Cause and Cure in the
Realm of Mind
W. John Murray
The Gleaner
Vol. 17, No. 2
Divine Science Publishing Assoc.,
November, 1925.
"No man hath ascended up to
heaven, but he that came down from
heaven, even the Son of man which is in
heaven." - John 3:13
SOMEONE has
said that he is a wise man who knows
where to look for what he has lost or
what he has never had and wants to find.
When a man loses his collar button in the
morning, he is apt to look in the most
inconceivable places for it when all the
time it may be in the cuff of his
trousers. A man who looks everywhere for
his collar button but in the cuff of his
trousers, may carry it to the office with
him and never be aware of its proximity.
He may swear and sweat if it happens to
be the only collar button he has, for a
missing collar button can be the cause of
a lot of mischief as well as
annoyance.
What time
and trouble would be saved if we only
knew where to look for what we lose, and
this is as true of health and happiness
as it is true of anything else. When a
man looks for happiness outside of
himself, he is like a man looking for his
collar button in the belly of a closed
piano when all the time it is at the
bottom of his trousers leg.
I feel
persuaded that one of the reasons why we
do not find more of the things we want is
because we look in the wrong place for
them. Through some strange perversity of
the human mind, when it is unhappy it
seeks relief for its unhappiness in some
form of outward distraction. It drinks,
it smokes, it goes to the movies, it
gambles, and it does worse things than
all of these things put together, only to
discover when it has run the gamut of
foolishness that it is more unhappy than
it ever was. All of which goes to prove
that if a man is not happy inside there
is not anything on the outside that will
ever make him so.
The cause of
our unhappiness is in mind and the cure
of it is in the same place, for there is
that in mind that is a sufficient remedy
for all unhappiness, if we will only look
for it there. A young man was going out
for the evening and his mother said as
she helped him on with his overcoat, "I
hope you'll have a pleasant time, son,"
and he replied, "Thank you, I always do,
I take it with me." The trouble about
happiness with most of us is that we do
not take it with us, we expect
someone else to bring enough for both of
us as some people do who go to picnics. A
Scotchman who had found religion got up
in a testimonial meeting and said, "I'm
happier noo, when I am no happy, than I
wis afore when I wis happy." He had found
a happiness in himself which no untoward
external circumstance could interfere
with.
One of the
first duties of the really Christian man
or woman is to be happy. When a gloomy
dean was preaching on all the joy which
comes from religion, a little woman in
the congregation whispered to her friend,
"He doesn't believe it, he thinks he
does, but he doesn't. If he really
thought he had a friend like that, rich
enough and strong enough to help in every
trouble, and willing to do it, too,
somebody that is sending him blessings
all the while he's here, and getting a
beautiful home ready for him to use
afterwards - do you suppose he'd go about
so gloomy and discouraged like that all
the time?"
A gloomy
dean who cannot count his blessings and
be happy in consequence, is less
religious than the simple woman who
thanked God on Christmas morning, because
He had used land and sea to supply her
with her Christmas breakfast. She had a
red herring and a white apple. A strange
combination but she was grateful, and she
was happy because she was grateful. I
have no doubt that there were many on
that same Christmas morning who had more
than they knew what to do with who were
anything but happy, all of which goes to
prove that happiness is a state of mind
more than it is a state of the
pocket-book.
If it is
true that the cause and cure of
unhappiness rests largely with ourselves,
may it not be equally true concerning
health, especially since the relation
between happiness and health is so
closely related? Only the other day a
case of insomnia which had defied all
remedies except those that are positively
harmful, was traced to a secret
unhappiness growing out of a
disappointing love affair. There is no
remedy in the drug store for insomnia of
this character, so that to her insomnia
there was being added a well defined case
of melancholia with its consequent dread
of insanity. Now just as the cause of
this young woman's malady was her
attitude toward her disappointment and
not the disappointment in itself, so the
cure rested on a changed attitude toward
this disappointment. Through spiritual
treatment and daily study, she was able
to see that her seeming calamity was a
blessing in disguise, for if she had
married the man she had set her heart on
marrying, she would have had one long
hell on earth. When the mist of
disappointment had cleared away, so that
she could think as she ought to think,
certain peculiarities of his began to be
seen which she could not see before
because of the blindness of her love.
Sweet refreshing sleep began to come, not
because the circumstance had changed but
because she learned to take another and
more healthy view of the
circumstance.
I fancy most
people are willing to admit that a
disappointment in love may ultimate
itself in insomnia or some other form of
nervous distress, but it is not so easy
for us to understand that the cause of
some of the most malignant diseases which
torment poor humanity may also be traced
to the mental factor. Such noted
physicians as Sir James Paget, Dr. A. T.
Schofield and others give it as their
candid opinion that, "cancer may be
caused by long continued grief and
anxiety." The other day I read of a case
of epilepsy, which had resisted the best
known specialists in that dread disease,
being healed by a spiritual scientist. It
was brought out in the natural
questionings in such cases that the young
woman when a child had witnessed an
epileptic in a state of convulsion. It
was a terrible shock at the time but it
seemed to wear away until she arrived at
the adolescent period when she began to
show signs of approaching epilepsy which
increased until it was declared by the
specialists to be a genuine case, and
treated as such. In this case the
spiritual healer did not work against
epilepsy but against the shock which
produced it and the case was healed. The
epilepsy was the effect, the shock was
the cause and the disease could not be
cured until the cause of it was
eradicated from the subconscious mind for
it was in the subconscious mind that the
ugly mental picture had reposed long
after the conscious mind of the child had
forgotten it.
Here is a
young woman bedridden with paralysis and
dependent on kind friends and neighbors
for support and care. Everything has been
done that is customary in such cases, but
she steadily grows worse until a doctor
who had learned that man is not just a
body was asked to call upon her as one of
his many charity cases. He inquired into
her history and found that she had been
the only support of a father who had
passed away as the result of paralysis of
long standing. In addition to being the
breadwinner for herself and her father
she had the physical care of him for they
were very poor. From time to time the
thought would come to her that if
anything of such a nature should come to
her what would become of her father? She
would put this thought out of her
conscious mind with horror, but her very
horror of it was making its impression on
her subconscious mind and the new doctor
knew this even though she was quite
ignorant of it, and it was on this line
that he decided to conduct the case. He
prescribed neither medicine nor massage
but he came every few days and talked
with her until he actually talked
her out of the malady. Call this case
pseudo-paralysis, if you will, the fact
remains she was confined to her bed and
whatever confines one to one's bed ought
to be cured, and if it cannot be cured by
matter it should be cured by mind.
Just as the
cause and cure of sin is in mind and
admitted to be so by the church, which
deals with moral disease, so the cause
and cure of disease is in mind and it is
gradually being admitted to be so by
thinking physicians everywhere. That
physician who treats merely the body of
his patient is treating only one half of
the patient, and this accounts for the
half cures.
It is now
being recognized that the force of mind
which is so frequently directed into
negative channels and which in
consequence produce negative results, may
also be directed into positive channels
and produce positive results, so that by
the very same force by which we bring
misery and sickness into our lives we
may, by reversal of process, bring health
and happiness into our lives.
When
Shakespeare says, "Our remedies oft in
ourselves do lie," he is merely hinting
at the existence of the greatest power in
the universe, the power of thought.
"There is a region in us where thought
becomes a divine force. It is the region
in us of self-control in the fullest
sense of the term, and the central throne
of the mind's dominion over the body and
its diseases," says Dr. Evans. This must
be, "The secret place of the Most High,"
that the Psalmist speaks of, and it must
also be "The kingdom of heaven within,"
which Jesus refers to.
It lies
within the possibilities of the
individual who has learned to think to a
purpose to rise above unhappiness and
disease as easily as the aviator rises
above the miasmatic vapors of the swamp
but he must be a trained thinker
even as the aviator must be a trained
aviator.
Not every
man who thinks is a trained thinker, if
he were he would not get into so many
difficulties. For the most part we use
thought as the child used the tiller of
the boat to get away from the very place
he wanted to land. We want health but we
think disease, not realizing that it is
the thing we think and not the
thing we want that we invariably
get. We want prosperity but we think
poverty and when we fail to rise above
poverty we cannot understand why all our
desires should be so cruelly
thwarted.
When thought
descends into the sordid and the morbid
it becomes slow in its response and
reactions to higher things, but when it
ascends into the realm of higher emotions
it gains impotency as water gains in
power when it is converted into steam.
If, then, we would heal ourselves or
others by the power of pure thought
without any other aid or assistance we
can only do so as we change our mental
attitude from despair and discouragement
to hope and expectation of better
things.
We must
learn to re-charge the batteries of our
subconscious minds with new and better
impressions, and this we can do by using
new affirmations. "The inhabitant of Zion
must not say, I am sick," he must learn
to say, "I am well," or "I am getting
well," for by so doing or saying he is
giving the subconscious mind its proper
nourishment. The mind cannot thrive on
sickly thoughts any more than the body
can thrive on sawdust, therefore feed it
with such mental food as is necessary to
it upbuilding.
"He that is
giddy thinks the whole world turns
round," says the immortal poet, but when
we get over our giddiness we see that
much, if not all, of what we have
regarded as outside circumstances has
been inside ignorance and when we learn
this we have learned one of life's
greatest secrets and conquest then
becomes an easy matter, for good is ever
more potent than ill, if we know it,
therefore let us know it and prove
it.
(Formerly at
Northwoods Divine Science Resource
Center)
