Chapter VIII
HEALTH, AND HOW TO OBTAIN IT
W. John Murray
The
Realm of Reality
Divine Science Publishing Assoc.
New York, 1922.
“The eyes of the blind
shall be opened, and the ears of the
deaf shall be unstopped. Then shall the
lame man leap as an hart, and the
tongue of the dumb
sing.”
--Isaiah 35:5-6
[86] In all
the world, there is no one thing so
earnestly sought after as health. It is
that without which there can be no real
success in any reach of life. It is a
universal necessity, for, without it,
neither prince nor peasant can be happy.
When the body is racked with disease, the
sinner cannot sin so much, nor can the
saint soar to such heavenly heights.
Without health, he who would tread the
path to fame in literature, art, music,
invention or industry, faces an almost
insurmountable barrier.
That some of
us, through our so-called diseases, have
been compelled to turn to God in our
extremity is true; but the blessing is
not that we have been sick unto death,
but that we have turned to God; and this
we might have done without being coerced.
It is a sad commentary on the wisdom of
the average man that he has [87] been
compelled by illness to do that which he
should have done naturally and without
effort.
It was the
custom among the early Israelites to turn
to God at the first suggestion of
disease, and, if history tells us
correctly, they had none of the diseases
which the Egyptians had, whose remedy was
not Deity, but drugs. It is recorded that
King Asa, when disease came upon him,
turned not to the Lord, but to the
physicians, and as a consequence,
“he slept with his
fathers.”
We make that
first which ought to be made last, and
that last which should be first. So that
to-day, when we are told that the sick
can be cured by a system which is wholly
drugless, we are filled with doubt
concerning it. We arrest chiropractors,
osteopaths and others whose patients
sometimes pass away without noxious
drugs, while another school may sign a
death certificate and avoid persecution
and prosecution in cases where their
patients have passed away with enough
drugs in their systems to represent a
pharmacy! In the same paper which
contains a glaring account of a man who
passed away without medical
assistance, you will find in the obituary
column a doleful array of those who have
passed into the beyond with
medical attention. These are facts which
ought not to be overlooked in a matter so
important as our physical well-being.
Divine Scientists make no objection to
the rest of the world filling itself up
with poisons, but they merely ask the
privilege of calling in the Great
Physician in the hour of temptation.
[88] It is
not that Divine Scientists are in open
rebellion to the existing systems of
therapeutics; it is that they have tried
these systems until disappointment has
driven them to God as the last and only
refuge. They are not engaged in warfare
with materia medica, neither are they
proselyting in the churches; but when men
become discouraged with attempts through
materia medica to heal their bodies, and
with theology’s efforts to answer
the questions of their own souls, Divine
Scientists are not to be blamed if they
recommend the throne of God as the court
of highest appeal.
We are
coming as never before to realize that
sickness is not a divine institution, but
that it is due to some form of mental
wretchedness--concealed, perhaps, from
friends, but nevertheless there. The
ordinary man seeks after health much as
the extraordinary man seeks for heaven;
and strangely enough there comes a time
when both find what they are looking for
in the same place, and in the last place
they look for it.
The sick man
travels to renowned corners of the
earth--from Battle Creek to Carlsbad and
on again--seeking for that health which
is more desirable than fine gold or
precious stones. The saintly man seeks
for a heaven which he never expects to
find until after he has been gathered to
the bosom of his fathers. An awakened
conscience, with an acute sense of right
and wrong, makes it impossible for him to
be really happy in what he calls a world
of sin, and so he sighs [89] for that
other world where pain and sorrow are
unknown.
By a strange
tendency of thought, we look for that
outside of ourselves which can be found
only within. The sick man seeks health in
divers places, and the saint seeks heaven
afar off, when all the time each is
carrying about with him the thing he
desires, if he only knew it.
Happiness
and health are not blessings which may be
imported from a foreign land. They cannot
be imparted from without; but, if they
are to blossom externally, their seeds
must be implanted in the deepest recesses
of the human soul.
To the man
who asked Jesus when the kingdom of God
should come, He said, “The kingdom
of God cometh not with observation. Ye
shall not say, Lo here, and Lo there, for
the kingdom of God is within you.”
If we accept this, we shall be compelled
to narrow our search to a small area.
Instead of scattering our energies and
wasting the little strength we are
conscious of in trying to find more, we
shall go quietly into the Silence and
affirm, “The strength of God is my
strength, omnipresent and eternal.”
In the depths of our own being shall we
find that which we have so fruitlessly
sought elsewhere.
If
happiness, health and heaven are not in
us as mental states, they are nowhere. It
is said that in the New Jerusalem there
is neither sorrow nor crying, for
“the former things have passed
away.” The New Jerusalem which
cometh down from God out of heaven is not
an ancient, but a [90] rejuvenated city.
It is that state of man’s soul
which may be called the kingdom of Good,
or God, in man while on earth, here and
now. It is the state of mind wherein the
individual perceives that the things that
are seen are carnal and temporal, while
the things that are not seen are
spiritual and eternal.
When a man
realizes that external conditions are not
superior to internal convictions, he has
emerged from the plane of limited
capacities to the realm of unlimited
possibilities. Instead of being the slave
of external conditions, he becomes their
master, for he has risen from the life of
sense to the Life of Spirit, wherein is
the only Reality.
Throughout
the ages the efforts of all the great
teachers have been to free men’s
minds from the belief that matter is
superior to mind, and thus to enable man
to rise from the dust and begin to
realize on earth his God-given powers.
That body governs mind is inconceivable,
but how to instruct mind to govern body
and make happiness and health grow where
discontent and disease previously
flourished is very essential.
The
important thing which man can learn today
is wherein lies the source of his power;
and when he discovers that it is centered
in himself, it is only a question of time
until he will direct it to constructive
ends. We are hypnotized by our surface
experiences because we are as yet
unconscious of our latent capacities.
As the race
sat for centuries in comparative [91]
darkness, ignorant of the fact that it
lived and moved and breathed in an ocean
of unmanifested light, which today we
call electricity, so the average
individual accepts conditions that are
almost unbearable because he does not
realize that there is a limitless
capacity for expansion within his own
being.
As the
aviator soars to ethereal heights and the
earth vanishes beneath him, so is it
possible for us to rise above our
discords, discouragements and diseases by
elevating the mind above morbid thinking.
When a submarine commander wishes to
escape the shots of a cruiser, he
submerges; or, when a storm rages, he
dives to a depth of the ocean where there
is perpetual calm. These acts should
illustrate the wisdom, in the hour of
seeming danger, of submerging the Self in
fathomless depths of the Love of God.
If, on the
surface of our lives, there are storms
and conflicts, there is depth of our
being where poise and power persistently
abide. To find this depth and rest there,
is to gather strength, not only to bear
the so-called ills of the flesh with
fortitude, but to overcome them. To rebel
against disease while believing it to be
incurable is suicidal, for it adds
discouragement to discomfort.
In sickness
we should be hopeful and expect recovery;
but the consciousness of the Abiding
Presence to whom sickness is unknown is
an infallible panacea. In the hour of
disease it is as possible for us to turn
inward to that Eternal Center where only
health abounds as it is for a [92] man to
seek shelter and protection from bombs by
going down into an underground
railway.
Things that
make us unhappy, and ill in consequence,
are neither as real nor as powerful as
they seem to be. In our ignorance of
God’s omnipresence we magnify our
ghosts of fancy until they assume
alarming proportions, and when we would
escape them they follow us like our
shadows--for this is just what our ghosts
of fancy are, the shadows cast by our own
spiritual density.
In the
Science of Creation set forth by Plato
and others, God, or the Immutable Good,
is the one source from which all
real things proceed. Since effect
must be ever like its Cause, we are
forced to the conclusion that all that
God creates is good, for it must
be like the Cause which produces it. Good
is positive and real; evil, being the
opposite of Good, is negative, and
consequently unreal, and to understand it
as such is to gain control over it. If
disease is evil, and most of us admit
that it is, then it, also, is unreal. It
is an appearance without actuality, like
darkness, which is merely the absence of
light.
To the great
majority of persons nothing seems more
real than disease, but when it becomes
known that only that is real which
proceeds from God disease loses its
terror for us, and through Truth we gain
the ascendancy over it. The conviction
that “Nothing is true but
God” is the rock upon which to
stand, against which the winds and waves
of human ignorance may expend [93] their
fury, but against which they cannot
prevail.
To be able
to realize that disease is not
God-created, and to know that there is no
other creator, is to be “endued
with power from on High,” for it
enables us to form a correct idea of
ourselves as we are in Divine Mind. This
is the beginning of our cure. So long as
man’s conception of himself is that
of a frail mortal, subject to sin on the
one hand and to disease on the other, all
the tendencies of his thought will work
in the direction of causing this
conception to be made manifest, for that
which a man believes himself to be that
will he surely become.
From this we
see the importance of forming a true
conception of the real Self, for
when this true conception of the Self is
formed it will go through all the orderly
processes of unfoldment until it
externalizes itself in happiness and in
health. The true conception of the Self
is that which is based, not upon human
parentage and physical surroundings, but
upon the Truth that we are the effects of
the Great and only Cause. In other words,
we must learn, with Jesus, not to think
of ourselves as the sons of men with
inherited evil propensities, but as the
Sons of God and joint heirs with Christ
to the kingdom of God in which there is
no sin, sickness, disease nor death.
To find
health and enjoy it as a permanent
possession, we must look for it where it
is. Looking [94] to drugs and change of
climate will never bring us perfect
health; and disappointment will be our
doom. God is the eternal health of man,
and it is only as we find our health in
God that we shall find it at all.
Since Life,
Health and Blessedness are from God, we
should look to God for them and not to
man. External methods are temporary, but
the internal conviction of one’s
connection with the Source is lasting and
permanent. Our health cometh from the
Lord who made heaven and earth, for if it
does not come from Him it is
non-existent. When vain searchings in
other directions have driven us to
despair we may, like the mariner, who, in
a storm, steers for a friendly port, turn
the prow of our minds in the direction of
that Indwelling Presence which is Health
itself. Looking away from terrifying
appearances to that Divine Reality in
which we live and move and breathe, we
may say with confidence:
“In
Thee I have no pain, no sorrow,
No anxious thought, no load of
care;
Thou art the same today, tomorrow;
Thy Love and Truth art
everywhere.”
Chapter
9
* * * * *
The Realm of Reality
Table of
Contents
(Formerly at
Northwoods Divine Science Resource
Center)
