From – The Art of Spiritual Healing
By Joel Goldsmith
What About This Body? – Part 1 of 4
Chapter 9
The principles of spiritual healing have been explained in the foregoing chapters, but an explanation does not heal. Even though you have gained some understanding of these principles, in order for them to be made practical and workable, and for you to develop a healing consciousness, they must be removed from the realm of generalities, from a mere intellectual exercise, and brought to bear on specific problems, whether financial, moral, mental, or physical.
One problem which is uppermost in the lives of a great many people is that of health, that of an ailing or aging body. Even those who are at the moment experiencing physical well-being are puzzled by the relationship of what they see as a material body to the spiritual scheme of things. What about this body? How does it fit into a spiritual universe? Is this material body the Word made flesh? Is it the material body or only the spiritual body which is resurrected? Does the material body manifest God?
Do not be too startled when I say to you that there is only one body: There is not a material body and a spiritual body. There is only one. Here, as in every aspect of life, the principle of oneness applies.
True, we entertain amaterial concept of body, and it is that concept of body which gets all twisted up and involves us in all manner ills, but the body has no power to cause trouble; the body has no power to be good or bad, sick or well: It is our conceptwhich appears as a sick or well body.
When your concept is a material sense of body, you open yourself to all the sins and diseases to which the body may be subject. The moment, however, that you drop that concept and realize that there are not two or three or four kinds of bodies, but that there is only one body, and that body is the temple of the living God, God-governed, God-maintained, and subject only to the laws of God, you bring this very body under God’s grace. If you believe that your body is material, you are limiting yourself; but if you feel, “Well, as I see it, I certainly have a material sense of it,” I can understand that and agree with you because everybody to some degree entertains a material sense of body.
Jesus carried a material sense of body with him right up to the Ascension. Even after the Crucifixion when he walked the earth, he still had the marks of the nails and the sword in his side, showing that even at that advanced stage of spiritual unfoldment he was entertaining in some measure a material sense of body, although far less than any other person of whom there is any knowledge. It was only at the Ascension that he rose, not above the physical body, not above a material body, but above a material sense of body. Then what became of his wounds and blood? They were not there: He had become pure white essence, so white in essence that he ascended out of sight.
When you can arrive at an understanding that even though you are entertaining a material sense of body you are not a material body, gradually the material sense of body will dissolve in the realization that there is no power in effect, no power in the body, no power in the organs and functions of the body, no power in germs, no power in food. “All power is given unto me.”
Then you are not well because your heart is well: Your heart is well because you exist. You do not walk because your legs are harmonious: Your legs walk because you are harmonious. In physical health, you are only healthy because your body is healthy; but spiritually when you are whole, your wholeness governs the activity of your body. Therefore, your body does not govern your health; it is your health that governs your body. It is you who govern your body through the realization of your true identity, and that realization becomes the health of all those who turn to you.
End part 1
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