By Stephen Russell-Lacy.
Listen to this episode
See the post Disease origins for a shorter version.
We all know that natural things like viruses cause disease. Coronavirus results in symptoms of covid-19. However, it’s worth exploring whether there are extra reasons for why we suffer illness. So, I’ll be asking whether disease is due to individual differences between people? Is it a direct consequence of industrialisation? And is it indirectly anything to do with the ethical quality of humanity as a whole? And being concerned with deeper matters, I am wondering whether spiritual theory might be able to help.
Medical level of explanation
Let’s start with medical science. The Greek doctor, Hippocrates, was the first medic to believe disease is not a visitation of the gods. Instead, he thought it is caused by earthly influences. Since then, medicine has made tremendous strides. It understands many of the biological processes when disease develops in a person.
So, every doctor now knows about toxic bacteria. The effects range from causing trivial skin infections to devastating disorders like bubonic plague. Bacteria cause various types of pneumonia and meningitis.
Government doctors tell us coronavirus is more easily caught than many other infections. It is more contagious. At the same time, not everyone exposed to it gets the disease. It depends partly on the level of exposure. Also, resistance to any illness varies in line with our immunity, age, and general medical condition. All play a role in determining whether a person becomes sick.
The point is, we cannot fully understand disease just by a study of the biological processes. We also need to understand how to improve our resilience. Also is it possible to understand the origin of the dangerous microbes and other toxic agents. Whilst medicine can often explain the process of development of disease, it doesn’t understand these other factors too well. Is it possible to prevent harmful microbes existing in the first place?
Isn’t suffering a direct effect of human action?
Clearly human suffering directly results from military combat and violent crime. Injury and disease can come from industrial conditions and pollution. Human manufacturing activity can cause electrification, radiation, exposure to extreme temperature or chemical poisoning. Laboratories find odourless and tasteless compounds of arsenic in some plant sprays, paints, and other household preparations. In addition, all prescribed drugs have potentially harmful side-effects. Morphine, for example, is an excellent drug for the control of severe pain. Yet it can lower respiration, and too much of it can cause death.
On the other hand, industrial and technological activity don’t cause many toxic agents. These are the many harmful viruses, bacteria, fungi, and parasites we find in the environment.
Viruses may survive for some time in the soil, in water, or in milk. They cannot multiply unless they invade living cells. There they may cause infection but not disease. However, when they do cause disease, they can for example result in smallpox, flu, measles, mumps, encephalitis, warts or the common cold. We may wonder why damaging microbes exist in nature in the first place?
Are there any less obvious causes of disease?
In 1999 Glenn Hoddle had to resign as England football manager. Journalists and a government minister criticised him for expressing his view concerning people born with a disability. He said their disability was a punishment due to sins committed by them in a former life. The idea of sin sounds judgmental to many people these days. Critics pointed out that Hoddle was being unbelievably insensitive and hurtful. He had forgotten that Britain had some of the most talented disabled athletes in the world. It was as if he were blaming victims of disease for their suffering.
Actually, the England manager was a person who had worked tirelessly on behalf of the disabled. Yet, his belief didn’t sound so very different from the fundamentalist notion that disease is God punishing sinners. A punitive concept of deity. People before the 18th century used the word ‘illness’ to mean “wickedness, depravity, immorality.” These older meanings reflect the fact that the word “ill” is a contracted form of “evil”.
These days those views are often seen as unacceptable condemnation of those judged to have led less than ideal lifestyles. Religious people tend instead to have an image of God as a wise source of loving compassion.
It is also possible to see the influence of the Eastern world idea of ‘karma’ in Hoddle’s thinking. Hindus and Buddhists tend to view one’s actions as deciding one’s fate in a future reincarnation. But we don’t have to believe in reincarnation to acknowledge that it is possible to bring our own suffering on ourselves by what we each do. Misfortune can follow on in this life directly from our own or others’ mistakes and foolishness. So, we can each make ourselves more at risk of disease. We can fail to wash properly and live in unsanitary conditions. Or we can have an entirely sedentary lifestyle, smoke, drink immoderate amounts of alcohol or eat food to excess.
But of course, we might well point out that, even if true, this doesn’t mean all illness and hardship is our own individual fault.
Has humanity brought a curse on itself?
This an unacceptable idea for many of us because a curse implies someone doing the cursing. Having said that, a question arises linked to this sentiment. Could there actually be a connection between the general moral state of humanity and the existence of toxic microbes in the environment? Could a selfish streak in humanity as a whole have automatic consequences in the physical dimension of nature? I know of one spiritual theory that offers such a view.
But hang on a minute I hear you saying. Just how rational is it to invoke any concept of the spiritual? How reasonable is it to try to explain something natural like disease in terms of something outside of and beyond nature?
Indeed, many scientists dismiss all spiritual theory as invalid. This is because, like so-called paranormal phenomena, they cannot research it with scientific methods. Actually, many think that spiritual and religious ideas about the world have been disproved by science.
But before going along with this view, you might want to first consider something. This is whether the natural sciences can possibly understand everything. The rise in the holistic approach, including mind, body and spirit, is beginning to be more generally accepted. This is so in public health care services. Writers and thinkers now see the relevance of psychological and spiritual issues to health.
Interestingly, we use the word ‘health’ in ordinary language not to just mean the physical body. Politicians speak of the ‘health of the nation’. We refer to someone as having a healthy attitude or healthy state of mind.
The human body and all its workings are something physical. Surgeons and nurses can touch, see, and measure them. But consciousness of mind and spirit is something non-physical. It is not part of the material realm. Consciousness is subjective and not objectively observed. One cannot touch or measure subjective awareness. Yet health care workers usually have no trouble appreciating the connection between body and consciousness. Between health of the patient’s body and their spirit of mind.
They recognise that consciousness clearly affects the body. For example, subjective negativity and pessimism of those patients undergoing surgery is often accompanied by physiological complications such as lowered resistance to infection. Also, emotional turmoil can cause ulcers or high blood pressure. Take away the psychological problem and the body will have a better chance to heal. In addition, the hectic pace of deadlines of the world, without time for quiet reflection, triggers negative emotions. This weakens the immune system in the body.
Some malformations in the body present at birth (congenital diseases) result from cell mutations. These are apparently accidental alterations in the developing foetus or in inherited genes. Science cannot explain when and why many of these apparently random changes take place.
There is a point I would like to emphasise here. It is that science cannot explain why harmful mutations and microbes in nature actually exist.
The physicist Schrödinger put it this way. He said the only way scientists can “master the infinitely intricate problem of nature”, is to simplify it. They do this by removing part of the problem. The part that scientists remove is themselves as conscious knowing subjects. Everything else, including the scientists’ own bodies as well everything else that can be objectively observed remains open to scientific investigation.
Consequently, neuro-scientists cannot explain human consciousness or human spirit; not even their own spirit of enquiry. No wonder then they cannot account for human intention which relies on consciousness. Likewise, biology cannot accept ‘intelligent design’ when looking at evolution. Yet, even many people who are not devoutly religious acknowledge that the spirit of God made the universe. According to this theology, a divine purpose creates the earth and human life on it: they do not emerge by accident.
What spiritual theory might explain disease?
Emanuel Swedenborg was a scientist, mystic and spiritual philosopher. He wrote about three concepts that I think are relevant. The three concepts are ‘correspondence’, ‘the spiritual world’ and ‘influx’. For him, there is a dynamic result of these three factors combining together. It concerns all the good and bad things that exist in the natural world. Taken together I think they can help formulate a spiritual theory of disease. His idea is that these mirror a shared consciousness of everybody. So how might this be so?
What did Swedenborg mean by his concept of correspondence?
Swedenborg gives numerous examples of how nature mirrors spirit. He suggests for example that gentle animals reflect the spirit of human kindness. The opposite spirit of mind – that is to say the spirit of unkindness – corresponds to fierce animals.
There can be some horrible feelings around. Spite, malice, envy, greed, etc. These he thought of as symbolised by snakes, scorpions, lizards, crocodiles as well as toxic and dangerous things of all kinds and poisons in both plants and soils.
There is one particular example of correspondence between the common spirit of humanity and nature that is relevant. This concerns the inner tension between various conscious motives we experience. The conflict between beneficial and harmful desires; between what is constructive and destructive. We can envisage how nature mirrors this clash of feelings. This is the biological battle between potentially dangerous toxins, fungi, viruses, etc and our body’s protective immune system including its antibodies which fight with viruses. The battle in the body pictures the battle in the mind. This is but one example of the way the world of spirit and the world of nature correspond together.
What is meant by the ‘spiritual world’
Swedenborg wrote in Latin. I think the phrase ‘the world of spirit’ translates his idea of ‘mundi spiritualis’ is more helpful in this context. We speak of a spirit of sportsmanship, a spirit of comradeship, a spirit of generosity, a spirit of envy and so on. For him the world of spirit is the source of such states.
He says we all will eventually become directly conscious of this normally hidden realm. This will happen, if not before our bodily death, then afterwards. This usually veiled dimension of existence comprises the spirit of those people alive in the world today. It also consists of the spirit of all those humans long dead.
This world of spirit he says consists of two separate general spheres. Firstly, a heavenly realm which consists of the consciousness of countless people he calls ‘angelic spirits’. They have a spirit of generosity, kindness, and many other human virtues. Secondly, he describes a hellish sphere, made up of millions of individuals who have a spirit of meanness, unkindness, and many other human vices.
Perhaps this hellish spirit should not surprise us. We see, in the media, news of warfare, genocide, crime, social injustice, drug abuse, political corruption, and other examples of social evil present within human society.
What he saw in his altered state of consciousness was a vividly real to him as seeing physical things in ordinary life. He claims that everything he saw in the world of spirit was a representation of people’s inner state according to the correspondence between spirit and nature.
What did Swedenborg mean by his concept of influx?
We could explore the meaning of influx by considering the well known mind-body problem.
It has long been a puzzle to science how consciousness of the mind can affect the body. Yet the mind can do this. One example is when we choose to lift our arm, then our arm rises. How can something non-physical like a conscious decision, interact with something physical like nerves and muscles? Another example is when prolonged concentration causes mentally tiredness, then physical fatigue envelops our body. A third example is when the mind has been under emotional strain. Then the immune system weakens and the risk of stress-related illness increases.
So the individual mind affects the body. When we remember this it is a bit easier to see how the world of spirit might affect the natural world. It would be the mind of humanity as a whole affecting our environment. This is what Swedenborg means by influx.
This is his idea that there is a mysterious influx from the world of conscious spirit. This flows into the natural world. It causes a correspondence between them.
His notion that goodness of spirit can affect nature is in line with the religious teaching. The churches teach that the divine spirit of God created and also maintains the universe. Likewise, I would say, the conscious world of spirit channels this divine life into the physical world. The spirit of goodness feeds into the beauty, growth and healing found on our planet.
But we need to notice two sides to the coin of influx. There is also distortion, corruption and inversion of divine life. Swedenborg also experienced the presence of these desires in the world of spirit. The range of natural things thus mirror the range of human consciousness.
This is the reason I am talking about these 3 Swedenborg’s concepts i.e. world of spirit, correspondence and influx. I conclude that destructive desires present in the hidden realm of consciousness cause harmful microbes and cell mutations.
Vulnerability due to bodily disorder
Writing almost three hundred years ago, Swedenborg used Christian terminology to get his points across. He called the destructive sphere of the world of spirit ‘hell.’ He went on to claim that, usually, influences from this sphere do not make us physically ill. That is to say they don’t do so unless there already is some natural condition which is conducive to it. For example in his book Divine Love and Wisdom section 341 he writes of the inflow from hell activating things in places which answer to evil such as decay, manure, and so on.
Likewise, I would suggest that some conducive physical disorder in the individual body is necessary for this from the dark side of the mind of humanity. Only, then can harmful fungi, toxins, viruses and bacteria in nature result in the process of disease in the body. Disorderly states of the body conducive to disease include an unclean open wound, or an injury to a limb or internal organ, or a weakened immune system.
All this doesn’t mean illness is due to any unworthiness in the person. We are all exposed to nature. The plague rains down on the good and bad alike. The presence of the pandemic is the outcome of the general state of humanity. The underlying cause of disease is instead a sphere of immorality in human beings as a whole.
Does this mean there is a curse on the world because of humankind’s sinful behaviour? No, not if we believe in a divine spirit of love trying to offset disease with healing. The inflow of healing from the world of spirit needs to be assisted by the work of doctors treating disease.
How can we prevent disease?
The body is more naturally resilient to illness if it is young and fit. Physicians can successfully immune us from some infectious disease. They do this by introducing substances into our bodies. Things that help protect us from infection. Our immune system is more efficient if we are not suffering from psychological stress.
However, ultimately to get rid of disease the world needs spiritual immunity. This would be when our world of spirit as a whole is morally healthy. A very tall order of course. But this analysis I have been sharing might be correct. If so then a reduction in the unkind spirit of destructiveness in human consciousness would reduce the presence of harmful things around us. And the inflow and sharing of more human kindness would result in a healthier planet for us all.
Copyright 2020 Stephen Russell-Lacy
Author of Heart, Head & Hands Swedenborg’s perspective on emotional problems
