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Creating Superlative Health Attaining the First Degree of Brotherhood is a goal each of us in Adelphi share. One of the qualifications for attaining that goal is achieving and maintaining superlative health and stamina. But just what is meant by "superlative health" and why is that so vital to achieving Initiation? QUESTION: Why do you think Christ included good health as a requirement for becoming a member of a Brotherhood? RICHARD: The Brotherhoods need people who have the energy and willingness to actively contribute to Their programs. If a Brother is frequently ill, he is not going to feel like spending the time and effort necessary to carry out Their programs. Furthermore, a sick body is concomitant with an inability to think clearly or creatively. And of course, meditation is a key activity to attaining mystic awareness and clairvoyance. QUESTION: What exactly do you mean by "superlative health"? Does it mean never having a cold, for instance? RICHARD: No. It primarily refers to more debilitating or chronic illnesses; however, as one develops and grows closer to Initiation, he does learn greater control over his body and therefore learns what he needs to do to avoid even colds. The more consistently one is able to remain healthy, the more one can contribute to the Brotherhoods' work. If one is to master the first four Planes of Existence and develop the ability to control his environment, being able to control one's health is certainly apart of that. Controlling one's thoughts and attitudes, visualizing oneself as being strong and healthy, saying positive affirmations, controlling one's physical environment, good nutrition, drinking pure water, having sufficient exercise and learning how to use what the Angels have put on the Earth as preventives and cures are all necessary to maintaining good health. At Adelphi, we seek to grow more and more of the organic foods we eat so that we're eating nutritious food grown locally. We've also undertaken the study of herbs and are learning to make many teas and tinctures which herbalists have used for decades in treating so-called "incurables." QUESTION: I have to admit that acquiring and maintaining superlative health seems more attainable than cosmic consciousness, but still difficult considering today's stresses. Taking into account the condition of American society, do you really think it is possible for a person to be exceptionally healthy? RICHARD: Yes. Although it is becoming increasingly more challenging to do so because of the imposition of vaccinations, fluoride, pollutants, food additives, antibiotics and steroids in our meats, the bleaching out of vital nutrients in our foods, etc., we have to overcome more than we did, say, three decades ago. In Adelphi, we are discovering more ways of purifying our bodily systems, such as cleansing all the elimination channels, and giving our bodies the fuel they need every day in order to function optimally. It has been noted that commercial cattle feed contains fifty minerals, dog and cat food has 24, whereas commercial baby food only contains eleven of the ninety minerals and trace minerals humans need daily for proper health maintenance, let alone production of new cells. I still have to tell people to avoid nicotine, caffeine and sugar. The alkaloids lead to the triangle of cigarettes/coffee/sugar interdependence and consequent hormonal imbalances causing chronic fatigue, which seems to be temporarily lifted by a boost from the very same substances which caused it in the first place. We become addicted to high concentrations of sugar as children, and almost all the soft drinks are laced with added caffeine as a stimulant. Children are frequently hyperactive because of the heavy doses of sugar in many items of their diet. Just about all snack foods are loaded with salt, and as a result, children, too, have a very high incidence of high blood pressure, which can have fatal consequences in early adulthood. Of course, salt and sugar in overabundance are present in prepared foods ranging from cans of baby food to the typically attractive junk foods of which Americans eat too much.
I would like to state some concerns I have about mandatory vaccinations. Vaccinations may in fact be responsible for much illness and even loss of life. The Center for Disease Control estimated that 58% of all measles and 87% of all polio are caused by vaccinations. Polio increased 300% in the states where the vaccinations were mandatory between 1958 and 1959. 87% of all polio cases were caused by the polio vaccine. DPT shots have recently been connected to the sudden deaths of infants, which may not be surprising considering that the serum contains formaldehyde, mercury derivatives, sodium chloride, nitric acid and phosphates in a medium of sheep's blood. In a study of 103 children who died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, Dr. William Torch of the University of Nevada School of Medicine at Reno found that more than two-thirds had been vaccinated with DPT just prior to death.
Dr. John Seal of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease says that any and all flu vaccines are capable of causing Guillain-Barre. Unaltered hospital records consistently showed that about 90% of all smallpox cases occurred after the individuals were vaccinated. And now we're faced with up to 300,000 cases of Gulf War Syndrome as a result of our young military personnel being given a new vaccine prior to going overseas. Immunizations cause weakened immune systems and thymus gland abnormalities, and have been implicated in genetic mutations, children's developmental disabilities, post-vaccinal encephalitis, autism, minimal brain dysfunction causing hyperactivity, violent criminality and drug abuse. Built into our brains is everything necessary for attaining psychological health and thus providing a fully functioning powerhouse for each Ego to acquire optimum learning and character development during an incarnation. A healthy vehicle and a healthy personality are dependent on our willingness to develop proper attitudes, good health habits and emotional maturity. Physical and mental health are both dependent on our attitudes. The thoughts on which we dwell tend to become realities in our environments. Fear and worry about illness do more damage to our vehicles than the disease-producing microbes which normally all of us carry inside our bodies. At any given time, there are many infectious agents in our bodies which could cause active disease; however, we do not succumb because our body's natural defenses hold these germs in check. A well-nourished body and positive attitudes can ward off any infectious disease. Systemic diseases are either nutritionally or psychogenically caused, and so-called accidental self-injury is also usually psychogenic. It is also helpful to remember that our Angelic Creators created our vehicles with flawless Vital Bodies, and the physical body is continually striving to conform to that perfect Vital Body. In order to maintain this condition, it is important that everyone, including infants, take a balanced supplement of vitamins and minerals daily. As a matter of fact, vitamins taken in pill form are cheaper than the cost of the equivalent food. Of course, you should not try to eliminate natural foods, since there are essential nutritional factors which are not available in purified concentrates. Minerals critical to health which have long ago been leached out of the soil by millennia of rainfall have to be made up of some plant or animal foods from the oceans as part of your diet. Dozens of elements required in trace quantities are absolutely vital to sustaining the health of plants, animals and human bodies. Yet even organic gardening cannot replenish the soil with these trace minerals, because the natural fertilizers being plowed back in never contain them. Sea animals do not become diseased; land animals do. That is because the sea animals have available to them, in the ocean, a balanced nutrient solution. Vitamin pills cannot replace the myriad enzymes and as-yet-unidentified factors only available in animal meats, and particularly, animal organs. If we can give the physical body the mental attitudes, oxygenation and nutrition it needs, it can return to homeostasis.
Quality wine and beer are good foods and can be enjoyed, provided you do not overindulge to the point of becoming tipsy or drowsy. When that happens, you have caused permanent brain damage. Even though you may kill off only a hundred or a dozen brain cells, you can thus permanently interrupt the memory pathways to important knowledge and intelligent functioning. Anytime that alcohol consumption results in your being able to detect even slight effects from it, you are detracting from Egoic advancement, since that depends on keen brain functioning. Your body needs adequate rest at the end of the day. Your Ego, in the process of directing your body, places a great deal of strain on it. Your body needs to be separated from the Ego for a time sufficient to allow the physical vehicle to regenerate itself through sleep; and so the body is designed to throw off the Ego's demands put on it for six or seven hours every night. Although you need adequate rest, the amount of sleep needed varies from individual to individual. Some people require eight hours a night, and others only six. Scientists have shown that when sleep is habitually disturbed, particularly during dream periods with rapid eye movement, a person tends to become irritable and nervous and can eventually come to behave psychotically. Even though you can stay unconscious in a noisy environment, you cannot get a deep sleep which provides full rest. Part of your brain is constantly identifying and analyzing the possible threats in those noises, and frequently calls on the Ego to pass judgment on them, and a twilight consciousness results. Sufficient sleep is essential to your emotional well-being, as well as your ability to function effectively and alertly day by day. It is important for your physical and mental health to move to peaceful surroundings if you do not enjoy them already. In addition to a proper diet and rest, your body requires exercise in order to retain its tone and vigor. Muscles that are not used tend to atrophy, whereas exercise keeps the muscles healthy. The best exercise is physical work and regular activity, walking and rebounding. Jumping on a rebounder not only has the beneficial effect of delivering more oxygen to every part of the body, it also strengthens the walls of every cell. Your heart and arteries are really muscles. It is noteworthy that persons who are physically active tend to flex and strengthen the cardiovascular system so that restriction of blood flow does not occur in later years, and so the brain and heart remain well oxygenated, thus assuring greatly reduced risk of stroke and heart disease. Use good judgment and intelligent care in maintaining your vehicle. You, as an Ego, are immortal, but your body has to be taken care of so it will serve you effectively for a century or so. A fearful or hypochondriac consciousness about disease actually allows the Mind to disarrange the body and immune system so that it tends to conform to the Ego's negative images. What we fear most comes on us fastest. There is no possible way that we can improve our perfect Vital Body, but our continual contemplation of the function of any organ eventually interferes with its operation. Fearful, angry thoughts upset the endocrine glands, and the bio-electric and etheric energy flows through the corresponding plexi of the central nervous system become imbalanced. Waking up every day and saying, "I'm gloriously alive!" sends tremendous health-oriented messages to our immune systems. Learning to deal effectively with personal conflicts, forgiving those who have asked us to forgive them for their abuses, removing ourselves from the environment of negative people, and giving of ourselves to mankind will help remove the negative attitudes of fear, hatred, resentment and jealousy from our lives which can be extremely destructive to our health. If we are carrying around guilt for our behaviors, we need to do what we can to make restitution with others, change our behavior and let go of the guilt. Love, faith, self-esteem and the knowledge that we are in control of ourselves and our life's circumstances can overcome these negative attitudes. If your fears are primarily of psychological origin, that is, without reasonable objective cause, then your body may remain needlessly in a state of continual hypertension. Whenever you are chronically tense about your life situation or if something external threatens your internal stability, you defend yourself by creating, as it were, a wall between you and these painful circumstances. This wall can be your muscles. When you are trying to cope with an unpleasant situation such as a as a child or verbal abuse from your boss or spouse, you do so by tensing up and becoming rigid. By this subconscious device, you slow down your breathing and limit the oxygen reaching your brain. Thereby, you insulate yourself from your threatening external world, but that becomes a lifelong habit of suppressing your feelings and restricting the amount of external stimuli that reaches your consciousness.
Your muscles, nerves and brain are like recording devices. Stimuli travel inward and your responses flow outward through your body. Repeated threatening situations tend to lock tension into your body. In your efforts to insulate yourself from a hostile environment, you create muscular armorings. These muscle tensions linger long after the initial threats subside, and they form in groupings which affect your posture, breathing, circulation and energy flow, all of which are detrimental to your health, your ability to live your life effectively, and be in touch with your own feelings. By self-analysis, you can release the psychic charge behind such armorings. The whole body is a memory device, not just the brain. Fixations and blockages stem from the entire body, rather than being a purely psychological problem. It is up to you to uncover the cause and find the solutions to the ineffective and unsatisfying ways you respond to people and life in general. This requires much reading in psychology to learn how your brain operates and what kinds of events in your past may have erected barriers to your present conscious awareness of why you respond poorly to events in your environment.
QUESTION: Does sexuality play a significant part in health? RICHARD: Yes. Proper sexual functioning is essential for health. We human beings have had the sex urge built into us by our Creators in order to serve several purposes. For procreation, to balance certain bodily energies on both the physical and Etheric levels, and to socialize the race. Your body is like a capacitor, building up and holding charges of energy. All things in nature tend toward a state of balance, and your body is no exception. Certain build-ups of energy are released beneficially through sexual orgasm. But all too many people are blocked from effective sexual orgasmic release by muscle armorings and psychological fixations. Each of us is so imbued with myths, fears and irrational beliefs about sex that few of us experience the full benefits of sexual climax, let alone full orgasm. The capacity for proper sexual functioning, provided one does not have a physiological problem, is something we are all born with. Yet as we grow up and are warped by parents, institutions and a society which is thoroughly baffled about the value and purpose of sex, we lose our ability to function naturally. Again, there is only one person who can unravel the complications that may exist in the area of your own sexual self-realization, and that person is you. The availability of legitimate, authoritative literature on the subject allows no excuse for continued unawareness that may exist on your part. In Adelphi, we are consciously pursuing a balanced philosophy wherein each individual may arrive at a point whereby he may experience his or her sexuality in a mature and healthy manner, and thereby find the font of love, creativeness and serenity intended by our Creators. The people at Adelphi recognize that it may take several generations of effort to regain the atmosphere conducive to full human self-actualization that we enjoyed as a race in ancient Lemuria. We can never enter into a discussion of mental and physical health without returning to the important theme of self-esteem. Because the person with a high sense of self-esteem tends to create a healthy, effectual environment for himself. A person with a deficient sense of self-esteem or self-worth tends to belittle all that he does. He creates maladaptive and useless thought patterns which tend to degrade him. If you think that you deserve to be ill or deserve to suffer emotionally because you believe you need to be punished or are unworthy, then your powers of mental precipitation will bring these images into living reality. If you think well of your self and believe that you deserve all of the blessings which life and God have to offer you, then that shall come to be yours. It is interesting to note that by making positive use of mental attraction to send messages into the universe, sources of information and health practitioners will appear in our lives for us to try out. By repeating often such affirmations as, "My body grows stronger and healthier every day," we are mentally forming clear etheric patterns which come to be manifested in the physical body. Be careful to make your affirmations short, precise, positive and believable. If, for instance, you are struggling with a health problem and you state, "My body is perfectly healthy," your brain will negate the message as a lie. It may also prove helpful to precede such statements with, "I choose to have perfect health." Further, our brains interpret everything we say as applying to ourselves. For instance, when we say negative things about another, our brains take the statements personally. It's also important to watch what we say in general conversation. It's possible to unwittingly cause health disorders by habitually saying phrases that may seem harmless enough, but may in fact be sending unwanted messages to the brain. For example, "I can't believe my eyes" may be connected to developing sore eyes, cataracts, or sties. Similarly, repeatedly saying, "I was knocked off my feet," "He stepped on my toes," and "I need to get back on my feet" can lead to sore feet, corns or calluses. So constant vigilance regarding our thoughts and words can be helpful if we're suffering a recurring health problem. Modern medicine treats individuals, not groups or communities. Perhaps we would do well to consider the important impact that living in community with others has on every aspect of our living. It is powerfully valuable to belong to a group of like-thinking individuals who are daily involved in becoming personally greater; learning to trust and be trusted; replacing attitudes of acquiring things with acquisition of spiritual growth and love; wanting to do our part and positively contribute to others. Is the absence of these opportunities contributing to our nation's un-health as a whole? QUESTION: How much influence does karma have on disease, especially in young children? RICHARD: It certainly can be a factor. How severe it is going to be is something that can be modified positively by the parents, and also by the attitudes they instill in their child. Of course, if an incoming Ego wants to be certain that he is going to have a disability of some special kind to work through, then he makes the changes in the fetus before he incarnates into that baby's body. That way, the defect is largely irreversible. QUESTION: Is it the Ego himself who makes the modification in the fetus? RICHARD: Right. He is the only one that is allowed to do so. But once the egg has been fertilized by the sperm, then that is that Ego's property. He is even able to mentally manipulate the fetal stages on the Etheric level as the physical body is taking form on the framework of the Vital Body. QUESTION: Since an incoming Ego can decide that it wants a certain kind of body and can affect the fetus as it develops, what difference does it make what the mother does? RICHARD: She is the nutrition source and the fetal environment. QUESTION: Would the incoming Ego know that she is going to take precautions to watch her nutrition and avoid harmful drugs and cigarettes and so forth? RICHARD: Yes. And if something goes wrong, he can abandon the project and the fetus will naturally abort. QUESTION: Where does the free will of the mother come in? She might just as easily assume that her pregnancy is all being taken care of by God. RICHARD: Well, he can't feed himself from the Astral. There are many negative and positive influences which the pregnant woman's actions can produce, some of which can really foul things up for the newborn's chances, and even his whole incarnation. It behooves all of us to do the very best we can for each new little one, so that in turn, the best is done for us when we next incarnate. There is a karmic liability for not doing the optimum possible for each incoming Ego. A woman can't just say to herself with impunity, "Well, this kid is probably incarnating to suffer because I'm not eating properly; I'm continuing to smoke during the pregnancy and I like to get bombed to take my mind off my pregnancy." She can't do that kind of thing without actually harming the baby to be. Most babies come out alive, but the incidence of physical and mental impairment is getting staggering. QUESTION: Doesn't that baby's Ego take into account the risks involved? RICHARD: Yes, he understands what kind of problems that he is generally going to be dealing with. If you want to incarnate at this particular time, then you have to take what is available. If you are qualified to incarnate into the Nation of God, then you wait until everybody is more enlightened so that you have every chance possible. He doesn't have to incarnate now; there is nobody on the Astral Plane forcing him. QUESTION: It seems like a woman would be determining the quality of the child she is going to have by the care and forethought she takes. RICHARD: Well, certainly. And also, what that baby is going to be as a mature human being and all of the bodily equipment that he will have to operate with in order to reach Initiation. QUESTION: I suppose a mother would try to do the best she can for her baby. But still, there may be some instances which would limit her free will, like an economic collapse so she couldn't get vitamins at the health food store. RICHARD: Well, such things, obviously, are beyond her control. Her baby is counting on her doing her part, so she should see to it that those things which are under her care and control are taken care of optimally. QUESTION: What about your mind slowing down as you grow older? Do you think that is a fallacy? RICHARD: A person who doesn't get proper exercise and eats foods that are too loaded with fats and sugars is just allowing the blood vessels of his brain to become narrowed, and thus less able to carry oxygen and other nutrients. As soon as brain tissue becomes malnourished, it does not function as it should and can even die. QUESTION: And that could happen at age 25? RICHARD: Yes, it could. QUESTION: So you really shouldn't connect mental and physical impairment only with old age. RICHARD: Well, such conditions are certainly more prevalent in old age. I've known people who could hardly make it to the door at age 60. And yet others who are as spry as sparrows well into their nineties. I'm much impressed with the fact that people who are very active mentally always seem to stay physically young as well as mentally young. So one's attitudes and interests have an important bearing on the brain. As one grows elderly, the functioning of one's Egoic Mind becomes less dependent on brain limitations and seems to be preparing for a return to disembodied functioning on transition.
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