Sickness for sale: don't buy it!
Lynn Gray Jackson
Turn the pages of many major magazines and you’ll come across advertisements for drugs to combat an endless list of dramatically described diseases.
These ads may seem very persuasive, but there’s a flaw at the heart of them: the argument that diseases are inevitable and that medications are the only way to control them.
In this inspiring audio chat, Christian Science teacher and practitioner Lynn Jackson explores a different way to consider disease: as a false claim that can be overcome with an understanding of our true spiritual nature as a perfect reflection of God.
Because God's protection means we're not susceptible to sickness, she says, we can also defend ourselves against fear of contagion, claims of contamination, and the effects of heredity.
Using examples from her own experience and practice, Lynn answers questions from site visitors about mental illness, chronic complaints, healing for animals, and ways to develop and maintain the spiritual sense of our identity. As she puts it, "We don't have to mentally purchase the disease being sold!"
spirituality.com host: Hello, everyone! Welcome to another spirituality.com live question and answer audio event. Our topic is “Sickness for sale: don’t buy it!” And our guest, Lynn Gray Jackson, will help us understand how to prevent sickness by being able to resist the mental influences that can come through news reports, advertisements, and sometimes a friend’s vivid description of sickness.
Lynn has been in the public practice of Christian Science for many years and has taught Christian Science since 1994. She’s given public talks on Christian Science and has written many articles for the Christian Science Sentinel, The Christian Science Journal,and this Web site.
Before we talk with Lynn, I’d like to make a few comments about the chat. The purpose of our discussion isn’t to criticize medical professionals or particular medications. What we really want to accomplish here is to talk about the times when a disease is represented so often and so vividly that it can give the impression that sickness is inevitable or inescapable, and how to guard your thoughts in those cases.
Lynn, do you have some thoughts to get us started?
Lynn Gray Jackson: I do. First, I want to thank you for inviting me on the program today; I’m looking forward to it. Over the past few years, I’ve been watching carefully the selling of disease that we see, particularly through the media, whether it’s an advertisement or a TV show that graphically illustrates symptoms and abnormalities of the body. It’s interesting for me to watch the responses the selling of disease receives from individuals, who then become afraid and concerned over their own health. There’s an article I read recently titled, “What’s making us sick is an epidemic of diagnoses.” I believe that was written up in The New York Times. And in there, there’s a quote, and it says this: “No one should take the process of making people into patients lightly. There are real drawbacks. Simply labeling people as diseased can make them feel anxious and vulnerable.”
Even with the Internet and the availability of instant information on any topic, there’s a growing self-diagnosis going on, and the term, an epidemic of diagnoses, as this article points out, is becoming more and more used.
So, to me, it’s like a two-edged sword. On one side, we have the actual selling of disease; and on the other edge, or the result of the first edge, is an epidemic of diagnoses. The physical diagnosis, then, would also induce the disease, and it becomes a vortex that pulls us in.
A long time ago, I saw an ad in a magazine of a man who claimed to have had a heart attack, or some problem, and then wrote up how wonderful his treatment and care was at a particular hospital. But what was interesting was, at the bottom of this advertisement was the disclaimer that said that this was a fictitious character, “a composite biography.” This man was purely a model. It was the sense that we have to deal with, that this is, in effect, the selling of a disease or a problem. That disease is inevitable, that medications are the only way to control disease—are things that I think we face all the time. Not long ago, I was talking to a friend of mine who is a nurse and she said, “People live with this particular disease all the time.” It was the sense of “living with it,” not destroying it.
So I think we do face this constantly. The question begs itself: “Do I have to buy into the selling of disease, with the result of an epidemic of diagnoses?” I don’t believe we do. I believe we have a choice of what we’re going to mentally purchase. There’s a great verse in Proverbs in the Bible that says, “Buy the truth, and sell it not; also wisdom, and instruction, and understanding.”
spirituality.com host: I think that’s a wonderful concept of buying the truth rather than the sickness.
Lynn: Yes, it definitely is. So what is the truth? Isn’t the truth a truer understanding of who we are as God’s child? Of how God created us? Of what we’re composed of, which are ideas of harmony, of health, of joy, of peace? This is the truth that we buy, or that we learn to understand through our study of Christian Science.
spirituality.com host: Oh, that sounds wonderful. And we have a lot of questions.
Lynn: Great.
spirituality.com host: So we’ve got some good ones to start off with. Would you like to?
Lynn: Sure.
spirituality.com host: All right. Martin in North Carolina is saying, “What ideas can I share with a friend who has become addicted to painkillers and is starting to wean herself off them?”
Lynn: That’s a good question, Martin. I think sometimes we have to look at what’s really going on. People naturally take painkillers because they’re in pain, so sometimes they fear that getting off of them, they’re still going to be in pain. That’s the very purpose of taking them. But I would encourage your friend to see herself as God created her, as the beloved child of God, as immortal, as perfect, as complete; as having nothing attached to her or a part of her that could bring forth pain in any way. It’s not a matter of getting off painkillers and then living with the pain, it’s a matter of seeing that the power of God destroys pain. And we can rely on God to do that for us. It’s a very natural thing. It does not require a long convalescence or a struggle with pain or human will, but it requires lifting thought to a higher sense of who she really is and how loved she is by her Maker, by God.
spirituality.com host: That’s very helpful. Bobbie is referring to our topic about buying into sickness, and Bobbie’s in Indiana and says, “I think it is almost impossible not to buy into it. The medical agencies are bent on selling it. Why doesn’t this get exposed by more than Christian Science, and get stopped? If someone has succumbed, how can he now rise above it?” And again, I just want to say that we’re not criticizing medical professionals here. But I can see how if you are assaulted by ads, as I sometimes am driving into work, that are for various medications or treatments, it can seem like there’s an awful lot of pressure in that direction.
Lynn: Yes, I think so. And particularly, we see that more and more. Bobbie, I would agree with you that it does seem very much that we’re assaulted by these ads, and that we’re exposed to it constantly. And yet, we have to rise above it. You have a number of questions in there that I hope I can hit on to your satisfaction. There’s this wonderful quote from Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, written by Mary Baker Eddy. It’s on page 261, and I actually use it a lot. On line 2, she says, “Look away from the body into Truth and Love, the Principle of all happiness, harmony, and immortality.” Now, I love that, because, to me, she’s telling us to do two things: look away from the body into what? Into Truth and Love to really see what is true about man and about ourselves as God’s child. Even though we’re surrounded by this stuff, it doesn’t necessarily mean that we have to accept it into our experience. I often say to people, “If somebody came and said to you, ‘Your tree outside is purple with orange polka dots on it,’ you may be exposed to that thought or to that tree—you may see it; but you don’t necessarily have to accept that as being final or as being true.” We can understand and learn to train our thought to turn away from that which is harmful to us. And anything that tries to project illness or sickness or the selling of something that we don’t want, we can learn to turn away from, to see something better—get something in place of it that’s better—which is an understanding of your spiritual self.
spirituality.com host: Well, I was just thinking that if someone did come to the door and say, “Your tree is orange with purple spots,” you would say, “Well, I have to go look at this.” You might be momentarily startled, but you’d go out, and when the tree was fine, you’d say, “Well, sorry, but it’s not.”
Lynn: Exactly.
spirituality.com host: And in a way sometimes disease comes and says, “I’m going to make you sick,” but if you really understand your spirituality, you can just say, “Sorry.”
Lynn: Yeah. “Sorry. I’m not buying that one. I don’t have to believe it.”
spirituality.com host: Right.
Lynn: And what’s interesting about that analogy is the whole neighborhood could believe it.
spirituality.com host: Right.
Lynn: But as long as you don’t, that’s what matters.
spirituality.com host: Right.
Lynn: So you’re not necessarily looking for masses of confirmation of others to tell you the truth, you’re looking for what Truth is, which would be the perfection of that tree, or the perfection of you.
spirituality.com host: Right. Laurie in Burlington, Vermont, says, “I’m always concerned by those ads that say, ‘Talk to your doctor about’ whatever the drug is. It seems like it’s encouraging people to imagine ailments. Can you suggest a way to think past this?” I think you’ve answered that a little bit in talking about the epidemic of self-diagnosis and so forth. But I think, again, it’s sort of going back to the orange tree, that even if you read an advertisement for a particular medication, that doesn’t mean that that medication has suddenly become a force in your life, or that you have to have it or need to worry about it.
Lynn: Right. I agree with you. It’s really a choice on whether we allow these ailments, or imagine these ailments, to take over our thinking. Again, we’re back to that quote from Mrs. Eddy, to “look away from the body,” look away from matter in this case, “to Truth and Love,” to God, to a higher sense of what [the] true cause of health is, which is God. And God causes health and brings forth health. So really, these imaginations that go on, or these vivid descriptions that take place, this epidemic of self-diagnosis that we sometimes find lets our minds just wander through channels of fear and concern—these are things that are really put down by an understanding of one’s relationship with God.
spirituality.com host: Maybe we should go a little bit into what that relationship is.
Lynn: Sure. To me, that relationship is a oneness with God. I see God as the cause of all good, and so He created man, or His creation, or the universe—if that’s a better word for it—after His likeness, as the first chapter in Genesis brings out: that man was made in the likeness, in the image of God. That’s a relationship, a cause-and-effect relationship, which is really why disease cannot and does not enter into that cause, because it doesn’t come from an all-loving, good, powerful God. So that relationship is a uniqueness—we each have a unique relationship with God, yet it expresses our perfection, our health, our joy, our companionship, anything that we’re looking at. That relationship is completely [invulnerable to] disease or any abnormality.
spirituality.com host: That’s very helpful. I have two questions that are kind of similar. I’ll take the first one. Bob from Galveston, probably Texas, is saying, “I’ve tried to share Christian Science with my family, and they keep saying how they have a problem with the fact that Christian Scientists don’t take medication. How can I help them understand it’s okay not to take medication?”
Lynn: By helping them understand that Truth is medication. That understanding the laws of God and applying those laws of God is medication, in the sense that it’s something that’s applied and has a result. It’s not a matter of leaving off something for nothing. It’s a matter of leaving off one system or form of healthcare for a system that is a science, as well.
So I think we have to see that what we do apply in Christian Science is the truth, and that truth is effective and that truth is applied to consciousness. And when consciousness is changed or spiritualized, then it has an effect on the body.
So, I would encourage your family to help them see that you’re not leaving off something for nothing. You’re really picking up something much more substantial and practical.
spirituality.com host: And the related question is from June in Bakersfield, California. She says, “Is it possible to take medication and still be a Christian Scientist?” And I think one thing I thought we might talk about a little bit is the difference between giving up medication and trying to will yourself well versus taking medication—what the difference is of relying on Christian Science versus willing yourself to be well.
Lynn: Yes. I think it goes back a little bit to what we said with the last listener.… You’re not willing yourself; it’s not a self-will situation. You’re weaning yourself from medication in the sense that you’re getting a better understanding of who you are. And you realize that the power of God is enough to handle whatever you’re faced with.
spirituality.com host: But, in general, Christian Scientists would not take medication.
Lynn: That’s right. That’s right. And the reason for that is because full faith and understanding is placed upon God as the healer of all diseases. So they don’t coincide. There’s certainly no condemnation for somebody who’s working out of a problem, or working out their salvation, so to speak. But to be completely in line with Christian Science, you wouldn’t take, or someone wouldn’t take, medication.
spirituality.com host: Anthony in Geneva has a quotation from Mary Baker Eddy. He says that she says, “‘To regard sickness as a false claim, is to abate the fear of it; but this does not destroy the so-called fact of the claim. In order to be whole, we must be insensible to every claim of error’ (Unity of Good, p. 54). What sense do you have of gaining that sense of being insensible to error?”
Lynn: Isn’t that great? Well, we want to be insensible to error. We know that, so how do we get there? I think it takes practice. We’re always practicing with our thought to get a better and deeper sense of our relationship with God that we talked about earlier. Sickness, being a false claim—we know that. Well, how do we demonstrate that? We demonstrate it by disbelieving that false claim. Mrs. Eddy says, “Disbelief in error destroys error….” So we learn to disbelieve the false belief, to see it as unreal. And doing this, and doing this with practice, and doing this consistently, doing this with all that comes to us all day long, brings us into that sense of being whole, being at one with God.
You know, I often say to people, “It’s not your fault if you’re walking down the street, and you see 10,000 people walk in front of you and they’re all sick or lame or diseased. But it is up to you on what you do with that picture.” And what we do with it is we exchange that false belief or all those false beliefs for what is true, which is man complete and whole and perfect and upright, never touched by this belief of life in matter.
spirituality.com host: Well, I think one thing that someone who’s listening might ask is, “Well, yeah, but there are germs out there and microbes and they’re coming after me all the time. How can you say that this is a false belief when those are real things?”
Lynn: I think this is something that we are even finding in the medical world and people in alternative medicine and different things—I think they’re coming to see this: that our outward experience is very much a result of our thought. And as we take away so-called power from the belief in germs and microbes and all of these things that we’re afraid of touching or being around or catching—infections and different things like this—as we disbelieve the power that we’ve been taught to give those things, and we put more of that understanding, that spiritual understanding of what does have the power, which is God, into the right side of the scale, then we become less fearful of these things. We begin to see that they’re often theories; that they’re not necessarily scientific facts. And because they’re not scientific facts, they can be disproved. And in many cases, in fact, in every case where there’s been true healing taking place, these medical theories or physical theories or theories of physics, all these things have been disproved as being factual.
spirituality.com host: And of course, because God is Spirit, the whole material point of view is eliminated, isn’t it?
Lynn: It is.
spirituality.com host: As you understand God better.
Lynn: Sure. And isn’t that great? To be able to eliminate the false claims. And where do we do that? We’re going to have to do it in thought, in consciousness. Again, we want to make sure this is not a mind over body situation—meaning small “mind”; we’re not trying to will ourselves into a better understanding. But we’re growing in a spiritual understanding of God’s creation and of our relationship with Him. So that takes place within consciousness. And as our thought changes, the outward and actual, or the experience, changes.
spirituality.com host: Erin in Geneva, Illinois, writes, “When people launch into vivid descriptions of sickness or disease, how can we, with no offense, stop them?”
Lynn: Yeah, that faces all of us. Let me tell you, it’s something that we have to deal with. I think there is just some practical advice there sometimes. I often at that point just try to gently change the subject, ask another question about something else. But how do we really do it? If somebody is just really into the discussion, and they’re telling us all these vivid things that we don’t want to hear, I often just turn my thought to a deep sense of the presence of God, and that that presence is all that I can hear and all that I can understand and all that I can take in. And that that presence is felt by me, and it’s felt by everybody around me.
spirituality.com host: Nice idea.
Lynn: Yeah. It helps me.
spirituality.com host: Fred in New Hampshire is asking, “How susceptible are we to popular belief? With all the bombardment on the public by the media about illnesses and their cures, how susceptible are we to these suggestions, and how do we avoid them?”
Lynn: I think you’re only as susceptible as you allow yourself to be. Again, we’re back to governing thought, and keeping thought at one with God, and seeing Him as the only cause and Creator of all good. And so I think we learn to put up a mental guard, if you will, that blocks any suggestion coming to us that we are susceptible to something. Again, even though it passes in front of us, we’re back to our own thought, aren’t we? We’re back to, What do I do with that suggestion? What do I do with that advertisement? Or, What do I do with that conversation with my friend? We learn to guard our own thought and to turn on those false beliefs, or turn on those suggestions, and see truly that they have no basis. They have no power behind them, no authority behind them. And truly, then, we see that we’re not susceptible to matter, but purely only to God.
spirituality.com host: Mike from State College, Pennsylvania is asking, “How can Christian Science survive in an age where disease and the medical solutions are so omnipresent in society?”
Lynn: Well, I think we’re seeing that happen. I think we’re seeing it survive. And how is that happening? Because it’s effective. We find that Christian Science is effective, that it’s practical, and that people are coming to it because it frees them from the chains of medical theories. And that’s truly what we want to be free of.
I was thinking yesterday—everybody in the whole wide world is concerned with healthcare, one form or another. We see many different versions out there or different approaches to healthcare. But this topic affects everybody. So we find that as we leave off the false beliefs and these suggestions that bombard us constantly, that there is a solution. In fact, it’s a systematic solution called Christian Science that is effective and has been effective for many, many generations.
Again, Christian Scientists aren’t Christian Scientists because they got drafted into this. They’re Christian Scientists because they’ve seen it work. They’ve chosen this method of healing because it’s been effective for them. And as long as it’s being effective, which it is, it can’t help but be effective, it will survive. It’s inevitable.
spirituality.com host: That’s very helpful. And for those of you who have just joined us, this chat is about “Sickness for sale: don’t buy it,” and our guest is Lynn Jackson, a teacher and practitioner of Christian Science from Lubbock, Texas. If you’d like to send in your question, we’d be happy to give a whirl at answering it. We’d be really glad to hear from you.
In the meantime, we have a question from Maria in Munich, Germany: “What do you say to those who suffer but seem actually convinced about medical treatment and medicine without giving them the feeling that they are being criticized for going to the doctor and taking material medicine?”
Lynn: Well, I don’t think it’s ever fair to criticize anybody for their choice of healthcare. And yet, we do often have friends and family who turn to systems that may produce more suffering or may relieve the suffering, but not on a permanent basis. I think we have to not necessarily concern ourselves with convincing others on what form of healthcare they should choose, as much as we should live our own life as closely as we can with God, and be that shining example. It’s there, and it doesn’t go unnoticed. When the individual is ready for what you have to share, they’ll come to you. They know where to find it.
spirituality.com host: Ron in Holland, Michigan, says, “In the Bible, Christ Jesus was confronted by a child his disciples could not heal, and then he healed the child. This was an example of a disease that had been sold to the child’s father. Can you explain how Jesus unsold this disease by healing the child when the father said, ‘Help thou mine unbelief’?”
Lynn: I’m writing that down. I like that. I really like your term, unsold disease. What a great way of thinking about this. It was, in a sense, a hereditary disease that was taken on by the father and then put upon the child by the dad. And I think what was going on there was the father was screaming out, “I do believe, but help the part of me that doesn’t believe.” I think we find ourselves in this situation often, where we’re working on a problem, meaning, we’re praying about it and we’re thinking over it, and we’re digging deeply into the Bible and into Science and Health to find our healing, or a deeper sense of what we need to learn, and we sense that there’s something that we’re missing, that there’s something that we need to gain more of. I believe that this is what the father was reaching out for. I think he was saying to Christ Jesus, “Okay, I believe that you have the power to heal. I believe that you’ve done this, and I’ve heard that you do this, but help the part of me that’s doubting a little bit.” Jesus recognized that there could be no doubt in this father’s thought concerning the son, because that doubt didn’t come from God. And that’s how he wiped it out. He wiped it out by understanding that the very thought of the dad here was from God; and therefore, the dad could only think good about the son, could only realize and acknowledge the son in God’s perfection. And that was the unbelief that I believe Jesus wiped out.
spirituality.com host: Karen in Georgia says, “How can we help others redirect their thoughts of disease when they share their self-diagnosis and predictions of the possibility of disease because of circumstances, genetics, or environment?”
Lynn: Any time that we’re faced with a conversation or a situation where others are bombarding us with disease, or in a sense, trying to sell to us the reality of the disease, we never want to be uncompassionate in the sense that we never want to act like we don’t care—because we do care. And obviously, you care, Karen, because you’re wondering,How do we redirect this? Well, to me, we redirect it often by stating something very simple, something that we know that they possibly know. I love it in the 91st Psalm, where it’s written, “There shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling.” Often, just sharing that statement right there, that no plague can come nigh their dwelling, or their consciousness, or their body, often takes thought off of the material, even temporarily enough for the other individual to grasp that, “Yes, that’s Biblical truth. That’s what the Bible says, and I can turn to that.”
spirituality.com host: One thing I wanted to ask specifically that’s in Karen’s question is her reference to genetics, because you’ve alluded to it a little bit in your answer to the question about Jesus’ encounter with the man, but I wondered if you wanted to talk about genetics. There’s an awful lot of media coverage of genetics in relation to disease and the inheritance of sickness and so forth. Sometimes genetics seems like such a fixed fact. Do you have some thoughts on that?
Lynn: I do, believe it or not.
spirituality.com host: I do believe it.
Lynn: Well, I think we do see this a lot. In fact, we’re seeing it with the DNA coding that’s going on, and even to the point where now…well, they’re very close to getting anybody’s DNA coded, and then predicting what’s going to happen in the future. And then going forward with that and considering somebody at risk for a particular disease. The term for it now is pre-disease. They may not have any symptoms whatsoever, but because they’re liable to it from their DNA coding. So this is all genetics. This is all the sense that one thing has been passed on to another from generation to generation. Sometimes it skips generations. It does all these wacky things—not often a systematic unfoldment of problems.
But, to me, when I’m thinking about heredity and genetics, I often go back to the termmental contagion, because, to me, if you’re working on a particular problem, and you know that your mother, your father, your grandfather, or cousin, has this same problem, and you both have been diagnosed with the same disease or maybe one has and the other hasn’t been diagnosed, but you sense it’s the same thing, it really is a mental acceptance of that disease into your consciousness. If we have somebody who is suffering from something and they share all these symptoms with us, and we take it on for them, we believe it for them—“So and so has this disease, I feel so poorly for them, I feel bad for them”—then, in a way, I think we’re accepting that into our own thought. We’re acknowledging that that can happen to somebody else, so then the next acknowledgment is that could happen to me. And that doesn’t kick it out of thought, that brings it into thought. So in a sense, that’s a selling of disease to ourselves.
spirituality.com host: Right.
Lynn: We’re not…I love that, unsold disease. We’re not allowing that to be unsold to us, we’re accepting it in, and to me it’s that mental contagion. So again, we’re back to the guarding of thought, to the guarding of consciousness; really keeping in our thought our true relationship with God and knowing that it is not vulnerable, that we’re not liable to disease, that we’re not vulnerable to being attacked by it. That we’re not in a position where we can’t protect, defend, or guard ourselves against these suggestions.
spirituality.com host: Well, and I have a real quick example. One night, I was at a restaurant, and the people in the booth next to mine, one of the individuals, had a very, very bad cold and was coughing and sneezing, and it was just a lot. And I noticed it, and the thought sort of strayed across my mind about that situation, but I didn’t pay too much attention until I got out to my car and found that I was coughing and sneezing, and I had been totally fine when I went in the restaurant.
Lynn: Yeah.
spirituality.com host: So like you said, you just simply take in those influences. And naturally, I prayed, and there was absolutely no problem as soon as I became aware of what was going on. But it is sometimes an unconscious thing, where you’re in that kind of an atmosphere and allow yourself to be influenced.
Lynn: Yes. I think that’s right. I think we’ve all had experiences like that where it’s been very tacit or latent. It’s there, it’s in the background. You think you’re not paying a lot of attention to it. That’s where, for me, when I get up in the morning and I’m doing some prayerful work for myself, for the family, for the world, for government, for all kinds of broad and general large things, I really take some time to know that there’s nothing that can come on that day or go on that day that can creep into my consciousness and make me accept it from a latent basis. You can really guard your thought that way, as well.
spirituality.com host: That’s so helpful. And now we have some more questions. This one is from Levic in Brazil. It’s, “Considering the ninth Commandment, ‘Neither shalt thou bear false witness against thy neighbour,’ I’d like Mrs. Jackson to comment on it in relation to sickness, as it is also a false testimony. Therefore, we kind of sin whenever we bear false witness to sickness, or accept it.”
Lynn: I think she answered her own question. That’s exactly what I would say, too. When we are taking it on, or when we’re seeing sickness, either, like we said, a report on the news or through an advertisement or a friend—wherever we see it—if we accept it, if we accept it as being real for somebody else, then we basically accept it as being real for us, and it is bearing false witness, because we are seeing another falsely, we’re not seeing them as the image and likeness of God. And then to go repeat that would be a false testimony, wouldn’t it?
spirituality.com host: Yes, it would.
Lynn: It would be testifying incorrectly about somebody’s true spiritual selfhood. So I think she’s right on, on the conversation on how they’re thinking.
spirituality.com host: Now this one is a little bit off the subject, and I’m not sure we can get into it, but I’ll read it to you anyway.
Lynn: Okay.
spirituality.com host: It’s from Charlotte in Wauseon, Ohio. She says, “It’s easy not to pin sickness or the belief in it on a human. But what about pets and other animals? How do we keep ourselves and others from selling sickness to animals and other non-human beings?”
Lynn: I always love this one. I’m right with you on this one, Charlotte. Again, I think we’re back to that whole concept of theories. And these theories come from what we think we understand about a body, a human body, or an animal body in any way, shape, or form. I often think of animals as not really having, and I may be wrong, but not really having the capacity to think evil, bad things, in the sense that they can’t take these things on. It’s almost as if sickness is projected onto them—projected onto them by medical theories, projected onto them by fear of their owner, or just fear in general. There are all kinds of different things that say, “Well, albino cats get this and calico cats do that and German Shepherds do this.” And these are universal beliefs that don’t have a foundation, that don’t have anything to them to back them up. So I think when we’re working with a pet or an animal, we have to really make sure that we’re handling these theories that tend to surround thought about them. But where would we do that, but within our own consciousness, our own thinking? And be careful not to pin false things onto them.
spirituality.com host: Yes, and there are certain expectations, such as, as an animal gets older, it will experience certain phases, and things like that. But, as you said, maintaining that spiritual sense of an animal’s identity, that works as well that way, doesn’t it? Just as you would pray and think of yourself in spiritual terms about yourself.
Lynn: Of course. Yeah. You’re right. Exactly. It’s no different to me in how we would pray for an animal in any situation. You would have to see that animal as a creation of God, and as maintaining and having all of the qualities that that animal needs to express—joy, lovablity, kindness, energy, activity, health—all things that would naturally be there.
And also, it’s very interesting, because in a situation like that, you can also heal a particular pet of maybe too much aggressiveness or disobedience or anything else, just like you would work with a friend. You would see that that’s not a quality of that animal. It’s not something God gave that animal.
spirituality.com host: Right. It all ties back to the first chapter of Genesis, where God created everything…
Lynn: Everything.
spirituality.com host: …including all the creatures.
Lynn: Exactly. I had a wonderful experience with one of our pets. I had left him with a friend of mine whose husband is a veterinarian, and I had left him because we had gone on a vacation, so he was going to kennel the dog for us for a week or two. And when I came back, my friend called me and said, “Well, my husband was playing with your pet—he loves your dog so much. But he noticed a skin condition that he would like to talk with you about.” And she said, “Now I know you don’t want a diagnosis, but I think you need to talk with him, because he’s very concerned.” And I said, “Okay, I’ll go talk with him.” And I went into his office and sat down. This is a beautiful, beautiful Collie. And he said to me, “Well, he’s got a particular skin condition and he’s going to lose all of his hair, and he’ll never grow it back.”
And the first thing that hit me was a Collie with no hair. Now isn’t that what you think about when you think of Collies, this beautiful fur? Then I thought, How am I ever going to explain that to anybody? And then I thought, Well, how are you going to explain it to yourself? This doesn’t make sense.
And so I thanked him, and I thanked him for his concern and I appreciated him keeping the pet while we were gone. He knew that I’m a Christian Scientist and that I would go home and pray. So I brought our dog home and prayed about it. I shared it with my husband and what the vet had said and we both just turned to really see the beautiful qualities of this pet, of this loved pet—that this theory, this medical theory and this fear couldn’t be imposed upon this beloved animal. And you know, it just never came true. This winter, we’ve had the coldest winter we’ve had in seven or eight years, and he has the most magnificent coat. He’s just a beautiful dog. So I think sometimes we have to guard our pets just like we would guard our own consciousness against these things.
spirituality.com host: Thanks. That’s great.
Lynn: Yeah.
spirituality.com host: Paul in Ottawa, Canada, asks, “How can we best handle suggestions of contagion when it seems evident that something as simple as a cold is spreading around an office environment?”
Lynn: Yeah, we find that. And we find this, too, with kids in elementary schools. It’s always such a hoot to see this try to take place. Again, Paul, I think we go to the whole concept of guarding your own consciousness. You’re absolutely enveloped in the arms of divine Love, and error or sickness or contagion or disease can’t penetrate your thought to make you manifest something God didn’t create. Contagion is something that everyone deals with almost on a daily basis, whether you go to a movie or a restaurant or anything. It’s a prominent theory out there that we have to combat. But it’s combated by our own sense of what we allow into our thought, what we’re going to allow in to affect us in one way or another. And we know we can’t be affected by something God didn’t create. It has to be good if we have it. So putting up that mental protection.
If we can go into that for a second—I love the terms defense and protection, especially when we’re talking about thought. To defend oneself brings forth an image, often, of maybe cowering in a corner and putting a garbage can over you so you don’t get hit and pelted by the things that are being thrown at you. But to protect yourself would mean to go out against the false concept or the false belief. Not just to say, “Well, it can’t affect me,” but to actually go out and to destroy it.
So when we do see this in our office or in a restaurant or in a movie theater, or wherever we happen to be, we really can be very proactive in our thought and go out and protect our thought, and put up that wall of divine Love, so to speak, rather than feeling like we have to somehow get away from it and huddle in a corner to defend ourselves.
spirituality.com host: And doesn’t that influence for good [help] the whole office environment?
Lynn: Oh, yes. Thanks for pointing that out. That’s absolutely true. There’s no reason this has to be limited to one person.
spirituality.com host: Right.
Lynn: Yes. It definitely has to. I guess one thing when I think about consciousness, I think about whatever is included in my consciousness, so if your office is included in your consciousness, it’s affected by your good thoughts and by your understanding of what’s going on.
spirituality.com host: Oh, that’s perfect. We’ve got a pet follow-up. We won’t do any more on pets, I think, but this is one also from Canada—Ottawa—and Alan is asking, “I like what you just said about animals. Could we not extend this even further to other aspects of nature—flowers, trees, even the earth itself? Couldn’t this also apply to the claim of a diseased planet, including global warming?” Now that’s a good thought.
Lynn: Yes. Exactly. I agree with him completely. You know, when we started, earlier in the program, we talked about God’s creation, which we used the word man for, and I said the word universe, if you prefer that. God created the universe, of course, which includes man, which includes animals, which includes plants and all of the galaxies and all these things that we’re just now discovering even, and things we haven’t discovered. So yes, very much so, Alan, this very much applies to flowers and plants, anything that we may see as diseased or not healthy—global warming, of course, ozone layers that are thinning and thickening back and forth. All of these false concepts, or these problems with the earth and the planet, have to be, and are, subject to consciousness, in the sense of our prayers for them.
spirituality.com host: Andrew in Australia is asking about mental illness. He says, “Mental illness seems to have gained popularity recently, and seems to be a growing problem worldwide. How does one approach this problem, which is largely based on a diagnostic opinion by those who consider themselves sane or normal?”
Lynn: I think he’s actually touched upon something Mrs. Eddy talks about in Science and Health, too, about insanity. And Andrew, we have to see that, I guess to medical theory there are different levels of insanity—it might consider you and I sane, might consider somebody else not sane. But no matter what it calls itself, because it’s a false concept, it’s amenable to the truth. And even those who are suffering from mental illness, they know it. They know that things aren’t right. If they know things aren’t right, then they also know what is right. So they’re not defenseless beings. We often look at those who are mentally ill as defenseless, as unable to protect or defend their thought, or unable to accept or reject a suggestion to their thought—and they’re not. They’re very much alert to what’s there and what’s present. So I think when we’re dealing with mental illness and the whole sense of what we see a lot of today in that regard, we’re really still dealing with a false concept, and particularly a false concept of what governs man. We have to go back…I love the term divine Mind for God. That God is divine Mind. He’s what gives us our thoughts. And all thought, then, which is good and healthy, comes from God. God is constantly giving us those thoughts. Because somebody’s been diagnosed with mental illness doesn’t mean God has stopped being God. It just means that we have the opportunity there to prove that that individual does hear and respond to the thought of God.
spirituality.com host: And that that person can’t ever be separated from the divine Mind.
Lynn: Exactly. How could there be a separation between cause and effect?
spirituality.com host: Right.
Lynn: It’s just an impossibility.
spirituality.com host: We have a questioner from State College, Pennsylvania, who says, “As a Christian Scientist, I sometimes feel guilty about the illness or disease that I may be experiencing. But it seems that individuals who are not Christian Scientists don’t feel guilty about having an illness. Can you address this issue of guilt?” I think that’s a good question.
Lynn: It really is. And I would just say right here, right now, please don’t do that any more. I know that guilt tries to set in, and I think it’s because we feel, “Well, there’s something I’m thinking that’s wrong. There’s something I’m not getting in Christian Science or not understanding about my spiritual self, and so I’m sick.” Often what we’re dealing with in sickness is purely a universal belief. We talked a lot about that—the contagion of colds or flu’s, or different things like that. It’s not so much that you need to feel guilty about it; we just need to recognize that it’s a universal belief that has to be handled. You’re not particularly sinning yourself, and so something has come up on you, but you’re at the standpoint of opportunity, to be able to put down a false belief. Please turn it around really to a sense of opportunity for your own spiritual growth, and really get rid of the guilt. There’s no reason to feel guilty. Sometimes we feel guilty because something we’ve been praying about is going on for a long time, and we feel we’re just not adequate. Then we have to deal with those feelings as well. None of those feelings really add to the equation of your perfection. And so the faster we can drop those off, the better. Those who may be sick and don’t feel guilty about it are really approaching the sickness from a whole different platform than you are. Yet your platform is one that can help wipe out that suggestion to you for the rest of your life. So it may require some deep spiritual prayer, but it really is a great opportunity for spiritual growth.
spirituality.com host: Now we mentioned the word handle a number of times in the course of our conversation.
Lynn: Yes.
spirituality.com host: Could you just maybe explain a little bit what that means?
Lynn: Sure. That’s probably a word that we use more in Christian Science. It may be difficult to understand for somebody just coming into it. When I use the term handle, I guess what I mean is really looking at a problem and analyzing what needs to be dealt with; analyzing in the sense of, “Is it a belief of contagion, is it a belief of heredity?” and then applying the truth, or the spiritual facts to that false concept, that false belief. So I guess when we use the term handle, we’re saying we’re looking at it and we’re dealing with it; we’re metaphysical praying to see the spiritual truth of the situation. Does that help?
spirituality.com host: Oh, that’s very good. Thank you. We have another Texan. This is Anna, who says, “Please comment on the ways to think about chronic health problems, which are also media-focused. Rather than living with them and managing around them, how can someone be relieved of long-term health problems?”
Lynn: Well, I think that’s a good question, Anna, because we are dealing a lot with chronicity. It’s kind of what I brought out in the beginning of the program when my friend, who’s a nurse said, “Well, people live with this disease all the time,” very much as if the goal is to have a certain quality of life, whether or not you have a disease. And I think we have to destroy the false belief or the fear in consciousness, especially those who are dealing with chronic health problems—something that’s recurring constantly, and may have an acuteness to it—something that peaks occasionally, and then goes back into a dormancy for a while. We really are, again, learning not to manage it, but to destroy it. It’s a latent fear that kind of says, “Well, I have this disease, or this problem, but it only flares up once in a while, or it flares up generally and only releases itself once in a while, so I’m learning to manage it or to live with it.” That’s really not God’s will for anybody. God’s will is to have man healthy and normal and active and free of these false suggestions that bombard consciousness. And so when we’re dealing with health problems, whether they’re chronic, acute, or just for the moment, we’re really learning to destroy the false belief in thought—to wipe it out, with the understanding that you are right now the image and likeness of God. And that’s never changed and it never will.
spirituality.com host: We have another person, from Chicago this time, asking, “What can we do if we find ourselves suffering from the symptoms of a popular disease—something that’s being widely discussed in the media? What’s our first step in finding freedom?”
Lynn: Well, again, I think that first step goes back to this quote that you guys are going to wish I got off of some time ago, where Mrs. Eddy says, “Look away from the body into Truth and Love….” To me, that’s really a first step. There are two things there: we’re looking away from the material, and we’re looking into Truth and Love, which are other words for God. We’re looking into what God knows. Often, again, we go into the sense…are we into self-diagnosis, where the imagination just takes off with us sometimes? There’s a popular disease out there. It’s all over the news, it’s all over the newspapers, maybe we’ve got a few friends with it, and we’re hearing it constantly. If we feel that we’re suffering some of those same symptoms, then we want to take those symptoms one by one, and look at them and see the fallacy behind it. That it really doesn’t have any cause to it, because the cause is not from God. Man’s true substance is spiritual, so matter can’t create a malfunctioning effect in man, because all functions are governed by divine Mind, by God. That’s what man, or you, reflect. That there’s no law behind it. There couldn’t be a law to enforce it in any way, shape, or form. There’s just no presence to it.
And so I would look at each one of the symptoms that may be presenting themselves, and I would really go after them on the basis of what the true cause is, which is God; true substance, which is spiritual; true law, which is the law of God in your experience and in your thought.
spirituality.com host: That’s quite comprehensive. Thank you. Colleen in Florida says, “How can we know that we can fully rely on God without the use of healthcare?”
Lynn: That’s a question that’s individual, Colleen. Each person comes to a moment in their experience when they know they can rely on God. And it’s different for everybody. Some people were raised in Christian Science and everyone assumes, Well, it’s easy for them because they were raised in it. And others came into it, and they say, “Well, they actually chose it.” There really is never a difference. There’s a time in everybody’s experience where they really come to acknowledge God as the only power. And you work with that understanding with whatever confronts your consciousness. Full reliance on God is not like throwing the dice. It’s not a chance proposition. It really is taking forward and upward steps on a firm foundation. And as you build that foundation under yourself, you don’t have any fear that it’s going to crumble. You may have opportunities to face diseases or problems in your life or in your experience, but if you’re building on them spiritually, you’re making that foundation stronger.
spirituality.com host: Christy in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is asking a very complex question, and our time is a little bit short. But, generally, she’s talking about, “How do you deal with things that have requirements, such as immunizations to travel to other countries, or taking courses that teach about illnesses?” and things like that. Her question is a two-parter. One is, “How do you deal with those issues specifically?” And then, “If you don’t want to participate, how do you give the information to people in a nice way that you really don’t want to participate in these sort of things?” And I think that’s a pretty complicated question, but things like immunizations often do have a basis in fear of contagion and things like that, and I thought maybe we could at least address that part of it somewhat.
Lynn: Sure. Well, I think if you’re a Christian Scientist, Christy, we’re always law-abiding. So if there’s a requirement for a particular inoculation for travel or different things like that, we always want to be law-abiding.
We have different ways of going forth with this. I think I’d just leave it there. Is there something else you want me to hit on that? Of course, we have our Committees on Publication who help us with this—if you’re a Christian Scientist. I would recommend being in touch with them.
spirituality.com host: But I think, basically, it’s so individual, isn’t it?
Lynn: It is. It is individual. And again, we’re not saying what to do and what not to do in the sense of, “This is what you have to do if you’re a Christian Scientist.” Again, we’re law-abiding in that regard. I know, for instance, and this is a little off the topic, but for instance, in childbirth, some states allow midwifery, and some states don’t. If you were wanting to have a child at home, and your state did not allow midwifery, then you would go to a hospital to have the baby. Things like that. So those are, I think, best addressed with the Committee on Publication of each state.
spirituality.com host: That’s very helpful. And finally, this is from May in San Francisco. And I thought it might be a nice note to end on.
Lynn: Okay.
spirituality.com host: “What special calling does it take to be a practitioner? Please use yourself as an example.”
Lynn: Myself. Well, I’ll tell you what. I think it’s a deep love of Christian Science, an understanding of what it is and what it does. And it’s a strengthening of your relationship with God. Anybody who’s truly thinking about getting into the practice, to be Journal-listed, really already, I think, has the calling, because it’s a desire to help, it’s a desire to heal. It’s a desire to nurture others and strengthen mankind. And as we nurture that within ourselves, we find it just can’t be contained within ourselves. It has to grow.
In my case, I knew early on, in high school, that I wanted to be a Christian Science practitioner. I just could not get enough of this truth. I couldn’t get enough of this Science. And so, I went through class instruction to teach me how to heal others, which was the purpose of class. I was still, at that point, in college, and I didn’t want to finish college. But I recognized the need to have a college education, in that sense, for me. That was what I felt I needed to do. So I did finish college, and went into the practice right outside of college, and have been in it ever since. Never looked back—[I] absolutely love it. And I love it because I’m always able to be in touch with people who are spiritually searching. And sometimes that spiritual search, most of the time, is also my spiritual search. I’m growing, too. So I think that you know you have a calling if you’re thinking about it. And you know you have a calling if you have a desire to heal and to establish this Science on a worldwide basis.
spirituality.com host: That was a lovely answer, Lynn. And I wondered if you had any summary thoughts that you wanted to leave us with?
Lynn: Well, that’s a good question right there in itself. I think we’ve had some really good questions this last hour, and some deep, deep thinkers out there. I hope that each one who wrote in got a little bit of an answer, if not all of their answer. And really, I hope we can turn away from the constant feeling that we have to mentally purchase this selling of disease that’s going on out there. I hope we have a better sense that we truly can guard our thought; that we truly can determine what we accept into our thinking, and therefore into our experience. That this selling of disease is not something we have to purchase just because it seems to be mass-selling right now. We can stand up individually for ourselves and for our environment, for those around us, for the world—and really take a deeper stand, a stronger stand in governing our own thought.
spirituality.com host: Oh, that’s very helpful. And if you’d like to read some of Lynn’s articles that are on spirituality.com, just go to the search [window] on your screen and type her name, Lynn Jackson, into the box. When you click on the word Go, you’ll find a whole list of them—and they’re wonderful articles.
To hear this chat again, you can find the replay of the chat in the Event Archive section of the website later today, if we can, but certainly within a day or two. To access the chat, just click on “Explore past chat events” in the Event box. When it opens, you’ll see a list of the past chats we’ve had, and this one will be at the top. You can also get the chat as a podcast for your iPod or MP3 player. To find out how to subscribe to a podcast, visit the Event Podcast page in the Events section of the site.
Our next chat is scheduled for Tuesday, February 6, at 2:00 p.m. Eastern Time. We’ll be talking with Barbara Vining, a teacher and practitioner of Christian Science, about healing for every illness, even incurable disease.
Thank you so much for joining us, for these wonderful questions, and for your prayers.
Citations used in this chat
Science and Health
King James Bible