By Avinash Khilnani
A mind healing movement based on metaphysical presuppositions concerning the true nature of ultimate reality seems to have taken its place in today’s healing techniques. The movement includes past life regression therapies, astral projections, self-hypnosis and similar metaphysical explorations of the self as a means of healing specific ailments.
The movement may be traced back to Platonism, When the fifth century Greek philosopher Plato postulated that ideas are more real than matter, and then to Swedenborg’s view that the material realm is an effect of spiritual and divine causes. Reality is said to be the result of spiritual factors. Recently, Hegelianism presupposes that the external world, mental phenomena and the nervous organism ar the rendezvous of body and mind.
Mind healing as an aspect of metaphysical healing is open to all spiritual healing methods, based on the tenet that the strength of body and mind are available to all those who have insights into their nature of reality and who have been initiated into self-healing at some point in their life. The initiation could be as simple as having attended a seminar by a religious, scientific or metaphysical expert, a simple hypnotherapy session to a complex Reiki initiation.
In spite of all the esoteric jargon, there is an absolute science to all things spiritual and it may be so mysterious after all. It is only mysterious in that our level of awareness does not quite grasp it well. To resolve the mystery we have to raise our awareness much higher.
Metaphysics today is exactly the science to help us do that. It is mind science, universal science and spiritual science. Western metaphysics now comprises of the three traditional branches of ontology, theology and universal science. Ontology is the study of existence. Theology means the study of God or the query about the divine. Universal science is the study of the first principles, which underlie all other inquiries. It is a thorough examination of the fundamental nature of reality that includes the study of relationship between mind and matter, appearance and substance as well as form and essence.
Meta, in Greek, means beyond, above and behind.
So, Metaphysics is beyond the physical and into the spiritual, but not as two separate realities, just different levels of the same reality.
In that sense, it is also magical. Metaphysics represents the coming of an advanced science, in its own time and its own way, to lead us into the higher dimensions of human experience.