What is Disease?
What is True Healing?

by Don Beckett

BESIDES the obvious — dis-ease, the opposite of ease — what really constitutes disease? In the practice of Reiki, we often describe disease as a condition of energy imbalance or blockage, caused by tension, lack of relaxation. Seeing it this way, we can say that Reiki heals by relaxation, which restores the natural and balanced flow of energy throughout the body. To be more specific: The energy is not just any, it's unique. Reiki is a particular vibration, which opens the door to Shinki, "God energy" or "Source energy" — and that is what flows in and restores our harmony with the vibration of Source or true Self.

Macrobiotics describes all energies and all things in terms of yin and yang.* The 2 occur together in every thing and every event. The ever-changing relationship of yin and yang is what creates everything in our dualistic world. And, like Reiki, Macrobiotics also describes illness as a situation of imbalanced energies. We can say that imbalanced energy is toxic; and therefore, that disease is caused by the accumulation of toxins in the body.

* Modern Macrobiotics teaches that yin is expansive, centrifugal motion, and that yang is contractive, centripetal motion — which is just the opposite of reality, in fact! This quirk of Macrobiotics philosophy adds confusion and – more importantly – causes a fundamental misunderstanding of the true nature of certain things. For a lengthy discourse on this, please see the article "Yin and Yang" : ^ ).

We create this imbalance/toxicity in countless ways. We are constantly both taking in and producing yin and yang energies — by eating, by thinking, by feeling (emotion), by doing anything, by doing nothing. Each of us is a circuit in the giant circuit-board we call the Universe; all connected with each other, all exchanging energy continually. And all of us have different balance points, different combinations of yin and yang energies. Even our individual balance points are ever-changing, affected by all that happens within and around us. We are always at some distance from the point of perfect balance; and always, whether consciously or not, striving toward that ever-moving point. The closer we are to the balance point, the healthier; the farther away, the more diseased.

Only One Disease

Hmmmm ... if all diseases are caused by energy imbalance/toxicity, then aren't all diseases really a single disease? The disease is the energy imbalance/toxicity — though it may present itself in a countless variety of masks: everything from a runny nose to a swollen prostate gland; heart attack; loss of hearing; cuts and bruises (yes, there are no "accidents," everything is a reflection of our degree of balance at a particular moment); indigestion; cancer; AIDS; and new combinations of symptoms arising faster than they can be given names.

Modern medicine is very good at naming symptoms, often by simply describing them in Latin. Naming things can be helpful, but this naming also leads to the mistaken notion that different collections of symptoms equal different diseases. Which leads to the notion that each "disease" has a different cause and a different cure. This creates an illusion of overwhelming complexity and focuses our attention at the wrong level. Instead of looking for the one, single, underlying disease, we end up fascinated by the myriad of symptoms that sprout from it. The real disease and its cause are never addressed by modern medicine, and so cannot be cured by it.

The Germ Theory

More confusion has been caused by what is called the Germ Theory of disease. With the microscopic discovery of a whole world of bacteria and viruses — and the observation that certain ones are characteristically associated with certain "diseases" (symptoms) — the microscopic thinkers concluded that a particular "germ" or family of germs was the cause of each particular "disease" (collection of symptoms), and that the way to cure the "disease" was to destroy the germs.**

** The Germ Theory of disease was invented and promoted by Louis Pasteur — in opposition to 2 of his peers, Antoine Béchamp and Claude Bernard. Béchamp had discovered what he called microzymes: prebacterial particles present in all living things. He said that these particles could change form and size, depending on the general condition of their host organism — and that disease occurred only when the normal functioning of the host was impaired. He said that microbes could not survive in a healthy, well-balanced organism.
      Claude Bernard, who agreed with Béchamp, became famous for his proclamation "The microbe is nothing, the terrain is everything." Possibly this pronouncement was so memorable because Bernard demonstrated the truth of it by drinking a glass of water teeming with cholera and showing no ill effects!
      Nonetheless, Pasteur continued propagating his Germ Theory; and he was such a good salesman that people bought it. The discoveries of Bernard and Béchamp (whose scientific credentials dwarfed Pasteur's) were all but forgotten. And then, Pasteur himself, on his deathbed, proclaimed that his Germ Theory was indeed wrong: "Bernard was right; the pathogen is nothing; the terrain is everything."
      One of the dirty little secrets in modern medicine is that Béchamp's and Bernard's refutations of Germ Theory, and Pasteur's own recanting of it, have been conveniently swept under the rug. In fact, when Pasteur's laboratory notes finally came to light (almost a century after his death, and though he had instructed his family never to release them!), they showed that some of his experiments did not even demonstrate what he had claimed at the time.
      Despite all this, the Germ Theory continues to be taught and believed — as, without it, there would be no basis for the existence of an antibiotics ("against life") industry. For more on this topic, you might like this article about Pasteur, and/or this one, The Lost History of Medicine, and/or this one, Béchamp & Pasteur – Clash & Consequence.

Reiki, Johrei, and Macrobiotics all take a more macro-scopic look at the situation. Seeing not only the symptoms but also the underlying cause — which is always an energy imbalance/toxicity — they focus on healing it by helping the body attain balance and release the toxins.

Release of Toxins

Macrobiotics tends to focus more on physical toxins — emphasis on diet and physical environment — while Johrei works directly and solely on spiritual toxins, with the understanding that "the spiritual precedes the physical." In other words, everything physical is merely a materialization of something spiritual — and, in fact, the physical manifestation (symptoms) of disease can be pre-empted if the spiritual toxins are dissolved early enough. Reiki, in a way, combines both these strategies: It brings about healing simultaneously on the spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical levels.

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