Don't Be Impressed by Disease!

JUDITH ANN HARDY

We all knew the simulated avalanche was unreal. Our tour guide had explained the event ahead of time. But even so, after our tram had entered the revolving plastic cylinder, I could easily have believed I was falling down steep crevasses. Just as the tour guide had promised, however, when I closed my eyes the falling sensation stopped immediately, and I could feel that we were in fact still progressing forward on a horizontal track. Moments later we all emerged from this tunnel of special visual and sound effects.

I have always been grateful for this unmistakable illustration of the unreliability and illusory nature of physical sense testimony. As a Christian Scientist, I was reminded again of the necessity of turning completely away from the story told by the material senses, in order to gain the spiritual facts of being. Disease, for example, is only an illusion. But its symptoms can appear so real and its name sound so frightening that if we're not alert we can find ourselves accepting it as real and in control.

"There is no disease,"^{Science and Health, p. 421;} Mrs. Eddy declares emphatically. Christian Science further explains that disease is not a power, not an intelligence, but only an illusion of material sense—the false sense whose argument is first that man is material, created by matter out of matter, and then that he is controlled by so-called laws of matter and subject to conditions of matter. Material sense asserts limitation, lack, and imbalance; too much matter, too little matter; deformed, diseased, debilitated matter. And it claims man as the suffering victim of matter.

Send a comment to the editors

We'd love to hear from you!

Easily submit your testimonies, articles, and poems online.

Submit

Don't Be Impressed by Disease!

We'd love to hear from you!

Sign up for unlimited access