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Christ Jesus commanded: "Preach the gospel and heal the sick." Permanent healing demands that this twofold injunction be obeyed. By the "gospel" is meant an inner understanding of the laws of life and being. Early man knew himself, as Virgin Spirit, to be made in the image and likeness of God. He was the ward of Angels and lived in harmony with the music of the spheres. Parturition was painless, youth eternal and death unknown. Then came the Lucifer Spirits who impregnated the desire body of man with a new impulse — the lower destructive fire force, as a result of which man gradually lost conscious touch with Cosmic Law. He fell into "coats of skin" and his consciousness became focused in the personal life instead of in the universal as hitherto. This opened the way for sorrow through disease, poverty and death.
The Old Testament carries the story of the coming of Lucifer, the False Light. The New Testament tells the story of Christ, the True Light, the World Saviour who was born of an Immaculate Conception and who came with healing in His Wings.
The purpose of Christ's coming was to teach man how to save himself through regeneration, and this He taught by example as well as by precept, for not otherwise could it be successfully taught. By awakening the Christ within himself, man lifts himself above and beyond all personal limitations into a consciousness of peace, harmony and plenty. He then realizes a new life where there is "no more sorrow, no more tears, no more death, for the former things have passed away."
The Supreme healer was also the Master Occultist. His healing ministry held a twofold purpose — to heal the sick and to impart lessons of profound metaphysical import to His disciples at the same time. Every biblical healing contains a key to spiritual Illumination or Initiation.
If we study carefully the various methods and words which the Christ employed in His healing works, we shall discover that all of the most important phases of occult law were brought into operation. He was concerned not alone with the imperfections of the outer physical instrument but took into account also the invisible bodies, wherein lies the origin of all disease as well as the beginning of the healing process.
Illness of any kind is nature's endeavor to focus attention on a weak link in the chain of perfect becoming and being. If we learn the lesson aright, permanent cure is the inevitable result. Illness should never leave us where it found us. This truth is emphasized throughout the ministry of Christ Jesus. Those who refused to heed it went away unhealed "because of their unbelief." In the light of this understanding, remember there is no such thing as incurable disease.
Every organ of the body is a replica of a mental concept and is a projection of that concept into physical manifestation. The eyes represent the conscious knowing of Spirit. The ego in its many earthly pilgrimages ofttimes loses the perfect attunement with the Ideal World which it enjoyed prior to descending into rebirth, and the imperfect sight which usually accompanies the maturity of years attests to this fact. Deliberately shutting ourselves away from spiritual truth during one or more lives tends toward physical blindness in some future incarnation.
Christ Jesus prefaced each of his restorings of sight with a lesson stressing the importance of spiritual understanding. Having eyes, see ye not? and having ears, hear ye not? and do ye not remember? These were His words just preceding the healing of the blind man as recounted in Mark 8:22-25.
John refers to Christ as the bread of life. The Disciples lament that they do not understand Him better because they have no bread — which is symbolic of their lack of spiritual knowledge.
Bethsaida means a house or place of fishing, and fish is representative of the Initiate in the New Dispensation inaugurated by Christ Jesus and outlined in the New Testament. That the healing of the blind man of Bethsaida deals with initiatory processes is evident from the rite observed by the Master in its enactment. The blind man (or neophyte) was taken to a holy place away from the town, and there the Teacher focused His great life force upon him. His vision was opened to the evolutionary epochs of the past and he was enabled to trace the path of human development through the mists of the past until in the clear light of the present post-Atlantean age he "saw every man very clearly."
Of the four healings of blindness, one is given by Matthew as occurring at Capernaum, one by Mark at Bethsaida, one by John at Jerusalem, and the healing now under consideration is described in all three of the synoptic accounts as taking place at Jericho.
Jericho is the Moon City, a symbol of the sense life. Here is the story of one Bartimaeus, blinded by the intensity of emotional reactions: Observe that he cast off his garment before be could receive healing. Then, "he immediately received his sight and followed Jesus in the Way." Through purification he became one of the pupils of the Master and began to walk in the path of discipleship. The healing at Bethsaida and that at Jericho do not represent equal degrees of advancement. One deals with the preparation for the novitiate, the other with definite attainment of first-hand development.
The pledging of the neophyte by the Master was preceded then, as now and always, by the words: "Whosoever would be first among you shall be your servant."
None are so blind as those who are unawakened to spiritual truth. Faith is emphasized in most New Testament healings because this attribute is one of the necessary essentials for true inner-plane illumination; not in the sense of a blind intellectual acceptance of certain statements supposed to be authoritative, but in the quiet, deep conviction that spiritual things do exist, and that they represent the Ultimate Good. Without that conviction, we have not sufficient incentive to put forth the effort necessary to attain liberation.
"According to your faith be it unto you." So said the Great Physician. In Nazareth He was not able to perform many works because of the people's unbelief.
Practitioners of all schools of healing realize the curative power of faith, and that permanent healing is effected to the degree that the consciousness of the patient becomes centered in the realization of the power of Spirit to heal. Will, Imagination and Faith are triune powers by means of which the wonders of magic are performed. By calling them into action disease can be cured. They must, however, be sufficiently developed to accomplish such a result, but we are reminded that if we have even the faith of a mustard seed we can perform miracles.
In the incident under discussion, the restoration of sight for the two blind men took place immediately after the raising of Jairus' daughter, and bears reference to the raising into equilibrium of the two poles of the Spirit in man by which means the darkness of material blindness and ignorance is dissipated for all time and the powers of eternal life made manifest here and now.
Disease is not a punishment but is the inevitable result of a violation of nature's laws. The suffering it brings will in time prove to be an enlightener restoring us to the ways of the highest law. When the ego awakens to a consciousness of its lack of proper adjustment to Cosmic Law, disease disappears and harmony or health is restored. This is the meaning of the Master's question related in John's Gospel 9:1-7.
"And as he passed by, he saw a man blind from his birth. And his disciples asked him, saying, Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he should be born blind? Jesus answered, Neither did this man sin, nor his parents."
"But," continued the Master, "that the works of God should be made manifest in him, we must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work. When I am in the world, I am the light of the world. When he had thus spoken, he spat on the ground, and made clay of the spittle, and he anointed the eyes of the blind man with the clay, and said unto him, Go, wash in the pool of Siloam, (which is by interpretation, Sent). He went his way therefore, and washed, and came seeing."
"The body proclaims the shortcomings of the soul:" Blindness is also the result of a neglected effort in the past to think clearly. A warped and twisted mental viewpoint will eventually produce a similar condition in physical sight; as deafness in like manner results from turning away from spiritual instruction.
"The body always represents the past; but the personal past of Everyman is a microcosmic fragment of his macrocosmic past, and both are impressed in his body." The Supreme Healer never observed the apparent limitations of the physical body. He worked always with the inner man, demanding that the spirit exert its own God-given powers, for only in this manner can permanent healing be obtained. His first question to this man according to Tyndale's version was, "Wilt thou be whole?" Will is the positive, masculine pole of Spirit. Faith belongs to the feminine principle symbolized in clear, pure water. When these two conjoin "Whatsoever ye ask in My name, it shall be done unto you."
In all pre-Christian ceremonials of Initiation the neophyte was required in the preparatory purification exercises to wash in a lake or pool. Those sacred waters were near the Temple or holy place. The pool of Siloam is an old Egyptian Temple term familiar to all Temple aspirants.
Familiar also to the ancient novitiate was the anointing of the eyes with clay which is afterward washed away in the holy water. This ritual gesture has reference to the opening of the interior organs of vision by means of which the neophyte is able to see at will into the spiritual worlds, though as yet he may be unable to function therein. (That requires still further preparation.) The pineal gland is often called the third eye, but balanced vision requires the harmonious functioning of both the pineal gland and the pituitary body. Of these glands, Uranus rules the pituitary body and Neptune the pineal; the pituitary is predominantly feminine, in potency, the pineal masculine. Their awakening and manner of development determines the nature of the inner sight which is achieved by the neophyte.
The work of transfiguration or regeneration of which these supernormal faculties are but the earliest tokens, must take place while the ego inhabits a physical body. All egos after putting off the fleshly sheath in the process of death become awake in the spiritual worlds, and therefore possess to some degree the power to see and experience the realities of that world. This, however, is not the same power as that of the Initiate in the Christ Mysteries who, while yet in the body, accomplishes a conscious severance of the soul from the body before this occurs in the normal process of death. To achieve this, the neophyte must cleanse his moral and mental nature by his own efforts as nature would otherwise cleanse it for him in the after-death state of Purgatory. Thus the Initiate lives both his Purgatory and his Heaven while still on earth in the body of clay. Hence the words of the Christ: "I must work while it is day; the night (death) cometh when no man can work."
His final triumphant proclamation will resound through all eternity, a clarion call to whosoever wills to follow in the Christed Way, the Way of Initiation, which was opened by the highest Initiator of them all, earth's Supreme Teacher when He declared I am the light of the world.
— Corinne Heline
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