[Gutenberg 23101] • Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing

"Mental healing" emphasizes the interpenetration of what are usually called "mind" and "body" and makes use of the power of thought to affect the body. In the worldview of mental healing, people's deeply-held thoughts make them ill or at least create the preconditions for disease and psychological problems. Healers work to remove deeply held resentments, to release unexpressed emotions, to assuage buried terror (all of which, in this view, are caused by deeply held thoughts), in order to build self-confidence and to plant in people a positive and hopeful view of their path through life. Mental healers insist that, just as people can make themselves sick by the way they think, the way they think can make them well again. On a simple level, a person whose self-image has led to a destructive diet that has caused medical problems may improve the problem and the diet by changing the self-image--which is a way of thinking, an intention, a mental act. Psychologists teach people to improve depression by changing the way they think. But mental healing travels further out the continuum occupied by these easily accepted cases, to claim that all disease is caused by how we use our minds and can be improved by using our minds differently. Mental healing departs even more radically from the normal view when it holds that thoughts can change not only the body, but even the external world. Energy-based healing methods rarely seem to employ mental activities--except for some visualizations. In energy systems, thinking is more likely to be considered part of the problem and pre-cognitive energy flow the solution. In mental healing, thinking is both problem and cure.