Mental Contagion

Art by Elise McDonald

Certain subjects have been coming up regularly, but I have chosen to put them back on the shelf — so to speak. Usually, if I keep getting prompts about something, I’m willing to look at the elephant in the room, no matter how inconvenient it might be. The subject of disease, and its causes and cures, brings up so many instances in my memory that I don’t know where to start. I think I’ll go with the first time I realized the extent of resistance to the subject from the general population. When I first moved to Eureka Springs, one of my neighbors had two little dogs. We spoke often when I was playing in my flowerbeds. Although we were not close, we were friendly. She often told me about her physical problems. One day she told me that her two little dogs had been diagnosed with congestive heart failure and diabetes. These are the two maladies which she was being treated for, also. I couldn’t help laughing when she told me (unfortunately), so I was forced to tell her what I found amusing. In our metaphysical studies, we are learning that all disease is mental. Her dogs having the same maladies as hers seemed to prove how disease actually spreads. I suppose my explanation wasn’t as empathetic as it could have been, because the woman became angry and said I was accusing her of making her dogs sick. That instance shows what a slippery slope we embark on with this subject. Please feel free to share your thoughts with me!

“We weep because others weep, we yawn because they yawn, and we have smallpox because others have it; but mortal mind, not matter, contains and carries the infection. When this mental contagion is understood, we shall be more careful of our mental conditions, and we shall avoid loquacious tattling about disease, as we would avoid advocating crime. Neither sympathy nor society should ever tempt us to cherish error in any form, and certainly we should not be error’s advocate.”
—Mary Baker Eddy - Science & Health Page 153:25-3

“Think of the freedom in the recognition that you are not bound by all the strange and twisted laws you have set up to save you. You really think that you would starve unless you have stacks of green paper strips and piles of metal discs. You really think a small round pellet or some fluid pushed into your veins through a sharpened needle will ward off disease and death. You really think you are alone unless another body is with you.

“It is insanity that thinks these things. You call them laws, and put them under different names in a long catalogue of rituals that have no use and serve no purpose. You think you must obey the ‘laws’ of medicine, of economics and of health. Protect the body, and you will be saved.

“These are not laws, but madness. The body is endangered by the mind that hurts itself. The body suffers just in order that the mind will fail to see it is the victim of itself. The body’s suffering is a mask the mind holds up to hide what really suffers. It would not understand it is its own enemy; that it attacks itself and wants to die. It is from this your ‘laws’ would save the body. It is for this you think you are a body.

“There are no laws except the laws of God. This needs repeating, over and over, until you realize it applies to everything that you have made in opposition to God’s Will. Your magic has no meaning. What it is meant to save does not exist. Only what it is meant to hide will save you.

“The laws of God can never be replaced. We will devote today to rejoicing that this is so. It is no longer a truth that we would hide. We realize instead it is a truth that keeps us free forever. Magic imprisons, but the laws of God make free. The light has come because there are no laws but His.”
—A Course in Miracles W-76.3:1–7:6