Ideal Suggestion Through Mental Photography · 32 of 34

XXIV. I Am Healed

As the building is complete in the mind of the architect before it appears outwardly, so the divine innermost is already perfect, waiting for me to bring it into the external. I am well, because the spiritual is the real, even if it be not yet outwardly manifest. How shall I actualize the inward ideal? By thought-concentration upon it, and by identifying the conscious ego with it. I am spirit, not matter. I am whole, despite outer appearances. The real ego being perfect, I am potentially sound in mind and body. The spirit of wholeness is in contact with every fibre and tissue of my organism. In God’s strength I affirm that my (naming seemingly diseased parts or members) are already well, strong, and beautiful. The spiritual body of correspondence is divinely complete, and that is the I. I bolt the door of thought against every mental picture of imperfection and disorder. I hold only the perfect, and affirm nothing less. I also claim entire supremacy over intellect and memory. I will forget the evil and remember the good. I am whole, mentally and physically.

Insight

The architect’s image is one of Wood’s better compressions — the building complete in the mind of the architect before it appears outwardly. The Platonist tradition uses the same image: in Timaeus 28-29 the Demiurge fashions the cosmos by looking to an eternal pattern, and Plotinus extends this so that every form has its prior in the Nous. Wood is applying this to the body as the building and the spiritual ideal as the architect’s drawing. The pastoral practice is real and gentle: hold the picture of wholeness, not the picture of pathology, in the foreground of attention. The stronger claim — that the spiritual body of correspondence is divinely complete and what diseased members are alleged to be is therefore unreal — is where the 1893 metaphysics outruns the modern reader’s good sense. Take the contemplative anchor; leave the denial-of-symptoms.