THE CAUSE OF DISEASE

Science teaches us that the living as well as the dead organism of both man and animal are swarming with bacteria of a hundred various kinds; that from without we are threatened with the invasion of microbes with every breath we draw, and from within by leucomaines, aerobes, anaerobes, and what not. But Science never yet went so far as to assert with the occult doctrine that our bodies, as well as those of animals, plants, and stones, are themselves altogether built up of such beings; which, except larger species, no microscope can detect. . . . Each particle — whether you call it organic or inorganic — is a life. Every atom and molecule in the Universe is both life-giving and death-giving to that form, inasmuch as it builds by aggregation universes and the ephemeral vehicles ready to receive the transmigrating soul, and as eternally destroys and changes the forms and expells those souls from their temporary abodes. It creates and kills; it is self-generating and self-destroying; it brings into being, and annihilates, that mystery of mysteries — the living body of man, animal, or plant, every second in time and space; and it generates equally life and death, beauty and ugliness, good and bad, and even the agreeable and disagreeable, the beneficent and maleficent sensations. — The Secret Doctrine, I, 260-1

Life-atoms are intimately connected with the causes and manifestation of disease. Both health and disease are karmically the consequences of the characters and tendencies which we ourselves have impressed upon the life-atoms composing the various sheaths in which we, the human egos, are clothed during earth life: impressed upon them by our thoughts, our feelings, our desires and our habits. This does not mean, however, that a man has now a photographic duplication, as it were, of his last physical body with the same diseases that he may have been suffering from then. Predisposition to health or disease, shape of body, and physiognomy, are all matters of karmic change, of evolution.

A man in one life may have a disease and exhaust the karmic causes which brought it about, and in the next life be perfectly free from it, or he may not be free — it all depends upon his karma. We have the same life-atoms and the same astral monad as before, both of course modified according to the karma previously engendered. The karma of these life-atoms and of this astral monad is simply brought over from the past life, and begins anew from the very point at which that life was closed. Life is continuous; but as all things change, including the very life-atoms of our body, and as our soul has changed for the better in its devachan by absorbing its experiences, so the new man is indeed the old man, yet is in a sense new.

We have now practically the same body that we had in our last life. Nevertheless, as a general rule — save in certain instances due to karma, as in the cases of those who die in childhood or in early youth — the reincarnating ego is born into a different race when it returns to earth, into a different era, into different surroundings. The life-atoms are identical, but they change necessarily, just as last Monday is not the same as the Monday to come, although we are the same person.

How about the growth and change even in one life of a human being? Has a full-grown man the same contour that he had as the newborn babe? And yet it is the same individual, the same life-atoms. Is the child the same as the adult man? Yes and no; the same body, but how different! So it is with succeeding lives. Just as the child grows into the adult by slow stages, so does a man pass from incarnation to incarnation, continuously the same in essential being, although in each new life undergoing a change, let us hope, for the better. We are making ourselves now very largely what we shall be ten years hence. We may have conquered a disease that we are today suffering from, or we may have a disease then that at present we do not have. In either case we ourselves are responsible. Disease, therefore, is the working out of karma, for everything that comes to a man is the consequence, the flowering, of seeds sown in the past.

Our physical life-atoms, being our children, partake of our swabhava, and respond to our thoughts and feelings, to our example; but it does not necessarily follow that a man whose present life has been marked by high endeavor and by noble characteristics should in the next earth life have a healthy body. The contrary of this is too well known: noble-minded men and women who are frail and sickly, and, on the other hand, vicious characters who have healthy bodies. How is this to be explained?

In the case of a fine and unselfish character who has a weak physical vehicle, he has won his freedom so far as the inner man is concerned; but so far as the life-atoms are concerned which he still has to use, he has not yet cleansed them of the preceding stain which that same spirit-soul brought upon them. But in time when the cycle of a frail physical body will have passed, then the man will be able to shine in splendor.

It is likewise true that some corrupt and evil human beings have bodies of physical beauty, but this is rare. More often, it is the unadvanced human souls who possess bodies of physical perfection, simply because the fire within is not yet aroused, and neither consumes nor enflames the body. Genius usually appears in a weak and often decrepit body because the inner fire is too strong for it, and can tear the body to pieces when it does not distort. Yet, if one were given the choice, who would not liefer be a genius, particularly a spiritual genius, even with a weak body, than an individual whose soul is spiritually dead — or as yet wholly unawake!

To say that selfishness is the cause of all disease is too general a statement. To be more specific, it is the form of selfishness called passion, whether conscious or unconscious, which is the fruitful cause of disease — unconquered violent passion, such as hatred, anger, lust, etc. Any such passion, mental or physical, shakes the lower constitution of man; it escapes from the control of the guiding hand of the higher part of his being, changing the direction of flow of the pranic life-currents, condensing them here, rarefying them there. It thus interferes with the normal, easy workings of nature, which in this connection means health. In fact, selfishness is at the root not merely of most disease, but of most evil-doing, and both are originally caused not by unconquerable but by unconquered passions.

The symptoms of disease, which only too often are treated as being the disease itself, are not infrequently the efforts of the forces of health to throw the poison out of the body. A disease should be understood as a purifying process because the end will be a cleansing. It should be welcomed in the sense of a quiet understanding of the situation, and without either fear or an attempt to complicate or hinder the process. But many people have an idea that the curing of disease consists in damming it back, shutting the doors against its egress out of the system. Such damming back, however, allows the roots of the disease to take firmer hold and spread and accumulate energy, so that when it reappears — as it inevitably will for its roots have not been extirpated — its reaction upon the body is more violent than it would have been if the disease had been allowed to take its course. As W. Q. Judge has written:

. . . diseases are gross manifestations showing themselves on their way out of the nature so that one may be purified. To arrest them through thought ignorantly directed is to throw them back into their cause and replant them in their mental plane.

This is the true ground of our objection to metaphysical healing practices, which we distinguish from the assumptions and so-called philosophy on which those methods are claimed to stand. For we distinctly urge that the effects are not brought about by any philosophical system whatever, but by the practical though ignorant use of psycho-physiological processes. — The Path, September 1892, p. 190

There is an ethical side to all this which has not been sufficiently touched upon. In many instances diseases may be a heaven-sent blessing: they cure egoism, they teach patience, and bring in their train the realization of the need for living rightly. If we with our ungoverned emotions had bodies which could not be diseased, they might well be weakened and killed by excesses. Diseases actually are warnings to reform our thoughts and to live in accordance with nature's laws.

A new cycle in medicine entered the world in the latter half of the nineteenth century: no longer were human beings dosed until they died with mighty draughts of this and mighty potions of that. Doctors were beginning to see that it is nature that cures, and that the wise physician is a guide and an eliminator rather than a doser. Nevertheless, because of the still imperfect knowledge which physicians have, diseases in their acute stages often kill. Their course is too rapid for the human system to withstand the strain. On the other hand, the medical practitioners of the distant future will understand so well what diseases are, and the methods of curing them — indeed, how to prevent them — that they will lead a disease out so gently that it will appear to vanish while actually it is manifesting itself, even as the body today very often throws off a sickness by its own unaided powers. (1)

As I have already said, there is no certain knowledge as to the meaning and cause of disease, with the result that new systems of medical practice are constantly being introduced. For example, some advocate the use of stimulants and narcotics; others, eliminative and suppressive measures, with respect merely to symptoms. I might add that there is more justification for these and other methods in vogue in certain of the regular schools of medicine, than there is for those opposed to all medical practice, such as the schools of so-called mental or faith healing. It is a very dangerous thing indeed by the use of affirmations and denials, or by methods of intense psychologic thinking, to dam back elemental forces working their way outwards through the human constitution. Consequently, however imperfect medical science may be today, it nevertheless treats the body with material means, which are the least harmful.

The ancient wisdom has some points of agreement with the "sects of deniers," as H. P. Blavatsky neatly called them; for instance, the teaching that a bright and cheerful spirit is a good thing to have; again, that life should be faced with an attitude of courage, and with an appeal to the spiritual energy inherent in the universe. But these are mere isolated points of agreement. There are other things which are impossible to accept, such as the notion that matter does not exist. If we were to deny the existence of matter, we should be obliged to deny the existence of spirit also, because spirit and matter are the polar antitheses of each other. Above all, there is the question of the concentration of personal interests around the individual, and the strenuous attempt at getting help for oneself, which is so contrary to the true spiritual ideal. If a man, in order to seek relief from some affliction, uses the spiritual powers of his being and tries to drag them down into the material world, he is proceeding in a direction opposite to nature's evolutionary flow, which is upwards. The rule is to raise, not to debase. Such action is a swimming against the current; and this is where the system of the healers or deniers is basically wrong.

We must remember that everything that happens to a man is the working of karma, and that diseases are the result of inharmonious thoughts and emotions of this or of a past life now working themselves out through the body. More particularly, all diseases are brought about through the instrumentality of elementals. This is the ancient teaching, and was the belief of the entire world until the West, in its supreme wisdom, began to look upon this consensus of opinion of the human race as founded upon superstition.

In the New Testament, due to its faulty translation arising out of a misapprehension of what those early Christian writers intended to say when they wrote these tracts, diseases are ascribed to the operation of devils or demons — a mistranslation which is grotesque. These daimonia, as the Greek word runs, are simply the lowest order of animate and sensate creatures — commonly called in theosophy elementals — forming the lowest step of the hierarchical ladder of which the highest is the condition of spiritual existence of as well as an actual world inhabited by the gods. Between elemental and god there is a wide range of difference in evolutionary progress, but no difference in essence or in origin, man occupying an intermediate stage on this ladder of life.

All diseases, therefore, from epilepsy or cancer to a common cold, from tuberculosis to a toothache, from rheumatism to any other physical ailment, are brought about through elementals working as the instruments of the karmic law. And the same applies to mental diseases: an outburst of anger, a raging temper, persistent melancholia, and the manias of various kinds, all are elemental in origin. Homicidal mania is an example in point; essentially it is quite unhuman as well as being inhuman — it is elemental. In this case an elemental has control of the human temple, and has for the time being dispossessed the rightful human dweller therein. Such a state is due to weakness and self-indulgence.

Epilepsy is likewise due to an elemental, which is a nature spirit, an energy center, a consciousness center, of an unevolved kind which in this case has usurped temporarily the position normally occupied by the human soul in the body. Epileptics, in actual fact, are 'moon-struck' when they suffer an attack. In this connection it may be of interest to note that one of the ancient Mesopotamian gods, spoken of in the early Christian and Jewish scriptures, is Beel-Zebub, usually translated as "Lord of the Flies." Zebub does mean flies, but the fly is mystically symbolic of an astral animate entity, and hence was taken as representative of the character and antics of the elementals. Therefore, Lord of Flies simply means Lord of the Elementals — of the elemental forces and powers; and that lord is the moon.

In antiquity and during the Middle Ages, epilepsy was known as the "sacred illness" on account of its marked psychological element which contrasts it so strongly with other more purely physical afflictions. It was believed that elementals of a higher grade, possessing a larger psychological sphere of activity, were concerned in the "falling sickness." This thought also prevails throughout the Orient, as in the South Sea Islands where things which are sacred in any sense are called tabu, forbidden, and considered to be under the special protection of the elemental spirits of nature.

Epileptic seizures are in reality no worse than any other outbreak of disease, for, as indicated, every disease can be traced to the same causes: an originating series of thoughts and emotions, eventuating in the present life in a distortion and an inharmonious interaction of the pranic currents in the body. According to the character of the emotions and thoughts, so is the disease.

In regard to cancer, there is one fundamental cause branching into two: deep-seated selfishness, first; and next, acting on this general background, unregulated emotionalism, the causes of which may have been sown ages back in other lives. The combined power of these two vital-astral currents weakens or even destroys resistance, and so directs the currents of life that they leave certain portions of the body where they are naturally in check, and center on others where they run riot. However, by control of the emotions and by self-forgetfulness, it is possible to help nature modify the course and development of the disease. Many more people would suffer from cancerous growths on the body if nature did not automatically gather together its forces of resistance — intellectual, emotional, moral, physiological, and what not — and thus cause the body to react so strongly that the resistance wards off the attack.

Many things regarding the human body are great mysteries, simply because we do not know enough about our evolutionary history. For example, we should understand cancer better if we realized that all growths, malignant or benign, are physiological memories of the method of propagation which the early third root-race used unconsciously. Then such growths were normal and natural; now they are abnormal at best and malignant at the worst. Then they were caused by the natural currents of life running true and strong; now they are caused by the same currents of life running strong in a wrong minor direction — wrong because occurring out of evolutionary time.

There is, however, a sure preventive of all diseases which partake of both a physiological and a psychological character, and that is the practicing of the age-old virtues, such as the paramitas.

As diseases are the karmic result of past errors of living, of working inharmoniously with nature, the way of health is to work with nature; and this is possible because we are an integral part of it. Every sage and seer has taught the way. The method is voiced again and again in every great religion and philosophy. But no true sage or adept ever interferes with the karmic law, for they are the servants of that law and manifest it in their works among mankind. In some senses also are they the bringers about of the karmic law; for thereby is natural equilibrium achieved and evolution advanced. Thus are they healers of the souls of men. Heal the soul and you heal the body