The Consolidation of a Mental Attitude
Disease is a kind of consolidation of a mental attitude... and it is only necessary to treat the mood of a patient and the disease will disappear.35
Using slightly different words Bach repeats this message time and again. Our mental outlook or emotional state is the cause of illness. Fear, greed, uncertainty, fixity, guilt, apathy, forcefulness, worry... these are the mental attitudes. As these patterns of activity become habitual so they constrict the flow of life force in our bodies and we are prey to illness and disease. More than that the pattern of mental activity, because it is causing disharmony in life needs to be corrected and so it will be brought to our attention (consciousness) for us to work upon it. Illness is therefore the opportunity for looking at the truth and encountering change.
In the picture that Bach draws of existence we see that subtle forces create a pattern, that pattern shapes the material of life in itself to create a physical result. The process is like the growth of all life forms. Constant suspicion or jealousy creates a pattern of behaviour in our daily life, it also sets up a pattern of activity in our subtle body (the emotional level) that channels and patterns the life force within us. That pattern is not a balanced or harmonious pattern. We call it a negative pattern of behaviour and it deeply influences all our life. In time it will result in a physical debility or distortion of health. The negative pattern also acts like a vortex that draws the material of disease into itself. At a simple level we recognise this when we think of tiredness as weakening our defences to the common cold. But every other negative pattern of emotional behaviour is also likely to weaken our defences.
The way that negative patterns act upon the body (both physical and emotional) can be visualised. A shock will tear the fabric allowing life force to flow out like blood from a wound. Rigid mental attitudes progressively remove the suppleness from the body just as ageing makes the bones brittle as the structure of the collagen changes (collagen is the elastic fibre in bone and tissue). Fear restricts the flow of life force so that change is less possible just as it creates shallow breathing and so reduces the exchange of gases. The effect of this can be traced through the whole metabolism: less oxygen means less activity in all parts of the body, less red blood (and so the pallor of fear), less efficient digestion, poor circulation and so cold, fatigue and poor health are inevitable. These are all physical effects of a poor pattern of breathing. But the breathing is a result of a more subtle cause - the restriction of the life force that a prolonged pattern of fear or nervousness will induce. It is possible to counteract the effects by learning to breathe better, by taking exercise and so on. This will effectively unsettle the pattern. But if the fear remains the pattern will reform and the condition will continue.
Other problems can be seen in a similar way. A pattern of health often has a quite logical sequence in it if we can ascertain the stages that lead to the originating cause. Any of the feelings of apathy, hopelessness or dejection will lead to a slowing of all life activity in the body, it will be a matter of which form of disease takes hold first when we come to give a name to the illness. Often there are many. In cases where tension, anger, dominance and pride are at work the life force is put under pressure, channelled into a fixed direction. The result is that pressure is localised in the physical body: in the heart maybe, or in the head.
Dr Bach saw this process as being a very literal indication of life activity. It will be necessary, he said, “to be able from the life and history of the patient [person] to understand the conflict which is causing the disease or disharmony... to give the necessary advice and treatment for the relief of the sufferer”.36 For Bach the relationship was direct. If we suffer pain it is because we cause pain to others... it has a slightly judgmental ring to it but he makes his point.
Pain is the result of cruelty which causes pain to others, and may be mental or physical: but be sure that if you suffer pain, if you will but search yourselves you will find that some hard action or hard thought is present in your nature: remove this, and your pain will cease. If you suffer from stiffness of joint or limb, you can be equally certain that there is stiffness in your mind; that you are rigidly holding on to some idea, some principle, some convention may be, which you should not have. If you suffer from asthma or difficulty in breathing, you are in some way stifling another personality; or from lack of courage to do right, smothering yourself. If you waste, it is because you are allowing someone to obstruct your own life-force from entering your body. Even the part of the body affected indicates the nature of the fault. The hand, failure or wrong in action: the foot, failure to assist others: the brain, lack of control: the heart, deficiency or excess or wrong doing in the aspect of love: the eye, failure to see aright and comprehend the truth when placed before you. And so, exactly, may be worked out the reason and nature of the infirmity: the lesson required of the patient: and the necessary correction made.37
This idea is elaborated in Heal Thyself. It is a little confronting perhaps but Bach wants us to take up the responsibility for our health and for our life. It is our mental attitude that is to be examined not the righteousness of our souls. To him, as both a doctor and as a man, the state of bodily health is a matter of observable fact not something that requires moral criticism. This is important since it is at the heart of the matter. If we judge the body of ourselves or another with the sharp knife of our minds we will only cause pain. We need a loving, caring understanding to appreciate how the mental attitude has become consolidated into this pattern of difficulty. Nothing sentimental will help but a truthful acceptance of life and the will to work with change. If we approach the matter with criticism and judgement we will find it rebounds: we must then examine ourselves to see what is happening.
If we have in our nature sufficient love of all things, then we can do no harm; because that love would stay our hand at any action, our mind at any thought which might hurt another. But we have not yet reached that state of perfection; if we had, there would be no need for our existence here. But all of us are seeking and advancing towards that state, and those of us who suffer in mind or body are by this very suffering being led towards that ideal condition...38
It is clear that all of us in life are pretty much in the same boat. It is not a matter where some of us are perfected and others are not. For, as one teacher put it, if we were too good for this world we may be sure that we would be adorning another! So in this matter it is not a judgement that is sought but an understanding of the process of disease.
In order for us to see that what Bach describes is actually so we must observe its truth in our own experience. In such circumstances case histories do not prove anything, rather we must actually see the process for ourselves. For this we must first suspend disbelief and then open our hearts to life: we will be shown. We might perceive by intellectual reasoning but the process is far more difficult. But for those who like to think about it we could go back to the most perfect case history of all, our own life. What we then might see is how the process of our health has reflected the mental attitude that we have had in our lives.
What actually happens then is something rather like this. As we experience life certain patterns of behaviour become engrained in us. They are the responses to a combination of factors: the inherited patterns that dispose our nature to certain attitudes, the learned instinctive responses of family patterning and then the responses that we have to the variety of life experience. What mental attitude these create will be individual for each of us but it will be well established in most of us long before we are adult. Let us suppose that a child finds life to be difficult. Perhaps a deep conflict has developed between the parents. When there is a prospect of the conflict being repeated the child has anxiety. It might displace this mental attitude with pretence, manipulative behaviour, whatever. But in individual cases the physical body could eventually register the story as earache, eczema or enuresis (bed-wetting). In fact each of these three offers a possibility of viewing the way that the pattern is manifesting since bed-wetting is likely to demonstrate fear or anger against the father, eczema a smothered fear and mental turmoil and earache a pressure of anger that wishes not to hear.
If we work with Dr Bach’s flower remedies we could prescribe for such a situation and know that as the emotional conflict was eased then the physical problem would disappear. If the mental outlook is no longer being informed by the difficulty then the physical body has no longer that negative pattern distorting the flow of the life force. So while we may begin by attempting to remove the eczema from a suffering child we must actually work to ease the mental outlook. The remedy in such an instance would be Agrimony which is for the anxiety and inner pain that is hidden by the appearance of cheerfulness. In such an example the pain is not allowed to show on the outside emotionally but it cannot be prevented from appearing physically.
In actual fact it is not really necessary even to take a remedy for the difficulty that we experience once we can see that it derives from this mental state. It is quite possible to work directly upon the mental state ourselves once we recognise that it is creating the distortion in our pattern of health. Perhaps we may think that it is asking too much of a child but in fact the child will find it easier to do than an adult because the adult is more bound in with the idea of being unwell. This interestingly is equally true of our responses to actually taking the Bach Remedies for children respond more readily than adults in most cases.
As adults we seem to feel we need something more complicated than this to explain health and illness. We feel that it cannot be so simple. Our instinct is for complex explanations since simple truths are more difficult to avoid. But what Bach is putting forward is a view that requires us to reorientate our ideas. Just as thought forms and karmic shells create the patterns of behaviour that we express in life so we have certain set attitudes about what constitutes health and what leads to illness. These attitudes often require complex intellectual structures to maintain the distance between idea and reality and to distance us from our responsibility for our own life. It is the complexity that leads us to go to specialists.
At the extreme we see all the hardware of the modern hospital system probing, measuring and assembling as many facts as possible in the hope of it making sense. But while modern medicine has successes in some areas it cannot offer any hope of reducing the burden of illness or increasing the prospect of health since it has no explanation as to why we get sick. In other areas of medicine or health care we see that a less technological approach touches more upon the human aspect. But often the problem is still made into a complex issue. The complexity makes it special and enforces the relationship of illness and health that already exists. What we see then is a mental outlook that is structured into the very way that we all see illness: we have a set idea of what our illness is and how we imagine we can get better.
This may be illustrated by the picture that we have formed (mental outlook) about ourselves if we are a patient or a practitioner. Even if we leave out the white coats we have an image where the patient is seen in a recumbent position, lying down under illness. It has to be that way otherwise we have no way of telling who is the patient. It also signifies that the illness has reached a stage of development where we can no longer maintain our daily living in the way we are accustomed, standing on our own two feet. Just the act of seeking help means that we have admitted that illness has got on top of us. For this reason we define a relationship that puts the helper as being okay and ourselves as being in trouble.
The natural consequence of this is to see health as an either/or situation and to imagine that we need only take something to get us up and better again. But while we may receive specific help from another person the process of life is really not built upon such a see-saw. If it helps to think in terms of visual models we can imagine the matter not as a line where we cross into ill health but as a circular image where the centre is the abundance of life and the periphery the various negative states of difficulty. Then, in order to be more in the state of health we need only look to see what leads us towards the centre where there is a greater abundance of life. Any other involvement in the difficulty is just delaying the change.
There are many ways of expressing this. Swami Sri Yukteswar (1855-1936) says:
There are two ways to be rid of disease, a right and a wrong way, the one being slow and uncertain and the other being speedy and sure; the foolish physician studies disease in order to bring about health while the wise physician studies health in order to annihilate disease, saying to his patients:
“Fulfill the condition of health and diseases will fall away from you of their own accord.”
And if this is so with the body, in like manner is it also with the mind which is full of maladies in the shape of hatred and jealousy and sensuality and anger and other painful and bitter sensations.
And how will we do this? He says:
Imagination is the door through which disease as well as healing enters. Disbelieve in the reality of sickness even when we are ill; an unrecognised visitor will flee.
From this we can only conclude that what we each hold in our minds is the mental outlook that defines our perception of life. If we hold the attitude that sees ourselves as unable to overcome our life difficulty then certainly we will be incapable. If we hold in our mind an attitude that is destructive to life we can only find ourselves being destroyed.
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