Open Your Heart, Mind and Soul

Apr 01, 09:39 PM

Current Headlines: By Dr Mohamed Mackeen

THE government has recognised the legitimacy of selected complementary systems of health therapies that are presently under the regulatory control of the Malaysian Society for Complementary Therapies, an umbrella body approved by the Ministry of Health.

Spiritual healthcare, education, consultancy, counselling, and therapy come within the range of the complementary therapies under the body, mind, and spirit division of this society.

This article introduces the subject of `spiritual health' and sets down the operational principles and therapeutic modalities.

This is exclusively based on the infallible evidence of the divinely-inspired knowledge (or revealed knowledge) and transcendental insights, which have been preserved in different forms and literatures from ancient times in the civilisational histories of all global communities.

The spiritual health care concept presented here is in no way an alternative to or a replacement for any of the existing physical or psychic health management and restorative systems.

SPIRITUAL health care is a concern that pre-existed conventional medicine ever since the creation of the human body.

It was an integral part of the messages proclaimed by the spiritually-awakened informants of the Creator (i.e. the prophets and other enlightened individuals) who appeared from time to time on Earth.

They left behind an imperishable heritage for the preservation, management, and understanding of the process of birth and life on this earth, of what happens beyond death, also of understanding the "subtle" creations co-existing with mankind.

This was with an avowed pre-intention to interfere with ordered human life generally and to mount invasions of the physical body in the human system to disrupt the metabolic functioning and cause pain and chronic suffering, leaving behind irreversible stains; these may be likened to the role of the "free-radicals".

Health management constituted an essential part of this divine blueprint for mankind. It is a part of the essence of life and not something external to it.

The divine energy to overcome these and protect ourselves is latent in every human being and is not extraneous to him.

At the bottom of this revealed message pertaining to health care is the notion of the spirit, the indefinable primordial life-energy - the ruh (called by different names in different spiritual traditions), which, on a time-scale, has a point of entry and exit in the incessant biological order of birth and death.

At the human level, the concern for an awareness of the pivotal role and the potential power of the spirit (ruh) in the management of life, including health and disease states, had been expounded in explicit and implicit terms in revelational and inspirational sources in different societies of the world.

In the West, with the collapse of the medieval world view and its understanding of universe, its origin and development, the degree of spiritual awareness in the hearts of the people was determined and limited by the emerging new moulds of thinking as those of Nicolaus Copernicus, Galilei Galileo and Johannes Kepler and with the awakening that followed the Renaissance, the spiritual factor lost its original and all embracing appeal.

Emerging from the scientific world view - posited by Isaac Newton and Rene Descartes and the more secular and pragmatic orientation of Francis Bacon's theory, which had kept man further and further away from deeper issues of mankind's spiritual life and purpose, there is now a new realisation that the scientific and philosophic positions taken by scientists have removed mankind further away from man's inherent spiritual intuition.

The over-stressed focus on material economics had for long robbed man of his deeper calling for the spiritual experience. This old mechanistic world view has been discredited since the early part of the 20th century, mainly through the influence of Albert Einstein, the pioneers of quantum physics and the newer research on prayer and intentionality.

The old prejudices take time to die and remnants of the mechanistic world view still linger in our consciousness. It has now been held that in order to perceive and experience higher spiritual states, we must at least be open to the possibility that such perception exists.

In other words, we must "knock on the door" before spiritual inspiration can be detected. If we attempt to look at spiritual experience with a closed and sceptical mind, we would perceive nothing and consequently prove to ourselves quite mistakenly that higher spiritual experience is a myth.

For centuries, our hearts were blocked to these perceptions because we did not at that time visualise Reality or intend to be seekers of transcendental truth.

They did not go along with our secular view of the world. This sceptical attitude gained supremacy in the 17th century because the failing medieval world view it succeeded was thought to be full of controversial theories and suggestive thinking not supported by truth based on acceptable evidence.

The present day understanding in the West of spiritualism is that it is not just an abstract theory or dogma but a real perception of the spiritual value as a factor in daily lives.

The daily management of the health of the physical body is largely bound up with the understanding and realisation of the spiritual factor, which is intrinsic to the creation and functioning of the human physical structure (i.e. the skin, muscles, organs, the sensitive gut, the vascular system and the bones), the neural, the psychic systems and above all the metabolic process, which concerns itself with turning the fuel in food into energy that the body can use.

In the words of James Redfield, "When the medieval cosmology began to collapse, we humans in the West were thrown into deep confusion concerning the higher existential meaning of our lives.

"We looked around and realised that in the final analysis, we merely found ourselves here whirling through space on a planet that circles one of a billion other stars without knowing why; surely there was some force of creation that put us here for an intended purpose."

The fuller life we sensed was not about mere psychological growth but a new awareness necessitated by a deeper transformation that could only be called spiritual.

Doctor Len Saputo, founder and president of Health Medicine Forum and medical director of the Health Medicine Institute in California, presents the following views in his book entitled Boasting Immunity: "Disease is regarded as more than physical disability and psychological challenge; rather it is thought of as an opportunity to learn more about who we are and as a tool to move us forward in our spiritual path.

"Many Americans are encouraging their health care practitioners to include spiritual practice as part of their treatment."

He continued further: "Modern medicine is re-awakening to the importance of both science and spirit and is looking for ways to merge this inseparable perceptive in healing.

"A survey of 1,000 American adults reported that 79 per cent believed that spiritual faith could help people recover from disease. Almost 30 medical schools now include training in religion and spirituality."

In the East, the supremacy of the spiritual factor in its diverse forms had stood the test of times and the spiritual insight of man, far from waning, blossomed into a full and effective tradition.

It captured the spiritual imagination of the masses to such an extent that it provided the only source of divine energy that could sustain them through the stresses and strains of life in its totality, especially at times when they were plagued by chronic and debilitating diseases or when faced with life-threatening prognosis.

Despite enormous challenges posed by the emergence of scientific thought, the rise of modern medical science and economic goals of life and the host of other developments, including the deep impact of technology, the urge to mobilise the store house of spiritual energy is firmly entrenched in the hearts of the masses and it is never left as a last resort in their fight for life.

The most remarkable truth in our understanding of the concept of "spiritual" health is the realisation at some stage of our temporal life, that within the anatomical framework of all living human beings, there are two intangibles and imperceptibles.

They are the spirit (ruh) and the conscious self (nafs), which appear at specific times in the biological life process as it evolved from stage to stage through the three dark chambers of the mother's womb (as-sulumat ath-thalath) - (Al-Quran-39:6).

Whereas the spirit is the immortal primordial life-force which emanates from the divine essence and is self-subsisting in nature, the conscious self is the self-consciousness which comes into active existence with the entry of the spirit into the human foetus 120 days after conception.

In other words, the spirit and the conscious self are caged in the human physical body for the duration of life on this earth; whereas the spirit does not need a physical basis for its existence, for the conscious self cannot exist without the body.

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