some remarkable things have turned up which will certainly seem incredible to you … I dare say that one day we shall find in astrology a great deal of knowledge that has been intuitively projected into the heavens. For instance, it appears that the signs of the zodiac are character pictures.”

In a letter to a Hindu astrologer in 1947, he told, “As a psychologist, I am chiefly interested in the particular light the horoscope sheds on certain complications in the character. In cases of difficult psychological diagnosis I usually get a horoscope in order to have a further point of view from an entirely different angle. I must say that I very often found that the astrological data elucidated certain points which I otherwise would have been unable to understand.”

Akin to the Alphabet of God and the Geometrical Blueprint, Jung came up with the term of Synchronicity: “Whatever is born, or done, in this moment of time has the qualities of this moment in time.” Synchronicity can also be called Meaningful Coincidence. In any case, things happen in order large or small for all of us. Order reigns at some level – there are no accidents.

The following fascinating story about “astrological twins,” taken from The Fated Sky, gives grand meaning to the ideas of Astrological Blueprints, Synchronicity, and Meaningful Coincidence:

This case “involved an English subject and his King. On June 4, 1738, in the parish of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, two boys were born less than a minute apart. One was William Frederick, later crowned George III, King of England; the other, James Hemmings, an ironmonger’s son. Widely separated by class, yet bound to a parallel fate, these two men, each in his own social sphere, lived out the edict of his stars. In October 1760, when George III succeeded his father to the throne, thereby fulfilling the purpose to which he was born, Hemmings took over his father’s business. Both men were married on September 8, 1761, fathered the same number of children (even, amazingly, the same number of boys and girls), suffered the same accidents, and succumbed to the same diseases, and died within less than an hour of each other on Saturday, January 29, 1820.”

The reader can research other cases of “astrological twins” via the internet quite readily. Just as today, rich and poor can consult astrologers in a variety of ways. Most commonly, they peruse Sun Sign astrology columns in up to 1200 newspapers around the world. In any case, there is no standardization of interpretations – as scientists might desire. For that matter, there are numerous kinds of astrology – East and West – Vedic and Tropical being the major schools. But, there are dozens of lesser ones, such as Karmic, Egyptian, Psychological, Medical as well as Uranian, Electional, Horary, Judicial, and Locational.

Let us close this section on Second Opinions by pointing to a painting by Johann Georg Gichtel circa 1703. The image pulls the chakras and astrology together to a degree. As such, it may give the reader some clues as to how the planets and their energies, humans and consciousness interrelate. We repeat, “As above, so below.”

Astrology, as suggested above, comes in many sizes, shapes and colors. Mastering astrology, like mastering medicine or money, can take a lifetime and then some. There are few amongst us in the likes of Evangeline Adams and Carl Jung. Still, most all of us can take the time and energy to study, learn and grow beyond our limited classroom education. The best of education, as Mr. Kiyosaki repeats, comes through our own efforts – and surely is a lifelong process.

Begin with a birth chart – your birth chart. Learn the meanings of the Houses, Planets, and the Zodiacal symbols. Ponder upon your horoscope – take it as a blueprint, the possibilities of your life reflected by the heavens. As you relate to people in your life, study their charts whenever possible. When you read biographies or memoirs of notable people, have their charts near at hand.

The study of transits might be the next step to follow. Transits picture the passing luminaries in context to the natal ones regarding the type and intensity of forces active during the present time in a person’s life. That can give valuable information for the individual and potentially for that one’s physician or healer most particularly with regard to “how long” a challenge will last. Medics in the past ages who used astrology surely spent much time pondering the transits in force in their patients’ lives.

Transits are clearly a more involved level as the placement of the luminaries in the present moment overlay those in the natal horoscope. Almost a double chart, transits can help the reader to focus on the forces challenging or promoting one’s life, wealth, and health at any time. Adams and Jung surely studied transits to expand their understanding of the people who consulted with them and of their passing challenges.

As noted before, mastering horoscopes and astrology can require a lifetime’s effort. But, learning some astrology can be accomplished by most people to add extra dimensions and second opinions to the moment’s measure.

Nature

Mother Nature

Having connected humans to the Heavens, let’s now consider humanity as a part of Nature. This idea begs recalling the declaration of Johann von Goethe who said, “Nature is the Garment of God.”

“The only solid piece of scientific truth about which I feel totally confident is that we are profoundly ignorant about nature... It is this sudden confrontation with the depth and scope of ignorance that represents the most significant contribution of twentieth-century science to the human intellect.” (Lewis Thomas)

Let’s start with the obvious fact that each human is home to trillions of tiny cells which usually do its master’s bidding. Looking in the other direction, each of us is a “cell in the body of God” – a vastly greater being. To live healthfully and holistically, we must learn our part on the stage of life – as Shakespeare reckoned. Using a different metaphor, we must come to understand how we fit into the Divine Tapestry or the perfectly woven Garment of God.

We suspect that many primitive people live and act in that state of being – at least relatively so. But with the advances and riches of civilization, which touch large sections of humans in the modern world, we have become separated – even divorced from Nature.

While Nature is not limited to the out-of-doors scene down by the river, we need simply consider how little time most of us spend in settings undisturbed by man-made structures. Most people in the West find themselves “in Nature” when they go “camping” in their Winnebago motor homes close to a National Park for a week in the summer. During the rest of the year, the “Nature walks” occur when they “travel” between their homes and their favorite form of transportation on the way to work or play.

Being rich westerners, we can have the best of both worlds – the natural one and the artificial, man-made kind. But the artificial jungles have taken over almost to the total exclusion of that Divine Garment of which we are Naturally part. This state of affairs is hardly new – but only more and more obvious to those who have eyes to see and dare to consider the Big Picture.

Great thinkers of past eras like Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) pointed his fellows back to simpler lives and healthier living. If we look back over our shoulders, we can imagine and even emulate lifestyles which prevent illness and injury. Maybe we can get clues from various societies spread around the world which even in the present day live in relative peace and ease with their environments. Among them are those who know how to invoke the healing forces of Nature when health problems intervene.

Surely, a wise Creator has made allowance for disease and disaster even in times when “medical men” and “shamans” were yet to be imagined – as suggested by James Esdaile. Humans once knew instinctively how to deal with bodily ills. We still have that instinct, like many in the animal world, of how to respond to bodily distress and disturbance on our own part as well as those of others.

“It is no measure of health to be
well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
Jiddu Krishnamurti

But, the fact is that the large majority of humans – especially rich westerners – live in highly artificial situations and thus relatively unnatural circumstances. Nature – in the common sense of the word – is more and more alien, distant, foreign to human beings.

We might wonder what is more important – whether to live in harmony with Nature or with our community and society? Which also brings up the premise raised in the words above by Krishnamurti.

“It ain’t easy being human” for a host of reasons. One of them being that our environs, our schools, our cities, our courts, our governments, our systems are often crippled, dis-eased or ill themselves. We might quite Naturally add to this list our communities as well as the simple idea of Community.

It seems increasingly obvious that humans, as they become richer, experience less community. Even in small towns and once cozy cities, people all too often do not know or care about their neighbors. Financial independence seems to breed fragmentation into smaller and smaller units of function. Even families in the present separate themselves into their own spaces, to spend time with their computers and phones, games and toys, drugs and libations.

So, it also seems obvious but little heeded that health requires attention to family and community as well as Nature. All three might do well to have Mother as their first name: Mother Family, Mother Community, Mother Nature. Mothers are in fact the true, instinctual, and natural healers in the world.

In many societies, women and especially Mothers have been honored for their life-giving and healing potentials. But, we know that the reign of Patriarchy has been long and potent. It also tends to produce rich man, patrician dis-eases.

As we have seen several times over, there are numerous similarities between the search for health as for wealth. Let’s add another which occurs when the seeker goes to the so-called experts office for advice and aid. People like Robert Kiyosaki will readily understand this anecdote:

When YOU take yourself to your doctor’s office, YOU unknowingly put both of you at a huge disadvantage in trying to get a handle on your health situation. I know YOU didn’t have much of a choice. “Doctor doesn’t do house calls. Nobody does house calls, these days.”

Home is Where ...

The writer is reminded of years ago consulting with a patient. The first thing out of her mouth was, “I’m really sorry, doctor. I missed my last appointment because I was sick.” Now, this medic-writer is the one who should have been sorry. House Calls are ought of season – much to the loss for patient and physician.

Isn’t it natural for the sick and injured to be attended as close to home territory as possible? But then, medicine as we know it generally equates with doctors and their offices, clinics and hospitals. This situation is neither normal nor natural. People get sick at home, at work, on the road, in school, etc. But, medical investigation almost totally ignores “the scene of the crime.”

A physician’s history-taking – which includes pretty much routine and standard questions, governed often by computer algorithms these days – very commonly addresses little or nothing with regard to the environment in which the patients’ illnesses arise. So much is lost, missed or ignored simply because patients “go to the doctor” instead of the doctor going to patients, as was once relatively common in days of yore.

Story time: A friend of long ago shared this telling story while passing time after a church service. It may give clues as to what can be learned without even experiencing a House Call. It also brings the disciplines of medicine and ministry – together with a number of multi-dimensional implications.

Over a hundred years ago, there was a kindly and fastidious, aging family doctor who lived in a small rural town. He was approaching retirement age and wanted to find a young physician to share some of the load in his latter years. Furthermore, he was concerned that his patients should have good care when he hung up his stethoscope and passed on his practice.

So, the gentleman took on a recent medical school graduate as his associate and potential partner. The young fellow was eager, but lacking in confidence as well as experience. The senior regularly and continually took moments to teach and mentor his new charge. His constant mantra was about OBSERVATION. He reiterated time and again, “Observation is the key to good medical practice.” [Mr. Kiyosaki would agree in regard to his field of finance, but he would use the word EXPERIENCE.]

Shortly after the new graduate arrived, two house calls were appointed on a particular day. The elder physician took the young man aside and lectured him, “Now, the house call is a wonderful thing because you, the visiting physician, have so many opportunities to gather information, clues, hints, etc. Your powers of observation can gather rapid and very valuable information which is much more difficult, sometimes impossible to ascertain in the office setting. Now, I want you to remember that as we go out on rounds today. The key is to Observe, Observe, Observe.”

The medics gathered their equipment and took a carriage to make their house calls. As they neared the first home, the elder said, “I shall take the first call. You keep a close eye on me and the patient and, by all means, cultivate your powers of observation.”

The two walked up to the house with the older man in the lead. He knocked on the door and the two were quickly led to the parlor where they found the lady of the house resting on the sofa. The lead physician introduced his new assistant and proceeded to do a brief history and examination. Within a few minutes, he brought himself up to attention in front of his patient and announced, “Madame, I perceive that you have been eating too much candy. I believe you know what I mean. You pay heed, cut down on candies, and take these tablets. You should be well in a few days.”

After the physician dispensed the medication and gathered his tools into his bag, the doctors departed to their carriage. En route, the younger addressed his mentor. “I’m sorry sir, but I missed it. The diagnosis, I mean. I never heard that diagnosis in the classroom, hospital or clinic during training. Please explain.”

“By all means,” said the elder. “If you had been sufficiently observant, you would have noticed that the good lady had a number of candy boxes – empty boxes – lying around her living room. That clue added to her retinue of digestive symptoms made it quite clear that she had been eating too much candy. Ninety percent of the diagnosis was made simply through observation. Do remember that when you take your turn.”

The doctors drove on to the next house. The younger medic took the lead and marched up to the door giving it a solid knock. There was no response. So, he knocked again and again. Eventually, a shaky voice called from the rear of the house, “Come in.”

The gentlemen made their way into the lady’s bedroom where the young M.D. introduced himself and his mentor. The patient was found propped up on some pillows, appearing a little flushed and flustered. Nonetheless, the new graduate proceeded with his history and exam which were both more involved and meticulous than the older physician’s had been an hour earlier. While very methodical, the young man appeared nervous on a number of occasions, but no more so when, nearing the end of the exam, he dropped his stethoscope on the floor. He sputtered a bit as he hurriedly retrieved his precious tool.

Within a few moments, he brought himself upright and turned to his patient, saying, “Madame, I do perceive that your problem is too much religion. I quite suspect that you know what I mean. Now, I wish you to take heed and mind your business. You will then feel better shortly.”

The two colleagues quickly repaired to their carriage. As they did, the elder stopped his young assistant, saying, “Now, this one is on me. My dear boy, I have never in forty years made any such diagnosis as ‘Too Much Religion.’ Your bedside manner and medical skills appeared quite satisfactory, but your diagnosis is surely perplexing. Can you help me understand how you came to that conclusion?”

“Why, yes sir, I will gladly do that. I must admit to you that I was trying to keep all your instructions and my own training in mind during the consultation. And very honestly, even with all my knowledge and observing eye activated, I hadn’t much for clues to the lady’s disturbance until the very end of our encounter.

“As I was feeling stumped, my nerves got the best of me and I dropped my stethoscope on the floor. When I bent over to retrieve it, I turned my head and peeked under the bed. Well, my powers of observation did right by me. There and then, I recognized the minister of the local church lying on the floor. My diagnosis was sound and sure. The lady clearly had ‘Too Much Religion.’”

Hopefully, the reader got a chuckle from this story. And to that might add the Observation that Health and Illness cover a Whole Lot of Territory. Your health is your responsibility, just like your wallet and checkbook. So, health has many dimensions to it – not just the biochemical-mechanical ones covered by most medics. They are good at dealing with problems of obvious causes, but those ills constitute but a small percentage of the whole spectrum.

“If doctors reduced their involvement with people by ninety percent and attended only emergencies, there’s no doubt in my mind that we’d be better off.” (Robert Mendelsohn, Confessions of a Medical Heretic)

We live in an artificial world which overlays the Natural one. Nature is supreme. If we bow to and respect Nature, we will take a large step toward health. Coming to some sort of harmony with society, community and family is of keen import in this day. But harmonizing with Nature is more inclusive and assures growth and maturation, health and happiness. To be sure.

Efforts to bring back community beg for our help – not just for the general benefit but for our own. “Healing others is healing self.” Primitive communities, which are generally dying away, know the truth of this idea. But we hand over community and nature responsibilities to the medical profession in terms of illnesses beyond their grasp, understanding and OBSERVATIONS.

Natural Law

If you do not bring forth that which is within you,
that which is within you will destroy you.
If you bring forth that which is within you,
that which is within you will heal you.
Gospel of Thomas

We might ask what is natural? In different eras, it has been suggested that disease and illness are “unnatural.” But then from the Larger Perspective, would we say that hurricanes and typhoons, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, floods and droughts are unnatural?

Just like the Divine, Nature knows. Humans most often are guessing regardless of how much study they have in any subject – wealth and health included. Irrefutable, unalterable facts are hard to come by.

The path of a seed to mature fruit, as it passes through stages in darkness, dirt and mud, does not appear to be a pleasant journey. The path of humanity and of individual human beings surely looks ragged, strained, and disturbing to most viewers. But from a higher wider Big Picture, it must appear otherwise. Being on the mountain top as opposed to down in the valley or in the trenches offers much different experiences and pictures.

So, let us say that Nature is always at work regardless of human expression and experience. Nature is like the Divine itself striving towards some Grand Goal. Along the way, cycles of illness and poverty inevitably enter into the process. “The poor will always be with you.” (MT 26)

Why illness? One of our Wise Dads, Paracelsus, who repeatedly spoke of Nature as his greatest teacher, made the bold statement long ago that, “Nature causes disease and Nature cures disease.”

He further believed that, “If we know Nature we know Man, and if we know Man we know Nature.” The medical profession even in his day had “entirely deserted the path indicated by Nature, and built up an artificial system …”

Nature, just as its directing Spirit, is ever through Natural Law working to evolve, mature, and advance the beings which it enfolds. Nature builds, sustains, and draws its creatures ever onward and upward into the destined fullness of Creation.

When evolving beings aka humans resist Nature’s efforts, consciously or unconsciously, illness and disease are sure to follow in due time and order. But, medics have been “fighting disease” for much of history quite ignorantly – even as financiers battle with economic limitations. Instead, we and they – physicians – need to understand the lessons and opportunities which are ever seeking to heal our bodies and enhance our lives.

Thus, we need to move from medical battles to educational journeys. This will be on the order of a paradigm shift – a large one. In some ways, it is already in the making as the internet opens up a wide range of options to learn and to teach. Medics need to move from being intrusive patriarchal powers to occasional consultants in unusual situations or true healers which they can become – if they invest sufficient interest and energy.

Divine Law

There are numbers of divine as well as natural laws. But in our quest for true health and well-being, there is one almost entirely ignored in the West. It really demands to be raised into western awareness, critical contemplation, and eventual acceptance.

In the East, it is known as the Law of Karma and Reincarnation. In the West, it might some day be named the Law of Divine Justice and Rebirth.

Socrates comes to our aid with his Theory of Recollection. He taught that most of our knowledge really arises through the impression of experiences in past lives. Our souls hold secure in their databanks the totality of our pasts. We draw on them as time and need and aspiration require. And they just as surely bring to us the lessons and opportunities as well as the pains and struggles fitting our souls and our progress upon life’s treadmill.

There comes to mind how much of modern psychology and psychoanalysis relies upon early childhood experiences trying to explain all sorts of adult thoughts and feelings, passions and actions, talents and flaws. While there surely is truth to the effects of traumas and turmoil in early years, the most important influences overshadow a person’s youth and whole life through forces carried over from previous lives.

Humans are souls – not bodies. Those souls take on bodies at birth and “retire” from them at death even as we do every night during the hours of sleep. But at death, we move at length into subtler realms beyond the awareness of all but a few seers. You and I are surely not our bodies. They change moment by moment, a little here and a little there. Science says all body cells are entirely replaced every seven years. So, we really only imagine being the bodies which carry us around and allow us experience physical life.

Our thoughts and feelings can change far more quickly than our cells and tissues. How much have we changed mentally and emotionally as well as physically in the past seven years! Well, we do hang onto our names and identities over decades. Ah, but it is our souls that do such. You and I are souls – spiritual beings having physical experiences for times and times and times. Dozens if not hundreds of lifetimes have brought us from the moment we “individualized” as humans until we eventually “graduate” into the fifth kingdom which rules the planet quietly and invisibly in our very midst – the kingdom of heaven.

Let us consider the Law of Justice and Rebirth in a little more detail – only a little more. On rebirth, we are generally born among familiar faces – family and friends with whom we have passed earlier times together. Human souls are attracted to other souls with whom they have traveled before, have attachments and/or unfinished business to attend. We pick up pretty much where we left off in our last incarnation. We recapitulate past times through our early adult years and then journey onward – in accord with the work to be done and bills to be settled.

It may interest readers if we explore how that worked out in the life of a physician mentioned in a previous chapter. In one of his researches, this writer ran across the following remembrance of Norman Shealy from his most recent lifetime in which he was John Elliotson, a 19th century physician in Britain. Like Shealy, Elliotson was also a medical innovator and pain specialist. In his own words, Shealy told:

“In January 1972, I was sitting in a lecture at the Neuroelectric Society in Snowmass at Aspen waiting for Dr. William Kroger to finish his lecture. I was a bit annoyed because he was trying to convince us that acupuncture was hypnosis and he suddenly said, 'In the last century a British physician demonstrated that you could operate on patients who were mesmerized. His name was John Elliotson.' When he said that, I felt as if someone had thrust an iceberg down my back and I said to myself, ‘My God, that’s me.'

“So in June of that year, I went to London. I got in a cab and asked the cab driver to take me to the Royal College of Surgeons, assuming that John Elliotson must have been a surgeon. As we turned down one corner to the right, I was sitting in the back of the cab and suddenly was picked up physically and turned in the opposite direction, again feeling as if there were an iceberg down my back. A block down to the left, instead of the right, was University College Hospital of London, where my office had been as John Elliotson. I walked in the building and felt at home.”

John Elliotson (1791-1868) was the first Professor of Medicine at the University College Hospital. He made his reputation in the 1830s giving public lectures and introducing the stethoscope and the use of narcotics from France where he had studied. He later brought mesmerism to England and gave public displays of mesmerism in the hospital amphitheater. Some of his patients who were placed in mesmeric trance became clairvoyant and then were able to make diagnoses of other patients. Elliotson also inspired the surgeon James Esdaile to do dozens of operations upon mesmerized patients in India.

Eventually, Elliotson was asked by the hospital Board of Trustees to stop putting on public displays of mesmerism. Rather than do battle, Elliotson then resigned from the hospital and published The Zoist quarterly journal for twelve years. There he recounted many aspects of mesmerism including patients who were operated on by another surgeon when Elliotson put the patient into a trance.

Norman Shealy appeared to have picked up the thread of his 19-century life and carried it quite a way further. Shealy told his parents when only age 4 that he would become a physician, and told himself when 16 that he would be a neurosurgeon. While the Elliotson-Shealy journeys are quite fascinating, we all follow our threads from lifetime to lifetime most often unconsciously and unknowingly.

Let the writer share one of his own lifetime threads which took much longer to come to his own awareness than did Norman Shealy’s. The setting for a key moment in my life was San Francisco, California, in the spring of 1984. I had been practicing medicine for seven years when I decided to follow a woman friend from Arizona to California. She had introduced me to a holistic physician, who was open to me joining his practice. When I applied to the California Board of Medical Examiners for a license, they wrote back saying, “If you have been out of medical school for more than five years, you will have to submit to an oral examination.”

“Oh, shit!” was the brief dribble that came out of my mouth on reading those words. I have never failed a written exam in my life, but have struggled on a number of occasions with performance exams. And, I never had to sit or stand for any such oral exam during my medical school days. That practice was common in olden times, but not in the present age in western medical schools.

Nonetheless, I went ahead with the process even while I spent the interlude of a few weeks working on the manuscript of my first – unpublished – book. I thought the examiners were looking to weed out others than myself and I didn’t crack a book. Testing was supposed to be on Emergency Room issues. I had little such experience in many years, but did not pay much heed to the warning.

The day of the exam I set out early to drive 100 miles to San Francisco. My car had a flat tire on the way. I arrived to join the other applicants wearing a sweater while they were all dressed in suits and ties. The signs were inauspicious. The process was short but not sweet. After a few minutes, two pairs of examiners decided I should return three months later. I was bummed, but proceeded with the plan for the rest of the day.

I had an airplane ticket to return to Arizona to co-lead a workshop on the Chakras. When I got back to Phoenix and shared the news, friends patted me on the back and said, “No problem. Just bone up. You can get past this to be a 'regular doctor' in California.” Aye, there was the rub. I never was a regular doctor – or regular person for that matter.

While biding time before going to the airport to fulfill that engagement, I took myself down to the beach at the Presidio of San Francisco where I had spent a year in training at Letterman General Hospital in 67-68 before going to Vietnam. While I moped along the sand, I was reminded of a moment spent with an extraordinary man in Houston, Texas.

While finishing medical school there in 1977, I had found Mr. William David at the Esoteric Philosophy Center. All during medical training I had been studying and dabbling and investigating beyond the confines of regular doctoring. I took one class with Mr. David, but I got most from two private sessions as he drew forth information for me from the Akashic Records.

David had a warm, gentle, engaging manner. He loved to laugh and make jolly. On my second consult with only days before graduation, he leaned back, closed his eyes and took some deep breaths. He was wide awake but not fully present as he seemed to search above, within and around himself for some thing.

Eventually, he asked me for questions. But mostly, he just tuned into who I was and where I was going. I had told him little more than that I was going to a medical internship in the Army at Fort Benning, Georgia. Mr. David first made some off-the-cuff comments about Army bases and opportunities. I remember him distinctly saying about my beliefs with regard to the upcoming internship, “You can do it. But, don’t talk about it.” Well, I didn’t quite follow his suggestions and was put on probation within the first months of my training at Martin Army Hospital.

David continued by touching on a lifetime he said I experienced as a surgeon during a war. Eventually, he went on to tell me that [in the late 19th century], “You were trained as a physician in France. But, you studied after Mesmer and learned his methods. At some point, you traveled to America and settled in San Francisco. You had some real disappointments there. The medical officials would not accept your credentials from France. So, you set up some kind of apothecary shop and did your real healing work quietly in the back room. Do you realize, you are repeating some of that now?”

Well, I realized but little of what he spoke. Because I got in trouble right out of the chute once I started my internship. I did get through it. I learned to keep my mouth shut and be more circumspect by the end of the year. But, one year of postgraduate medical training was enough for me. I went on to finish my Army obligation as a Flight Surgeon for three years at Fort Riley Kansas.

For years, I carried this awareness or possibility that I had been a hundred years past a physician from France, who moved to San Francisco. Then, I had to do the real work behind closed doors because my credentials weren’t accepted.

But there was another part to the story. The name of Mesmer would appear here and there from time to time. Mesmerize is a word which finds its way in this era into many vocabularies and conversations. I must have used it a few times over the years, but I was practically oblivious of Dr. Mesmer and what it really means to mesmerize until …

Almost forty years later, Dr. Mesmer and his animal magnetism came back to me. Better late in the game than not at all. Researching my recent book Phenomenon: 13 Lives of the Millennium Man, on the life of Helena Blavatsky, I found repeated references to Mesmer and his work – indications that our forebears missed an opportunity to recognize not only healing possibilities but also to gain deeper understandings of life itself.

Modern medicine still doesn’t know how aspirin works, what makes the heart to beat, what happens when we go to sleep at night, etc. My depth studies with Helena Blavatsky led to those with Anton Mesmer which can have immediate implications and life-changing potentials for those who are open and ready to receive them. I have been fascinated, amazed, astonished, enlightened and practically thrilled to uncover this long forgotten treasure.

Let’s do a very brief overview and leave the details, stories and phenomena for later:

• Hypnosis and mesmerism (aka animal magnetism) come from the same roots but are very different in application as well as in results. Hypnotism uses words and suggestion; magnetism when properly done needs neither of the two.
• Dr. Mesmer himself was the re-discoverer of works done over the ages by great healers who had profound effects on their fellows in previous epochs.
• Mesmer’s real claim to fame is that he brought the idea and opportunity, potential and practice of magnetic healing before the eyes of thousands Europeans in the 18th and 19th century.
• He made his own discovery, studied, researched and put forth his animal magnetism to patients and colleagues, scientists and physicians most directly in Austria and France and points in between.
• Anton Mesmer had an extraordinarily keen mind, observing spirit, radiant hands, and seemingly clairvoyant eye which guided his studies and work.
• Many, many were healed and even more were relieved of their ills simply by the touch – although it was a different kind of touch than you might imagine.
• Mesmer’s teachings were spread widely in Europe before the French Revolution, but lost traction for various reasons including obstruction by medical politics and the great turmoil of that period.
• Mesmer’s magnetism was resurrected in the 19th century especially in England, but never gained a foothold in any medical institutions.
• Scholars and physicians of the old schools did not understand Mesmer’s simple but subtle work and feared that the dominant medical paradigm might be swept away by the healing hands of Nature. They used all kinds of tactics including ridicule and slander to prevent this opportunity from spreading Mesmer’s doctrine and the implementation of this simple method of healing.

Many times in his several writings, Anton Mesmer spoke that his major desire was for his discovery to touch humanity. His greatest reward would be to know that he had done something which would benefit the whole of humankind.

This writer believes that Mesmer’s recognition is long overdue, that the 21st-century may open to understand what he was trying to share, and that the gift of healing can be shared much more widely in the coming days. Mesmer’s magnetism can become the true Universal Health Care.

Let the reader beware that such a gift may not be happily or even grudgingly accepted by the Powers-That-Be. Especially as the medical machine supported by rich drug companies has created a vast business and bureaucratic system which portrays that it alone has the knowledge and ability to deal with human illness and injury.

Still, the medical system always falls back on the healing power of Nature – vis medicatrix naturae – to support its pills and operations. The healing power of Nature really needs very little of medical and surgical intervention. Particularly since such often get in the way of Nature’s own efforts.

Let the public and patients recognize that healing comes from within and that the Nature within them is connected with that in all living beings. The abundance of health in another can relatively easily stimulate restoration to you in many cases. You can do the same for another in need of healing.

Anton Mesmer brought to public light the gift of Nature for use in the hands of human beings. This is the simple, yet profound message that I apparently studied almost two hundred years ago. [Do understand, I had a different body and name, and was born in a distant land and spoke another tongue.]

But in the interim, I forgot all about Mesmer and Nature and the Gift. [The Angel of Forgetfulness does that to us each time we return into bodies at birth.] And it has taken forty years since I received the first hints in the message of William David about the work to be done. Ah, better late than not at all.

So, I have begun the work in earnest after studying far and wide in the traditional and alternative medical fields and in the arena of life. Now in recent years, I have dived into the “mountains” of material on Mesmer and animal magnetism and comparable disciplines. I have read and studied and read some more. It would be impossible for one person in one lifetime to research all that has been written on the subject.

But, I have been working hard on the subject and have much to share – like Mr. Kiyosaki. You may wish to join me in learning about the Healing Gift we all possess and can quickly learn to contribute towards Sharing the Health.

We have looked at two remembrances of previous lifetimes. There are many more to consider in various writings over the generations. From the medicine-healing angle, the reader may wish to investigate the works of Drs. Brian Weiss, Arthur Guirdham, and especially Ian Stevenson among others.

Short of some seer studying the “Records of your Lifetimes” or you experiencing spontaneous remembrances, there are simple ways for you to “investigate” previous lives and maybe even future ones. Believe it or not, we can uncover awareness of our past lives by perusing our present affections, afflictions and interests as the following examples suggest.

• Personal and particular interests – especially those that differ from friends and family. How about the simple one of reading. Writers need to be readers. I grew up with a book in his hand. No one else in the family read much more than the local newspaper. To this day, one of the things for which I am most noted is reading while taking walks on streets or even highways. Following on, I reckon to have had lifetimes as a student, scholar, and the like.

• Favored foods and drinks. Example: I have never had interest in coffee or tea as well as beer and spirits, but some time back discovered chai and drink it most days even in the summer. Aha, I just now discovered it to be the national drink of the Indian subcontinent. That fits, I am sure to have lived in India and even more certain of having lifetimes in Tibet.

There are several reasons for the latter comment. But quickly, I was invited by a friend to attend the Initiation of the Avalokiteshvara in Los Angeles, CA, in 1985, even while I was then living back in South Dakota. I made the trip to sit with several hundred others for the three-day event led by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Even then, I thought, “This must be a repeat performance. Most all of us must have sat at the feet of the Dalai Lama long ago and far away in the land of the Bod-Las – also known as Tibet.”

• Preferred environs. Quiet spaces are supportive for me to read and to live. Fittingly, I am quite sure to have lived in a monastery or two over the ages.

• Friends and co-workers. Six months spent living in New York City in 1999 exposed me to many, many Jewish people. I helped provide entertainment for a score of bar and bat mitzvah celebrations. A friend at the time announced that the two of us had been rabbis long ago.

• Deja vu experiences. Have you ever been somewhere and thought, “I have been here before? But, how could I?” Or met someone and thought to yourself, “It seems like I have known that person for a thousand years.”

Thirty years ago, I was leading workshops called Conversations on the Heart and Soul of Healing. My favorite stop for several reasons was at Unity of the White Mountains in Show Low, Arizona. Prior to the workshop, I attended a study group at mid-week which was composed of ten or so people. Standing out amongst them was a blonde-haired, blue-eyed, cheery-faced, New York comedienne. Bibi was constantly wisecracking and keeping the group awake and involved. Bibi had bits of the trickster and the elf and a few other mischievous roles in her. She carried more than her share of blarney as well, playing the part of Bridget O’Flynn from time to time:

Bridget O’Flynn, young lady, was that you sneakin’ in?
Now look at the state of your Sunday clothes!
Look at your shoes and your new silk hose!
Why, you've been doin' the rumba, I suppose.

But there was more than blarney in Bibi that captured my attention. Meeting Bibi was surely a repeat experience. A reprise performance from another time. Bibi has been a key figure in my life, drew me to New York City, introduced me to all sorts of New Yorkers as well as other present-day Americans and a number reincarnated from East and West.

The preceding are just a few experiences from which the reader may gather clues to uncover their own previous lifetimes. Let the reader peer within, ask the self questions in that direction – and it is quite likely that hints and even inner visions will arise.

The future is even now being “designed” like our own “blueprint.” But, it is not wholly determined, as free will reigns. We can neutralize unfulfilled karma and begin at any moment to chart a new course. We surely can tune into some of the opportunities and challenges coming to us in this time as well as in future returns.

The days die each night with the hours of sleep. With the rising of the Sun life is renewed. Similarly, death is only an end to this lifetime. As we pass out from the body at the end of these days, we can prepare for the Sun to rise again as we enter new physical form and life.

Let us just briefly, suggest to the reader a few ways to set your mind upon your next chapter. Take time to contemplate regrets and unfulfilled desires during the present passage. Consider dreams and castles yet to be built down the road. Look at your bucket list – if you can’t tend everything there, imagine them unfolding in the next round. As the mind is the builder in this life, so it is from here on. When we take leave of our bodies permanently, rather than resting in peace, RIP – let us Rise In Purpose.

The True Healer

Each patient carries his own doctor inside him.
Albert Schweitzer

I believe that each of us has a financial genius within us. The problem is, our financial genius lies asleep, waiting to be called upon.

Robert Kiyosaki prods readers time and time again to seek deals, attract money and grow rich. He sees the path to riches as traveling from fear to courage and from ignorance to knowledge in finance. That perspective seems to fit practically all areas of life.

Education and schooling in the usual sense can only go so far to produce courage and knowledge. The greatest among us are really self-taught. Then once taught and more learned, we can share our learning by word and image, example and inspiration.

It is important to add that the real genius is the one which Kiyosaki says lies asleep. But actually, it is not asleep but we are the sleeping ones. Most of us, most of the time, are submerged into our unconscious and relatively ignorant as we spend so much of our lives outwardly focused, tethered to social constructs, and oblivious to the subtle ties to our deeper natures. Only when we discipline ourselves, turn within persistently, and beckon the inner genius, will it rise into clear awareness and bring us the true learning that passes time and space.

As mentioned before, we are not all ordained or ordered to become wealthy in the mold of Kiyosaki. Nor are most of us fated to rise to the top of our professions or occupations. The world is made up largely of mediocre talents. It takes lifetimes and lifetimes to pass through the Halls of Ignorance and later into those of Learning – before we can approach the one governed by Wisdom and Truth.

It seems that Robert Kiyosaki, having uncovered his own financial genius, may have touched the Hall of Wisdom. But he would even admit that “there is always more to learn.” It is a vast universe in which we live. There is still more for him to seek to learn – just as for you and the writer. It is said that, “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.”

When we are ready that Greatest of Teachers – the Genius Within, the Angel of the Presence – stands patiently waiting to share true Wisdom and Love with us.

I NEED A REASON GREATER THAN REALITY: The power of spirit —

Let us again mention Socrates and his daimon to begin to understand Kiyosaki’s “power of spirit.” We all possess a conscience – a voice from within. But Socrates’s daimon is more like “an attendant power or spirit.” Plato, Socrates’s great disciple, told that a kind of spirit joins with a human at birth, and follows along through life and after death. That ancient idea of the daimon is comparable to the guardian angel of Christians.

So we say, when we are really serious about growth and health, wisdom and truth, we ought to wake up and pray for the help of our own genius – daimon – guardian angel.

As Robert Kiyosaki has stated, we all have our own genius within. He has focused largely upon the financial genius. With the passage of time, he seems to now be seeking the genius of health and wholeness in which aspiration we all should emulate him – sooner or later on our journeys upon this benighted planet.

The simple concept amounts to the fact that truth and love and wholeness are vouchsafed within every human soul. We can draw upon that genius in a host of manners. Look within if we dare to re-discover the genies who have filled the annals of history for good and ill.

There have been genies recognized in the outer world from Caesar and Alexander to Churchill and Hitler, from Edison and Tesla to Gates and Jobs, from Mozart and Beethoven to Gershwin and Bernstein. Pick a field and you will find bold and prominent humans – usually men because of the rule of patriarchy – in every field who had a secret genius. Paradoxically, the secret may have never been revealed consciously to those celebrities.

We can go back to ancient Greek times, when the famous and inimitable Socrates taught freely and wisely. Yet, he was sentenced to death for impiety and corrupting the minds of Athenian youth. At age 71, he drank the cup of deadly hemlock poison rather than evade his punishment, even though there were opportunities for him to escape.

Socrates famously admitted, “I know only one thing and that is that I know nothing.” At the same time, he also was well known for consulting his daemon. The daemon made itself known as the inner voice that was helpful to him and warned him against making poor decisions. When the voice was silent, it meant he was acting appropriately. Socrates believed the voice came from a deity and that everyone has a daemon.

We all have the Small Still Voice waiting to be consulted and heard in ways similar to that of Socrates. While we may have a “genius within” which knows money or medicine, we all have angels constantly seeking our best as well as the best of all concerned. Such is in line with the Bodhisattva Vow which calls for the dedication of all actions toward the benefit of all beings.

The idea of the Voice of the Silence appears in several traditions and religions. It holds no central focus but like Silence lies hidden from vulgar awareness.

It seems that we all have “voices” which creep into our consciousness. Some attribute them to guardian angels, devas or demons – mediators between humans and higher beings. Others think of the “voices” as conscience. But, do be careful telling a psychiatrist about hearing voices.

In a different sense, we are all mediums who tune into influences according to our own predilections. Thomas Edison remarked that, “Ideas come from space.” He seemed to give credit for his inventive genius to those Idea Genies. Others considered to have Genius over the ages rarely were as candid as Socrates or Edison. Most in fact, have been totally at a loss to explain whence their gifts and inspirations come.

Let us imagine for that moment that along the path of human life, that there may be an inner genius accessible to us all. Be it the physician within, the inner financier, the legal whiz. There still requires a “listening ear” like that of Socrates. If we listen selfishly, our successes will redound karmically to our detriment. Sooner or later, regardless of our wizardry, we must play for The Whole Team – that is, all of humanity and the whole planet.

Are we listening? And for whose benefit do we pay attention?

True listening is another name for meditation. Meditation, to which Radha Gopalan gives frequent mention, comes in many guises and can be of major benefit to those who take it seriously. But, true meditation like real listening focuses upon the Lord within – the true Genius. Master meditators entreat the Silent Voice to speak in its ineffable language and carry them on and up unto Itself – the source of Gopalan’s You Power.

Part of the road we travel on planet Earth involves learning to listen for and call upon higher and higher forces. The more so we accomplish that simple sounding but daunting task, the closer we come to being truly healthy and whole beings.

The source of all good (Good comes from God) is in our very midst. Wealth and prosperity ultimately comes from the same Source. The Great Physician dwells within the whole of creation, humanity, and every human being. “Christ in you the hope of glory” is ready, willing and able to lift us from poverty to prosperity, illness to health, fragmentation to wholeness.

To be truly rich, we need to be able to give as well as to receive.
John F. Kennedy

Introduction - Table of Contents

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Rich Dad, Sick Dad

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Dr. Bob

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