To be awake requires energy.
One of the common complaints that people bring to their physician is “fatigue.” Sometimes, when people complained to me about fatigue, I found serious diseases like cancer or heart failure. In that case, curing the disease would help the fatigue. But, there are three categories on the fatigue-awake scale that are not often discussed that do not necessarily involve a “disease.”
Point A
On the diagram below, look at point A. If you look at the scale, you will see that as negative influences go up (emotional drama, guilt, poor diet, even physical disease, poor health practices) the person dwindles in energy. But, here’s the surprise: because the scale is not linear, as the person decreases negative influences, he/she will not experience much increase in energy. So, there will be little motivation to continue efforts to remove negative influences.
Point A is where most people live.
All the way to the right on the scale, you find death. But before death, the negative influences are so great that the person experiences little change in state even with something very negative. Often, as a physician, I have seen people in the emergency room who were under so many negative influences (drugs/alcohol) that they were not even aware that they had been shot or stabbed.
Someone living at A will need strong, even unnatural influences, to experience improved energy and pleasure (hence a leaning toward drug abuse). We all crave any emotion other than boredom and fatigue. It’s why we go to the movies. Most would prefer fear (scary movies), sorrow (tear-jerking dramas), or fear (action movies), or desire (sex movies) over boredom. It’s what art does for us…wake me up, scare me, make me laugh, make me cry–anything but boredom.
But, don’t really hurt me. That’s a movie or a good book or just good art.
So, when someone lives at A, it takes a great stimulant to bring them back to energy.
Not that movies or art are not helpful. Artists and poets create for us both heaven and hell and hold up for us both love and hate. But, on a physical level, living at A is miserable and making it back to B, where one may feel an upsurge in energy will require removing multiple negative factors.
The main point about point A is that patience will eventually bring them back, but getting from A to B will require patience because immediate and dramatic effects may not be felt when adopting good habits.
Point B
At point B, one starts to experience increased energy due to the removal of sufficient negative factors. This would also represent most young people for whom the negative influences of poor diet, exercise, or mental and spiritual abuse of themselves have not yet affected them.
Most healthy adults practicing good diet and exercise will routinely make it here. Because of the sensation of the fall back to fatigue when practicing wrong habits, this person will usually get back on the right path pretty quickly because they will miss the energy lost.
But, most seldom remove enough negative influences to make it to point C.
Point C
At point C, the person has removed so many negative factors that he/she operates from a place of creativity, natural flow of energy, love, and even can reach spiritual enlightenment. Achieving this will often require the practice of fasting, prayer, meditation, reading of scriptures/philosophy, and a more diligent removal of negative influences and habits–and the practices of other positive habits–than most are willing to do.
Notice that at this level, even a slight movement to the right on the negative influences line will drop energy precipitously.
The person at C will notice a drop in focus and creativity with even the slightest change. Not that this person is fragile, but their focused mental and spiritual state is sensitive.
The Muse will run, the angels will fly, the vision will fade when offended.
Making it to C, once felt, will cause a person to thirst for GOD, to hunger for health, to beat the walls in anguish, go without food, leave their friends and family–anything to climb back up the hill.
Richard Bucke, who experienced an enlightenment episode while traveling in his carriage, wrote about this experience and the conditions that may lead to it (in Cosmic Consciousness) and how it changes one forever.
The purpose of the Law of Health is to move one to the left on the Negative Influences scale as far as one may dare to go.
