I am working on the metaphysics of the moment. Another word for this work is "treatment." Treatment is always self-treatment. Reading Jan Christiaan Smut's magnificent work, Holism and Evolution in my morning reading time and Dr. John M. Dorsey's Psychology of Language in my afternoon reading time is providing interesting dymanic in the life of my ideas. An old word for this dynamism in ideas is "chemicalization," using a non-organic metaphor for a real psychic experience. Like dropping an alka-seltzer in a glass of water, a chemical transformation is triggered by the combining of two different chemical substances whose properties antagonize the moment, until one emerges as basic and the other disappears. The catalytic agent or trigger is untransformed in the event and plays only a mechanical role in the transformation. Actually it is the thing itself which is thrown into self-transformation. As this process is in high gear in my just now, I expect to be with it a while longer and not yet haver coherent results of what is precipitating within me. Also, I am far beyond the point of twoness and instead of an antagonism or struggle for survival of the aptest mental power, the concept of Holism and its holistic action in my individuation combining with the consciously solispsist oirentation toward my emotionality and hence all my life is more of a synthesis and integration, a harmonizing of cosmic visions into a single, unfied vision and a well-made languge. I keep promising my self to write and someday maybe soon I will do so. But for now I share this piece from Maragret Laird's Chrisitan Science Re-explored (now called We are The World We Walk Through), which keys with a marginal reference in Science and Health, "the true healing,":
S&H 230:27
"We think that we are healed when a disease disappears, though it is liable to reappear; but we are never thoroughly healed until the liability to be ill is removed. So-called mortal mind or the mind of mortals being the remote, predisposing, and the exciting cause of all suffering, the cause of disease must be obliterated through Christ in divine Science, or the so-called physical senses will get the victory."
Margaret Laird:
There is but one way to accomplish healing. This way is the way of Science, the discernment of nothing to heal. This accords with a statement about healing in the Christian Science textbook: “We think we are healed when a disease disappears…but we are never really healed until the liability to be ill is removed.” This liability to be ill, impoverished, unhappy, lies in mistaking the material personality for man—conscious identity or Mind. In mistaking the material personality for man—conscious identity or Mind. In the material personality conscious human individuality is the personality. This fact is the cause and cure of dis-ease.
It was during my service as 2nd Reader of First Church Evanston that I became increasingly restless and began to question the validity of organized religion’s efforts to hold Truth to a stereotyped pattern. I began to see that there is no Truth for the individual but his own demonstrated understanding. As this fact broke into consciousness, I experienced a natural impatience and resistance to the habit of clinging to outworn religious concepts.
The mental gymnastics of attempting to correlate incidents or myths taken from the King James version of the Bible with passages taken from to me seemed limiting and frustrating to original thinking.
One day this contradictory passage from Science and Health appeared in the Lesson Sermon. “While we adore Jesus for what he did for mortals treading alone his loving pathway up to the throne of glory in speechless agony exploring the way for us, yet Jesus spares us not one individual experience.” Science and Health page 26 I asked myself, what did he do for mortals if he did not spare us one individual experience.” I questioned this passage and others in this Lesson Sermon on “Sacrament”. I realized that my thinking was no longer oriented to Christian theology but was taking the path of Science. I did not adore Jesus, he meant nothing to me, nor did my heart overflow with gratitude for what he did for mortals. He was not my Christ. Even at that early day I recognized that the divinity (Spirit) of each individual is his own Christ or Savior, whether named Jesus, Mary, John or James. Also,
Also I could not subscribe to the statement read each Sunday at the CS church services: “Now are we the sons of God, an it doeth not yet appear what we shall be; If now I am the son of God, now am I the appearing of that fact. The I or Ego in the now is the I or Ego appearing in the future. We know what we shall be because of what we are. The divinity of humanity is not a development. It has no future that is not now. The end is from the beginning. Reality may assume different forms, but remains Reality all the way.
The CSt who is Science has no “Jesus” to adore. His Jesus is defined by Mrs. Eddy, “The highest human corporeal concept of the divine idea.” The highest human corporeal concept of the divine idea.” His Christ speaks to him from within and as the self-unfolding Truth. I soon read my Bible as Science-fiction where the characters and circumstances portray the God-idea in the metaphorical language of that day and when I read, “I am the Way, the Truth, and Life,” I did not think of “Jesus,” but of my own divinity. Each one individually is his own I Am, his own Way, Truth and Life. In every name and concept, I am is the concept or name. Before Abraham was I Am. Every tree, every flower, every man, is continually crying out, I Am. This I is Mind. (WATW-xxxviii)
Healing in Science is education. It is the elimination of disease in the sense that sin, “missing the mark,” imperfect apprehension, is the dis-ease. The “educator” that the patient or pupil grows for help in the self-discovery of his divinity does not deny the sin or sickness. They are not his dis-ease. His disease is the ego-image he has mistaken for the Ego, his true self. One of the first steps in the educational process, therefore, is acquainting the patient with his ego-image. This confrontation with habitual thought patterns, many of which the patient may not be conscious of (W-121) holding, is of great value and must precede the understanding essential for “leaving the mortal basis of belief.” A CST will not ask himself why or how he got into trouble since what confronts him as trouble is the mistaken sense of himself. The all-knowing Mind never got into trouble and does not have to get out and the ego-image can never get out since it is the trouble.
You tell me it is your experience that healings in CS are lessening, and that more CSts are finding it necessary to have medical aid. I do not think this is surprising. CSts have rested too long with the conditioned thinking that healing means the elimination of symptoms rather than the healing of disease through awakening to the truth of being. What you call no-healing of the physical body is the spiritual fact coming to view that body is metaphysical—conscious thought. Mrs. Eddy made this point clear (132) many times in the CS textbook. She says SH150 the healing power is Science (knowing) and not a phenomenal exhibition. Also on SH230 “we think we are healed when a disease disappears though it is liable to reappear, but we are never thoroughly healed until this liability is removed.” The marginal note of this paragraph is “The true healing.” The metaphysical healing of physical disease comes with the awakening or discovery that “Mind is the source and condition of all existence.” The mythology of healing is obsolete in the Science age. In the Science age, the magic of healing is the fact of no sick to heal, no sinner to save.
Love, the divinity of humanity, supplies the human need with the magic of Science: a practitioner able to recognize that in mistaking the ego-image for the I or Ego (one’s self), we have dying in our living, and living in our dying. Science (knowledge) is Spirit. It is the dynamic Life-force, the unchanging Change apparent as new concepts of Reality, new technological discoveries, new “materialism”. A comment in the LA Times of Jan4/71, by an anthropology professor at UCLA is pertinent to our point: “Man [as conceived today] is already obsolescent.”
The man of imagination, maintaining the absolutely neutral position of Principle, with no pro-this or anti-that is the one who will discover steps and techniques for communication leading to the abolishment of war.
I was once asked by a prominent physician, “How confused can you get by reading books like the CS textbook which deny the reality (W-122) of matter?” I replied, “There need be no confusion if you do not read words but let ideas unfold from your own withinness, letting your own Mind, your own being doing the reading.”
(WATW 121)
