We are in bondage under the Law so long as we remain in ignorance of its true nature, but in the wisdom of the Christ we become free, because there is no longer any dissonance between our individual keynote and that of the Universe. This is the meaning of the teaching of Paul, the great biblical metaphysician.
"Behold I make all things new," declared Christ. When we are worthy to be freed from past karmic bonds, we contact the Law of Liberation. The choice is then ours, to reject or to accept, to remain under bondage or to be free. All biblical healings were so ordained by the worthiness of the recipient.
"The soul's faults of today crystallize into the body's ailments of tomorrow. Spirit is always the builder of the body. The miracles of the Master's healings are only for those who have ears to hear and eyes to see." Thus wrote the great Paracelsus.
Impediment of speech follows upon a misuse of the sacred life force. An injury or loss of the tongue is a consequence of blasphemy, the injury of others through gossip, or the betrayal of a sacred trust. "The tongue is a little member full of deadly evils." Other illustrations of the Law may be observed in the loss of fingers, as the karmic result of unfair and dishonest practices; loss of hands, as a result Of committing wanton destruction as frequently occurs in war, for instance; loss of feet, resulting from walking in paths of wrongdoing and leading others therein; bodily deformity resulting from the perpetration of cruelties such as the hideous punishments of the horror chambers of the Inquisition; spinal trouble, through using spiritual forces for purposes of black magic and the like; stomach and digestive troubles from a gluttonous and debauched appetite; heart trouble through intense selfish and personal love which failed to regard the welfare of others; and tuberculosis resulting from materialistic thinking and living. Sometimes the karmic consequences of violation of cosmic law follow within one lifetime; more often they occur in later incarnations, after an interval of death, so that an individual may be born innocent in respect of the one lifetime known to him yet suffer these karmic retributions carried over from the past.
In the case of the deaf and dumb man described in the gospel of Mark, Christ Jesus touched the man's ears and his tongue, and looking up to heaven (the symbol of the Eternal), He said, "Ephphatha," which means, "Be opened." He had chosen to follow Christ into the heaven of a new life, freed from the limiting restrictions of the old. His choice may be ours with the same results.
Ephphatha, "be thou opened," refers esoterically to the development of clairvoyance, clairaudience and the power of the spoken Word awakened in the disciple. This symbolic act of the Christ has been commemorated in both the Greek and Roman churches in the Baptismal Rite where the priest touches the ears and mouth of the penitent with a finger which has touched his own lips, and pronounced the word, Ephphatha.
The early Church referred to Ephphatha as the mystery of the Apertio, or Opening, and connected it in the Mysteries of Christ Jesus with the Rite of Baptism wherein the disciple also received the powers of extended sight and hearing. It was possible for the Archangel whom we know as the Christ to permeate all crystallized atoms with the powers emanating from His own home world, the realms of Life Spirit (the Buddhic Plane), where all is life, light and love. Because of this, healings were instantaneous in all cases where He chose to make them so. Such were the forces resident in Him, whose radiations were so powerful that even those who touched His garment were made new again. This fact was again evidenced in the healing of Malchus' ear at the time of the arrest of the Master in Gethsemane.
After the prolonged exercise of His powers, the glorious Christ Spirit would depart for a season of solitude in an Essenian retreat, in order that His mighty vibrations should not completely shatter the human body of Jesus which He had assumed at the time of the Baptism and used throughout His ministry on earth. During these retreats from the public ministry, He withdrew from the mortal body, leaving it in the care of the Essenes, who worked upon it in His absence. This was a specialized work the Essenes were able to do because of their own high spiritual powers which they radiated from themselves. Advanced souls invariably work by projecting their vibrational powers. Thus also did Christ cast out the evil spirits with a word, and healed all that were sick and whose karma entitled them to healing, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by Isaiah, the prophet, saying, "Himself took our infirmities and bore our diseases." (Matt. 8:16)
Paracelsus, admonishes us to remember that the subject of disease and healing can be understood only when considered in the light of karmic law, and this affects not only the physical body, but also the several interpenetrating invisible vehicles of man. "There is a twofold power active in man," he says, "a visible and an invisible. The visible body has its natural forces and the invisible body has its natural forces — and the remedy of all disease and injury that may affect the visible form are contained in the invisible body, because the latter is the seat of power that infuses life into the former and without which the former would have no life."
Visible and invisible body building is divided into cycles of seven. The first cycle of seven is concerned chiefly with the building of the physical and vital bodies, which correlate to the development of the glandular system. The second cycle is concerned with the development of the desire body. It is fiery, and correlates with the chemistry of the circulatory blood system. The third cycle is given over to the development of the mental body. It is airy. Thought now becomes the supreme creative power. In the subconscious it establishes habits, the tendency of which is to crystallize the etheric or vital body. The fourth cycle summarizes or synthesizes the preceding septenates. It recapitulates the past, and in so doing frequently touches karma that has been carried over from previous earth existences, and which is now scheduled for payment.
The age of twenty-eight marks the completion of the fourth septenary cycle when, in the occult sense, the true mental life of the ego is considered to have begun. It marks the final maturation of the four etheric "sheaths" which are the matrix of physical growth.
"For ye should comprehend that there be seven lives in man, of which not one attaineth to the true life which is in the soul." These seven lives are the seven septenary periods from birth to forty-nine years of age, which is the "Middle Age" of the occultist, and marks a time of profound and fundamental change leading to new vision in one who has found "the true life which is in the soul." The seven must be transformed before the fullness of development is realized. Christ Jesus cast seven devils out of Mary of Magdala, which has reference to this sevenfold attainment. After this experience she became the foremost woman disciple of the Master and was the first of them all to be able to lift herself sufficiently high in consciousness to recognize Him when He returned on the blessed Easter Day.
"The true physician must both understand and perceive," writes Paracelsus further. "If he does not see the patient's astrality, he cannot prescribe that which being the curative opposing force, must be roused within the patient's spirit. The true healer looks not for causes in the visible, but seeks to understand the invisible." Truly, man will never know perfect health until he learns to live in harmony with the laws of life. Again in the words of Paracelsus: "Sickness is the expression of a fight that is being waged by the occult man against the degenerate conditions of his nature."
All truth is one and eternal, and the teachings of the Christ have reached down the centuries in the testimonies of the wise and the virtuous to our own day. The following words of a truly New Age teacher, Doctor Alexis Carrel, in his popular book, "Man the Unknown," are to the point: "Science," says he, it studies intensely man's liver, kidneys, all his physical functions, everything except the only important function, which is Thought." This sounds the keynote of the regenerative processes of the New Age. Christing the mind, Paul called it. When this is done, the purification and the perfecting of the body follow. The chains of past causation and the bondage of heredity hold us only so long as we permit them to do so. We are in bondage under the law; we are free in Christ.
"Go and sin no more lest a worse thing come upon thee." These words well express the close connection existing between disease and sin, sin being all that which is not in accord with the constructive powers of nature, or in other words, with divine Law. Illumination and regeneration are one in the processes of healing. To know continuous radiant health is to live in constant communion with the divinity within. This was the message of the Christ as it is of all true teachers who have both preceded and come after Him.
The physical body is a reflection of the Divine Plan as it manifests in the universe about us. It is composed of molecules ensouled by a central point of light or spiritual power, which controls its vibratory rate or motion. Every element in the universe is within man. The microcosm is the child of the macrocosm. Inharmonious interaction, or disease, manifests in the etheric body before it registers in the physical. The tone of the vitalizing vehicle is lowered; it is "jangled out of tune" by ceasing to vibrate in harmony with the keynote of its archetypal pattern.
Positive affirmations and constructive thinking rapidly restore the normal tone of the etheric body and contrariwise, fear is the greatest deterrent to the restoration of health. The Twenty-third Psalm holds a magical power for the alleviation of fear. Let the rhythm of its declarations impart their harmony and strength into the whole being. It will make for health and wholeness. "The Lord is my shepherd, I will not fear." "I will fear no evil for Thou art with me."
The true spiritual healer possesses faculties with which the inner bodies of the patient and their relation to the physical vehicle may be examined. "If our medical students," writes Franz Hartmann, the noted occult writer and physician, "were to apply a part of the time which they employ for the study of external sciences which are practically useless to them, to the development of their interior perceptions, they would become able to see certain processes within the organism of man which are to them at present a mere matter of speculation and which are not discernible by physical means."
The day is not far distant when orthodox medicine, like orthodox science as a whole, and also orthodox religion, will experience a spiritual awakening that will lift it to new heights of service. The quickening activity is under way. Ever greater are the numbers of awakened souls earnestly striving toward the ideal enunciated by the Blessed Lord Himself when He said:
— Corinne Heline
