< previous page page_271 next page >

Page 271
infusing the space around us. The experience is so overwhelming and unexpected when it occurs that it can be initially frightening. It sometimes leaves us speechless. Those times have been among the most profound and memorable of my life  they are a high like no other for me.
In a discussion about psychotherapy, psychologist Larry LeShan has said, "Therapists operate on different theories, but the thing they have in common is, they model." 18 By this, he means that therapists pay attention to the patient, and thereby teach the patient to pay attention to himself. This is true for healers as well. Healers have respect for the patient, and thereby teach the patient to respect himself. "What you're really trying to teach is an attitude, but attitudes can't be taught. They have to be caught."19 What the patient can do, in turn, is to "set an example for his or her own immune system." We can mobilize our own self-healing potential by loving ourselves, says LeShan, and by treating ourselves as if we are worth caring for, and as if our life is worth fighting for.
I think this practice of psychotherapists is similar to that of spiritual healers. The healer provides access to a healing template or field of loving, harmonizing information for the patient, which then amplifies the patient's own self-healing knowledge. It could be that the healer provides clear access to a universal consciousness (which some know as love, or God) for the patient, and that this catalyzes the patient's self-love. I perceive that a spiritual healer opens a window of revitalizing information to the client. Spiritual healing provides a mental by-pass operation that allows new access to a nonlocal, spiritual mind for those who carry conscious or unconscious barriers to it.
I believe love, in the sense of caring about the well-being of others, is active information that organizes the substance of living forms (the body) when barriers to its expression or reception are removed. Such barriers are erected when individuals maintain or defend their psychic separateness. Resentment, guilt, fear, worry, and even grief create such barriers, whereas trust and gratitude dissolve them. Unity consciousness extends itself through space and time, seeking to amplify itself wherever minds remove the barriers to their connections.

 
< previous page page_271 next page >