One of my many correspondents asked if there were any principles that could be applied to healing modalities like Reiki, Dar’ Shem, Quantum Touch etc., that come under the heading of energy work. This is the gist of the letter I sent in reply, with matters personal to the correspondent deleted. I hope it will be of interest, though it only skims the surface of an immensely deep subject.

There is a child's prayer that lots of people used. It begins, “Now I lay me down to sleep.”

If a person understands thoroughly the difference between the I and the me in that line, and identifies with the I instead of with the me, they are not far from enlightenment.

And that is the principle of the secret of healing any condition, including present time unwanted habits. It works like this:

We all watch the movie of our lives unfolding on the screen of consciousness. Most people identify with the movie because of wrong understanding. Look at a couple of hours of your movie as though it was on film. Every fraction of a second the movie camera took a picture. Your couple of hours would be hundreds of feet of film. But every frame would actually be a “Still” there would be no movement. Run the film through the projector and there is the illusion of movement because the eye retains the image of frame 1007 long enough for frame 1008 to be projected and blend with it.

In your real life movie you actually live ONLY in the NOW. Anything before NOW exists only in the memory and imagination. Anything in the future exists only in the imagination. The only time you ever have to do anything is in the NOW. This is the eternal NOW of the Self, the I of the little prayer. Zen monks are trained for years to BE HERE NOW. To a Western observer they may seem to be repeating an action over and over again. But to the monk that is not what is happening. Each time is the first time.

This doesn’t mean that you don’t make plans for the future. Of course you do, but you don’t live in those plans. That’s living in the future. Live in the NOW where you can make the best plans. Most people spend such a lot of the their lives agonizing about the past or future that they hardly live in the now at all.

The little person you were at age five had none of the perspective or thoughts of the present person. That little person is so different from who you are now that it could just as well be any other little person. It no longer exists. For practical purposes it is dead. Similarly, the person you were ten years ago is just as dead. Only the NOW is real. The rest is imagination.

But it isn’t the witnessing I that puts all the life movie together, it’s the me, the little self. It appropriates whatever seems to be going on and declares loudly, “THIS IS MY LIFE. THIS IS HAPPENING TO ME. Then it uses the retaining power of the memory and says. THIS HAPPENED TO ME YEARS AGO AND I CAN PROVE IT BECAUSE I CAN REMEMBER IT. The entity that appropriates the movie and identifies with it is the ego, the little me. And it goes on to know that “ I WAS BORN AT SUCH AND SUCH A TIME. I AM GROWING OLDER AND ONE DAY I WILL DIE AND BE NO MORE.” And absolutely none of that is true. The ego doesn’t even really exist. It is merely the sensation of living a life separate from what the senses record as the other things in the world. Actually everything is the same Consciousness in flesh, plant, or mineral disguise.

I have my students imagine a rose, then ask them to change it to a lily, then ask them to change it to a rock. Many can do that easily. And then I ask them to answer for themselves, not to me, these three questions:

1.What was the rose made of?
2.Who or what was looking at the rose?
3.Where did the light come from that illuminated the rose?

The answers to these questions direct attention to the I and away from the me. They are very powerful levers to pry the ego out of the way.

But the rose, lily and rock are merely different forms of the same substance. The material of which those three apparently totally different things are made is the same material. And it is so in the world. Every material thing around and in you is made of electrons and other atomic particles. And every electron is identical with every other. The electrons of gold are identical to the electrons of the hair in the ear of a mouse. Only the patterns of those electrons differ in the different substances, and give them different qualities.

In your most brilliantly technicolored and “real” dream, everything in that dream universe is made of the same substance, your Consciousness. You can ask the same three questions about your dream universe as about the rose. And you can ask a fourth. When you awake and say “I didn’t dream last night.” what is it that is reporting that you didn’t dream?

And when you wake from your private dream into the public dream we all share, the same thing is true. Everything in your public dream is also made of the same substance; Consciousness in various forms. And that includes people. Everyone you meet is Consciousness in a flesh disguise; yourself in another body.

So in life this is what happens all the time: intuition, or the Self, suggests a line of action. The ego appropriates it immediately and says “ I DID IT.” And then the mind steps in and thinks…“ I wonder if I did the right thing.” The ego thinks it’s in charge, and the mind, which can only think or doubt, usually doubts, because of negative habits.

But with the right understanding, we just watch the movie of the karma of the current body we are using. The major circumstances of the movie are totally pre-arranged by actions that we identified with in previous incarnations. We made this life by our previous lives, and are currently making the next one with our current lives. We already have the stage properties of family, country, gender and so on. All of these are in the script as givens. You are the Supreme Actor pretending to be Mr. Mrs. or MS X. I am the Supreme Actor pretending to be Douglas. Our respective roles are fixed by the script. But our interpretation of those roles is up to us. We are free to have any attitude we want to the situations of the movie. But we are not the infinite variety of roles. We are the Actor. There is only one Actor playing all these parts. And no part is more important than any other part. There are no stars in this movie. Everyone is equally important.

In this mundane world the actor may have been playing the part of a bachelor fending off the attentions of the heroine in the play. When the play run is over, the actor goes home to his wife and children. His character is gone. When our bodies come to the end of the script, we leave them and go home into the subtler world. The character is gone. The Actor remains.

In your previous human perspective you may have been the Supreme Actor pretending to be the petite and beautiful brunette Myrrha from Marseilles in the South of France. But in every incarnation in which the body you were using had access to a mirror, what was looking out at the reflection of the various faces was the same Consciousness, the same Actor playing a different role.

Back to the movie of your current life. At any moment, with the right understanding you could take scissors and cut off all the film, except that showing the current frame. Then the next set of frames would not need to contain any of that previous stuff. Only the NOW would exist for you. We all have the power to edit our movie in this cutting room.

The rule for earthly living is this……“ What you think is what you see, and what you see is what you get.” This is the rule we use whether we know it or not, to make our lives enjoyable or miserable.

I am constantly meeting people who are trying to change miserable circumstances in their lives. They moan and whine continually about some present condition, and then complain that things are bad. I tell them as gently as possible, “ If you dwell continually on the present misery and keep energizing it, how can you expect things to change. Until you change your thought your world cannot change to accommodate it. You cannot see all your options if you only think of negative ones.”

The natives who met Magellan and later Captain Cook, were unable to see the big ships of these men, though they were anchored in full view. The black box of conditioning in their minds could not allow them to imagine canoes of such a magnitude. So they couldn’t see the ships. “What you cannot think you cannot see. What you cannot see you cannot get.” This is the other side of the rule.

You may have many ships in your personal harbor that you cannot see because of prior conditioning. Some may well be treasure ships, and others may be better sunk. But until your mind changes, or your attitude changes, you will be unable to see these ships, which include hundreds of options available to you.

So the chronic habit, or disease, is something that has been practiced for a long time. It’s in hundreds of feet of the film of the movie. And because of this it attains the impression of permanence. Only in your mind however is it in any of the future reels of film. Anything that happened in the past can only affect you if you identify with it, because only NOW exists. By changing thoughts in the NOW the past effects can be eliminated as a blueprint for the future.

When a talented instantaneous healer such as Jesus or Joel Goldsmith, looked at the withered arm presented by the invalid, they didn’t see it. They took no notice of any report of their senses that was not in line with the perfection of the Self, the Consciousness behind all things. In that Consciousness there is no disease. By accessing that Consciousness, their own true I, they are resonating at a much higher frequency than the invalid’s ‘me.’ Then, as all the grandfather clocks against the same wall will eventually entrain into the same pendulum rhythm, and the women in a dormitory situation eventually all have their periods at the same time, so the vibration of the withered arm entrains to the higher vibration that does not contain disease. There may occur a healing that spectators call a miracle. The film after that scene does not contain the disease. This is a secret behind all manner of healing modalities. The higher frequency entrains the lower, and the higher is the healthier.

Healers who don’t know how to keep their energy high may entrain to the lower energy of the client. Then they get the headache or the arthritis, because they are now at the level of the disease. Spiritual healers who use their own energy to heal, are often very sick people.

Here is another way to look at it. In fact it is what gave me the insight in the first place. I knew the concept in my head, but hadn’t actually experienced it. I was watching a heavy snowfall through the Venetian blinds in my living room. One particularly fat snowflake caught my attention and I followed it down to the ground. Then came the cognition. The slats on my blinds were horizontal of course and there were over thirty gaps between them through which I had watched the snowflake. And as it reached every consecutive gap in the blinds, the universe of snowflakes outside had changed. None of the millions of flakes were where they were before. The observed universe changed at every gap. Then I realized that no matter how narrow the gap between the slats the same was true. In every second, millisecond or microsecond there was another universe out there. I was seeing a movie.

So are we all. We sit in the theater of the world cinema and watch the movie of what seems to be going on. And we all see a different movie. Most of us identify with it and say, “ This is my life.” That’s ego talking. The enlightened person sits in the same theater and doesn’t see any of the pictures, only the nice white screen behind. Because they know it is all a play of Consciousness, and they are identified with that Consciousness, the I and not the me. They can, with an effort of will, see what anyone else is seeing as their life, but they know at the same time it is just a karmic movie.

So, in answer to your question….If you understand that it is only in the NOW that anything can be done, and that time is not an ever flowing stream…and that between thoughts you are a Cosmic Being, and the next thought contracts the Universal Consciousness into the individual mind, and the individual life is reconstructed, then you can use any modality to affect a change.

We meditate to stay between thoughts, until we can live from the human perspective while retaining the awareness of our true Self.

Hope this helps. It isn’t as theoretical as it seems. It is the most practical thing in the world. “What you think is what you see and what you see is what you get.” and vice versa, Don’t think anything you don’t want to experience. There is never any virtue whatever in a negative thought, and your only true freedom is the freedom to think what you want to think, though few there be that do this.

Think what you do want to experience. Have a short list of things you know to be absolutely true, and when the negative thought comes along, and you see it in time, say, “Sorry, wrong number. I can think higher thoughts.” And then do it. Let negative thoughts become triggers that fire positive thoughts. The energy of the negative will disappear. Miracles will become commonplace in your life. Blessings, Douglas