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The first law, or warp thread, is where our thought
seems to make the move from the physical to the mental. We are never really
dealing with matter as such, but with states of mind, states of consciousness.
Forty years ago the medical profession used to say that about twenty per cent
of human illnesses were psychosomatic, that is to say, they were generated by
an emotional or mental state, and that until that state was put right there was
no permanent healing. Today they say the percentage is about eighty-five.
Looking deeply into ourselves we know that our physical pains are very often
the outpicturing of some mental state that we are going through - stress, or
anxiety, or resentment, or fear.
When people consult a medical doctor they are usually
given a pill to relieve the condition. The patient believes that there is some
power in the pill he is taking, and this belief helps it to operate for him.
Doctors often find that a patient may respond to a placebo more positively than
to a drug. The trouble is that drugs do not heal the man, they just affect the
symptoms. Unless I am changed within, unless my attitude, my life-response,
changes in some way, I am not totally healed, even though I am grateful for
what the doctor or the surgeon may have done for me to restore the physical
condition.
This relation of mind and body, the mental and the
physical, is very like the relation between figures in mathematics and the
number written on a piece of paper. The number on paper is a very useful
symbol, but you know perfectly well that the outline there is not the
actuality, it is not the power. The power and the availability is in the idea,
in the mental realm, in the principle. So even if you destroy the paper on
which your figures are written, you have not touched the calculation itself. It
is ever available, with fresh power to help you solve whatever comes up. So it
is with turning to the mental.
It must be significant that in human language we talk
about disease, or dis-order, or un-happiness, or dis-content. There are many of
these words, as though human language knows that these statet are not real in
themselves; they are temporary negative situations. You could say that disease
is more like a hole in the ground than an actuality. The only way to get rid of
a hole is to fill it up. You fill it up with something substantial. If disease
is a mental hole, an acute sense of the absence of God, then we can fill up
that hole with the consciousness or substance of truth. As the Gospel says, "Ye
shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free" (John 8:32). Then we
are on the right track.
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