IS DISEASE REAL, OR APPARENT?

In dealing with the reality or unreality of disease, the first thing to be established in the mind is the sense in which we are to use the word “reality.”

If we can accept the definition of the word “real” in its philosophic sense as that which is insusceptible of discord and decay, dissolution or disintegration, we will have a sense of reality which admits only that which is perfect and permanent. According to Plato’s idea, the real is the ideal, of which the materialist’s real is a more or less imperfect representation to the sense. The real, as we know it through the senses, is in a constant state of change, but, as science reveals it, it is “the same, yesterday, today, and forever.”

As the word “real” is susceptible of so many meanings, so is the word “apparent.”

Probably one of the simplest ways to define these words would be to say that the word “real”  is “that which is,” while the word “apparent” is “that which appears to be.” It is in this way that the exact sciences use them.

Helen Keller, despite her great handicap, knew that God is. When she was able to understand her friend and teacher, who developed a system of communication independent of the senses, she was told about God, and the girl, who could neither see, hear, nor speak, made it plain to her friend that she knew all about Him, but not by the name which the teacher used. Intuition, that inner sight, which is not dependent on the optic nerve for its existence or continuance, had assured her of the reality of that to which the most perfect senses in the world would never testify.
He only is a philosopher who knows that the visible world with all that it includes is a mental picture. The world exists for us as the representation of our own states and stages of consciousness. Rob us of consciousness, and our world disappears. Rob all men of consciousness, and the world, as we view it, would collapse, for where there is no mind to perceive a world there is no world to be perceived. Swedenborg declared that God creates the visible world through man, according to pre-existent patterns. Plato seems to have taught that the visible world is a more or less poor reproduction of the archetypal universe of Ideas, which Ideas antedate the so-called material world and will survive its discontinuance. In Plato’s philosophy, moral or spiritual beauty is the only real beauty, of which all physical beauty is so much copy or imitation.

The end of the world, which has been predicted so often, may not come to pass as many have prophesied, all of a sudden and in bulk, but gradually and a little at a time. The end of the world is now being interpreted as that gradual decrease of materiality which is to so thin the veils from before the faces of mankind that what cannot be seen, while those veils of materiality obscure the view, may be plainly discernible. The new heaven and the new earth are not going to be created, for that was done in the Beginning; they are going to be revealed, much as anything else will be revealed when the thing which conceals it is removed.

Somewhere I have read that Herbert Spencer once said that, “What is real is permanent, what is not real is not permanent;” but this is only an echo of what Paul said nearly two thousand years ago when he declared, “The things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.” If we can accept Spencer’s declaration that what is real is permanent it will help us to take a new view of disease that will be of great service. If disease is real, then it is permanent; but we know that in most cases it is not permanent, for it comes and goes, while God goes on forever. The fact that disease is not permanent proves that it is only apparent, and the knowledge that it is only apparent, and therefore unreal, in the truest sense of this word, confers upon the knower the power to overcome it.

Today the majority believe in the reality of disease, just as in Galileo’s day the majority believed the earth was flat; but belief does not make real a thing which cannot be real, no matter how apparent it is. Take two children, one of whom believes in the reality of a ghost, and the other who believes in nothing of the kind; which of those children will be most free from fear and consequent misery? Consider two men, one who believes in the reality of disease, and the other who knows that it is only an appearance due to  some wrong mental attitude, and which of these men is the more likely to recover from it?

When this truth about man is more generally known we shall no longer judge after appearances. We shall see ourselves as the perfect expressions of Him in Whom is no disease, and to Whom disease is unknown. We shall treat disease as the wise man treats any other illusion, and it will flee from us. We shall regard it as a mirage of the carnal mind, an appearance without actuality. The apparent will vanish and the real will take its place, just as apparent darkness takes its leave at the approach of light.

Ideas from:

The Realm of Reality

Rev William John Murray

Divine Science Publishing Assoc.

1922

Rev W. John Murray - The Atonement
 or
http://northmarch.blogspot.ca/2008/10/rev-w-john-murray-atonement.html