So surely if we are looking for cause when it comes to illness our focus must be on the soul?
We could argue indefinitely as to what motivates us to eat processed, overstimulated, nutrition-deficient garbage. We could also discuss what motivates us to engage in behaviours which we know are harmful to health.
Difficulties arise when we consider conditions like cancer. When there are any vested interests, those vested interests, especially if they are rich, will move heaven and earth to convince you of the validity of their claims. Regular readers of this blog will know I will never accept the claims of an industry that exists only to “manage” dis-ease.
Yes turkeys don’t vote for Christmas. If a cure for cancer was found almost all of the largest and most profitable organisations involved would go out of business.
If you visit Cancer Research UK’s website you will find that the probability of your getting cancer in your lifetime is now one in two. The upward trend is caused by "people living longer" and "cancer risk increases with age." If I didn’t have dear friends, and my beloved late Anne who have been and are in cancer’s embrace I would be tempted to suggest the best way of avoiding cancer is to die young. If you visit another website, The Environmental Working Group, you will be shown the limitations of this argument.
However this blog post has a much higher purpose than the relatively easily defeated nonsense emerging from the cancer industry.
Our biological spacesuit is primarily constructed to function through the five basic senses. As I dictate these words I am resting on a hard wooden desk. To let go of decades of programming, to step into a world where “nothing is solid” is no easy task. To imagine that illness is not part and parcel of this incarnation is extremely challenging. Another person who is extremely dear to me, my stepdaughter Jan, has a rare disease which may, in time, be cured by conventional means. That we differ in our worldview has no bearing on my desire that a chemical solution, any solution, may be found to relieve her suffering.
There is no doubt-no doubt whatsoever-in my mind that the environment of 2017 is radically different from the environment of 1952. There are so many factors today, outside of our control, which are detrimental to health it is almost impossible to avoid them.
So back to where we began. Consider if you will if there is any possible reason why you would have dis-ease in this lifetime. Go beyond the obvious, whilst accepting the obvious may be the cause, to what you might have planned to learn from this incarnation. Is it possible that your condition is the best route for you to learn certain lessons? Is it possible that the search for a solution to your illness leads you down paths you would have never gone down? Is it possible that the symptoms of your condition are pushing you towards being kinder, more gentle and more loving of yourself? Is it possible, if you are an empath or someone with a highly developed social conscience that time spent on yourself, healing yourself, should for once have a higher priority than caring for others?
And is it possible that your (temporarily painful) journey is the best possible learning for those who you serve and for humanity?
I have read many spiritual books that suggest we are now at a time where there is no longer any need to spend endless lifetimes paying off our karmic debt. The message is, if you believe in karma, you can pay it off in this lifetime. I also believe that leaving the earth plane in ignorance, having had an “unexamined life” is a recipe for coming back here and repeating the same old cycle of birth, a programmed, soulless, unawakened existence and then death over and over again. But those burgers taste good...
I trust both here and in many other blog posts I am making a rather strong case for perpetual learning, curiosity, the search for truth and the requirement never, ever to subscribe to the utterances of those who would enslave us in perpetuity. And let me destroy another myth here.
That is to go against the mainstream, to go beyond the five senses, to believe in the possibility, indeed the certainty, of returning earth to paradise is a miserable struggle against all the odds. It is the complete opposite of the truth.
So I would exhort you to look, as deeply as you can for the spiritual cause of any condition you may have. Unless you do, the trap of ignorance will claim you and although your memory of past lives may be wiped, your next incarnation will be much worse than it should be had you decided to wake up in this one.
We all know that stress is the major determinant of illness. No, let me rephrase that we don’t all know or accept that, because leaving aside the vested interests, those of us who are still embedded in the material world will remain convinced that it is all to do by chance, by genetics or because we are living too long. If you wish to do your research you will find far more mainstream support for the role of stress in ill-health.
Stress impairs the immune system. The immune system functions, as the name suggests, to keep us immune from dis-ease. Impair the immune system and we are susceptible to a whole raft of debilitating illnesses. I have read articles that have admitted “common sense” tells us that stress has a bearing on illness but “proving any connection has been virtually impossible”. I will leave you to decide how much what you believe has a bearing on any area of your life. So severe mental and emotional stress makes us ill.
Have you a “favourite” part of your body for experiencing illness? A part of your body that has been operated upon, or weakened through ill-advised physical activity, or weakened due to a poor diet, or compromised by prescription drugs or because your parents told you that this family has always suffered in this way? Or even because that part of your body has always been associated with illness. So what do you think the chances are of a spiritually-caused illness creating mental and emotional stress and being manifested in this particular part of your body?
Even if I am unable to convince you of the spiritual cause I know I am pretty safe ground when I suggest illness is bound to go in the above direction.
Serious illness can be a signal to lose the will to live. Illness can also create an alternative lifestyle supported by benefits, attention from others and the safety and security of having to do very little. This alternative lifestyle may only marginally win out from the desire to be healthy. There is no blame attached here, it is more of an indictment of the (western) world we live in that some people would rather be ill than healthy, even at a subconscious level. Or illness can be the best thing that ever happened to you.
Physical illness is caused primarily by emotional and mental stress. Emotional and mental stress are obviously reinforced if we are in pain, have reduced mobility or are a burden to others for example. And it is rather difficult to embark on a journey of self-discovery when we feel this way.
As we move towards the close of this piece it would serve you rather well to look for the cause of your situation beyond the immediate, beyond the physical. However having a dialogue or an encounter with your soul or higher self will be fruitless unless it prompts you to change your life. It is entirely possible that your soul may tell you to stop eating garlic or take more exercise or be kinder to yourself. It is equally possible that your soul may bring to your attention a suppressed trauma from this life or a past life. One thing is certain, no matter what the outcome, getting closer to your soul is probably the best thing you could ever do.
Your soul loves you even if you have been ignoring and neglecting it.
Happy healing!
Thanks as always to the lessons I am learning from the beautiful Mrs Stewart who has inspired this post. And did I say being a truth activist and spiritual "warrior" is the only way to be?
Jack Stewart, 31st of October 2017.