Mind’s Control Over the Body

From time immemorial, humanity, striving to be better and purer, has sought to control the body, and Mrs. Eddy tells us (Science and Health, p. 417) that it is important to understand “the complete control which Mind holds over the body.” It would take many volumes to describe with any degree of accuracy the well-nigh innumerable ways and means which have been used by mortals in the attempt to bring their bodies into subjection. When the motive has been solely ethical or religious, the results have been apparently most grotesque and unsatisfactory. Efforts to chastise the body or to render it insensible have led to pitiable exhibitions and mutilations, thus making the physical more conspicuous and more obtrusive instead of reducing it to relative unimportance. So likewise has the attempt to control the body by drugs, manipulations, injections, and the like, proved unfortunate. The more attention the body has received, the more it has seemed to demand. Even when the motive has been purely esthetic, the pampered flesh has not rewarded the care expended upon it and real beauty has vanished in proportion as artificial aids have been considered necessary.

Perhaps the least illogical of the illusions about the body has been the athletic point of view, which seeks to gain and to establish power, grace, and activity and place the body in subjection to the law of dominion by exercising it. It should be recognized that law is mental, not physical, and therefore to bring the body into subjection to law for any purpose, whether it be religious, curative, esthetic, or athletic, necessarily involves a mental modus operandi. Christian Science shows how this control is to be accomplished in a Christian and scientific manner. The general practice of doing this has seized the problem at the wrong end. The right practice is just as necessary today as it was in the time of Paul, and it involves being “absent from the body” and “present with the Lord.” Paradoxical as it may seem, the only sure way of controlling the body is to be absent from it. To be present with Christ, Truth, means the rejection of materiality and reveals man as wholly spiritual, governed by the law of God, Spirit, and not by matter.

The inevitable effect of dwelling constantly in the thought of the body is set forth on page 260 of the Christian Science text-book, “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures” by Mrs. Eddy: “Selfishness and sensualism are educated in mortal mind by the thoughts ever recurring to one’s self, by conversation about the body, and by the expectation of perpetual pleasure or pain from it; and this education is at the expense of spiritual growth.” Thus the attempt to spiritualize thought by making the body a first consideration, either by punishing it, starving, drugging, or exercising it, is doomed to failure, because such action constantly recalls it to one’s attention and revives it in one’s thought. Obviously, then, the true way of controlling the body, to make it subservient instead of masterful, is to turn away from the contemplation of it. It is not possible to reach the kingdom of heaven, the consciousness of the presence of God as All, by a choice of foods. Neither dieting nor fasting can procure for us this state of consciousness, but being “present with the Lord” can and does accomplish this. “Present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God,” writes the apostle. Lay down this false sense of man as a material body, even the generally accepted teachings of anatomy and physiology, and present man as the spiritual, incorporeal idea of divine Mind, then the sacrifice of the false is complete and the presentation of the true has taken place.

This realization of the truth about man cannot, however, be reached without a preliminary spiritual understanding about God. It is the genius of Christian Science that it bases its teachings wholly upon God as first cause, Principle, source, and origin of all that has existence. Popular opinion is rapidly outgrowing the belief that God is corporeal. We are today very far from the primitive notion of God as a being who can be depicted or outlined in painting or statue. The savage with his hideous idols, and the artist in bygone ages who ventured the attempt to give form to God, would find no acceptance today in popular opinion for their concepts. Yet the thought of God as person, with attributes and characteristics common to human persons, such as jealousy and the desire for punishment and revenge, has by no means disappeared. For great multitudes God is still an object of fear, and not in the Biblical sense of fear as reverence, but rather as downright fright. In the imagination of innumerable individuals God is still the watchful parent waiting to catch them in their misdeeds and administer to them the strokes of correction. It still remains to displace this false picture by the impersonal understanding which Christian Science teaches, namely, that “God is incorporeal, divine, supreme, infinite Mind, Spirit, Soul, Principle, Life, Truth, Love” (Science and Health, p. 465). The divine nature thus explained cannot inspire fear, but on the other hand evokes admiration, adoration, and love.

This understanding makes God available in the hour of temptation, sin, sickness, suffering, and sorrow. From this understanding also the student of Christian Science can advance to the spiritual perception of man as the idea of divine Mind, discarding the false belief that he is a material body that needs to be either drugged or dieted, pampered or pounded into health and harmony. Man as idea reflects or expresses divine perfection, and the realization of this is what brings well-being to the human consciousness, and so to the substratum of mortal mind, namely, the physical body.

The road to health for the physical body lies through metaphysics. Physics cannot reach the source of being, nor accomplish any more for the body than to indulge its false beliefs. Metaphysics of the right kind, based upon the teachings of the great Master, illustrated by his glorious works, and explained by Christian Science in our own time, brings the body into subjection to Truth and leaves it in the control of Principle. Therefore whosoever would establish a spiritual ascendency over physical sense and thus become a law unto himself, can do so by placing himself under the law of God, which governs man harmoniously. Before this law all manifestation of weakness, disorder, pain, or stagnation will vanish; all riotous desire for self-indulgence will fade away; mad ambition, equally with self-love and egotism, will be corrected; the overweening sense of self-importance which comes from constant thought about physique will yield to the joyous emancipation from material thraldom. Then will remain the spiritual satisfaction of unity with God, and humanity, no longer trammeled by the fear or love of the material body, will reach the true perception of the atonement, the at-one-ment of God and man, Principle and idea.