Facets of a Diamond – Blog

The humane person, the true philanthropist, is the person of virtue. And what is virtue? Socrates declared that virtue is knowledge. (Conversely, wrongdoing is only due to ignorance – “no one [knowingly] wishes evil,” he declared in Plato’s Dialogues).

Knowledge of what? “Of his own and his fellows’ nature.”[1] The knowledge of our own

William Blake’s “mind-forg’d manacles”* instantly cause me to think of obstetric forceps which when applied incorrectly (a common problem, at least in my experience) distort the baby’s head and thus its brain. And then I think of the need for them: the tight and twisted passage into our world. Unlike the other primates, a big

The great poet and artist William Blake believed that “we all live surrounded by hosts of spirits, that there is no real division between this world and the next.”[1] Hence, his wife, Catherine, remarked, “I have little of Mr. Blake’s company; he is always in Paradise.” (As I believe she was, too.)

With

To heal is to help the self-concerned sufferer become an altruistic healer.

For to suffer is to not love – and to heal is to love.

But before the sufferer can love, he must feel loved.  And this is the very essence of the healer’s role.

By loving him,
the healer
helps the sufferer
to heal, to love.

The sufferer does not know that he is Love. And this is the root cause of his anguish.

The task of the healer is to feel the Belovedness bestowed on him, and on all, unknowingly by the sufferer, and to return it to him that he may at last realize that he, and all, is Love.

But

I have found over many years of clinical experience that there are five criteria, which, when met, can best ensure a satisfactory outcome
from the therapeutic relationship with the sufferer. These are:

1. The insightful recognition that there is suffering, pain, dis-ease in your life.

2. That you accept responsibility—not blame—for this.

3. That you know

A pigeon with one leg hobbles over to him – Knowing more than the medical students. How can they walk past – and not Know?

If we really believed our mothers deeply loved us – if we Knew their Souls – there would be little need to venture beyond her to the Unknown, no need to seek a goddess out There. For she would be as a goddess in the home.

All my work as a healer is basically to do with the mother: reconciling the anguished sufferer – and that’s every one of us – with his mother as Love. For it is this, I believe, that underlies all human suffering.

Now the words heal and whole are derived from the same etymological root, and so

The psychoanalyst George Frankl stated that
All mothers want only to love
and all children want only to be loved.

To which I would add
All children want only to love.