I am working from the Helios Books edition 1970. The original was first published in 1937 and has been through many editions since, so yours may be slightly different to mine, but not in its overall ideas. There is a pdf copy available for free here which will do the job. It is a deceptively simple book which can be read through in no time at all. Full digestion and appreciation of it takes much longer though.

Israel Regardie was very much a 20th century man; anti-religion, pro-free love, pro-drugs, pro-psychotherapy. He was Jewish (the clue is in his name!) and most important of all was Aleister Crowley’s secretary. As a result of all these things a great deal of what we know today about the ‘occult’ comes to us courtesy of him. This is a double-edged sword. While many of the techniques of the secret society to which he belonged, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, are priceless, Regardie’s writing and approach became, over time, increasingly psychologised. What I mean is that he believed the amazing possibilities and untapped potential of life to be in the hands of humans, rather than to God. I don’t agree with him on that, but it’s a separate discussion for another time.

Also, Regardie’s own limitations can be seen from his numbers. He was born on 17th November 1907, making his Four Roads 9,8, 1 and 1, with a Power Number 19/1. So it would be natural that he would believe that healing (9) would all be a matter of personal (1) power (8). It always comes back to the numbers in the end.

But we should start this journey by taking the book in question, The Art of True Healing, by itself, as a stand alone thing. Much benefit will be gained by avoiding the trap of trying to place its words and ideas in context with other things. Don’t do that, just treat it as you find it, and work with it as a thing by itself, which may - or may not - reveal connections to others disciplines and practices as you go along.

This is how he opens the book, forcibly showing us his 8 and 1. He then continues by naming and describing this force as libido.

Libido is a tricky word, and we must understand that he was writing this in 1935/36, so we have to be careful to grasp what he really means. Libido is not simply sexual desire, it is the want, thirst, urge, hunger and desire that we all have to be our fullest, realest self, to express our nature to the max. This force, he claims, resides at the heart of every living cell, animal, vegetable and mineral, pushing it onwards and upwards to be what it wants to be. Now, for most people, where this force shows itself at all (and in many people it does not) it manifests as greed, ambition and lust. But it can be re-directed to other, more helpful ends. Rather than using this force to attain high office, wealth, status, a new car, new clothes or jewellery, or to sleep your way around the world or be adored by millions, this force has other uses, namely to provide health and healing.

But, and here’s the problem, if this is the case, if there exists within everyone a enormous reservior of power that has the potential to renew our bodies and transform our environment, then why isn’t everyone healthy, happy and fulfilled? Becuase, he says, we resist. We resist, fight, kick against and generally fail to take seriously the potential amazingness of the force that we have, quite naturally, inside us. Dammit! We are resisting the infinite flow! We are the problem! We need to get out of the way!

The problem is further compounded though by the fact that our resistance is subconscious. We do it automatically! Without even knowing it, twenty times a day, we block, obstruct and resist the natural flow of this infinite force with us.

Think on that for a few moments. Can you see how and where you are doing this? it’s probably easier to see it in others, but that doesn’t mean its not happening inside you, because it almost certainly is. This is step one, in the art of true healing, to become AWARE of this reality, the fact of that we are full to bursting with infinite amazingness, but that we deny it, block it from being expressed and resist when it wants to manifest. We do this all the time, through our own stubbornness, arrogance, close-mindedness and fear, but we also do it by buying into the profoundly limiting beliefs of the society in which we live. As Regardie himself says,

Now, as may be obvious, we live in interesting times. They are interesting because this armour of prejudice and ill-conceived fantasy is cracking. The inevitable collapse and transformation of Western civilisation into something different but undoubtedly worse (at least in the short-term) is becoming increasingly visible, to increasing numbers of people, and that is one way that an awareness of the amazingness of the infinite within us can emerge and be realised, when things are so bad that we have no other choice. But by itself that it not enough. We need the positive to the expanding negative. We need encounters with the spiritual if we are really to change our outlook for the better.

Encounters with the spiritual is what my work generally, and the Hub specifically, are all about. I do not have all the answers (well, sometimes I do :-)) but I do know where you can find the answers, through spiritual experiences, such as the Inner Guide Meditation, as well as through all the many other fascinating exercises and topics that are available here. But what it boils down to, in the end, is that spiritual experience is more important than spiritual knowledge.

Spiritual experiences re-connect us to the infinite amazingness, they re-ignite wonder and fascination in a way that science is simply incapable of. At first, maybe, you will need a bit of faith or trust in order to get started, but eventually your spiritual experiences - mysterious encounters which defy the mind - become second nature.

What Regardie is saying though is that, in order to truly heal, your realisation of the infinite amazingness must become fully conscious, and that this can only be attained through repeated, mental effort, deliberate, willed attempts to see the Divine everywhere and in everything. Essentially an elevation of consciousness is necessary in order to heal. Your automatic resistance has to go, replaced by the realisation that all - everyone, everywhere, everything - would be health and light, if we would just let it. When we don’t do this then fatigue, tiredness and illness are the consequences, basically our rewards for fighting God.

So, you must first desire health, and then match that desire with an awareness of the constant presence of God. This sets the stage for the healing work.

However, desiring health isn’t so simple for some. If you feel, in any way, on any level, that you kind of deserve your present state of illness or disease, then lo-and-behold, you are right, you do. and that lingering belief will keep you there, in that state, in that pattern, until you see that infinite amazingness awaits you if you would just smash the bars of your mental prison. Easy, eh? Not really, because many, many, many people like - in fact need - to be ill. When your illness is all that you have, when it becomes your identity, when it becomes the reason why others notice you and defer to you (when they never did before) then that illness will be very, very, very hard to let go of. The presence of karmic debt numbers might pre-figure such a situation, as might the presence of 3 (attention seeking), 6 (refusal to individuate) and 9 (overly dramatic victim complex). To be fair though all numbers have the potential, in their own ways, to hang onto illness and disease because of the perverse rewards it provides them.

Another challenge on the path to health and healing is that pain and illness are great teachers, and when you remove the pain you can, potentially, remove the learning. In such cases the removal of the pain will not stick and a different problem will return, in order that you learn. Basically if the pain or illness or disease are linked to something you need to learn then on some level you will know that and that will be why you block the infinite amazingness, because you aren’t really ready for it.

Tricky isn’t it? Yes, but a way through can be found. None of us are destined for suffering, it’s just that suffering is often what we get, essentially because we aren’t learning and are blocking the omnipresent infinite amazingness that should be, by rights, ours to to claim, right here, right now.

Of course the Art of True Healing isn’t just about physical healing. This idea of the constant vigour of the infinite amazingness blocked by our own narrow vision influences our ability to succeed and thrive in life in general. Our distance/alienation/disconnection from the natural bountiful flow of life breeds problems of all kinds, physical, emotional and mental.

So that’s the first part, awareness of the roots of the problem. The first step we must take is to make deliberate attempts to think about and notice the infinite amazingness. This is a necessary, though insufficient, beginning, and we must will it - we must go looking for God and re-train our mind to see God, everywhere and in everything. For some this will be a lengthy process requiring years (decades? life times?) where negative patterning will have to be uninstalled. This can be done alongside the positive work, and does not have to be completed first. Later on of course we will have to make much a much bigger effort to connect to the infinite amazingness. Our usual, day-to-day waking consciousness isn’t really enough to see what we need to see, it does not connect with the Divine so easily, at least not at first.

I will leave you for now with the words of the current Dalai Lama, which may help you move from awareness to action.

More in 2-3 weeks time. Your homework between now and then is to consider what is being said here as deeply as you can. Reach out with questions in the comments below please so everyone can share in the process. Please excuse any typos. Read ahead in the book itself if you wish, but understand that the firm foundations described here will have to be laid down if you want avoid trouble later on.