You know how, when someone feels especially sad, those internal thoughts and feelings can quickly translate into an obvious external, physical effect. You see it when the person’s eyes overflow with water. That can get you thinking. If there is such an obvious connection between thoughts and physical tears, what might be the connection between our thoughts and our overall physical well-being?
For a very long time now, people from diverse cultures and eras have been exploring the mental side to health and wellness. What might be the potential of us all, on a worldwide scale, learning how to gain a better sense of the connection between thought and healing? Imagine how it would be for everyone if health care were no longer considered from so narrowly material a perspective as it so frequently is.
Over a century ago, Mary Baker Eddy, a pathfinding thinker, and author of Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, made this observation in her book: “Whatever guides thought spiritually benefits mind and body” (p. 149). She had experienced firsthand the connection between thought and body, but took it much further. She recognized that positive and permanent effects on health and well-being lay in something immensely more potent than the human mind. Through extensive study of the Bible, she recognized Christ Jesus, the Son of God, as a scientific thinker and healer who understood the potency of thought’s effect on health—particularly the beneficial influence of spiritual thinking—better than anyone ever had.
Today, it’s common to hear doctors talking about a mind-body connection. For instance, well-known physician and author Dr. Lissa Rankin has some very helpful insights about this in her best-seller, Mind Over Medicine: Scientific Proof That You Can Heal Yourself. Right at the beginning, she asks, “What if I told you that caring for your body is the least important part of your health … that for you to be truly vital, other factors are more important?” (p. xiii).
On this little planet, humanity has made remarkable progress in so many areas. In healing mentally, though? Not so much! It feels as though, overall, mankind has lingered a few feet behind the starting line, never really taking determined forward strides toward demonstrating in a broad, worldwide sense, consistent spiritual healing. Many people, though, believe that it’s high time to make some truly significant progress in this important area.
So, why not move forward and take that next step? As you can surmise, healing mental practice begins with a search for well-being in something more than physicality.
Now perhaps you’re thinking: “Wait a minute. Are you introducing prayer, here? Prayer is fine for spiritual solace, but, when we get down to it, we’re essentially physical, right?”
It certainly seems that much of conventional medicine is based on the assumption that people are mainly material machines, or organisms. And material machines logically warrant material treatments. From that perspective, mainstream medicine offers mostly material options to fix up what it primarily perceives as physical.
In referring to those material options, which Dr. Rankin continues to use and recommend, she says: “But what if something else is even more important?
“What if you have the power to heal your body just by changing how your mind thinks and feels?” (Mind Over Medicine, p. xiii).
That points in the direction explored over 150 years ago by Mrs. Eddy. In Science and Health she observes, “When we remove disease by addressing the disturbed mind, giving no heed to the body, we prove that thought alone creates the suffering” (p. 400).
Does that mean that we should use human will to clench our fists, grit our teeth, and mentally visualize health?
I glimpsed the fact that my health truly is a condition, not of physiology, but of Mind.
No. Willpower is not the approach advocated by Mrs. Eddy. Through her earnest prayers, and her searching study of Jesus’ healing example, God revealed to her the divine Science behind Jesus’ healing works. This was followed by her own vast practice of effective prayer and treatment, and she explains that “metaphysical healing includes infinitely more than merely to know that mind governs the body …” (Christian Healing, p. 14). She knew that health is much more than a condition of either matter or human thought, pointing out that “health is not a condition of matter, but of Mind; …” (Science and Health, p. 120).
New readers of her writings soon discern what the author means here by using the term Mind. She capitalizes Mind because she is employing it as a name, or synonym, for God. The divine Mind is infinitely powerful, and a completely nonmaterial presence—the all-embracing consciousness that is all-loving, ever present, and entirely good. This Mind really is our creator, the ultimate source and fundamental maintainer of health and wholeness.
OK, so on a practical level, if health is a condition of more than matter and human will, and is the condition of divine Mind, how can people like you and me experience this divinely maintained health? How does this change of perspective—this revealed Truth—actually cure sickness?
Let me give you an example. Early one morning, when I was a teenager, I woke up suffering from severe food poisoning.
Previously, I’d learned from reading about the way Jesus healed people that he didn’t depend on himself; he actually went “unto my Father,” as he put it (John 14:12), using the word Father as a term for God. That approach had become my model, too, so without waiting for even a moment, I turned in prayer to the presence of God to help me.
Lying on my bed, I reached over to a bookshelf and just randomly opened my copy of Science and Health. You can imagine how surprised I was when my eyes landed directly on these words: “Admit the common hypothesis that food is the nutriment of life, and there follows the necessity for another admission in the opposite direction,—that food has power to destroy Life, God, through a deficiency or an excess, a quality or a quantity” (p. 388). And on the same page it says, “The fact is, food does not affect the absolute Life of man, and this becomes self-evident, when we learn that God is our Life.”
This wonderful book is seven hundred pages long, and my eyes fell only on those specific sentences. Boy, that felt amazing! As I read those words again, I felt such a grateful love for God. In a flash, I realized that, as Mind’s creation, my entire life is God, the actual Life of His entire creation. My present substance is actually divinely spiritual. Then came the kicker: The battleground wasn’t a material stomach. And it wasn’t the food inside my stomach that I needed to address, either. The battleground was in thought, where the belief—the mistaken belief that food has power to discomfort or destroy a creation of Mind—needed to be seen as untrue and discarded.
I saw more clearly than ever that we truly are not material machines. We forever have been, are, and remain God’s creation, not matter’s creation. Effective prayer is not about using the power of divine Mind to manipulate matter. It’s entirely about Mind, and its intact mental creation being understood as already spiritually present and whole. The divine authority of this truth is something to be grateful for because, really, it can destroy the lie of sickness for anyone.
It gently dawned on me that the power of the Mind that is God had transformed my thoughts and changed my perspective of myself. I glimpsed the fact that my health truly is a condition, not of physiology, but of Mind. There was no material machinery. Just complete spirituality—health in Mind—which is something very real and tangible right now.
The sickness was completely gone in just a few minutes. There were no aftereffects, because the permanence and solidity of divine Mind was behind my shift of thought from matter to Mind. When I look back on it, that healing is defined for me in this way—as a human, very mistaken, and fearful perspective giving place to the viewpoint and intelligence of the Mind that is God.
You may be able to tell as you are reading this how these ideas about prayer and healing mean so much to me. What do they mean to all mankind? Over the years, I have had—and seen many others have—many healings in this manner; and I believe it’s time for mankind to move beyond seeing the power of God limited to merely cleansing thought to some degree, and viewing Mind-healing as just a curiosity.
These kinds of healings are actually the low-hanging fruit of spiritual growth. Higher up is the knowledge and recognition of the entirety of our presently intact spiritual identities as divine Spirit’s pure spiritual reflections.
But we must start somewhere, and take that first step. Exploring this issue of the Journal, you’ll learn of many people’s inspiring experiences. Imagine what it might mean for the public to understand more broadly that health care at its best begins with recognizing health as a condition solely of the ever-present, loving Mind that is God. The potential for humankind is vast if we can each learn how to make much better connections between thought, divine Mind, and our need for healing.
