Warts and all
The mind-body approach to health is often accused of being magical thinking. "This sounds too good to be true," carp the critics. "You can’t just wish your troubles away." But "too good to be true" seems to be more applicable to current scientific convictions that you can protect yourself from cancer by eating broccoli. Diet-based health theories have been popular since recorded history, but no one has ever found the magical combination of foods that guarantees health.
"That’s only because people in the past didn’t understand how the body works," sniff the scientists of today as they analyze various kinds of broccoli to determine exactly which one contains the maximum amount of magical anti-cancer ingredients. Using that logic, it should be obvious that the reason critics of the mind-body approach think it’s too good to be true is because they don’t understand how it works.
Take wart cures, for instance. Modern medicine doesn’t treat warts with much success, but you can get rid of them by "thinking them away." Warts that have reappeared after burning, scraping, chemicals, and surgery can disappear in a week after the wart bearer is provided with a convincing wart cure. Sometimes the direct approach is all that is needed. The wart is commanded away or visualized away. Other times a more theatrical tactic has the needed power to inspire a cure. "Cut a potato in half and rub the cut part on the wart. Bury the potato (sometimes according to specific instructions -- after dark, a foot deep, let no one see you do it), and the wart will fall off in seven days."
Is that magical thinking? The wart was here and now it’s not and all that happened was--what?--believing a wart cure would work? It seems pretty darned magical, but from the mind-body perspective, there’s a cause behind the effect.
Psychoneuroimmunology is the scientific investigation of the effects of what we think of as mental processes upon our biochemistry. The scientific theory would go something like this: thinking a certain way generates emotional states that trigger something in the body to successfully attack the virus that creates the wart. Unlike fruitless assaults upon the outer shell of the wart (by burning or cutting), this attack by internal biochemicals or killer cells finishes off the virus where it lives.
But mind-body principles are based on the fact that everything material is composed of energy. Our most scientific science, physics, tells us this is so. This means that our wart is simply the manifestation of a certain coalescence of electro-magnetic energy, translated by our senses into the appearance of a wart. By using our imagination to direct the electro-magnetic energy of our consciousness, we rearrange or disperse the energy showing up as the wart, allowing it to disappear. Perhaps directing mental energy results in white blood cells vanquishing wart viruses, but since it’s all energy being directed by the mind, such distinctions are really only useful for purposes of discussion -- not for getting rid of that pesky wart.
Science has been urged to study wart cures to find the "mechanism" by which they affect their magic. It is assumed that if scientists knew exactly what goes on in the body to oust the invader that has so resisted external attacks, someone could come up with a drug-based method of triggering the process—something predictable and less weird than this "rub it with a cut potato" mumbo-jumbo.
While we wait for science to figure that out, what can we, students of the mind-body approach, learn from wart cures?
First, they show in an irrefutable fashion the power of the mind to change the body. No one can argue that you had a wart. No one can argue that it resisted the medical establishment’s best efforts to annihilate it. No one can argue that it was there, and that after you did something that qualifies as "nothing," it is now gone. You may have trusted in special instructions like "rub it with a cut potato" or used some other ritual that focused your intention and attention, or you may have simply understood that you could get rid of it by "thinking it gone." Whatever the details, something physical disappeared because you decided it would.
Another aspect of the lesson is that warts are good practice for exercising the power of the mind to heal. They aren’t going to kill you, but you definitely want them gone. You have good motivation for focusing your mind for the purpose of healing without the distracting and contradictory energetic static of fear and worry. Warts are visible. No one can say you just imagined the wart or that, since it went away by "thinking it gone," you didn’t really have a wart in the first place, as is frequently used to argue away spontaneous remissions of cancer. A wart provides a clear test case for a beginner using the mind-body approach, or a reminder for the more advanced student.
Warts tend to be fairly uncomplicated afflictions. They don’t require you do any self-examination to see what secondary gains might make it hard for you to let them go. You don’t usually need to ponder the symbolism of the wart to uncover what buried problems it represents. You probably don’t have to explore your beliefs to discover what is making you vulnerable to this viral invader. Usually you can simply decide to make the wart go away—change your mind about it, as it were—and that’s that.
Which brings us to the final lesson of the wart cure: you can do a lot of wishing that you didn’t have your wart and continue to have it. Wishful thinking does not seem to marshal the energy of the mind to heal. Wishful thinking focuses your attention—your mental energy—on having the wart. From an energy perspective, wishful thinking feeds the wart by keeping a focus of wart-shaped energy in your reality.
Wart cures focus your attention on being wart free. From the mind-body perspective, this is not a merely a fine distinction; it’s the whole point. If the electro-magnetic energy that makes up the physical world is focused into specific manifestations by your conscious attention, then you must focus your consciousness on what you WANT in order to remove it from a focus on what you DON'T want. Hence, the handy instrument of the cut potato, which gives you a distracting ritual coupled with imaginable guaranteed good results. You perform whatever wart cure you choose, and assume your wart will go away. You don't worry about whether it will go away. You don't bombard it with energy. You just let it go.
This could bring up one more question that deserves pondering: how did that wart get focused into being in the first place?
Maybe you wished you could to give yourself a demonstration of the power of the mind to heal with something easy to practice on.
Or maybe it’s because you haven’t been eating enough broccoli.
What do you think?