Pike's Peak Atrium Group Leader's Message
Group Leader David Miller is sharing a significant message
written by our former Imperator
BACK TO GOD AND HEALTH
By H. Spencer Lewis, F.R.C.
THIS TITLE implies that we have wandered or strayed from the natural and moral path that leads to health. In many ways this is true. For years this country and its people were swayed by the dogmas and creeds propounded by those who would lead us into the channels and the customs that would take us away from our natural birthright of attunement with God and with all of the natural forces that give us life and health. But we who know the trend of human affairs rejoice that people have found freedom of thought and the determination to find God and health within their own consciousness and within their own simple existence.
We must pay homage to the various movements sponsored by foresighted men and women, broad-visioned churches and organizations, which have fostered a study of the natural laws pertaining to life and health and which have slowly and permanently broken down the faith and trust that men, women, and children had placed in injurious drugs and questionable proprietary remedies. I do not mean by this to cast any reflection upon the various standard and reputable and efficient systems of medical practice endorsed and recommended by the most eminent schools and scientists of this country.
The Rosicrucian Order has been devoted to the teaching and promulgation of those natural laws which enable men and women to maintain their natural birthrights, develop their inherited powers and faculties, and attain success and happiness through mastership over those things that are commonly called the obstacles of life. The Order does not represent a movement devoted to the ailing and does not recommend any one system of therapeutics as superior to any other. With studied carefulness it promotes the idea that illness of any kind is a result of violation of some natural law and that the patient is not the one to diagnose his or her situation and attempt to cure matters, but that the patient should consult an eminent authority or a specialist or a qualified practitioner and secure medical or therapeutic help as may be required.
The Nature of Life
The Order teaches certain fundamental principles in regard to the nature of life, its maintenance and its enjoyment, as have been known to the organization for many centuries and which have been partly responsible for the reputation that the Rosicrucians possess certain secret knowledge regarding the natural laws not commonly appreciated by the multitudes. We all have the right to perfect life and may achieve it through certain simple rules.
The Rosicrucian ontology, or science of being, begins with the fundamental proposition which we find so ably expressed in the Christian Bible: that in the beginning God created humans out of the dust of the earth and breathed into their nostrils the breath of life and each human became a living soul. No matter how we may analyze this statement―and we find it expressed in practically the same words by all of the ancient schools and sects and in all the sacred writings of the Orient―we come to a few definite facts that science of today proves and individuals everywhere are discovering to be absolutely true.
First of all, we are dual creatures. Each of us has a physical body and a spiritual body called the soul. In the process of creating and evolving this most wonderful of all God’s creations, there came a time when these two bodies were united by the process of breathing or by the intake of the breath of life. Our own experiences have shown us that just as we become conscious of our existence as an animated being by the uniting of these two bodies, so the other great change called death or transition is a separation of the two and in the interval between birth and death these two bodies must coordinate, cooperate, and function in unison and harmony in order that there may be health as well as life.
The Spiritual Body
Few men or women will believe that health or disease or physical pain and suffering are a result of some condition of the spiritual body. The most casual observation of the operation of natural laws and the divine laws of the universe makes it plain that disease and ill-health, suffering and pain are things of the flesh and of the physical body and not of the spiritual body. For this reason we are justified in confining our study of health and disease to a study of the physical body and its relation to the natural forces and its weakness and power.
Reverting again to the fundamental proposition of the Rosicrucian ontology we find that the physical body was formed of the dust of the earth. But we change those words to the modern scientific terms and say that the physical body is composed of the material elements of the earth; or we may go even further and say that the physical body is being formed hourly from the living, vitalizing, physical elements of the earth upon which we live. It is true that there would be no life without the soul or the divine essence, and that this divine essence exists not only in the organized body called a human being, but also in all of the elements of which the human body is composed. There is the divine essence in the water, in the minerals of the earth, in all vegetation, in everything that exists.
We know today that there is no such thing as dead matter, that all matter is living. It is alive with the essence of divinity, with that vital force known by many names, undiscoverable except in its manifestations, and most assuredly emanating from the greatest of all constructive sources of creation. But living matter, unorganized in the image of God, does not constitute the living human body. It is only when the elements of the earth pass through that wonderful transmutation process established by God that they become organized and associated in a way that they have the highest form of physical expression on earth―the human body, so wonderfully and fearfully made.
Complex as is this physical body in its organization, in all its parts, in its beauty of synchronous action, coordination, sympathetic cooperation, and power to move itself, it is nevertheless composed of and being recomposed of the simple things of the earth according to a divine law.
Humans were not created in the image of God with any intention that the Deity should take upon itself the right to change the fundamental laws of nature or to modify them or negate them. Humans have found that when they go too far in the privilege of exercising their minds and their abilities to choose, and ignore some of the necessities of life, some of the demands of nature, the decrees of God, that they weaken their physical constitutions by the violation of natural laws and break their attunement with nature and go farther away from God each time.
Contrary to the Laws of Nature
Without question, we have evolved customs and habits of living not originally decreed in the scheme of things and in many ways decried by nature and abhorred by the divine principles. We remove ourselves from the open country, from contact with the natural forces of the earth, from sunlight, earth’s magnetism, fresh vegetation, pure water, and the proper cosmic vibrations, and confine ourselves for hours in small enclosures, in foul air, in darkness, and in the breeding places of disease, germs, and ill-health.
We ignore the right of the body to have free expression, unimpaired freedom of movement and proper ease, by tightening about our bodies various limiting and binding articles of clothing. We place undue pressure upon the our blood vessels and nerves, wearing tight shoes, throwing the body out of balance in walking or standing, and doing many things to the body’s mechanical operation that are contrary to the laws of nature. We ignore our body’s demand for rest and sleep; we negate the demands of the functioning organs and arbitrarily adapt periods and times for them which are not consistent with the perfect scheme outlined by nature; and in thousands of ways we take it upon ourselves to force our physical growth and development into habits and customs not harmonious with the decrees of nature.
Nature has provided us with thousands of elements that should enter into the recomposition of our body from day to day, and yet we arbitrarily select but a few of these as our choice and abstain from the rest. In all our thinking and doing we are hourly violating some law of nature for which we must pay the penalty in the form of pain and suffering, disease, and ill-health.
It is only in a normal healthy body that the human soul can function and exist harmoniously. If humans would find God, happiness, success, and prosperity, we must maintain our physical body and its normal standing so that everything may manifest the divine, vital essence that gives us life, that gives us health and gives us the power to do. As we break down our physical organization we lessen the ability of the soul, the essence and mind within us to function in all their majesty and power.
There is no question about the fundamental principle involved―get back to nature! Get back to nature’s way of living! Get back to earth! Get into the sunshine, enjoy the vegetation that nature has provided and all the things that give the elements necessary to the body, take in all the fresh air that contains the vital force of life, expand your consciousness, give greater freedom to your divinity to express itself. Thus you will become healthy, wonderful in your inherited privileges and blessings. You will become what God and nature intended you to be: the living image of the great cosmic powers with all the creative forces sustaining the ability to accomplish and attain.