The Three Functions of Thinking, Feeling, and Willing
We look at health (and its absence) at many levels, as I’ve written here previously, and one of the orientations we consider is the patient’s balance between the three primary functions of : thinking, feeling, and willing. Different constitutions and personality types will have an innate balance between these emphasizing one more than the others, but ultimately, a state of health drives a patient to balance all three.
Orson Bean, in his book Me and the Orgone, said:
Reich was once asked the age-old question, “What is truth?” and he answered, “To find your way to the thing you feel when you love dearly, or when you create, or when you give birth to your children, or when you build your home or when you look up at the stars at night.” These are the things that we feel in common with every other human who is capable of feeling. They are the deepest, tenderest, most profound and exhilarating of feelings and the capacity to feel them is the capacity to be free.
Heilkunst treatment works through a variety of modalities and processes to address all three of these functions. One level at which willing is addressed is by addressing the patient’s willingness to take their regimen into their own hands, and actually exert their own will power to make healthy changes in their lifestyle. Taking conscious control of the will power is often not easy, and it may take some patients quite a long time to start to make lasting changes to their diet and lifestyle.
The function of thinking is also quite important in treatment, especially as the patient moves more and more into the third jurisdiction of “Therapeutic Education”. Faulty thinking, and more specifically, the diseases which originate in belief are the locus of the mind, and its capacity for healthy, objective thinking. Various conflicts, ego issues, and other blockages in our consciousness can keep the patient from making quicker progress at this level of their treatment. Also, their bio-physical layers of armoring serve to keep the patient from being able to accept any new input at this level, until enough of this has been removed.
The feeling function takes quite a central position in Heilkunst treatment, including the whole realm of medicine, and its function to address true diseases. The quote about Reich above hints at the vastness of this realm, and its relationship to our health. Every disease uniquely affects us, and shifts our innate natural feeling for life into a “morbidly mistuned” expression, as Dr. Hahnemann would say. Remediation with the appropriate remedies progressively frees up, and releases our natural capacity for feeling to not only be more healthy, but more objective.