Paraphrasing Eckhart Tolle, we will find health not by rearranging the symptoms of our body and the circumstances of our life, but by discovering who we are at the deepest level.

Spontaneous Healing

Paul Bahder, MD

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Reality is discontinuous but experienced in time it appears as a flowing chain of cause and effect. It appears as a determined flow of one thing being necessarily followed by another. There appears little room for a change in our experience. The relentless association of one experience leading to another one through the “law” of cause and effect creates a very tight fabric in the plot of our daily life.

The seed already appears to contain the tree. It is only a matter of time before the seed will appear as the tree. We may say that the seed and the tree appear as two different states of the same underlying truth, much like water and ice. Yet, if that were the final word on reality we would never see anything truly new. We could only hope to see consequences or effects of the preceding cause but never behold a new creation.

In the medical arena once a diagnosis is made, the prognosis follows. That is why we hear doctors telling patients that they have so many months to live in case of a diagnosis of a “terminal” condition. In most instances such doctors are well intentioned and only ignorant. They are totally fallen into the belief that their understanding of the law of cause and effect is the truth, that cause and effect is the final description and forms the final verdict on life. Not only that, they believe that their understanding accurately reflects that description.

Missing is the humility to recognize the crack in the fabric of experience. Or more accurately, the context of experience. Conventional approach to medicine is ignorant of the underlying field of experience and the opportunity for the mysterious and the unexplained that it provides. Conventional medicine is arrogant in its assumption of “knowing” the present through the diagnostic label it assigns and projecting a certainty about the future through the pronouncement of prognosis it imposes. In many instances we witness a self-fulfilling prophecy. Believing into a diagnosis-prognosis cycle and imposing that belief on a relatively innocent patient leads to the manifest experience of that belief.

Recognizing the discontinuity of our experience in the plot of our daily affairs is the opening into another dimension. It is a crack in the tight fabric of our mental concept of the moment into the living reality of Now. To see that the appearance of things now does not predetermine their appearance in the future. And that is because an appearance deals with categories of mind and not with qualities of reality. Categories of thought and perception, mental concepts that form what we see and believe are discreet units, objects of mind, discontinuous quanta of experience. Underneath experience forming the context that makes perception possible is what is often referred to as Oneness. That word is however somewhat misleading as it suggests yet another concept. It is meant to lead us out of accepted notions of what’s true but instead it substitutes another, this time “spiritually advanced” misperception.

When things do not go according to our plan, our hope, expectation, or even according to the medical prediction – the curtain of time opens up just a little. If we are vigilant and welcome the opening, we may see something new pouring through. If instead we react with frustration or fear – we will miss that space between the sentences of the script running our life and we will continue burdened as before.

The Ancient Greeks had a habit of saying that in such moments when the unexpected and the unexplained appears it is the god Hermes who pays you a visit. He makes an appearance to show you the hidden reality – the one previously obscured, hermetically hidden, sealed off from our usual perception.

In that moment when the unexpected, unanticipated happens: a flat tire, a missing key, a forgotten appointment, it is then that the program of our life, the script is broken. Haring a grave medical diagnosis can be such a moment. From the disparity between how our life is supposed to be and how it is unfolding now a new insight, a whole new plot or even a new direction can arise. Life is renewed from the shock of discontinuity of its apparent flow. New found depth, compassion and wisdom can pour through the disbelief in such an instance.

Rather than dismissing such moment as a nuisance, an accident, why not welcome Hermes and ask him what valuable reality he is bringing us now?

When you get close enough to any experience, when you allow yourself to open up completely to the underlying mystery of it all – then you will see that what you experience cannot be fully explained by what proceeded it. There simply is no way to completely determine what’s next from what transpired. Each moment in a fundamental way is discontinuous from the past. That is why what we call “grace” can never be fully eliminated or dismissed. Grace is always in operation as a potential, unexpected healing. In the breaking of the chain of cause and effect, the miraculous is possible. Spontaneous healing, even in seemingly most hopeless cases, is possible. The new can and does appear in each moment. Do we have the eyes to appreciate it?