As many of you know I managed to survive a traumatic childhood and the 7/7 London tube bombings. Well that is not what I want to talk about now, but more about my healing from those events so I won't be mentioning those events any more in this article. I just wanted to mention that because the holidays are coming and so is the start of a new year so I wanted this article to be happy and joyful.
That is truly happy and joyful - not the false jollity that Western society promotes around a commercial Christmas. But really joyful because what has happened to me is authentic and could have happened at any time of the year - just providentially it happens to have come to be at this time of the year - ready for me to share with you.
As many of you already know I have been living with constant pain and the inability to walk for a number of years now and moved to a town in the UK with a reputation for "healing" and "spirituality". What I found when I moved here was that a lot of it was purely commercial, delusional and sham. It was faith healing and so-called spirituality for sale. Now I will add here that when I use the words "a lot of it," what I mean is all that I have found. I apologise to anyone reading now if they have found real healing and spirituality here and if you have please email me to demonstrate your claim. That is because I have issued several challenges here for people to demonstrate to me that they have real psychic and healing skills and like the challenge put forward by James Randi no-one has come forward yet to take up my challenge.
Well, as other readers will know from my previous articles especially the one about finding Joy through Deism, I have found emotional, mental and spiritual healing here in my town through Deism. I have found it in a town in the UK that equates in American terms to the Bible Belt meets Sedona. (I understand Sedona in the USA is well known as a "New Age" centre of "spirituality".) So if you understand that I think you can get an idea of the sort of community that I live in.
I must also balance that by saying that there are also many local people who live in my town who do not like/understand or want what they see as the "incomers/invaders" who they call "hippies" despite the fact that they have been here about forty years now. It is like living in a town with two different tribes in it!
Anyhow I manage to have a foot in both camps so to speak and am reasonably well known here. Mainly because I have spoken out against what I see as the commercialisation of so-called "spirituality" and have introduced Deism which hasn't always made me popular with the "New Agers" or the fundamentalist Christians. But has made me popular with the locals and the moderates. Many people here now consider themselves Deists and have reported back to me that it has helped them out of the mental hells that the "New Age" and Christianity and other "revealed" religions have put them in. That is part of the reason I am unpopular in some circles - because Deism is powerful and based of Reason. And it is hard to argue against it!
I managed to obtain paid carers/care givers from the local authority, (which I contribute to but are from a not-for-profit organisation and so are affordable), and one of my carers has become a Deist. We got talking about religious and spiritual matters and she conveyed to me in a roundabout way, that is without saying it directly, that based on some peoples interpretation of me that she expected to find me a militant atheist! She was pleasantly surprised to find that I was pleasant and reasonable and I explained to her that I was a Deist and what it was and she exclaimed "I think I am a Deist. I just didn't know it had a name!" Now she is busy reading all the Deism.com articles!
The misrepresentation of me as a Deist does not surprise me at all now. At first it did but then I communicated with Bob Johnson the founder of Deism.com and he told me some of the "negative" things that had been said about him. Well, honestly I didn't recognise what they wrote at all as being about him. I thought they must have been talking about someone else. And people have done the same about me. However I have come to recognise why people do that. In every day language if someone cannot counteract your argument intelligently they try to put you down. In attacking the person they try to make the argument appear ridiculous also. In the language of debate this is know as using "ad hominems" which to use the Wikipedia entry means:-
"An ad hominem (Latin for "to the man"), short for argumentum ad hominem, is an argument made personally against an opponent, instead of against the opponent's argument."
For more information go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem
However I have come to realise that the use of ad hominems is the last refuge of those who adopt a position in an argument that when investigated is shown to be intellectually and morally bankrupt. In that regard, the use of ad hominems against me, I have come to see as a compliment to the strength and power of Deism! Which is made all the more sad because the very tools that make Deism so strong and powerful - the use of Reason and Nature - are freely available to everyone who recognises these God-given gifts.
However despite opposition, or maybe even because of this Deism is making inroads in my community. I am now using a monthly meeting here to introduce Deism. And most attendees have recognised that they share many of the ideas of Deism. I have produced evidence of this group to Bob Johnson and one review of it said, (of Deism), "A beacon of light in a town of Woo!"
I thought I would share this healing going on with you at this time of year. But Deism has also further healed me in a physical sense - I have now managed to get out of much of my physical pain.
Because of Deism I stopped looking for healing for my pain through faith healing and other mystical and magical thinking so called healing modalities. It is patently obvious that these do not work and are extremely harmful if taken to their logical conclusions as many articles in our Deism ezines and publications demonstrate. It is also perfectly obvious to me that they do not work because over the last three years I have had five churches praying for my healing, three groups meditating for it and four groups doing "magical" rituals for my healing - and still nothing was physically different! Even through I asked them to stop performing these meaningless acts on my behalf they stubbornly persisted.
However fortunately for me I persisted down the Deist path of Reason. The full reason for my pain was not known as chronic nerve pain is still not fully understood. However, I read everything I could about the subject and eventually suggested to my GP what was wrong with me. He fortunately treated me as intelligent and recommended me to a foot and ankle specialist in our socialised medical authority, (the NHS - the National Health Service), who proceeded with further tests and came to the conclusion that my diagnosis "might" be right. However by this stage my whole Reason and intuition felt that my diagnosis was right!
I had come to the conclusion that my nerve pain had been caused by a K wire that had damaged the nerves in my feet during surgery. K wires are wires that are used in the feet when bones are broken to help them to heal straight. They are wires like coat hanger wires and are literally pushed straight through the centre of the bone and kept there for a period of time until the broken bones had healed. Then they are taken out. One of the main complications when using K wires is the possibility of damaging the nerves.
When the nerves are damaged a tumour forms around the damaged nerve in order to try and protect it. The problem is that this tumour then takes up space in the joint and compresses the damaged nerve even further which results in extreme and ongoing pain. This is what I diagnosed had happened to me. However different surgeons in the NHS supported each other and kept blaming my pain on the original injury - not on the follow up surgery - but I was convinced differently. That is not to say that I am not grateful to the NHS for all the other things they have done for me, and I do support the idea of socialised medical care - but just like many professions, the professionals support each other. It is not for nothing that George Bernard Shaw said "All professions are a conspiracy against the laity!"
However two days ago I went to a private surgeon who has no allegiance to the NHS and he had the highest resolution ultrasound scanner that is available. With the use of this and his expertise he diagnosed that I had a damaged nerve and a tumour around it. He also confirmed that from the way it was damaged the damage would have been caused by the nerve being punctured by the K wire during surgery. Just what my Reason and instinct had said all along!
He injected an anaesthetic into the damaged nerve and told me to go for a 30 minute walk. He said if I was in no pain after this that his diagnosis would be confirmed and he would be able to operate.
Well I went for the 30 minute walk and there was absolutely no pain in my foot. However all my other leg muscles were aching because I hadn't done anything more than hobble a few steps for several years!
The surgeon confirmed that I would be a good candidate for cryosurgery which is the latest technique that is used for killing damaged nerves. That way with the nerve dead, (as they do for teeth in root canal surgery), the pain would cease. However there is a 12-14 weeks recovery time during which the patient must keep off their feet and rest as much as possible. For that reason I have postponed the surgery until after Christmas. The surgery is about 98% successful with no complications because it is only minimally invasive. For those interested more information can be found here:-
I am very optimistic about the outcome of this surgery and am sure it will cure my pain. I may not be able to walk fully because of other conditions but at least I will be out of the constant pain I was in regardless of however much I rested my feet. And finally I will be able to come off pain killers which have their own side effects, (numbing of the brain for one), and are also potentially addictive. (I am on pain killers just one degree below morphine - that's how bad the pain has been.)
I am so glad I found Deism because it gave me the strength to rely upon my own God-given Reason even when much of the medical establishment was against me. (At one point it was suggested that I see a psychiatrist since the pain was deemed to be by one NHS surgeon "all in my head"!) I am also thankful for Deism for it encouraging me to look towards Science and Nature for solutions and not "revealed" religions and mystical "spiritual" traditions for healing because it is Science and Nature that ultimately healed me. And of course God who created Nature which informs Science.
When I first contacted Bob Johnson, the founder of Deism.com, it was to thank him and Deism for the healing it had brought to my mind and to my spiritual, emotional and mental health by helping me to make sense of what had happened to me. I never thought I would be contacting him a year and a bit later to tell him that Deism had lead me to find the physical cause of my pain and to its eventual cure. (Which I am sure will be). But that is the situation and a testament of the power and beauty of Deism.
I only hope that Deism can bring to your life all the power and Reason it has brought to mine!