Qualities Required of the Healer

Qualities Required of the Healer

In the laws and rules which I have given, certain necessary characteristics of the healer are mentioned and certain needed requirements are indicated. These we should register first of all as they not only present qualities and attitudes which are essential to the successful practice of the healing art, but they indicate also why – up till the present time – there has been practically no successful or systematized healing of any patient under any of the current healing schools. There has been what I might call “accidental healing,” due to the fact that the patient would have been healed anyway, for his hour to pass over had not yet arrived. Deliberate conscious healing, with full understanding, has only occurred when the healer was an initiate of high degree, patterning himself upon the life and the nature of the Christ.

Let us now look at the indicated qualities and attitudes. I will briefly enumerate and comment.

1. The power to contact and work as a soul. “The art of the healer consists in releasing the soul.” Think for a moment what this power involves. The healer is not only in immediate and conscious touch with his own soul, but through that soul contact he can easily contact the soul of his patient.
2. The power to command the spiritual will. The particular law involved in the healing act must be “brought into activity by the spiritual will.” This necessitates the capacity to make contact with the Spiritual Triad. Therefore, the antahkarana must be somewhat in process of construction.
3. The power to establish telepathic rapport. The healer must “know the inner stage of thought and of desire” of his patient.
4. He must have exact knowledge. We read that he must “know the point exact through which relief must come.” This is a most important point and one entirely overlooked by the so-called healers in such movements as Christian Science, Unity and others. Healing does not come through an intense affirmation of divinity, or by simply pouring out love and the expression of a vague mysticism. It comes through mastering an exact science of contact, of impression, of invocation, plus an understanding of the subtle apparatus of the etheric vehicle.
5. The power to reverse, reorient and “exalt” the consciousness of the patient. The healer has to “lift the downward focused eyes unto the soul.” This refers to the eyes of the patient. This statement implies limitation, because if the patient is not at the stage in evolution where this is possible, and at the point in evolution where he can contact his own soul, the work of the healer is rendered inevitably futile. The sphere of action, therefore, of the spiritual healer is strictly limited to those who have faith. Faith, however, is the “evidence of things not seen”; that evidence is largely lacking in the majority. Faith is not wishful thinking or an engineered hope. It is evidence of a well-grounded conviction.
6. Power to direct soul energy to the necessary area. “The spiritual or the third eye then directs the healing force.” This presupposes a scientific technique on the healer’s part and the right functioning of the mechanism of received and directed force within the head.
7. Power to express magnetic purity and the needed radiance. “The healer must achieve magnetic purity…and attain dispelling radiance.” This involves great personal discipline in the daily life, and the habit of pure living. Purity inevitably and automatically results in radiance.
8. Power to control the activity of the mechanism of the head. The healer must have “linked the centers in the head.” The true healer has established a magnetic area within his head which presents itself or expresses itself through a definitely recognizable radiation.
9. Power over his own centers. The healer has to “concentrate the needed energy within the needed center.” The center in the patient’s form which is nearest to the seat of the physical trouble has to be made receptive to the energy discharged into it by the corresponding center in the healer’s body. It will be obvious to you, therefore, how much knowledge and energy-control is required by the true healer.
10. Power to utilize both exoteric and esoteric methods of healing. The healer will employ “methods of occult healing though the ordinary medical and surgical methods will not be withheld.” I have constantly emphasized the God-given nature of experimental medicine – which is a phrase qualifying medicine today, and qualifying still more metaphysical healing. There is no need to call in a spiritual healer for broken bones or for those difficulties which orthodox medicine has already mastered. However, the patient’s general morale and condition can be justifiably helped whilst wise surgery and ameliorating medical knowledge are applied. This the usual so-called metaphysical healer is apt to ignore. Healers will be divided eventually into two groups:
    1. Those comprising definitely trained spiritual healers.
    2. Healers with less developed power but with enough radiation and magnetism to aid in the ordinary healing process. These will usually work under the guidance of the spiritual healer.
11. Power to work magnetically. “Thus he can pour the vital healing force upon the patient.” This the healer does through a scientific coordination of his equipment, using the hands as a directing agent. In this way the disease can be healed, ameliorated or worsened, even to the point of death. The responsibility of the healer is therefore great.
12. Power to work with radiation. “Thus can his presence feed the soul life of the patient.” This again is brought about through a system of coordination, but the agent of radiation is then the aura and not the hands.
13. Power to practice at all times complete harmlessness. “The method used by the Perfect One…is harmlessness.” This, we are told, involves a positive expression of poise, an inclusive point of view, and divine understanding. How many healers combine these three qualities and also work through love?
14. Power to control the will and work through love. “The healer…must keep the will in leash.” This is one of the most difficult qualities to be developed, for the will of the healer is frequently so potent in its determination to bring about a healing that it renders the effort to apply that healing process entirely futile. From the reverse angle, frequently the sentimental and mystical desire to love the patient negates all efforts to hold the will in leash. Remember, brother of mine, the spiritual will must be present as a quiet deep pool of power behind all expression of the energy of love.
15. Power eventually to wield the Law of Life. Of this little can be said, for it can only be wielded by those who have developed or who are rapidly developing the consciousness of the Spiritual Triad – a very rare thing as yet.

In the study of these requirements there is no need for discouragement. Such a study will serve to set a needed goal for all healers in the New Age. It will also explain why the various healing systems which are practiced today throughout the world (particularly in the Anglo-American countries) have hitherto notably failed, in spite of their claims. None of them – if they kept properly certified records which would be scientifically accurate (and practically none of them do) – would register more than the tiniest percentage of cures based upon pure spiritual healing. The percentage cured is less than one in a million “cures.” These cures would have recovered in any case in due time, if left to nature or to ordinary medical and surgical science.

But today, so great is the spiritual stimulation in the world, and so vast are the numbers responding to it, that the moving forward of a large group out of the ranks of average humanity on to the Path of Discipleship is inevitable. This moving forward will provide – during the next five hundred years – many healers who will fulfil to some degree the requirements which I have listed above.

The philosophies endorsed by the various systems such as Unity and Christian Science are basically sound and state the fundamental platitudes (the essential truths, nevertheless) which underlie all that I have said above. People, however, are not healed by the enunciation of platitudes, by the affirmation of divinity or by the statement of abstract theories. They will be healed when the right time comes because of the ability of the healer in the New Age to express in himself and in his daily life the quality of divinity, to be spiritually capable of invoking the soul of his patient, and also to be magnetically pure, and through the power of a particular type of radiated energy to stimulate the patient to heal himself – through the medium of his own inner mechanism. The healer in the New Age will possess the ability to make the following contacts with both ease and understanding:

1. With his own soul.
2. With the soul of the patient.
3. With the particular type of energy which is to be found either in the soul or the personality ray of the patient.
4. With any one of his own centers which is needed by him in order to act as a transmitting agency for energy to be sent into an area governed by some center in the body of the patient.
5. With the center in the patient’s etheric body which controls the area where the disease is located.

This, as you can appreciate, connotes much technical knowledge. Added to this, the healer must also possess that spiritual perception which will enable him to intuit the “karma of the moment,” as it is esoterically called, and therefore to know if a cure is permissible, practicable, or impossible. This is a form of knowledge which no healer in the world at this time possesses, no matter what his claim may be. Again I say, this is no cause for discouragement.

What is truly needed, and what will be brought about as the decades elapse, will be that disciples and men and women of spiritual orientation will enter the medical  profession and perfect themselves in the techniques of orthodox medicine and in an exoteric knowledge of physical anatomy and of pathological symptoms, plus the orthodox remedies and modes of handling disease. To this technical knowledge and understanding they will add a measure of esoteric learning, and they will then begin to combine, whilst practising their profession, both the exoteric and the esoteric wisdom which is theirs. This will at first be purely experimental, but out of the experience gained in utilizing both fields of knowledge a new medical science will emerge, based upon two paramount recognized factors:

1. A cumulative mass of knowledge and information anent the dense physical vehicle. This has been accumulated by men of science down the ages and is largely proven and true.
2. A constantly growing understanding of the nature of the etheric body, of the centers, and of the transmission and circulation of certain controlled energies.

This combination of two aspects of truth will be greatly facilitated by the increasing sensitivity and almost clairvoyant perception of developing humanity. One of the outstanding results of the recent world war will be found to be a tremendously increased capacity for nervous reaction. This nervous receptivity is at present abnormal and the results are sad. The reason for this is that the nervous apparatus of the average human being (and by that I mean his nervous system, plus the nadis which underlie it) is not yet adequate to the demands upon it. Time, however, will adjust all this.

Both metaphysical healers and orthodox medical men at this time are apt to repudiate each other with much violence. Taking it as a whole, the orthodox physician is less rabid and exclusive than the modern metaphysician. They know too well the limitations of their present medical attainments. But the so-called spiritual healer recognizes at present no limitations, and this definitely constitutes a weakness. Both groups, in time, must become collaborators with each other and not opponents. Both have much to learn from each other, and both must recognize that the particular fields of knowledge for which they stand are equally a divine expression and indicate the ability of the human mind to search, to record, to discover and to formulate truth, so that others may benefit thereby.

I would recall to your attention the fact that both groups have much to do – the one in penetrating into the realm of the subtle and the intangible (and this is rapidly being done), and the other in descending from its vague abstractions and impractical generalizations in order to learn to recognize the facts anent the objective and the tangible; this is not as yet being done; metaphysical healing, so-called, is lost amidst a mist of words and high-sounding affirmations.

The sincerity of the majority of those who belong to these schools of thought is unquestioned; their motives are almost uniformly sincere and good. In both groups charlatans are to be found and also a small – a very small – minority of self-seeking and ignorant exploiters of men. Among them are numbered both physicians and metaphysicians who are commercially oriented; they are, however, a minority. In the sincere investigator and lover of humanity in both groups will be found the future hope of medical science as it seeks to meet the need of humanity – a humanity which is becoming increasingly sensitive and subjectively oriented.