One can very easily go to extremes on mental illness vs physical illness.

One school says all trouble comes from physical illness.

Another says it all comes from mental illness.

The psychiatrist mixes the two and says all mental illness is physical.

It is time every auditor, particularly Class VIIIs, took a hard look at this area.

The body is capable of having physical illness, acute (momentary) or chronic (continual). Broken bones, pinched nerves, diseases can any of them occur to a body independent of any mental or spiritual action.

The mind or spirit can predispose the illness or injury. By this is meant a person can be distraught and have an accident, or decide to die and get a disease.

But the disease or injury when he's got it is a body circumstance and responds best to skilled medical (ordinary usual, put on a tourniquet, set a bone, give a shot) treatment.

On a sick or injured person, you can reduce the time of healing or recovery by removing the spiritual or mental upset, providing the person can be audited, but usually after effective physical treatment. The facts are real enough. Auditing a person with a broken leg after it is set and he is comfortable, to remove the engram of the accident or treatment and the earlier "reason" he or she was distraught or had the accident, can improve the bone knitting time by as much as 2/3rds by actual test. This would be six weeks down to two weeks.

But the bone has to be set!

A body is a biological object. It has all manner of internal communication systems and organized interrelated functions.

Now if you tried to audit a preclear when he was acutely ill, you would find him hard to audit, confused and distracted and unable to follow commands. He may become overwhelmed easily. He certainly is not likely to respond properly. Because the body is sending all sorts of pain or discomfort messages and confusions, it is very much in his way. Two things are going on at the same time – his case as a spiritual being, his body as a distracting pain or sensation object.

The pc assigns the body to his case or his case to his body.

You have to get the body out of the attention area to some degree before anything helpful usually occurs by way of auditing.

Now let us take the pc with a long term illness. He has been sick with something since the age of 8. He really doesn't know he's sick physically. He blames it all on his own case.

In a lot of cases we audit him and he has enough relief to then get physically well. For he was mentally or spiritually suppressing his body.

These successes (and they are numerous) could cause us to do an all mental concentration and lead some to insist all illness was from the mind. This makes some make the mistake of omitting physical examination and treatment in all cases. Certain schools of healing in the past got the entire field in disrepute by assuming and stating and acting on just that.

When you find a pc who does not easily respond, whether he answers up to 7 cases "Physically ill" or not, you sure better get him to the nearest clinic for a thorough physical examination including head and spine X-rays and get him examined pathologically. For you will usually find he is physically ill, in suppressed pain or discomfort. There are cures for a lot of these things now and not requiring "exploratory" operations either.

Don't throw away all the grades of auditing on him. He's sick. Physically.

That's why you do a White Form. A long history of accident and illness should prepare you to be alert and to send him to a clinic if his response to auditing is the least bit poor.

Then when you have the physical side of it in hand, audit him at assist level.

When he is well give him his grades.

Don't force auditing into physical healing. It works much of the time. Special types of auditing (running out injuries, etc.) assist healing markedly. That doesn't mean you should avoid all medical treatment!

"Failed cases" are medically ill or injured cases. Without exception. So why fail. There are medical doctors and clinics. There are standard, usual treatments. You don't have to buy "exploratories" and questionable actions. These are done only when the medical doctor can't find out either. When this impasse occurs, start doing assists or look for engrams.

There are some bizarre or strange postoperative (after operation) or post injury (after injury) conditions which do surrender miraculously to auditing. A suppurating incision (operation cut that remains open and unhealing), a bone that will not heal after having a plate put on it, such things usually surrender to auditing. These facts should be used but they do not contradict that medical treatment was needed in the first place.

The psychiatrist is an example of the other extreme to spiritual healing. Instead of "all mind" he is saying "all physical".

Holding either extreme produces failures.

The psychiatrist got into his "all physical" by a sensing that insanity symptoms seemed to resemble persons in pain or delirium.

In these cases the stress of physical suffering is pouring back into and overwhelming the mind.

After considerable study on this, I realized that an error could have been made out of a statement "all insanity is physical".

This is probably the case in the large percentage of the insane. But from this one cannot then say "all mental trouble is physical" because that can be demonstrated as not true. We see it as easily as in a case of a person falling ill on the receipt of bad news, who then gets good news and gets well. The great Voltaire, on his deathbed, received news that he had been awarded the Legion of Honor, after a lifetime of being scorned by Authority. He promptly got up, put on his clothes and went down to receive the award.

In the case of insanity having physical causes, one could discover this, say it and be promptly misunderstood in this way. The sufferer is in a general agony from a nerve long ago crushed. This actual pain is distributed from its point of concentration to the whole of the nervous system. The person cannot think, looks dazed, cannot work or act. An operation removes the pressure causing the condition. The person is then "sane" in that he can perform the actions of life.

After a few successes of this nature, the psychiatrist leaps to the conclusion all mental trouble is physical. He teaches some student saying "all mental trouble is physical". The student goes off, tries to figure it out, dreams up a special insanity virus or "genes" or a special illness called "insanity". He then resorts to all manner of odd and often brutal treatments. By cutting or shocking a nerve channel one can stop the pain messages but such actions lay in new complications which usually terminate in premature if not immediate death or injury.

This tells one why tranquilizers (psychotropic drugs) make a patient rational or at least able to function for a short while. They too have their side effects. Usually all they do is, like aspirin, reduce the pain.

Patients do not always know they hurt. They suppress the pain or sensation. It seems normal to them or "life". When they receive a distressing experience or have an accident they cease to suppress and may go "insane", which is to say, become continuously overwhelmed by pain or unwanted sensation. They cannot think or act rationally. They may even be insane only during periods of the day or month that coincide with the time of the accident. But they are in physical distress.

As they cannot eat or sleep, their condition worsens by exhaustion and they may go into various states including a deathlike motionlessness or actually die.

The CORRECT ACTION ON AN INSANE PATIENT IS A FULL SEARCHING CLINICAL EXAMINATION BY A COMPETENT MEDICAL DOCTOR.

He may find disease, fractures, concussion, tumours, or ANY COMMON ILLNESS which has escaped treatment and has become chronic (perpetual). He should keep looking until he finds it. For it is there. NOT some "insane germ" but some ordinary recognizable illness or physical malfunction.

The WRONG THING is to cut nerves or subject the person to more pain. Electricity can force a nerve channel to flow or paralyze it. That is probably why it seems to work sometimes. But it cures nothing and more often confirms the insane condition and certainly fills the patient with dread and terror, injures him and shortens life.

The problem in insanity is often how do you keep the patient from injuring himself or starving or dying before he can be examined by a competent medical doctor in a properly equipt clinic.

This is done by rest, security, feeding, under drugs if necessary.

A patient can be "built up" by various biochemical compounds, diathermy and other mild means that add to his stamina.

Treatment of what really troubles him such as continual sensation from a once broken leg which was never set, a broken spinal disc or such pathological ills as disease, can then be treated properly and corrected.

Recovered from the treatment, the patient will be found not to be "insane" any longer.

Auditing can then occur, any and all engrams (traumas) erased and the person's recovery will be greatly accelerated.

Of course the real target of auditing is the improvement of the ability to handle life, greater intelligence, reaction time and other benefits.

Like the spiritual healer of another age who said all was mind and forbade physical healing, the practitioner who says all is body and scorns mental healing is an extremist.

Each of these is at the opposite ends of "Aristotle's Pendulum". Each has seen with his own eyes a few remarkable cures. Thus each is confirmed in his belief and will hotly argue and even attack others who do not share his or her extreme view.

The truth, as is usually found, lies in between.

There is no "insanity virus". Even heredity remains unproven since families perform similar actions, are prone to similar physical ills and they also mentally pattern or copy each other. Either physical or mental facts can similarly prove that "insanity runs in the family" when it seems to do so. Thus "hereditary insanity" is an apparency which gives rise to the folk tale.

There is the spiritual identity of man, the mind, the thetan, call it what you will.

There is the physical body of man and that, even if cellular, is still material or physical or whatever you call that.

Proponents of both extreme illnesses are likely then to go off on an erratic course of search and research as the truth includes both and when you do include both you then begin to add up successes toward the desirable 100% of the physical sciences in result.

One cannot call either extreme more than an art. And the proponent of the purely physical does not have a "science" just because sciences are also physical.

One has a science only when one can predict and attain uniform results by the application of its technology.

It was very natural for the psychiatrist to think he had a foe in Scientology as all he had to hear was "spirit" and he was off. Since that has been his opposite "foe" for a long time.

To heal Man one has to realize he is dealing with two things – the spirit and the body. When a preclear comes to us because he wishes to be physically cured of a real current illness or malfunction, we do not serve him well if when we see he does not respond to auditing we do not require a full physical clinical study of his body until a real illness is found and treated.

If we already know he is ill we should call in the doctor. And we should limit auditing to assists.

This is also a case of crossed purposes. We are trying to give him greater capability and freedom. He is only trying to stop hurting.

Go ahead, sign them up. But at the first smallest clue (like the White Form) that he is being audited only to get well, we should have in good contact a medical doctor or clinic who is friendly and does not do unusual things to people and get the preclear diagnosed to really find what is wrong with him, get it cured if it is medically feasible and then, with a physically well pc, give him his auditing.

If this is done routinely, another benefit will also occur. The preclear so audited will not again become ill easily and will retain his very real auditing gains when he has these.

We are good enough to often get by. The ability of the body to get well often asserts itself when a preclear is given auditing, since the source of perpetuation (continuance) is removed from the illness and it changes.

Letting a pc, who has a badly set continually painful bone go on up the grades is doing him a disservice. He probably will not attain or retain his gains.

The stable datum on which I operate as a case supervisor is that if a pc does not get good gains quickly I want to know (and will find) what is physically injured or ill about him before I go on letting him be audited. The X-ray machine and other clinical actions become a must. For he is in suppressed pain and each time he gets a change, he puts on full stops as it started to hurt. He won't get the same gain again and tomorrow the same process or type of process won't work. He stops the pain if it starts to hurt and puts a new stop on his case. This is true of those cases who really have a physical illness.

Slow gain, poor result is a physically ill pc.

The exercise of these points requires judgement for a person can be given treatments which will not heal him. Where this is the case, and the treatment seems too damaging or uncertain, treat the pc on this routine:

1. Rest

2. No harassment

3. Food

4. Mild sedatives.

When the person seems well, audit him.

The truth of the above definition of "insanity" can be experienced easily with no great stress. To have a headache or toothache is sometimes quite distressing and distracting, making one gloomy or inactive. Taking an aspirin cheers one up and he can work.

That is in fact the basic mechanism. It is why tranquilizers work.

This is why old-timers thought they had to cut nerves to "cure" the insane. But that's like fixing the telephone exchange by throwing a hand grenade into the switchboard. You may get no more complaints but you sure don't have a telephone any more. Which, I suppose, is the basic way to stop all complaints. Nobody can ring up even if the house were on fire!

Drugs such as marijuana are craved only when the being "needs them" to stop undesirable physical pain or sensation. Then they backfire, causing more distress than they cure.

Some pcs, taken off marijuana for a few weeks, can be audited. Some can't. Those who then can't be audited are in pain whether they consciously realize it or not. In their "unconscious mind" (below their self-suppression) they hurt.

So those who can't be audited well when taken off some drug like marijuana should be gotten to a good clinic and given "the works". A competent medical doctor will find the broken bone, the disease, the diabetes. Give it a medical cure.

Then audit the pc by Standard Tech, checking resistive case lists, etc all over again.

Pcs don't always know they're ill.

Mental upset aggravates physical discomfort. Physical discomfort aggravates mental unrest.

So play it safe.

A slow case who doesn't respond well to very usual approaches has something else wrong with him physically.

Don't be an extremist.

Your job after all is to do the most you can for the pc.