I’ve had a bit of a revelation the past couple days and thought I would share my thoughts. This article has nothing to do with economics, investing, politics, hot-looking women, sports or beer…. I know boring right? It merely discusses the greatest mystery of the universe, the purpose of our human existence and its relationship to the divine. So if y’all want to move on to Fed Fund rates or Don Lemon’s new show on Twitter, I understand.
My son sent me this podcast last week when I was at the ACC Tournament, How To Unlock Your Mind And Master Your Life. It was not until Sunday night that I started to watch it. In it Dr. Joe Dispenza discusses the interrelation between the mind and the body and how if the mind is “set” properly, it secretes “pharmaceuticals“ to every cell in the body to fix an extraordinary array of illnesses, even to the point where the lame can walk again. The mind gets “set” properly through meditation and teaching it to think the right thoughts. Without going into the technical details and the dozens of peer reviewed articles, the mind can be “reset” to do these things by eliminating negative emotions and “recorded” memories of trauma. These “bad” emotions block our ability to take new pathways that generate extremely heighted levels of internal energy, and this is the force that heals our bodies. I have purposefully oversimplified the message, but there are a whole host of metrics, brain activity, chemical releases that have been monitored in detail that allegedly support these conclusions.
I am anything but some new age fruitcake. So, although I cuss a lot, lust after good looking women, pee on my neighbor’s boxwoods and refuse to recycle, I do consider myself to be a practicing Christian. I’m kind of the George Plimpton of Christianity ( I’m not very good at it but enjoy writing and thinking about it). I believe in the Trinity and the power of the Holy Spirit to do miraculous things. Once earnestly invited through the door to someone’s heart, it can release someone from any kind of mental anguish, bondage, hurt or pain and fill them with indescribable joy.
How did a left-brain, smart ass guy like me begin to believe in the metaphysical? It started through “seeing and feeling,” which led to a lifetime of study. My grandmother, Ella Williams Smith, was born in Richmond in 1888. She grew up with gilded age advantages due to being the granddaughter and niece of tobacco industry titans. She was given a luxurious William Lawrence Bottomley designed baronial home in the foothills of the Blue Ridge outside Charlottesville. However, she did not live some sort of Paris Hilton self-centered existence. I once heard a minister say that there were three ways that people generally come to Christ. 1) A Paul on the road to Damascus experience, 2) through bookish study and 3) some folks were just born good. I think Ella was just born good. She devoted her whole life to helping others, but there’s more.
She had seven children, and as a young mother, they were often sick. She questioned the local vicar at the Episcopal Church about spiritual healing, but he wasn’t much help. She was best friends with Lady Astor who converted to Christian Science in 1914, which helped to lead Ella to study Christian Science. She determined that she did not and should not need to go through any priestly offices to get to God. That’s when the miracles began to happen. She describes these activities in a book of memoirs she published in 1972, Tears and Laughter in Virginia and Elsewhere. After listening to the podcast, I remembered a page from her book. A black man in her neighborhood, Mr. Henderson, had tuberculosis, had not eaten in 4 days, was in bed and expected to die in a few days. She went to visit him and was impressed by his faith and willingness to be obedient. Quite inadvertently, she opened her bible to Psalm 27. Many know the first verse of this psalm, as did she, but she was not familiar with the second verse, “When the wicked, even my enemies and my foes, came upon me to eat up my flesh, they stumbled and fell.” She then felt a great light open up in her consciousness. She then closed the bible and she listened to the words pour out of her mouth as though someone else was speaking through her. She told Mr. Henderson “that his enemies and foes were nothing but the wrong thoughts that he thought about himself and that other people thought about him. That God’s children could not be his enemies or foes, and certainly could not eat his flesh; wrong thoughts were all that seemed to be doing that.”
“Wrong thoughts!” Exactly what Dr. Dispenza in his podcast says cause so many physical ailments and unhappiness! Mmm. When Ella went to visit Mr. Henderson the next day, he was healed, and he lived a remarkable life of another 50 years that perhaps I will tell another time. And for now, all I will say about Ella is that she too lived a remarkable life, and there are countless stories of God working through her to heal others. I am one of Ella’s 28 grandchildren. We all witnessed her gifts. Thus, I am predisposed to the “metaphysical.”
Dr. Dispenza’s work does not use Christian imagery or nomenclature, but yet all the scientific discoveries he lists, fit perfectly, like a glove into the tenets of Christianity. Watching the podcast will help you understand these comparisons, nevertheless, I will list a few of them:
Podcast: Letting go of negative emotion. Christian tenet: forgiveness.
Podcast: Heat and energy permeating the body. Christian experience: The Holy Spirit.
Podcast: Deprogramming the mind of negative experiences, Dr. Dispenza’s states these patients are effectively new people. Christian analogy: Being born again.
Podcast: After Dr. Dispenza’s cleansing exercises, the mind is in an uncluttered state and produces tremendous energy and the patients often weep out of great joy. Christianity: Read C. S. Lewis’ Surprised By Joy.
Podcast: Dr. Dispenza gets his results through meditation. Christian tenet: The power of prayer, certainly an act of meditation.
Podcast: Brain waves that measure satisfaction and joy are at their peak when a person “gives.” Christian tenet: Too many to reference.
Podcast: Dr. Dispenza speaks of experiences where people in wheelchairs who retrain their minds to let go of “the bad stuff” suddenly can walk again. Christian tenet: Matthew 11:5-7, “the blind see and the lame walk.”
Remarkably, in Dr. Dispenza’s group settings, those who have not gone through all the meditation and cleansing exercises, often seem to get the same results as through some sort of collective osmosis- this reminds me of the Apostle Paul’s teachings on the “Body of Christ.”
So what is this? Is Christianity not real as it all can be explained by science or is science confirming Christianity? I tend to think the latter. I am not a Darwinist. The human body is so masterfully designed it would take an infinite amount of years for its complexities to have occurred by accident. I didn’t take the Covid vaccine because I didn’t want to mess with what I considered to be the intelligent design of our creation. What Dr. Dispenza’s podcast tells me is that our human bodies are even more complex and intelligently designed than any of us could possibly have thought. This also tells me that we are creatures of God and not some clump of random cells that formed by accident. I think the more we understand this and explore this relationship and its possibilities, there is great hope for the world.
Less you think I am some pious prig, preaching down and being judgmental, I am a woeful sinner and undeserving of God’s grace. I’m a bad apple. Women don’t even wait for me to say something rude to them before slapping me. My 9 illegitimate children won’t speak to me, and I am pretty much disliked by respectable people (not that I know any).
However, I think these issues are fascinating and that many of you might enjoy Dr. Dispenza’s podcast.
