Is My Body Telling Me This?

I HAD indigestion just before an important appointment. The thought of trying to participate in the meeting while feeling the physical discomfort wasn't a happy one.

An experience a friend had related to me, however, came to thought. Suffering from a headache while driving along a highway, she had pulled over to the side of the road. Praying quietly, she felt led to ask herself, ``Is my head telling me this?" She had learned in Christian Science that because of the allness of God, Spirit, matter is not the reality it seems to be. In fact, it cannot exist within Spirit's infinitude. When on this basis she decided that her head couldn't report to her how she was feelin g, she was healed. She drove on, free from all pain.

This idea prompted me to ask myself, ``Is my stomach telling me I have indigestion?" No, I realized; stomachs, like heads, can't talk! So what was doing the talking, telling me that I had indigestion? I glimpsed that it was what Paul, in the Bible, calls the carnal mind. The carnal mind is the supposititious mind apart from the infinite, divine Mind, God. In the opening book of the Bible, this ``talker" is represented as a serpent, persuading Eve to go against God's wishes and eat the fruit of ``the tree

of the knowledge of good and evil." When Eve and Adam accede to the serpent's wishes, misery ensues for both of them.

My current unhappy state too, I perceived, could only come from listening to the ``serpent" of materialism, trying to persuade me that evil and good mix and that man embodies this mixture. On the contrary, Christ Jesus proved the reality of all good and the consequent unreality of evil. He demonstrated that man's true nature in God's image is wholly spiritual.

The Master showed that there is only one true Mind. This infinite Mind is the only real source of thought. Then, the only true talker is the Christ, which communicates the ideas of this divine Mind to men. Jesus illustrated in his healing work that the Christ is always delivering messages of man's true spiritual nature and well-being--never suffering--to each one of us.

Despite the evidence of indigestion, I accepted the divine message of the unconditional, spiritual health of God's man as an accurate report. As I did so, the pain vanished. My appointment went smoothly without any physical discomfort. And my joy at this proof of Christ's healing power led to an opportunity to share some healing ideas with the individual I was meeting.

We can prove through prayer our God-established health. When we gain some understanding of the fact that a report of sickness seeming to come from the body is just the voice of the carnal mind--claiming to speak up in place of God--we can face such a situation with spiritual strength. This gives us a basis for protest against any evidence of sickness. As Mrs. Eddy, who discovered and founded Christian Science, explains in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures: ``When the body is supposed to say, `I am sick,' never plead guilty. Since matter cannot talk, it must be mortal mind which speaks; therefore meet the intimation with a protest."

Just as our bodies can't talk, so, ultimately, we see that the carnal mind can't talk either, because it has no genuine existence; God is the only Mind. Christ alone delivers true messages, which speak to us of man's spiritual identity as the offspring of God, Spirit. This true identity of each and every one of us is permanently painless, forever free of discomfort. Prayer empowers us to disprove any claim to the contrary!