Patricia Tupper H. - The Christian Science Journal, Jan. 2000
PEOPLE IN VARIOUS SCHOOLS of medicine are reevaluating the conventional concept of body. They’re prompted to consider how beliefs affect body, and some are exploring the possibility that body might be something very different from what has been previously believed—not just how the body operates, but the very essence of it. They ask, If the body isn’t a machine distinct from mind, then what is it? And how can one gain control over it?
Some of the more dramatic medical documentation of the relation of belief and body was presented a number of years ago in studies of individuals suffering from multiple personality syndrome. Patients were observed to have different conditions in their different and separate states of mind. One woman had diabetes in her dominant personality, but when she was in another personality, doctors could run tests on that same body and find no evidence of the disease. Another multiple personality patient had a bodily scar in one personality but not in another of her personalities (one that had no memory of the accident).’
In the effort to understand such phenomena, the book Science and Health is indispensable. Its author, Mary Baker Eddy, writes: “Disease is an image of thought externalized. The mental state is called a material state. Whatever is cherished in mortal mind as the physical condition is imaged forth on the body.” 2 It’s important to consider the route Mrs. Eddy took in coming to this conclusion. From childhood, she had faced recurring illness. A deeply devout Christian, she felt that she—anyone— should be able to turn to God, divine Love, for healing, as Christ Jesus taught. She prayed, but she was not healed. She continued praying, and she also explored the various modes of healing available to her—allopathy, hygiene and diet, homeopathy, mental suggestion. Yet she found no permanent help in these methods either.
In the process of seeking to heal herself and others, however, she witnessed over and over that body is changed as thought is changed. These experiences were preparing her to receive an understanding of the connection between Christian regeneration of thought, something she had learned of from childhood, and the regeneration of the human body. Describing these years, Mrs. Eddy writes: “The author’s medical researches and experiments had prepared her thought for the metaphysics of Christian Science. Every material dependence had failed her in her search for truth; and she can now understand why, and can see the means by which mortals are divinely driven to a spiritual source for health and happiness.” 3
Mrs. Eddy finally came to the conclusion that the human body is a wholly mental construct—often governed by fears, expectations, and widely held beliefs, but not by physical laws. Although she turned completely away from medical approaches as she found clear answers to the nature of being in the Bible, what Mrs. Eddy learned from her early experiments with medicine serves to make Science and Health a central meeting point for the religious thinker and the scientific thinker.
She drew from Scripture the fact that God is the true Mind, the creative Mind. She saw that, in order to heal in Christ Jesus’ way, it’s necessary to junk the notion that God’s image, His spiritual reflection, can have a mind of its own. In fact, one has to junk the notion that there is any intelligence but God. To heal is to put off the so-called old mind and to put on the all-intelligent, divine Mind. It’s to reflect this Mind and so, in a degree, to know as God knows.
The healing of sickness as well as of sin occurs naturally as one puts off a materially based way of thinking and seeing things and puts on, in some measure, the sinless, divine consciousness of Love. To have as our present sense of things a conviction that God is Mind (and to live our life from this basis) places our present sense of body under the jurisdiction of God’s perfect government. Our body then manifests what God knows, instead of what fallible mortal beliefs would communicate to us.
IF WE BELIEVE our body to be matter—regardless of how diligently we oil, fuel, exercise it, even replacing spare parts—it will still sag, drag, deteriorate, and decay according to the limitations of matter and the prevailing human beliefs about body. Yet, as we realize even in small degree that, in reality, man is God’s own spiritual likeness, this will be expressed in health, longevity, joy, and freedom. We begin to glimpse spiritual reality and experience the effects of that understanding.
What is matter, then? One might say that matter is a false way of seeing and experiencing things. It is ignorance lived out. It may seem hard to believe that matter is merely a projection of delusive mentality; one might argue that, without matter, things would be intangible. But this is simply not so. Consider how we see and feel and touch things in our sleeping dream. Experience in a dream is tangible; yet we know that there’s no matter in a dream. Nor is what happens in a dream governed by laws of matter. The waking mortal dream sense is entirely mental, yet tangible. What’s more—because experience is mental—it can be proved that neither the so-called human mind nor body need be held subject to material laws and conditions!
DOES ONE have to go as far as Mrs. Eddy did and reject the existence of matter? Isn’t it enough to recognize the large influence of thought on body?
To realize the mental nature of things is a step of progress. But many schools of thought have reached this point and then been stymied. This is because the brain is commonly believed to be the source of thought, the seat of consciousness, controlling the systems of the body, its functions and sensations. Trying to cure disease from this perspective, one would attempt to reprogram the brain, which is, in itself, part of the misconception of intelligence in matter. One would be trying to fix the problem with the very misconception that caused it in the first place! Christ Jesus said, “It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing.” 4
Healing in Christian Science does not involve trying to reprogram the human mind. This concept of a material intelligence has to be seen for what it is—a misconception, a misconceived impression, of the relationship of Mind (God) and His idea, man. Christian Science acknowledges that body does manifest mind; but it goes on to reveal that there is only one actual Mind, God, and that the divine Mind produces only harmony. This is the ultimate in healing!
If you’re approaching divine Mind-healing from a human mind/body direction, re-look at what you know of mind’s determining the state of body in the light of the fact that God is Mind, the absolute, only cause. If you are approaching this healing from a route that sees body as a biological machine controlled by physical law, joyfully drop expectations that one’s present sense of body has to follow any law other than God’s. God is entirely good, causing only health. If you’re approaching cures only from the direction of faith healing, consider the Biblical command “Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus.” 5 Obeying the one divine intelligence, Jesus showed the healing power of Christ, the true idea of God, to be scientific, understandable, consistent.
Scientific Christian healing goes far beyond trying to excite the human mind to think differently and so change a physical body; in fact, the human mind is not a contributor to such cure. To be healed through the Christ Science involves actual Christian regeneration, growing more Christlike in every thought and deed, yielding to God’s loving and wise government of all He creates. The physical effect that takes place so consistently occurs because consciousness and body are inseparable and yield to the law of divine Mind.
LET ME ILLUSTRATE. One of our daughters was required by state law to have a physical examination in order to play on her school tennis team. The examining doctor found what he described as a suspicious-looking spot in her throat. He insisted on an immediate biopsy. I assured him that I would get treatment for her right away. Loving her so dearly, I turned to the method of cure that I trusted the very most. I knew that a false belief couldn’t be cut out with a scalpel.
I studied this verse in Hebrews: “The worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.” 6 This meant, to me, that in God’s all-powerful love and wisdom, He did not—and could not—create His child out of perishable matter! The problem that needed correcting was a misperception of her substance, not a bodily disease. I continued to study and pray daily with the support of a Christian Science practitioner to see my daughter as God’s, Spirit’s, child, exempt from anything pertaining to matter.
A week or so later my daughter came to me with a little growth perched on the end of her finger. “Look, Mom,” she said. “What the doctor saw was just a lump of oatmeal that was stuck in my throat.” Of course, it wasn’t oatmeal; but how I rejoiced that that mortal misconception was no longer even appearing to be part of her! Mrs. Eddy writes:
“Christian Science brings to the body the sunlight of Truth, which invigorates and purifies. Christian Science acts as an alterative, neutralizing error with Truth. It changes the secretions, expels humors, dissolves tumors, relaxes rigid muscles, restores carious bones to soundness. The effect of this Science is to stir the human mind to a change of base, on which it may yield to the harmony of the divine Mind.” 7
THE HUMAN BODY is mental projection, manifesting either right or wrong conclusions about God and man. Over the years I’ve come to realize that even on my worst days, in my least enlightened states of thought, there’s still no actual matter in my experience. When it is our present understanding that God is Mind, then our present sense of body—the human body—displays conditions that are more consistent with Truth and Love.
Our age is in the very beginning stages of a radical shift in thought, one that will usher in a whole new definition of body—what composes it, how it operates, and how best to care for it. Individual healing by individual healing, Christ, the true idea of God, is lifting humanity above its ignorance of God’s dear love and care for all. Ultimately, humanity will grasp that man does not live in a physical body, but is the cherished, spiritual embodiment of the qualities of divine Love in all their glory.
1 See The New York Times, June 28, 1988, and May 21, 1985.
2 Science and Health, p. 411.
3 Ibid., p. 152
7 Science and Health, p. 162.
April 2nd, 2008 at 5:56 am
I read it again!
Very interesting and clear thoughts. I especially liked the explanation that we are not trying to fix the body via human mind,. Christ is the Mind who operates.
Many thanks