Spiritually disassociating ourselves
Someone once said, “I was thinking that we all learn from experience, but some of us have to go to summer school.” If this is true, we may feel we’ve been to a lot of summer school! And what is summer school but more experience.
Individual experience is the classroom of salvation.
The classroom of salvation was fully utilized by the Master Christian, Christ Jesus.
Mrs. Eddy, the Discover of Christian Science, writes about Jesus’ experience when she says, “While we adore Jesus, and the heart overflows with gratitude 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, if we follow his commands faithfully; and all have the cup of sorrowful effort to drink in proportion to their demonstration of his love, till all are redeemed through divine Love” (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, 26:3).
The classroom of salvation doesn’t allow for a lot of loafing, does it?
For success, it requires a systematic approach.
It calls for consistency -- consistency in study, in reading, in praying – in how we live our life! Frankly, it requires what I like to call “spiritual disassociation.”
Spiritual disassociation means to be consciously disengaged from materialism and worldistic means and ways. It prayerfully disassociates the claims of materiality that try to cling to our thought and lives and associates ourselves, prayerfully, with being man, the image of God, as taught in the first chapter of Genesis.
As God’s child, all the needed right qualities are reflected from Him -- qualities such as patience, harmony, health, to name a few.
Christ Jesus, the Master-healer, spiritually disassociated disease and deformity from the person seeking healing. He did this by scientifically understanding that what St. Paul called "the carnal mind" was merely an imposition on the individual's thought and experience. Jesus understood that the the presentation of blindness or hatred or sickness was not a part of man, God's child, but rather was an imposition this carnal mind.
Jesus also spiritually associated perfection with each individual, knowing as he did that all the good God has is given to His creation, man, -- through reflection.
When Jesus passed by the man who was blind from birth his disciples asked, “Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?”
And the Master replied, “Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him” (John 9: 2,3).
Jesus' method of healing, in this instance, was through both spiritual association and spiritual disassociation.
He affirmed God as the only cause and creator and who did not curse the blind man with the blindness, while at the same time Jesus disassociated the man from the false belief of heredity, curse, accident, and every other so-called law of matter that would try to bind the individual. He separated, with his spiritual reasoning, the so-called causes of matter from the truth of Spirit, God. This scientific understanding healed the man. Jesus never associated a disease with a person but rather saw it as an imposition on the individual’s thought. Once this imposition was lifted the individual was free to feel and act as God’s perfect creation.
A friend of mine was having a dinner party one evening so she baked a tuna casserole. She set it on the kitchen counter went to the other room to chat with her guests while the casserole cooled.
Later, she walked back into her kitchen to find her cat up on the counter eating the tuna casserole. She quickly picked up the cat and put it outside.
She then, and I hesitate to say this, served the casserole to her guests!
They had a lovely time, and, surprisingly, a good meal.
When they were finished eating, my friend went back into her kitchen, opened the outside door and called her cat, but as she opened the door she looked down and found her cat lying at her feet dead. Afraid, for her guests' lives, my friend confessed to them what she had done.
Some began to feel ill and sick to their stomachs.
And fearing they had been fatally poisoned they rushed to the hospital to have their stomachs pumped.
The next day this woman’s neighbor came over to unburden her conscience.
The neighbor said she knew that the night before my friend was having a dinner party for a number of people. And she was reluctant to interrupt their occasion.
So instead of coming to the front door and ringing the bell she decided to lay the dead cat at the back door.
Then she confessed: she had hit the cat with her car as she was pulling out of her driveway.
It was clear to my friend then that the cat hadn’t been poisoned at all!
There was never a need for her guests to have had their stomachs pumped! There was no cause for them to feel ill or afraid! They were never in danger!
Every time I think of this story I have to ask myself: What made the guests feel ill, and what made them go to the hospital and have their stomachs pumped?
Wasn’t it their false belief that they had eaten poisoned food and that this food killed the cat? But the food wasn’t poisoned, and the cat wasn’t killed by the food.
It was their belief that they had eaten poisonous food that caused their illness. And this belief prompted their response to have their stomachs pumped.
It was the carnal mind associating one incident with another.
Now here’s an even more pertinent question: What would have been the cause if the cat had been fatally poisoned by the tuna casserole? Wouldn’t it be the same?
The false belief?
Either way, it was in the realm of the falsely mental, a false belief, associating one circumstance with another, that caused the discomfort.
This story illustrates how the falsely mental viewpoint will try to control our experience if we’re not wise enough to prayerfully disassociate ourselves from the false belief.
Now, what if the difficulty is disease? Is it still falsely mental?
Without a doubt it is.
A case was brought to a Christian Science practitioner that was particularly interesting. The patient had been suffering from a hemorrhage for many years.
She was homebound and could barely get from the bed to her chair, which she sat in all day. She called many different practitioners and sometime during their work together she would ask each one: “Do you detect any belief of cancer?” This question would come and go depending upon how difficult the day was for the patient.
The patient and practitioner worked together for a long time -- and without a great deal of improvement. Then one day the patient asked the question again, “Do you detect any belief of cancer?”
Because there didn’t appear to be an immediate healing with the case the practitioner’s thought was led back to something she had learned in Christian Science class instruction.
She remembered that the teacher instructed the class to handle what the patient believes the problem is.
It then became apparent to the practitioner that the patient believed it was cancer. The practitioner began focusing her treatments toward the fear of cancer and after a few days the patient reported that the hemorrhaging had stopped.
A few months later, and from a completely different problem, the patient unexpectedly and quickly passed on.
An autopsy was called for. Her family specifically asked that they look for signs of cancer.
The doctor reported that there were no signs of the patient having or ever having cancer.
What caused the hemorrhaging? Wasn’t it belief?
It was in the realm of the falsely mental that the patient associated a physical problem with heredity, symptomology, and fear. And when was she healed? When these things were spiritually disassociated from her.
Mrs. Eddy writes, “Disease arises, like other mental conditions, from association” (S&H 154:3). She states clearly that disease is a mental condition.
This must mean that the belief in disease needs to be dissolved within consciousness. And since it rises from association it also falls from
spiritual disassociation.
It falls because spiritual disassociation separates the fable of disease from the fact of man’s perfect being.
“It is latent belief in disease, as well as the fear of disease, which associates sickness with certain circumstances and causes the two to appear conjoined, even as poetry and music are reproduced in union by human memory” (Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, 377:31).
A few years ago, while I was lecturing, I was on a small prop plane going to another city. It was early in the morning and the sun hadn’t risen yet. I got on the plane and sat next to a window where my view happened to be the propeller. The pilot started the engines and the propellers began to rotate. It wasn’t long before they were at full speed. What was particularly interesting to me was that the propeller outside my window didn’t have a stripe on it, that is, it wasn’t marked. And because it wasn’t marked it appeared, when it was rotating, that it wasn’t there. I couldn’t see it at all. I was within an arm’s distance from it and I couldn’t see it.
God had a lesson for me that morning. Because I began to learn that this is exactly how the carnal mind would try to control our thinking. I reasoned that if the carnal, mortal, mind could make me believe that something isn’t there when it really is, then it could make me believe that there’s something there when there really isn’t. I saw how thought determines experience.
I knew that the laws of physics could prove to me why the propeller appeared not to be there when I knew that it was. And I knew that the laws of metaphysics could prove to me why a particular difficulty was not there, even when mortal mind claimed that it was.
Through spiritual disassociation, or separating, of the false from the real, the fable from the fact, we arrive at man’s sustained God-given perfection. We spiritually understand how and why man has always been man, even if the material senses are declaring oppositely.
We may go through a lot of summer school, a lot of experience, as we learn to spiritually disassociate mortal thinking from true spiritual understanding, but each experience gives us he needed spiritual growth as we learn how to discern between the false and the true, the unreal and the real, the material and the spiritual!
Someone once said, “I was thinking that we all learn from experience, but some of us have to go to summer school.” If this is true, we may feel we’ve been to a lot of summer school! And what is summer school but more experience.
Individual experience is the classroom of salvation.
The classroom of salvation was fully utilized by the Master Christian, Christ Jesus.
Mrs. Eddy, the Discover of Christian Science, writes about Jesus’ experience when she says, “While we adore Jesus, and the heart overflows with gratitude 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, if we follow his commands faithfully; and all have the cup of sorrowful effort to drink in proportion to their demonstration of his love, till all are redeemed through divine Love” (
Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,
26:3).
The classroom of salvation doesn’t allow for a lot of loafing, does it?
For success, it requires a systematic approach.
It calls for consistency -- consistency in study, in reading, in praying – in how we live our life! Frankly, it requires what I like to call “spiritual disassociation.”
Spiritual disassociation means to be consciously disengaged from materialism and worldistic means and ways. It prayerfully disassociates the claims of materiality that try to cling to our thought and lives and associates ourselves, prayerfully, with being man, the image of God, as taught in the first chapter of Genesis.
As
God’s child, all the needed right qualities are reflected from Him -- qualities such as patience, harmony, health, to name a few.
Christ Jesus, the Master-healer, spiritually disassociated disease and deformity from the person seeking healing. He did this by scientifically understanding that what St. Paul called "the carnal mind" was merely an imposition on the individual's thought and experience. Jesus understood that the the presentation of blindness or hatred or sickness was not a part of man, God's child, but rather was an imposition this carnal mind.
Jesus also spiritually
associated
perfection with each individual, knowing as he did that all the good God has is given to His creation, man, -- through reflection.
When Jesus passed by the man who was blind from birth his disciples asked, “Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?”
And the Master replied, “Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him” (John 9: 2,3).
Jesus' method of healing, in this instance, was through both spiritual association and spiritual disassociation.
He affirmed God as the only cause and creator and who did not curse the blind man with the blindness, while at the same time Jesus disassociated the man from the false belief of heredity, curse, accident, and every other so-called law of matter that would try to bind the individual. He separated, with his spiritual reasoning, the so-called causes of matter from the truth of Spirit, God. This scientific understanding healed the man. Jesus never associated a disease with a person but rather saw it as an imposition on the individual’s thought. Once this imposition was lifted the individual was free to feel and act as God’s perfect creation.
A friend of mine was having a dinner party one evening so she baked a tuna casserole. She set it on the kitchen counter went to the other room to chat with her guests while the casserole cooled.
Later, she walked back into her kitchen to find her cat up on the counter eating the tuna casserole. She quickly picked up the cat and put it outside.
She then, and I hesitate to say this, served the casserole to her guests!
They had a lovely time, and, surprisingly, a good meal.
When they were finished eating, my friend went back into her kitchen, opened the outside door and called her cat, but as she opened the door she looked down and found her cat lying at her feet dead. Afraid, for her guests' lives, my friend confessed to them what she had done.
Some began to feel ill and sick to their stomachs.
And fearing they had been fatally poisoned they rushed to the hospital to have their stomachs pumped.
The next day this woman’s neighbor came over to unburden her conscience.
The neighbor said she knew that the night before my friend was having a dinner party for a number of people. And she was reluctant to interrupt their occasion.
So instead of coming to the front door and ringing the bell she decided to lay the dead cat at the back door.
Then she confessed: she had hit the cat with her car as she was pulling out of her driveway.
It was clear to my friend then that the cat hadn’t been poisoned at all!
There was never a need for her guests to have had their stomachs pumped! There was no cause for them to feel ill or afraid! They were never in danger!
Every time I think of this story I have to ask myself: What made the guests feel ill, and what made them go to the hospital and have their stomachs pumped?
Wasn’t it their false belief that they had eaten poisoned food and that this food killed the cat? But the food wasn’t poisoned, and the cat wasn’t killed by the food.
It was their belief that they had eaten poisonous food that caused their illness. And this belief prompted their response to have their stomachs pumped.
It was the carnal mind associating one incident with another.
Now here’s an even more pertinent question: What would have been the cause if the cat had been fatally poisoned by the tuna casserole? Wouldn’t it be the same?
The false belief?
Either way, it was in the realm of the falsely mental, a false belief, associating one circumstance with another, that caused the discomfort.
This story illustrates how the falsely mental viewpoint will try to control our experience if we’re not wise enough to prayerfully disassociate ourselves from the false belief.
Now, what if the difficulty is disease? Is it still falsely mental?
Without a doubt it is.
A case was brought to a Christian Science practitioner that was particularly interesting. The patient had been suffering from a hemorrhage for many years.
She was homebound and could barely get from the bed to her chair, which she sat in all day. She called many different practitioners and sometime during their work together she would ask each one: “Do you detect any belief of cancer?” This question would come and go depending upon how difficult the day was for the patient.
The patient and practitioner worked together for a long time -- and without a great deal of improvement. Then one day the patient asked the question again, “Do you detect any belief of cancer?”
Because there didn’t appear to be an immediate healing with the case the practitioner’s thought was led back to something she had learned in Christian Science class instruction.
She remembered that the teacher instructed the class to handle what the patient believes the problem is.
It then became apparent to the practitioner that the patient believed it was cancer. The practitioner began focusing her treatments toward the fear of cancer and after a few days the patient reported that the hemorrhaging had stopped.
A few months later, and from a completely different problem, the patient unexpectedly and quickly passed on.
An autopsy was called for. Her family specifically asked that they look for signs of cancer.
The doctor reported that there were no signs of the patient having or ever having cancer.
What caused the hemorrhaging? Wasn’t it belief?
It was in the realm of the falsely mental that the patient associated a physical problem with heredity, symptomology, and fear. And when was she healed? When these things were spiritually disassociated from her.
Mrs. Eddy writes, “Disease arises, like other mental conditions, from association” (S&H 154:3). She states clearly that disease is a mental condition.
This must mean that the belief in disease needs to be dissolved within consciousness. And since it rises from association it also falls from
spiritual disassociation.
It falls because spiritual disassociation separates the fable of disease from the fact of man’s perfect being.
“It is latent belief in disease, as well as the fear of disease, which associates sickness with certain circumstances and causes the two to appear conjoined, even as poetry and music are reproduced in union by human memory” (Eddy,
Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,
377:31).
A few years ago, while I was lecturing, I was on a small prop plane going to another city. It was early in the morning and the sun hadn’t risen yet. I got on the plane and sat next to a window where my view happened to be the propeller. The pilot started the engines and the propellers began to rotate. It wasn’t long before they were at full speed. What was particularly interesting to me was that the propeller outside my window didn’t have a stripe on it, that is, it wasn’t marked. And because it wasn’t marked it appeared, when it was rotating, that it wasn’t there. I couldn’t see it at all. I was within an arm’s distance from it and I couldn’t see it.
God had a lesson for me that morning. Because I began to learn that this is exactly how the carnal mind would try to control our thinking. I reasoned that if the carnal, mortal, mind could make me believe that something isn’t there when it really is, then it could make me believe that there’s something there when there really isn’t. I saw how thought determines experience.
I knew that the laws of physics could prove to me why the propeller appeared not to be there when I knew that it was. And I knew that the laws of metaphysics could prove to me why a particular difficulty was not there, even when mortal mind claimed that it was.
Through spiritual disassociation, or separating, of the false from the real, the fable from the fact, we arrive at man’s sustained God-given perfection. We spiritually understand how and why man has always been man, even if the material senses are declaring oppositely.
We may go through a lot of summer school, a lot of experience, as we learn to spiritually disassociate mortal thinking from true spiritual understanding, but each experience gives us he needed spiritual growth as we learn how to discern between the false and the true, the unreal and the real, the material and the spiritual!
