“There is a Crack in Everything”

Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack in everything

That’s how the light gets in.

~Leonard Cohen, ‘Anthem’

Nothing that is complete breathes.

~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

These two quotations keep popping back into my mind lately, as they imply some very important concepts around health, disease, and the goals of treatment.

At a micro level, these quotes can be interpreted in terms of the cancer miasm, which I wrote about recently. Interestingly, the above quote about breathing has a profound meaning in terms of cancer, which completely inverts the healthy function of the cell to be anerobic instead of aerobic. In my recent blog on the cancer miasm, I mentioned the psychological characteristic of perfectionism, which can be likened to a false form of trying to being “complete”, and therefore not breathing.

A meditation on the macro questions of health, illness, disease, and the purpose of treatment can also follow from these quotations. The concept of resonance, which I’m always making reference to in these blogs, functions in both positive and negative ways. The “crack” through which disease enters us is this very resonance — no disease can be contracted which we do not have a resonance for. This points to one of the absurdities of the Pasteurian germ theory, which posits that a mere proximity to a germ is sufficient for contracting the disease. The best immunity, in this sense, is to ensure that we do not have resonance with the state of mind of the disease which is going around.

Without having this “crack”, or capacity to take things in through resonance, we would not breathe or be living at all. Furthermore, this continual taking in through resonance prompts change, transformation, and growth. When our “crack” is covered over by chronic disease and armoring, our capacity to have these growth experiences through resonance is limited. I think you’ve met people like that, who have such a thick wall around them, that their capacity to take in anything new is virtually non-existent. This is also why, when a new patient tells me that they “never get sick”, a red flag goes up in my mind, wondering if they are sufficiently armored that nothing appears to move on the surface, while a much more serious chronic illness is brewing at the depths.

The book The Healing Power of Illness does a brilliant job at expanding on this concept, and illustrating how the goal of healing is to raise our resonance quotient, so that we can experience and discharge all of our negative resonance at the least consequential level possible. “Bumping” into someone as we walk down the sidewalk is a much more safe form of discharging a particular resonance, than “crashing” into them in our car at 100 km/h. The purpose of Heilkunst treatment is to raise the level of our negative resonance discharge as much as possible, in order that we “get” the meaning of our lessons as gently as possible.

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