Healing of the Self examines mind-body relationships in health and sickness. Contrasting conventional, psychic, and spiritual approaches to healing, it clarifies basic principles of healing and recommends a combination of conventional and alternative methods. It also offers a variety of practical techniques that have proven useful both in self-healing and in assisting conventional treatment.
Because of the "datedness" of some of the medical and psychological terminology that appears in this section, we would like to remind the reader that these notes were written and compiled during a period that spanned approximately forty years. During that period, the fields of medicine and psychology underwent many changes--not only in terminology but also in technique. In keeping with his lifelong interest in current events, P.B. wrote many of his paras in response to events and ideas as they developed within the evolution of the healing community itself. He seldom took the time to go back and update such notes, and even more rarely did he record the time at which they were composed.
As P.B. concerned himself primarily, however, with the salient issues and philosophic implications of such ideas, the meanings he addresses are still clear and timely--even when the language carrying them seems somewhat dated to professionals in the field. For that reason, we have made no attempt to update older terminology. We suspect that readers familiar with more current terminology will find it fruitful, as we have, to approach the more technical sections as excerpts from a researcher's workbook which parallels developments in the healing arts since the early 1940s.
Editorial conventions here are the same as stated in the introductions to Perspectives and The Quest. Likewise, (P) at the end of a para indicates that it also appears in Perspectives, the introductory survey volume to this series.