Karmic Determinants
As a health professional and just a person interested in health ... We are spirit in incarnation, and as such, our present experience is based on a lengthy history of earlier experience. If our present day illnesses and deficiencies have any meaning at all, they must be understood - and treated - in this larger context. - Indeed, as onto-psychosomatic (body-mind-spirit) entities or continuums... a soul-searching analysis may reveal that these negative responses of ours are actually the sign of deep-seated personality problems, which result from unconstructive attitudes and emotions we have habitually indulged in throughout several earth lives or more. So we have brought them over with us into the present life. Then, each of us needs to ask of ourself: Do I wish to take this undesirable trait with me into my next life, as well, or will I overcome it now?
Edgar Cayce said: All illness comes from sin. This everyone must take whether they like it or not; it comes from sin whether it be of body, of mind, or of soul.
It is no wonder, then, that in quite a number of the readings (physical-and-life) given by Edgar Cayce the sufferer was admonished to change his attitude and outlook as a necessary precondition to physical improvement. So, we do learn through pain and suffering. These handmaidens of karma serve to convert the soul. After all, if we are prone to make mistakes, it is well we should learn from them!
We live under grace to the exact extent that we are attuned to God. Each of the major types of disease which afflicts humanity can be seen as a message that we are not properly attuned.
Today we live in what Dr. Bernard Jensen calls a 'carcinogenic environment.’... 'We are living in it, drinking it, eating it.’... We have apparently brought on the illness in this life due to our environment and diet.
Although proper diet and exercise are a necessity if good health is to be maintained, the inner cause, or dis-ease, may be emotional or attitudinal. All of these cases (karmic, beyond heredity & environment) emphasize the need for spiritual attunement, as well as the need for correcting attitudes and emotions. Thus, the real or inner problem is on the mental or spiritual level. Since karma appears to be more of the spiritual than anything else, it would seem that the real work, the real effort, must be at the spiritual level if the condition is to be permanently corrected or healed.
We are body, mind and soul. Edgar Cayce said that to understand physical karma, we must look more toward the spiritual than anywhere else, since that is where the solution always lies. Yet the problem may manifest on any of the three levels of personal existence - physical, emotional or mental - or it may manifest simultaneously on all three levels. This indicates the complexity of the treatment for karmic ills.
In each case, however, the actual transformation of these patterns depends on the willingness of the individual to come face to face with himself or herself, accept it, and then begin working immediately to improve it - to heal the scars of the soul.
The weaknesses in the flesh are the scars of the soul! -Edgar Cayce
There is no medicine which can be administered to heal these scars, nor any plastic surgery which can remove them. And so, the challenge to the health professional or counselor is to work with love and patience to help the patient or client see his or her own role in generating ill health - and what can be done to change the underlying pattern. It is not necessary to know actual details from earlier lives to be successful in this endeavor. In fact, such knowledge sometimes is a distraction, as the patient or client becomes absorbed in speculation in who he or she was - rather than in honestly facing the changes which must be made! Far more important is an intelligent ability to see the karmic kinds of patterns at work - and to begin working directly to change them.
To be sure, healing with spiritual force represents the greatest challenge. Once this is accomplished, bodily healing is the inevitable result, although it may be aided in part by external stimuli... The ideal which is held in meditation should define the precise hormone levels which are realized as a result of the meditation. Theoretically, a selfless spiritual ideal held in meditation should give rise to the hormonal balance which will activate the 'Christ genes.' If this is done consistently, a healthy physical body should, in due time, become manifest (Dr. Michael James, Ph.D., research scientist).
(Extracts from Mary Ann Woodward's Scars of the Soul: Holistic Healing in the Edgar Cayce Readings)