Therapy means healing or making whole, bringing into balance. We are in conflict between the physical, the psychological and the social within our stories. In any area of conflict there is spiritual unawareness. The body or the world of form is where these conflicts show up. These painful conflicts and their symptoms appear in the body, in the mind and in the social fabric of our lives.

What we fail to realize is that thoughts are things and that when they are linked together they form a story that we tell ourselves about life and about ourselves. This story is made up of fact and fancy, but it is probably 95% fiction. Some philosophies, recently supported by science, suggest that the entire universe is a dream, a metaphor, an illusion, an information network, a shared belief system. "The universe is more like a thought than like a machine" a physicist said 100 years ago. Objects are made up of atoms, which are like beams of light, programmed as DNA instructions. The universe is an information system with which we imbue and attribute various meanings. This chain of meanings is our story.

 

And so let us view life as an explorer, a puzzle-maker, a dream interpreter, a story teller, a researcher. If we can find the missing parts and the mis-named parts, we can be healed and made whole again. To view people as patients, as sick, as trouble-makers, as victims, as political pawns, as employees in the work force, as numbers in a big brother world, as outsiders, as rejects, as handicapped, as offenders, as insiders, as addicts, as dysfunctional, as neurotics, as psychopaths, as co-dependents, as manic-depressives, as alcoholics, as sinners, as goody-two shoes, as jerks, as airheads, as preppies, as introverts as extraverts, as rednecks, as assholes, as gay or straight—is not only unfair but untrue. We develop labels for symptoms and such a shorthand is demeaning and constrictive.

Bob Trowbridge

Symptoms of dis-ease or trouble arise in several arenas: health, work, money, sex, relationships, career, and society. The world is a mirror of our story and of the symptoms we experience in these major arenas. Our life story is only a tiny snapshot of who we really are. Due to our fears and contracted stories, we have narrowed down our understanding to near ground zero. People were born princes and princesses, until society turned us into frogs.. We bought into a social belief system which was handed down from generation to generation through our families and society, and we seem to choose to stay stuck in our story.

Our symptoms are meaningful messengers about this constricted, constipated life story to which we are addicted. We may be twenty-four cylinder engines, but we hobble along on two cylinders sputtering, coughing and bellowing out toxic smoke behind us. The info-junk and info-meaning that we ingest daily prevents us from using about 90% of our fire-power.

Rather than be bored, we will do nearly anything for meaning and action. We turn our lives into soap operas rather than to do nothing. We have unsatisfied hungers for meaning, information, touch, love, creativity, freedom, and structure. Oftentimes we seek to feed this hunger with toxic and frustrating foods and other substances, information, activity, feelings and buzz words.

If we are to be healed, made whole, set free, inspired, and empowered, we must (1) name the story that we are the victim of, (2) expand and improve that story, and (3) transform that story. We need physical sight, psychological insight and spiritual vision in order to clear up and claim our true nature and inheritance as infinite, immortal, human beings.

 

Every word, thought and image in your mind was created by you. Every word is a name that you gave things. Every name is your own name, whether you heard it somewhere else or not. You created every concept in your story. These words and their meanings constitute your life. (your semantic brain dictionary is just as you wrote it). The information highway is your highway. You built it piece by piece. Your geography is just what you made it. Your history is just what you made it. Your math, your science, your English, is just what you made them. Your animal world is whatever you made it. Your car world is whatever you made it, no more no less. Your world is as big as your curiosity and your imagination.

You are a playwright, a story-teller, making it up as you go along. You are a creator, every minute of every day, 24/7. You create your story and all of the characters in it as you go along. Every prop, every plot, every scene and every character is whatever you named it, created by your own wonderful human imagination.

You have a health story, a work story, a play story, a story about time, a myth about men, a myth about women, a myth about children, a god story. You have a story about everything that has any meaning in your world. Your meaning is whatever you have made it. Meaning is a spiritual function. You have a story about yourself, about your parents, your siblings, your spouse, your children, your neighbors, your boss, as well as about the cosmos and god. You made up those stories, consciously or unconsciously. You dream every night for two hours, creating little dramas or dreams, even while you are asleep. You travel in your sleep. You go to different worlds and study many different things.

 

You are part of the collective mind, the entire human mind and the entire mind of God. Your memory is hooked into the universal memory bank You are hooked up not only to the information highway on the internet, but to the universal data bank. All memories back to the beginning of time are in this data bank. In the near future we will have an international data bank which will cover almost all subjects,and which will be available on the internet. However, it will not be universal and it will not contain all of the records of time immemorial, which your mind already has.. Have you ever had strange dreams not from this historical period? We are just now mapping the entire system of genes in the body, but that knowledge has always existed in your infinite imagination.

Edgar Cayce had a severe throat problem that could not be cured that prevented him from speaking. A hypnotist put him into trance and asked him to find out what was wrong with his throat. Cayce told him. Then the hypnotist asked him to find out the cure was, and Cayce also told the hypnotist the cure. Cayce was cured of his throat problem by the time the trance was ended. After that Cayce went into trace over 16,000 times during the rest of his life to retrieve medical and healing information for many people.

Are all stories in the newspaper true? Are any of them true? Thousands of newspaper articles are written daily about the president, about the economy , about famous trials and famous people, but are any of them complete and totally true? We get weather reports daily, but are any of them totally true? Each story, each report, each history book, is perceived and written from a specific viewpoint.

Think about how people see you. How does your dentist see you? How does your child see you? How do your parents see you, even if your are 60? How does a bill collector see you? How does a police officer see you? How does your boss see you? How does your therapist see you? How do you see yourself? Is any viewpoint true? No one can see you as you are, but only as they imagine. Everyone has their own story about you, just as you have your own story about them. The world itself is our projection and therefore it offers us meaningful messages and feedback about our own story.

I have a client who is an environmentalist. She sees America as a spoiled selfish nation, she hates American consumerism, she hates our artificiality and our hypocrisy, even our air conditioners, the way we mis-treat animals, the way we pollute the water. She has a unique viewpoint. She is so sick of it that it is making her sick, and even suicidal.

Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and Paul had different viewpoints about Jesus and about what the good news is. Each of us has his own version of god and of the Bible. There are no two dictionaries or bibles that are the same in our heads. We live by what we believe. We see what we believe. Each person lives in his own world, in the world he created in his own mind. He has his own vocabulary. Each word means something different to each person. Even though we all may speak English, we also speak man-ese and woman-ese. Communication is not easy to come by because it assumes that we all speak the same language when we use words. Just because everyone says the word "snake", the word "snake" does not mean the same thing to any two story-tellers. To one of my employees "snake" means a terrible fearful and dangerous monster, and to the other it means a cute little animal from the forest and she collects snake skins. "Going shopping " means one thing to one person and another thing to another.

Is even a road map true? How many map-makers have we had? Look at some of the old world maps. Even the most modern maps are someone’s guess and someone’s measurements. Your map of Virginia is entirely different from mine, according to our experiences. Some people hate the commonwealth and some people love it Your map of life is uniquely yours.

People don’t know. People assume and decide. We are the products of our choices.

Julia Roberts

So find out what your story is. Name it. Find out what your words and images mean. Define them consciously What is your health story, your money story, your sex story, your relationship story, your cop story, your lawyer story, your people story? Tell it outloud. What obstacles exist in your story? What beliefs and fears run your life? What kinds of love do you have in your story? People live and die for their stories and for what they love in their stories.

Think about all of the things that have been done for the love of money. People will cheat, lie, exaggerate, minimize, deny and cover up about money. Think about all of the crimes that have been committed about the love of women or the love of sex. Jealousy crimes, stalking crimes, harassment crimes, affairs, sexual addictions, cheating, manipulating. How many families are split up over the love of inheritances?

How many wars have been fought, and football fracases have been committed for the love of winning? I saw a movie this week about a chess player and how the love of playing the perfect chess game drove him into madness and suicide.

Our stories are a combination of fact and fiction. Go to any library and you will find a fiction section. All of our television dramas, and most of our news is fictional to a degree.

(1) Education expands our story through more sight. (2) Psychology helps to correct our story through insight. (3)Spirituality is the way we transform our stories from within imagination itself. "Making whole" or healing then is bringing together our three types of perception: physical sight, psychological or social insight, and spiritual vision.

We do not know ourselves by any stretch of the imagination. In the next thousand years you will never know the height and breadth and length of yourself. We know more about most other things than we do about ourselves as the great beings that we are.

When Plato said "Know thyself" he summed up all of philosophy. When Jesus said "Don’t you know that you are gods?" he summed up all of religion. When Norman Cousins said "All illness is created by fear" he summed up all of medical knowledge. When Edgar Cayce said "Thoughts are things" he summed up all of metaphysics. When William Blake said "You are imagination" he summed up all of art and poetry. When Albert Einstein said that the three dimensional mind can never reach infinity and that he wanted to know God’s thoughts, he summed up all of futuristic science. When Gregory Bateson said "The dualism of subject versus object is the false premise of civilization" he summed up the meaning of history.

Ruth Stotter

We have all sorts of stories and myths about ourselves. For instance, are you invisible? Do you weigh anything? Scientists have not been able to locate the operator of the body. They know where the brain is, and the hypothalmus, but not where the person is located. As far as they can tell, you are invisible, and weightless. They don’t know if you are in the body or out of it. As far as they know, you are invisible, and if you weigh anything it would be less than one ounce. They weighed the body just before and after death and found only one ounce or less in difference in weight. They didn’t see the soul leave the body. Yet they know that out of the body experiences and near death experiences occur. Many occurrences cannot be explained unless we assume that the spirit is the person, but not the body.

Almost all humans believe the story that "I am my body." Yet most humans do not believe that the spirit dies when the body quits working. 2/3 of the human race believes that the spirit reincarnates and finds another body. No one has been able to prove reincarnation, but there is very little proof for anything. All that we have is social consensus or agreement, which is the whole basis of science. Even math is based upon axioms or postulates. There are a number of investigators pursing the idea that the body can live forever, or as an immortal. They have found records of several people who ascended or translated and were never found dead. Ancient Chinese Taoists records have been found that report over 5000 cases of people who never died. Melchizadek, Enoch, Moses, and Jesus, along with Saint Germaine and a few other saints have survived death. A book on the Incorruptibles reports on a number of bodies that did not decay after death, including Yogananda in this century.

Bob Trowbridge

Maitri Upanishad

And now for a closing quote with a little sarcasm in it:

The Master Teacher