A Conversation With... Robert Knapp

The Monthly Aspectarian: Dr. Knapp, tell us a little about your path to becoming who you are today.

Robert Knapp: I'm a holistic physician. These days, I guess we're sometimes called complementary physicians or integrated physicians. In any case, I went to school wanting to bring together the best of the East and West and to integrate the best in spiritual and psychological healing with physical methods. I graduated in 1972 from Upstate Medical School in Syracuse, New York where I also did my psychiatry residency. Since then, I've studied a little bit of everything from meditation to biofeedback to yoga, was a member of the Zen Buddhist Center, studied nutrition and acupressure -- all of the various methods that have evolved over the ages. I particularly put my attention on an approach that originated with Charles Fillmore, the co-founder of the Unity School of Christianity, called The Twelve Powers approach.

I practiced as a holistic physician. I lived in Syracuse at the time, and I had a thriving practice with everybody who was a yoga student or wanted nutritional counseling or who meditated or who went to Unity. Then in 1974 I joined a spiritual group called Mark-Age, and headed up their health department, which is called Healing Haven.

Subsequently, starting about that time, we researched and upgraded the approach that was given by Charles Fillmore. He basically says that we have twelve God-given talents, powers, abilities, faculties, call them what you will ... Faith, Love, Strength, Wisdom, Power, Imagination, Understanding, Will, Order, Enthusiasm, Release and Regeneration. Each one of these powers expresses in a particular part of our physical body ... so that our body literally is the temple of the living God.

In medicine over the last 20 or 30 years, we've seen more and more research that begins to document this connection and interaction. You see it especially in all of the research on the heart and circulatory system. There are a couple thousand studies now that show that if we are open and loving, if we live in community, if we have a sense of loving and being loved, our heart works well. If we don't, then our heart has much greater tendency to develop disease.

TMA: Going back to the twelve powers themselves, would you say that individuals have all these powers in varying degrees?

RK: Yes, we have them whether we're aware of them or not. From the earliest days, we learn to love or not to love, or variations of that. Or we have faith or confidence or trust ... we learn to trust ourselves or others. Or hopefully, we're taught from an early age to trust in a higher power. We all have that. When we come into more of an awareness of our inner self, our spiritual self, the God-self within us, the Christ -- call it what you will -- then these powers open up further and begin to flower.

TMA: What parts of the body do the twelve powers relate to?

RK: It starts out with Faith. Faith is our foundational power. We call it the Rock of Faith. It's at the top of the head in the area called the cerebrum. Faith is our ability to proceed. It's our proceeding power, according to Charles Fillmore. It's how we can look beyond the physical into the spiritual. It's how we can know from within that we're the child of God. That perception takes place in our brain, so Faith correlates with our brain.

Love, as you can well guess, relates to the heart and to the circulatory system, anything to do with the circulation of the blood.

Strength correlates with our spinal cord and our nerves, our backbone. We talk about people who are strong and steady as having lots of backbone. Those who are weak and lifeless and who have ambivalence are called spineless. Our language gives us clues to all of these powers. We all have an inner awareness of this.

The next power is called Wisdom and Good Judgment, and it relates to the pituitary gland or master gland. It's like we have a judge sitting right in the center of our head. In fact, we have seven judges. Each one of the endocrine glands very carefully weigh and judge the amount of hormone in the blood that brings any particular function into order. Of course, we need to make wise and good judgments and not be down on ourselves or others because as Jesus and others have said, as you judge, so will you be judged. In the physical body, that's literally true. Our thoughts and feelings and patterns literally will translate down and play out in the way that our body functions.

Power expresses through our voice, our voice box or larynx, our vocal cords, giving us the ability to convert our ideas into the words that we speak. Power also expresses in and through our muscles. When muscles contract, they provide movement for our whole body, and especially for our arms and legs, which give us power in this physical world.

Imagination relates to the third eye and the organ called the thalamus. This is the place in our physical form where we create new images about ourselves, where we receive new images that come into our mind's eye.

Understanding is accomplished by way of our five senses. We gather all of this information and then we analyze it in order to understand ourselves and our place in the world.

The power of Will relates to our lungs, our respiratory system, breathing in the will of God, God breathing His or Her will into us to bring us life. It powers our throat, our voice, our speaking of the word, our power center, our throat chakra if you want to put it in Eastern terms. It also relates to our muscles and limbs that bring us power by making it possible for us to move in this physical body, and to have power in this dimension.

Order relates to our solar plexus, our digestive system, where we take in substance in a very orderly process of digestion, and then we build in the order, the framework, of the body.

Enthusiasm or Zeal is at the base of the brain. It's a little organ called the hypothalamus, which regulates our energy, our zest, our zeal. We literally have spots or places in there which, if you stimulate them electrically, you feel terrific. In other places, if you put a probe in there, you would be depressed. Many of our anti-depressants today regulate the nerve cells in that area. The amount of serotonin that's used to work with the transmitter systems in the body work directly on the function of the brain.

Release, of course, and elimination -- sometimes they're given different words -- as our eliminatory organs or colon and our kidneys and urinary system remove waste from the body.

And Regeneration, of course, relates to our reproductive system, our ability to create good in our life and spring forth new form.

TMA: How does an individual utilize this information?

RK: We put out a book called Twelve Powers in You. In many ways, what it is is an update and an effort to put the teachings in modern language. The first time this information was given was through Charles Fillmore, and he published a book, Twelve Powers of Man, in 1930. We took all that information and I worked with two Unity ministers, David and Gay Lynn Williamson. David would cover the metaphysical or spiritual sides of it; Gay Lynn, who is a psychologist, would cover the soul, subconscious side, and I would show how it correlates in the physical. We made a seven-hour videotape as well, covering each one of the powers, giving examples ... one, of how it works, and two, of how you can use affirmations and decrees. There's a guided visualization at the end to work with in order to hold a new image or to work on a particular quality in order to bring it about.

We have a song tape as well, with one song on each of the powers. Sometimes I think people get the most out of this because we're all so busy nowadays that we don't have time to read and think and do self-analysis, but we can always listen to music on our way to work and back. The whole point is to remind us, especially once we get into healing or new age thinking or metaphysically-oriented thinking, that we have these powers. We know that we want to be more loving, we want to be more wise, we want to have more faith, and so we give a number of ways in which we can do this.

TMA: Again, how do people actually use the information themselves?

RK: This is a pretty vast system. You can get caught up in the facts and figures of it, but the whole point is, how do you use it? When I facilitate a workshop, we always do a practical exercise. My workshops and talks are always experiential. For example, one of the things we do with the Love aspect is, I'll tell them the story of how I've worked with this in my own dealings with my family and loved ones and how that has helped me and how it has also helped them to change and become better people. Then quite often, we'll do a visualization where I'll have them sit quietly in meditation, get in tune within with their higher self, that center within themselves, and then picture a person right in front of them who has been challenging in their life, one who presses their buttons or drives them a little nuts now and again. Maybe it's an ex-wife or husband or maybe it's one of our kids who's a problem child. The goal is to open our heart and to love that person that we visualize sitting in front of us. The whole purpose is to find a way to look past the outer, temporary problem and to focus instead on the good within that person.

We're always to told to love one another, but how do we do that? How do we put that into motion? First of all, it has to be in consciousness, it has to within us. If we can find a way to open our heart up, to let go and release them and let that higher love flow through us -- to forgive them, if you will -- we change and that change sets up the environment both inwardly and outwardly where they can make change as well for the good.

TMA: Do you have any brief case histories or anecdotes you can tell us?

RK: Let me tell you the story with my dad. At age seven, I had a baby sister who died suddenly for no good reason. It basically destroyed the whole fabric of our family. My mom ended up going to the mental hospital where she had shock treatment. My dad was very challenged by it and had his own problems, and my brother and I were taken to live with my aunt and uncle who -- well, let's say they did their best, but they weren't the most loving people that I ever knew. That left a scar. I always felt abandoned. I felt unloved. I had lost the people I loved the most. You know, we learn how to love first through our interactions with our parents. That's the way we learn about power and the faculty of love. That's the way we learn about all of these aspects.

When I got into spiritual work, I had a dream in which I went back to this time in my family. My mom was being taken away to the hospital and I heard this big, all-wise, knowing voice behind me say, "Bob, you were so hurt by losing the one person that you loved the most, that you decided that you would never love anybody again."

This is not an uncommon story, mind you. Most of us have shut down in some way and then we become overly intellectual or in my case, I became somewhat of a perfectionist. I was going to be the best student I could be, or be the best athlete I could be and then people would love me ... rather than loving me for who I was. So when all this happened, I had chest pains, I developed an arythmia, I had physical problems that were associated with this that went back to childhood. I was told that if I would sit down and do the visualization that we just talked about, if I would love my dad, if I would open up to him and my mom, that I would change and they would change. So I did this. It took about two years of daily visualization and work and some counseling. Eventually I changed, of course, and my symptoms went away because I felt this new sense of loving them as a spiritual being.

My dad, who basically never went to church, one day was at home and was visited by a door-to-door minister. The guy prayed over him and he had this incredible feeling of light and energy and electricity go through his body. He had this total change, and he called me up and we talked about it. Within days and weeks, he asked me, "What can I read?" so I gave him all kinds of stuff, from The Power of Positive Thinking to Autobiography of a Yogi to Edgar Cayce to Shirley MacLaine, all of the stuff that was around back then. And my dad totally turned around, so that from being someone I really disliked and felt abandoned by, we went to having a warm, loving relationship.

TMA: I've always been struck by how forgiveness is not for the forgiven but rather for the forgiver.

RK: It always affects the forgiver the most. I do the same sort of thing in my healing work. If someone comes in, one of my first tasks is to love them as they are, to have faith in their goodness. If I can get out of the way and do that, then I really get uplifted first. I get into that higher consciousness first and then they pick up on it and then it's much easier for them to make a change.

TMA: As soon as you move out of judgment.

RK: Exactly. You may be the first person who's loved them like that in their whole life.

TMA: Unfortunately true.

RK: I'd like to remind everyone that we all have the power within us to grow, to change, to heal, to help one another. We have that higher Presence, that Power, that can help us overcome anything. It doesn't really matter whether it's at the mental level, whether it's emotionally upsetting, whether it's an old pattern, a memory pattern from this or even past lifetimes, whether we're having a physical illness ... all of these things can be healed if we will use our twelve Powers in the right and balanced way.