Rolf Alexander - The Healing Power of the Mind: Practical Techniques for Health and Empowerment

Contents

Publishers Preface

Much of the material in this book appeared as a privately published handbook for the authors own patients. It is no exaggeration to say that it contributed greatly to the recovery of many who previously had looked upon themselves as incurable and that it shortened the duration of the illness to a considerable degree in every case where its principles were followed persistently.

This book was not written for entertainment purposes; it contains specific information that must be mastered by mental effort if you would reap benefits. The principles and the exercises outlined herein have been tested over a period of years by actual practice, and their effects on hundreds of patients have been checked and double-checked. These practices, wedded as they are to the practices of Tibetan and Indian healing methods, will transform your life and lead you to self-mastery through The Healing Power of the Mind.

The Quest

We take the first step toward knowledge, my son, when we realize our ignorance. The difference between the discussion heard in the Almshouse and that heard in the Lamas council room, is that the former is by deluded men who believe that THEY are wise, while the latter, realizing their ignorance, draw wisdom from the gods.

Book of Right Feeling

The practice of medicine has been longstanding in my family. I, of course, wanted to carry on the tradition and so, more than a half century ago, I graduated from medical schoolwith honorscertain that I could be a successful healer.

As weeks grew into months, and as case after case passed through my hands for treatment, a sense of frustration and disillusionment began to grow within me as I came to realize that the therapeutics I had mastered at such expense of time and effort either worked indifferently or not at all.

In fact, I began to suspect that this profession of medicine, far from being the miracle-working science I had believed it to be, might instead be an assemblage of unproven and unprovable theories organized around a few basic facts.

I began asking questions but found no satisfactory answers, even from the most eminent of my professional acquaintances.

Why was a treatment sometimes effective in one case, while in another, perhaps one suffering from the same disease in a milder form, it was utterly impotent?

Why did the same drugs have such a radically different effect on different people?

Why did some people die from comparatively minor causes while others, literally riddled with disease, hung on to life for years?

Was there a deeper, more fundamental factor which governed the human organism and determined its susceptibility to disease and its response to treatment? Was disease the effect of a failure of this unknown factor to function?

The more I thought over the latter question, the more the experiences of my daily practice seemed to confirm that there was indeed a potent basic factor within humankind which ordered and regulated all of the bodys vital functions, attended to all of the bodys defense mechanisms, ordered their repair of damaged bones and organs and tissues, and which tied all of the numerous activities within the body into a smoothly functioning whole.

From that point of view, the treatment of disease became merely the elimination of effects, without necessarily altering the causes. True, this battle against the effects called disease was a necessary battle, but without touching that deeper unknown cause, the best that could be hoped for would be the mere postponement of death, since inevitably the leaking waters of life would break the crumbling body structure at another place.

In search of this basic factor within humankind, I spent the next few years at post-graduate work in London, Paris, Vienna and Heidelberg, where I sat at the feet of some of the most famous pathologists, endocrinologists and analytical psychologists of that day. And though the work of these great men was brilliant, I came away dissatisfied, for the fundamentals I was searching for had somehow eluded them too.

Thinking that perhaps I might find a clue to what I sought in the ancient birthplace of civilization, I journeyed next to India and later to Tibet, and there I found that many searchers had trod the trail that I was following, and that some had actually brought back nuggets of information.

Sometimes these mental nuggets were gilded with the trash of superstition, or wrapped in filmy mystery, but they worked in many instances, and if one can press a button and flood a room with light, I do not care how fantastic the theories may be about the origin and composition of electricity.

World War came and on the battlefields I had ample opportunity to apply the knowledge I had gathered and the results were heartening. Then came peace and freedom and the opportunity to settle down to research and experimentation in order to analyze the mass of data collected and to coordinate the results into practical treatment.

I found that there is indeed a key basic regulating factor within the human bodya vital core or soul that is both the originator and the regulator of every mental and physcial function of the body. This factor remains perfect in its knowledge throughout life; it is only when it is interfered with that the organism is prevented from defending itself against bacteria from without, or from repairing damaged or worn out organs or tissues within.

The first of these two factors is the nutritional condition. Despite the perfection of the basic core or souls knowledge, the organism must have a supply of all the essential materials it needs from without in order to produce the hundreds of special products it must manufacture within. In Western society there is almost always a long-standing deficiency in several of the more subtle food factors or vitamins as well as other posssible deficiencies.

The second and most important factor is the emotional or mental factor. All mental responses, if repeated often enough, tend to become automatic, and every emotional reaction, mild or severe, has immediate repercussions in every tissue, cell and process of the body. Thus our attitude toward life as a whole determines the kind of mental responses we generate toward the innumerable experiences of life, and these responses have an immediate effect on every organic tissue and cell of our bodies. An emotional imbalance becomes automatic and chronic and the perfect core of intelligence within is kept in a state of extraordinary emergency and prevented from carrying out its normal workaday functions of assimilation, elimination, repair and defense.

A great variety of diseases can be produced in the laboratory rat by withholding from its diet one or more vitamins; a great variety of diseases may be produced by keeping the animal in a state of fear or anger; combine both of these factors and the effect is lethal.

Out of these findings evolved the A Reactivation Treatment, in which this book plays an important part. By a systematic study and application of the principles set forth in the following chapters, that mental substratum sometimes called the subconscious mind can be reeducated into a new, true perspective of life. This in turn will generate the logical harmonious responses so necessary to emotional stability, thus freeing the basic core or soul from its state of extraordinary emergency and enabling it to attend to its normal business of repairing the body.

This is a work that only you can do and there are no really effective substitutes for this personal effort. You will not find the task of reeducation easy, for nothing worthwhile is easy, but if you want to return to a condition of perfect health and happiness, and consider that state worth working for, you will have no difficulty in setting aside the small amount of time daily that is needed.