“The doctor of the future will give no medicine, but instruct his patient in the …prevention of disease.” This remark is attributed to Thomas Edison – an innovator and visionary – and is just one of many pioneering ideas that continue to be voiced as new, higher concepts of reality are grasped.
A while ago, I had the opportunity to interview Dr. Donald Hoffman, at the University of California, about his views of reality, and the professor of cognitive science indicated that we do not see reality as it is. Instead, each of us is being tricked into believing his or her own view of reality.
As I thought about this view, I correlated it to what happens when our eyes are tricked into seeing a mirage in the desert. As we get a closer view, this mirage disappears, just as we perceive matter as substantial until viewed at the level of its smallest components – quarks.
With this new, closer view of matter, I think it’s reasonable to look beyond matter to understand reality, and that’s where reality defined through thought comes into focus. Then the preventative and therapeutic pursuit of health and the expression of harmony in the body does not need to be through a reliance on medicines, but through the avenue of thought. I found this conclusion to yield to powerful healing results.
A promising sign of progress to me is that many doctors are now coming to a similar conclusion that thought is key to reality. Dr. Irving Oyle, an M.D., states: “There is nothing out there. It’s all happening on the back of your eyeballs.” What I understand this to mean is that thoughts, beliefs, suggestions, and opinions all affect how we experience reality.
These new findings suggest that when a person asks a physician to fix the body, it is important to think beyond that physical body, since from a physical perspective that physical body is made of quarks – which exhibit behavior completely at odds with our view of matter. And that’s the paradigm shift – the idea that reality is not based on the current perception of matter.
What’s interesting is that this isn’t a new thought. More than a century ago, Mary Baker Eddy, a pioneer on the link between health and spirituality, wrote in her seminal book, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, “Christian Science explains all cause and effect as mental and not physical.”
The thought that “all cause and effect are mental and not physical” was demonstrated when I was serving as a chaplain’s assistant in the military. I received a call from the base hospital that a soldier’s wife had been asphyxiated in their military apartment. The physician explained that because of the damage her body sustained by the gas leak, this woman would never be able to hear, see, or walk. I was asked by the Christian Science minister to stay at the hospital and pray, so each day I would pray silently and audibly. Soon the woman acknowledged that she heard my prayers and after a time she started reading biblical passages herself. The final healing came when she was able to walk out of the hospital.
Healing took place as thought was lifted spiritually and spiritual qualities were expressed.
And as our understanding of reality and its link to consciousness deepens, the question then becomes where does thought originate?
Theoretical Physicist Michio Kaku gives this explanation of the origins of thought: “…we are in a world made by rules created by an intelligence. Believe me, anything that we call chance today won’t make sense anymore. To me, it is clear that we exist in a plan which is governed by rules that were created, shaped by a universal intelligence and not by chance.” To me, that universal intelligence is God.
So the real paradigm shift may not be that our thought is reality, but that real thought and consciousness is directly expressed by man from God and that God – harmonious, all-inclusive, and all-governing – is the true reality of being.
Don Ingwerson | Media and Government Relations for Christian Science in Southern California
Blog: csinsocal.com
Twitter: @scalcs
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