If the Spirit Within Us is Deficient
The following consists of excerpts from Talking About Acupuncture, a book transcribed from a lecture JR Worsley gave in 1982. It includes minor editing by Judy Worsley and the Worsley Institute editing team to bring quotes from different sections of the book into context for this website.
"There is more sickness today than there was fifty years ago, simply because we are abandoning and neglecting the most integral part of man and woman. If the spirit within us is deficient, we are much more susceptible to disease. The strength of each individual depends on this core."
"This spirit within each of us is God, the Ultimate, Consciousness - call it what ever you want. We are an extension of the universe."
"Many people talk about vital Chi energy, the life force, and think it's enveloped within us. Really, it's just an extension of the ultimate source of energy which comes from the cosmos. We are part of that - the macrocosm and the microcosm."
"Do you know, a child of seven can understand the wisdom of traditional Chinese medicine? It's so simple; it's so basic; it's so natural. Yet we have turned our backs on it. We are now going in for things that isolate the body. You have a cardiac specialist; you have a pulmonary specialist; you have a kidney specialist. We are specializing in parts. We are not parts; we are one. Any one part of us that is not functioning correctly must affect the whole. The part that is affected is not necessarily the cause; it may only be the symptom."
"You will find we lay far too much importance on physical pain, and physical symptoms. I put it to you that most people can tolerate a fair amount of physical pain. But you know what you can't tolerate - when it starts to get to your mind. When you get depressed, when you get worried, when you get anxious, when you feel within yourself you don't want to bother to carry on. That is worse. The mental anguish is worse than the physical pain. And when you go deeper to the spiritual anguish, that's the time when you want to give up. It's not worth living - there's just no point in going on."
"Another reason we are not winning the fight against disease is that going back perhaps 100, 200 years, 'named' diseases like arthritis, back pain, rheumatism were very often caused by people having to work outside, badly clothed, badly fed and badly housed. Being exposed to these harsh conditions affected the physical body. People got sick. Now, at least in the West, everyone's pretty well housed, everyone is pretty well fed. If it rains and you have an outside job, now you can come inside. You don't have to work up to your knees in mud like they did 100 years ago. You have all the facilities under the sun available. And yet there is still as much arthritis, back pain, rheumatism as there was 100 years ago. But now the cause is internal, not external. The disease is being caused now by worry, fear, grief, hostility, anger, hatred, jealousy: all of these are now manifesting in the physical body as rheumatism, etc."
"When you have these two contexts, you can see how foolish it is to treat rheumatism. One was caused by excessive damp, cold, standing in water, no ventilation, no warmth, bad clothing. Nowadays it is the internal factor. The hatred, the anger, the fear converts to aggressive energy, and then you manifest rheumatism, and you can't move your arms. How stupid to give a pill to cure it! One was caused by an outside factor; now it is caused by an inside factor."
"Our job is to find the cause of disease; so, in this case, we would try to find the internal cause of the rheumatism. Once we have established the cause we will try to correct it. If we can correct it, the rheumatism goes not for a day, not for a year, but forever. So the main thing in this system of medicine is first our ability to diagnose the cause of the disease." © 2004 J.B. Worsley and Worsley, Inc.