Well here we are again. Before we go any further, I would like to say that everything I am about to say is what I am getting from this talk. I know I have said that before, but I really feel the importance of letting you know this. We all get what we need to hear at the moment we need to hear it. I chose this consultation call because of the way it began, that being talking about God, Universal Intelligence and Innate. Those of you, who knew my father, knew that he used the term God in all of his talks when it came to Universal Intelligence and Innate. I on the other hand struggled with this all my life. So my understanding of this clip is very different from what you might get out of it. I am not a religious man at all, but my father was. I respect him for that; I respect his opinion on the matter, but what about those of us that struggle to understand chiropractic without the use of God as a way of understanding Innate and Universal Intelligence.
I don’t know if all of you know of my struggle with alcohol. It was a terrible part of my life and I tried for many years to cut my dependency with alcohol. It ate its way into every aspect of my life, until I had no life at all, but when I hit my rock bottom and I was willing to admit that I was powerless over alcohol and that my life had become unmanageable, I started to change. When I finally admitted defeat and asked for help, I went into AA and I used the 12 steps of AA to get sober. Now I know you are asking what does this have to do with the topic at hand, that being, “Is there room for God in Chiropractic.” I am getting to that, but I ask for a little leeway to get to my point. In AA step two says, “Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.” I had a very hard time with this, because well I do not believe in a God, please don’t let that taint your opinion of me, I do believe in a higher power. In the rest of this audio clip, Dr. Sigafoose reads from, BJ’s Green Book “The Book Of Answers” and in particular a part of the book called, “And You Might Die.” In the reading he uses the story to explain synonyms. Now a synonym by definition is, a word or phrase that means exactly or nearly the same as another word or phrase in the same language, for example shut is a synonym of close. Well to my father God is a synonym to Universal Law and Innate. This still did not help me with my understanding of a higher power and it certainly did not help me to understand that God had a place in chiropractic.
So let’s go back a bit to me dealing with getting sober and with me dealing with the second step of AA, that being I came to believe that a Power greater then ourselves could restore me to sanity. You see just because I do not believe in a God, does not mean that I do not believe in nature, that I do not believe in science. That I do not believe in the power of the Universe Intelligence. I can see a tree I can feel the wind I can feel the warmth of the sun on my face. I cannot control these things, — they all are –or — they all — occur and they all – happen — weather I believe in them or not. All of this, all of these things became my higher power. If all of this could happen without any of my help or guidance then if I put my faith in them and I just believed that I could simply breath in and breath out and wake up and that life could go on without alcohol and that all of my struggles would eventually ease and go away, then if a tree can produce oxygen without any help from me, then the Universe would ultimately allow me to have a day without a drink.
You see it is all a matter of semantics at this point. Some people like my father call it God; whether you refer to your higher power as God, the Indian God Ganesh, Allah, The Great Spirit, Vishnu, Christ, Jehovah, El Shaddai, The Universe, Universal Intelligence, The Great Artificer, the Hopi God Tawa, Nature, or any other name by that which you call the Great Being, it doesn’t matter. Each of us has a personal relationship with it and no one should stand in judgment. I respect my father and his relationship with God. It was in his core, just as my own relationship with Nature or Science or Universal Intelligence is in my core. When I allowed myself to believe in a Power greater then myself, I allowed myself to know that I could get better. Now don’t get me wrong, this all took years of hard work and I had to be honest with myself about all of my actions that got me to the awful place that I was, but I had FAITH. It was that faith in something greater then me that saved my life and I am happy to say that I have not touched a drink in almost four years!
Now back to, “is there room for God in chiropractic.” If God is your higher power and if you need to believe in God to understand chiropractic, then I would have to say YES. There is room for God in Chiropractic, but I also have to say that if I choose not to believe in God and I would prefer to believe in Science and in Nature and in the Universe, that you should respect my beliefs as well. To be honest I am a bit jealous of the people that have faith in an omnipotent being. I would love nothing more then to put my blind faith in a higher power that has a plan for everything in this Universe, but I just can’t do it. What I can do is believe that the sun will always rise in the east and set in the west and that when it rains the water falls down and not up and that if a bone is sitting on a nerve and it is pinching off the information from the brain to body, then that part of the body that is being affected will not work properly and I have to believe that if I do not drink that my life will be good and bad, but without the alcohol my life will be better, just like your life will be better without a Subluxation.
So you see — God, Innate, Universal Intelligence, Science or Nature, it all takes FAITH. Because the power that made the body does heal the body and whether you believe that it is God doing it or releasing a Subluxation that allows the impulses from the brain to reach the part of the body that it is going to, hence allowing the tissue cells to create healthy cells instead of sick cells that is doing it, it does not matter, what matters is that it works. And when something works, that being chiropractic, we all can agree on one thing. It does not matter how you explain it as long as you can understand it and that you make it your own, because it is not your beliefs or your faith that makes chiropractic work, it is the Big Idea behind it ALL.
Thank you so very much for listening today, I hope you got whatever it is you were supposed to get out of this episode. I know I did. If you would like to hear the rest of this consultation call, it and so many others are now available on Sigafoose.com for immediate digital download. This consultation call is number 104 and what you heard today was only 12 minutes of a 40 minute call. We have also started a Subscription Service that will allow you to get one consultation call sent to you every week in its entirety. So with that I am going to let you go and ask you to take a moment to figure out – What is your higher power and does it help you to understand chiropractic? See you next week.
Chiropractic ally Yours,
Dr. Carey N. Pabouet-Sigafoose
