Editorial October 23, 1976 Issue

Right the Inward, Fix the Outward

Geoffrey J. Barratt

Whatever thoughts we entertain tend later to visit our body and experience; they show themselves in good health or ill, success or failure. Realizing this not only makes us more careful of what we think but leads us to the right way to heal and repair whatever is not good in our physicality or affairs. We can work at tipping out the thoughts that are not derived from God, Spirit. And we can seek and assimilate those thoughts that are. These act correctively on the outward state. "The infinite will not be buried in the finite; the true thought escapes from the inward to the outward," Mary Baker Eddy explains, "and this is the only right activity, that whereby we reach our higher nature."^{The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 159;}

We can't right the inward—that is, gain composure, confidence, and high spirituality—merely by adjusting the physical states and elements that seem to make up our body and its surroundings. All healing initiatives lies with the spiritual thought. The natural direction of spiritual thought is from the inward to the outward. And, under divine law, the material outward can't invade the spiritual inward. It's the state of the inward—the condition of our thought, spiritual or otherwise—that is all-important. Christ Jesus was stressing this when he said, "There is nothing from without a man, that entering into him can defile him: but the things which come out of him, those are they that defile the man."^{Mark 7:15;}

Spiritual thought can't be contained within. It can't be resisted without. The reason is that true thought is inseparable from divine Mind, and Mind even now exists everywhere. From this perspective, the inward and outward are seen as a limited sense of the infinite and actual.

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