Ideal Suggestion Through Mental Photography · 17 of 34

IX. “I Will Fear No Evil.”

The highest and purest human perception is that which sees no evil and understands that all things, real entities (for subjective conditions are of our own making), are made by Good in good and for good. This is selfevident, for the manifestation of God must be universal, else how could He be omnipresent. Subjective thought and experience is the only lens through which evil can be beheld. “Thou that art of purer eyes than to behold evil.” Only finite and unfolding beings need the educational and corrective discipline called evil, which is the “growing pains” of good. Soul must have an experience in matter.

The roots of illness have their rise in conscious or unconscious fear. Fear is a recoil from the view of mental false images. Their reality is conferred by consciousness. Mental impressions of disease, death, and hell, are pictures of non-entities, except as we make them real, to us. In building our thoughtworld we should leave out negative material. Our real world is our thoughtworld and not the “things” that are about us. Those words of Jesus, so often repeated and emphasized, Fear not, are deeply significant. They are religious, and also scientific, “I will fear no evil.”

Insight

The roots of illness have their rise in conscious or unconscious fear is the strong form of Wood’s stress-and-disease claim, and the paragraph deserves both halves of a careful reading. The kernel: chronic fear states do measurably affect immune function, cardiovascular health, and disease susceptibility — and the 1893 medical literature was not yet equipped to track this. Hans Selye’s 1936 stress-response framework and the late-twentieth-century psychoneuroimmunology research confirm Wood’s broad direction on this point. The overreach: organic pathology has many other roots (genetic, microbial, environmental) that no amount of fearless thought reaches. The fear-not refrain from Jesus that Wood cites is doing pastoral and physiological work simultaneously; both are valid; neither is the whole picture.