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Copyright © 2003, 2010 Don Beckett
BESIDES the obvious — dis-ease, the opposite of ease — what really constitutes disease? In the practice of Reiki, we often describe disease as a condition of energy imbalance or blockage, caused by tension, lack of relaxation. Seeing it this way, we can say that Reiki heals by relaxation, which restores the natural and balanced flow of energy throughout the body. To be more specific: The energy is not just any, it's unique. Reiki is a particular vibration, which opens the door to Shinki, "God energy" or "Source energy" — and that is what flows in and restores our harmony with the vibration of Source or true Self.
Macrobiotics describes all energies and all things in terms of yin and yang.* The 2 occur together in every thing and every event. The ever-changing relationship of yin and yang is what creates everything in our dualistic world. And, like Reiki, Macrobiotics also describes illness as a situation of imbalanced energies. We can say that imbalanced energy is toxic; and therefore, that disease is caused by the accumulation of toxins in the body.
* Modern Macrobiotics teaches that yin is expansive, centrifugal motion, and that yang is contractive, centripetal motion — which is just the opposite of reality, in fact! This quirk of Macrobiotics philosophy adds confusion and – more importantly – causes a fundamental misunderstanding of the true nature of certain things. For a lengthy discourse on this, please see the article "Yin and Yang" : ^ ).
We create this imbalance/toxicity in countless ways. We are constantly both taking in and producing yin and yang energies — by eating, by thinking, by feeling (emotion), by doing anything, by doing nothing. Each of us is a circuit in the giant circuit-board we call the Universe; all connected with each other, all exchanging energy continually. And all of us have different balance points, different combinations of yin and yang energies. Even our individual balance points are ever-changing, affected by all that happens within and around us. We are always at some distance from the point of perfect balance; and always, whether consciously or not, striving toward that ever-moving point. The closer we are to the balance point, the healthier; the farther away, the more diseased.
Hmmmm ... if all diseases are caused by energy imbalance/toxicity, then aren't all diseases really a single disease? The disease is the energy imbalance/toxicity — though it may present itself in a countless variety of masks: everything from a runny nose to a swollen prostate gland; heart attack; loss of hearing; cuts and bruises (yes, there are no "accidents," everything is a reflection of our degree of balance at a particular moment); indigestion; cancer; AIDS; and new combinations of symptoms arising faster than they can be given names.
Modern medicine is very good at naming symptoms, often by simply describing them in Latin. Naming things can be helpful, but this naming also leads to the mistaken notion that different collections of symptoms equal different diseases. Which leads to the notion that each "disease" has a different cause and a different cure. This creates an illusion of overwhelming complexity and focuses our attention at the wrong level. Instead of looking for the one, single, underlying disease, we end up fascinated by the myriad of symptoms that sprout from it. The real disease and its cause are never addressed by modern medicine, and so cannot be cured by it.
More confusion has been caused by what is called the Germ Theory of disease. With the microscopic discovery of a whole world of bacteria and viruses — and the observation that certain ones are characteristically associated with certain "diseases" (symptoms) — the microscopic thinkers concluded that a particular "germ" or family of germs was the cause of each particular "disease" (collection of symptoms), and that the way to cure the "disease" was to destroy the germs.**
** The Germ Theory of disease was invented and promoted by Louis Pasteur — in opposition to 2 of his peers, Antoine Béchamp and Claude Bernard. Béchamp had discovered what he called microzymes: prebacterial particles present in all living things. He said that these particles could change form and size, depending on the general condition of their host organism — and that disease occurred only when the normal functioning of the host was impaired. He said that microbes could not survive in a healthy, well-balanced organism.
Claude Bernard, who agreed with Béchamp, became famous for his proclamation "The microbe is nothing, the terrain is everything." Possibly this pronouncement was so memorable because Bernard demonstrated the truth of it by drinking a glass of water teeming with cholera and showing no ill effects!
Nonetheless, Pasteur continued propagating his Germ Theory; and he was such a good salesman that people bought it. The discoveries of Bernard and Béchamp (whose scientific credentials dwarfed Pasteur's) were all but forgotten. And then, Pasteur himself, on his deathbed, proclaimed that his Germ Theory was indeed wrong: "Bernard was right; the pathogen is nothing; the terrain is everything."
One of the dirty little secrets in modern medicine is that Béchamp's and Bernard's refutations of Germ Theory, and Pasteur's own recanting of it, have been conveniently swept under the rug. In fact, when Pasteur's laboratory notes finally came to light (almost a century after his death, and though he had instructed his family never to release them!), they showed that some of his experiments did not even demonstrate what he had claimed at the time.
Despite all this, the Germ Theory continues to be taught and believed — as, without it, there would be no basis for the existence of an antibiotics ("against life") industry. For more on this topic, you might like this article about Pasteur, and/or this one, The Lost History of Medicine, and/or this one, Béchamp & Pasteur – Clash & Consequence.
Reiki, Johrei, and Macrobiotics all take a more macro-scopic look at the situation. Seeing not only the symptoms but also the underlying cause — which is always an energy imbalance/toxicity — they focus on healing it by helping the body attain balance and release the toxins.
Macrobiotics tends to focus more on physical toxins — emphasis on diet and physical environment — while Johrei works directly and solely on spiritual toxins, with the understanding that "the spiritual precedes the physical." In other words, everything physical is merely a materialization of something spiritual — and, in fact, the physical manifestation (symptoms) of disease can be pre-empted if the spiritual toxins are dissolved early enough. Reiki, in a way, combines both these strategies: It brings about healing simultaneously on the spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical levels.
All three approaches work by promoting the release of toxins. This is nothing miraculous; releasing toxins and balancing energies is the body's natural work. However, when we reach the point of showing physical symptoms (and sometimes even before), we have become unbalanced enough that the body is not able to function normally. Then Reiki, Johrei, and Macrobiotics, together or individually, can bring the body back to its normal functionality of healing itself.***
*** IMPORTANT NOTE: There are indeed times when we may become so extremely out-of-balance that more drastic actions are necessary. In emergency, life-or-death situations, aggressive medical procedures are sometimes the only things that can hold body and soul together long enough for healing to happen. Such emergencies are what modern medicine was designed for — and I'm very thankful to it for saving my life more than once! However, this emergency medicine has come to be mistaken for everyday "health care" — and, applied in that way, has created a world of escalating disease. [ related article ]
The medical approach is to quarantine the toxins in the body, by the use of drugs. This prevents the body from getting rid of the toxins. If we have a cough, for instance: "Here, take this cough syrup, it'll stop you from coughing!" And it does. But what appears to be magic is in fact only sleight of hand. It stops the cough by paralyzing the body's natural cough reflex. Is that a good thing? Would it be better to consider why the body is coughing in the first place? Coughing is a release of toxins. Releasing them allows the body to heal and get back to normal, even though the coughing is unpleasant.
If we take the cough syrup, we feel better not to be coughing ... but what has really happened? The toxins that were causing us to cough have been driven deep into the body, where they are held prisoner, so to speak, by the "magic" of the cough syrup energy. The medical philosophy, though never stated, being, "We don't care how ugly the monster is, as long as we don't have to see it!"
The problem is, after years and years of binding various toxic monsters inside our body (just keeping them out of sight), there comes a time when the shackles no longer hold them. All those prisoners, who individually were not really dangerous, eventually combine forces and emerge as something truly big and nasty. Eventually, something so nasty that all the medicine in the world won't keep the lid on it! And there's an added penalty: The drugs themselves are severely toxic to the body.
IT'S only fair to note that we can create a similar condition without medicine, by improper eating, for instance. For each of us there is an optimal balance of yin and yang energies at every moment, and we must learn to sense it. That is what the study and practice of Macrobiotics is all about. However, there has been a tendency among long-time Macro-bots to become excessively yin (too much constrictive, compressive energy), and in recent years the Macrobiotics community has been shocked by the deaths (and near-deaths) of several of its gurus, from degenerative diseases such as cancer and heart ailments. It seems to many of us that these are often cases of excessive constriction trapping imbalances/toxins in the body over a long period, until they cumulatively break free and manifest something lethal.
Now that we see there is really only one disease — imbalance/toxicity — what are we to make of the famous Germ Theory? Johrei turns the Germ Theory on its head. Instead of seeing "germs" as the cause of illness, it sees them as a consequence of illness. They arise from the illness, and in fact they devour the toxins! It is in the dead and dying bodies of these germs that the toxins pass out of our own bodies, purifying us and allowing us to heal. In other words, Johrei teaches that the viruses and bacteria that modern medicine devotes itself to killing are, in truth, Hazardous Materials Cleanup Squads, who sacrifice their own lives for us. Again, the medical approach is to kill off these natural healers and drive the toxins (and our disease) deeper into the body, where they can be ignored for a time.****
**** In an article called "I Am a Spiritual Scientist," written in 1954, Mokichi Okada (the founder of Johrei) wrote: "The established opinion of contemporary medical science is that the cause of all disease are germs. The discovery of germs marked the beginning of a new epoch, and medical science seemed to show great progress after this discovery. This progress, however, was only progress of the material, half progress. Killing germs does not get to the fundamental cause of disease. ... Germs and bacteria are only the result of disease, not its cause." He also said: "Germs and bacteria grow up from larva and larva are what we know as virus." Viruses originate from spiritual impurities, he said; they begin as inorganic matter, then become organic, and grow into bacteria. Notice how nearly identical this is to Antoine Béchamp's description of the prebacterial particles he called microzymes.
I accept the Germs-as-toxin-eaters paradigm, because it duplicates perfectly something that has been validated in the outside world. In the realm of gardening, it has long been thought that insects (with few exceptions) were the enemy, and fortunes have been made selling chemical poisons to kill them. Those nasty bugs, eating our crops! But it turns out that the bugs only eat plants that are diseased or out-of-balance with the environment. It has been demonstrated that an insect that mistakenly takes a bite of a healthy plant can actually explode! The sugar content of a healthy plant is so high — such expansive, yang energy — it will disintegrate the insect! (It's important to realize that a truly healthy plant is one growing naturally, in healthy soil, without artificial chemicals.) These discoveries and many other fascinating ones are described beautifully in The Secret Life of Plants (Tompkins and Bird, 1989).
With macro-scopic vision (instead of microscopic) we see a perfect analogy here. Healthy soil grows healthy plants, which are not bothered by insects. Diseased soil grows diseased plants, which attract insects to eat the toxins. In the same way, when our body is within a certain range of energetic balance, we are "healthy" and free of "germs." When we become sufficiently imbalanced and diseased, we attract or give rise to viruses and bacteria, which eat the toxins. So it's best if we can welcome them gratefully and let them do their job of purifying us, even though it's unpleasant. In Johrei we have a saying: "Ouch, Thank you!" : ^ )
Reiki, Johrei, and Macrobiotics all work by accelerating the body's natural healing process — and it's important to distinguish between true healing and the removal of symptoms. Treatments such as drugs and surgery merely target the symptoms, masking the disease and leaving it to grow and reappear. Even energy treatments such as Reiki and Johrei can be used in a symptomatic way, if personal will is involved. True spiritual healing is a matter of surrender and acceptance, and aligns us with Divine Intent (as manifested in the macrocosmic Universe).
It's important to realize that symptoms of illness are messages along our path of spiritual awakening. Many kinds of treatment can remove or hide the symptoms, but true healing occurs only with a change of consciousness. Without such a change, we eventually replay the same symptoms or create different ones with the same message. Used properly, Reiki, Johrei, and Macrobiotics are tools for balancing and harmonizing our personal vibrations with those of the greater Universe, bringing fundamental changes of consciousness and true, natural healing.