No one can avoid aging and the decline of our physical and mental abilities. Aging seems to happen. Like a river, life flows and carries us with it. Illness is different from aging. A disease often seems to strike without warning. Rich or poor, educated or uneducated, sickness seems to attack everyone at some point. On the surface, it appears that both aging and illness are simply part of the human condition. But are they unavoidable? Ancient texts speak of beings that lived healthily for hundreds of years. Were they a myth? Did they count years differently back then?
The question is not whether we can avoid the inevitable process of aging, but instead, what we can do to make it less of a problem. Can we successfully age or live without illness? Developed over roughly twenty years, the Attractor Field Techniques (AFT) are not just a way of viewing disease and aging. AFT is a system for understanding and changing the mind and body.
AFT sees our problems as arising from the distortion of the energy system within us. The energy system involved is as important as is the actual physical pain. A problem is the result of something. Issues do not create themselves. AFT answers questions concerning the “why me?” and the “why now” of illness. What is it that makes us susceptible to physical and emotional problems? Medicine says genes and environmental pathogens. AFT says, look inside; the spiritual masters were right all along. How you react to the world is the single most crucial factor in your life experience and your illness’s susceptibility. How you look at the world is the source of the adverse effects of aging. AFT provides an objective method for connecting thoughts and physical problems.
How do our thoughts influence the body is not a question that science or medicine can answer. AFT’s position is that the energy of our thoughts, and that of Qi, are part of a spectrum of non-dimensional energies. Something Quantum physicists call the “implicate” order of existence. These energies not only impact our bodies but further the entire context of our lives. Our view distorts the powers underlying our physical being while we live our daily lives. For the most part, we have no idea what we are doing to ourselves. We harm ourselves by the way that we look at and respond to the events of our lives. Our thoughts radiate a spectrum of energies that are part of the totality of being. We each participate in this reality. We each influence one another by the energy that we radiate as we take part in this totality. It is a two-way street. We can learn to understand how to improve our current and future lives.
Underlying our bodies are discrete, energetic fields that maintain our physical being. Our physical bodies are biological systems that float within a swarm of energetic fields. These fields are responsible for the development of the anatomy and maintenance of our physiological functioning. For instance, your hands, joints, and organs all have invisible energetic fields that provide information to your cells that developmentally direct their physical structure and regulate their organized and effective functioning. Conventional medicine deals with what can be seen and touched, the body itself, not the underlying energies. The distortion that occurs in these energy fields is created by what conventional medicine sees as stress. AFT treatments work by correcting the distortion in these fields. AFT treats the stress at the source of the distortion.
At the end of his career, Hans Selye, the father of the concept of stress, concluded that stress is the biggest thing that leads to illness and premature aging. The disease is a process, not an event. It is a process that begins with habitual thought patterns that distort our energy system. It ends with processes that weaken and harm our bodies. Our invisible and intangible thoughts materialize in our physical being. Illness and suffering result from our emotional stress reactions. Surprisingly, being out of step with simple spiritual truths is the source of our health problems. Every spiritual master has spoken these truths for millennia: they are timeless gems of wisdom offered for our well-being.
Although there is a general process at work in stress reactions, different disease states arise from the specific ways we react to the world. Illness occurs as a result of specific reactive patterns, not by chance. We now know that what conventional medicine recognizes as stress is just the tip of an iceberg.
Because stress puts wear and tear on the body, AFT sees all stress reactions as being toxic. Any response that leads us to feel upset is toxic. Any reaction we have that causes us to see others negatively or see ourselves as victims is toxic. The more robust and more prolonged our response, the more it poisons us.
Most of us see our reactions to the world as justified, caused by life events and others’ actions. We pay attention to the event’s content, what happened, and we fail to understand that meaning occurs only within our minds; meaning is not part of the event. If we ignore the context, we can misinterpret events. Someone smiling at you in the office or supermarket is quite different from someone smiling at you on the other side of your pillow. If you ignore an event’s context, you are likely to make serious mistakes in judgment and act in ways that others see as inappropriate.
It is our attitude toward life that helps or hinders us. Our philosophy is the context within which we view life’s events. It determines what something means to us, whether we find it stressful, neutral, or pleasant.
Stress and attitude are directly related. Stress comes from inside, not outside. Events are neither good nor bad until we judge them. Unless we are talking about some physical trauma, it is only and always the meaning we give to an event that creates stress. Different people react to the same event differently because they provide a different sense to the event and thus experience the event differently.
Have you ever watched a movie with someone else and later discussed it with them and wondered if they had seen the same film? Have you ever discussed events from your childhood with other relatives and found that their recall of what had happened was quite different from yours? Some view divorce as ruining their lives, while others see it as a cause for dancing in the street. It is the same event but can affect you quite differently depending on your perspective.
There are many ways of thinking and reacting that are considered “normal” that produce catabolic energy. “Normal” means not being very much different from the average. In the behavioral sciences, “normal” is a statistical concept: if something is expected or happens to the vast majority of people, it is statistically “normal.”
Diseases are common. You must ask yourself, “Is disease normal?” If you think that disease is normal, do you want to be normal? If most people in life regularly shoot themselves in the foot, would you like to join them?
Attitudes are built on our beliefs and values and shape the context of our life. We form opinions that match emotional reactions. After creating them, we automatically store them in our memories. We then use our memories to interpret current events. In effect, we make sense of what is in front of us by our past experiences. That is why we habitually respond as we do. We see and experience a replay of the past as what is happening now. It is how we make sense of things and is part of our self-generated personal illusion.
As sense-making creatures, we try to understand the situation in which we find ourselves. The sense we make appears to be guided by forces beyond the situation itself. The same event can cause different conclusions; it depends on the person involved. The past focuses on our sense and meaning: the energetic karmic patterns present at the time of our conception. It is a pattern passed on to us by our ancestors, much like “energetic DNA.”
The concept of energetic karma is foreign to the western mindset. While not explicitly mentioned in the bible, the Ten Commandments implies it. God proclaimed, “I am a jealous God, visiting the offenses of the fathers upon their children to the third and fourth generations.” Lamsa: 1961; The Holy Bible from the ancient eastern text; Harper, San Francisco.
The reason we conjure up about why we are al one is the most meaningful conclusion we make in our lives. It shapes and gives meaning to the rest of our lives, turning us into one of the channels of stress. It is the touchstone of our awareness. After formed, every subsequent event is flavored and colored by its presence. It is our reality, and we know that it is true – Until we change it. How to do this is the subject of the experiential workshops presented by the Tree of Life Foundation.
As it turns out, the spiritually guided sages were correct all along. Attitudes that devalue life are harmful to health and well-being. These attitudes are more dangerous than you could imagine. And what is it to lessen life? Simply put, it is to see something as having little or no value, to see it as something terrible, untrustworthy, mean, harsh, demanding, arrogant, or any number of negative ways. Any thought or action that devalues or reduces you or another is harmful to you. You can think of it as a universal energetic boomerang: what goes around comes around. Jesus wisely told us that “what we sow is what we will reap,” and the Buddha warned that “wrongful thinking” is the source of all pain and suffering. More recently, A Course in Miracles indicates that if you knew what a single fearful thought did to your body, you would never allow yourself to do it again.
AFT does not advocate any one spiritual tradition over another. We believe that all religious practices should be honored. After all, it is the same God that we worship and revere. However, we do consider “Loving your neighbor as yourself” as “the greatest commandment of all.” Most of us do not love and appreciate ourselves, and therefore cannot love another.