2nd FIRE – brief synopsis
There are many thoughtful people, among them scientists and medical practioners, who are intuitively sympathetic to so-called New Age ideas, but who lack the energy of conviction to make of it an effective, healing philosophy - using ‘healing’ in the broadest sense.
2nd Fire explores a number of principles or laws of Nature. These indicate that an understanding of suffering is possible and consequently that the basis for an honest, philosophically coherent and effective system of healing can be found.
The Principle of Law in Nature, for instance, asserts that natural law applies with equal rigour in all realms - physical as well as metaphysical. Since suffering is first and last a psychological (metaphysical) experience, this principle is of fundamental importance. With it goes the Principle of Causality which asserts that all our experiences are meaningful, never random… and are therefore intelligible.
The energy of the healing process comes ultimately from acceptance of self-responsibility - don’t blame mother, school, Apartheid, germs etc. The direction of the energy comes from an understanding of the purpose of Evolution.
Consequently, in the medical context the emphasis will move - as it is already doing - increasingly from physical practices to
psycho-spiritual practices and therefore increasingly from external to internal strategies based on an expanded appreciation of psychosomatic principles.
There are several obstructive myths to this type of thinking which need to be overcome; they include the myth that unpleasant experiences are ‘accidental’, ‘unlucky’, ‘tragic’ etc.; the myth that pain is an end in itself, even a virtue - rather than an important therapeutic message; the myth that body and mind are casually connected rather than exactly matched and, finally, the myth that there are some questions about suffering which are sacrosanct and may not be asked - although the answer may release us.
With fresh insight we can appreciate that physical experiences are a reflection of our spiritual needs and therefore that they hold the key to the required remedy. However, there is an important creative challenge: because the symptoms to be healed in one realm or paradigm (say the physical) first require healing in another less dense realm (in the ‘mind’ say) we find that literal translation is difficult. So, to find correspondences, we are eventually compelled, by the laws of Nature, to apply our minds to this puzzle, to demand answers. One way of doing this is to explore the metaphorical content - the figurative ‘logic’ - of our suffering.