The New Thought Simplified · 37 of 38

Eleventh Suggestive Lesson

My seeming trials and pains are not really against me. They are like the purifying fire which burns up the “wood, hay, and stubble,” leaving the real self unharmed and beautiful.

God never made illness, disorder, nor discord any more than he created sin. They are not normal nor in the highest sense natural. They are manmade perversions.

Insight

God never made illness, disorder, nor discord any more than he created sin. They are not normal nor in the highest sense natural. They are manmade perversions. This is one of the more theologically loaded paragraphs in the Suggestive Lessons, and it deserves the period flag clearly. The privation theory of evil that Wood is reaching for — that disorder is the absence of order rather than a positive creation — is Augustinian and Thomistic; it runs through serious Christian theology and has good philosophical credentials. What does not survive the move from theology to physiology is the implication that organic illness is therefore manmade perversion. Cancer cells follow the same biochemistry whether the patient has been spiritually disciplined or not; microbes infect the saint as readily as the sinner. Take the theological kernel about disorder-as-privation; leave the corollary about responsibility for organic disease.

Nothing can antagonize me. I have no impatient or rebellious spirit toward person, place, thing, or condition.

I disarm every seeming adversary and win it to my side by vibrating with and not against it.

Bitterness and penalty are linked to sin to turn me from it. They come to make me uncomfortable in the lower consciousness so that I may be pushed higher.

I do not like friction, and therefore look about to see if I may climb above it. Its friendly goading comes to drive my thoughts upward to harmony and life, and nothing less bitter would do the work.

My recognition of the real purpose of pain takes away its sting. To see it as an enemy intensifies my distress. To think anything is against one virtually makes it so, while love toward enemies of any kind transforms them. Even disease is really the friction caused by the surge of divine and recuperative forces to repair our mistakes. Resistance makes the process harder.

“But I say unto you that ye resist not him that is evil.”

Non-Resistance is a Divine Law.