A: First of all, you must understand that there are no degrees of Truth. Truth is absolute. God is absolute. God is absolute Truth; God is absolute Being; God is infinite, eternal, immortal, omnipresent perfection. God is all. Therefore, the all-ness in the infinity and completeness and perfection of God being established, any measure less than that experienced by the patient represents the conditioned state of consciousness, which makes it impossible to bring through or realize the completeness of the activity of God.
Here you have two factors: the consciousness of the practitioner and the consciousness of the patient. Let us assume that the consciousness of the practitioner is far higher and deeper than that of the patient, and so the patient comes to the practitioner with a conditioned state of consciousness in which it is not possible for him to open his consciousness completely to the fullness of the activity of God. It may be that there is so much attachment to the body and to the sense of personal health that the patient does not completely let go and thus receive the full benefit of the infinite completeness and perfection of the activity of God as individual consciousness. Although the practitioner may be an instrument for a complete and perfect healing, the conditioned consciousness of the patient does not always allow this to come through.
On the other hand, the practitioner may not be up to the experience of the miracle of complete healing. To be in the highest state of consciousness, the practitioner has reached that elevation of spiritual awareness in which no effort is ever made to contact God for the purpose of healing. He is abiding in the consciousness of God as individual being, hence in the realization that the individual is already at the standpoint of immortality and eternality, that state of being to which nothing can be added.
The practitioner who is trying to use Truth over error, who is contacting God for the purpose of establishing harmony, or who is still in the third dimension of life, in which body is something separate and apart from spiritual consciousness, will make the mistake of being concerned with health as against disease, or will permit himself to be concerned with what appears to be something less than perfection in the visible scene.
For perfect healing, the practitioner must abide in the consciousness of God as the infinite All, which means abiding in the fourth dimension of life, in which no recognition is given to the pairs of opposites—good and evil, rich and poor, moral and immoral, immortal and mortal. In this fourth dimensional consciousness, or Christ-consciousness, the practitioner is never aware of someone or something to be healed or corrected but is always aware of the Omnipresence of God’s Being.
When the practitioner is able to abide in Christ-consciousness and have always “that mind which was also in Christ Jesus,” then the fullness of God’s Being freely flows, and regardless of whether it is an acute illness or a chronic one, or whether the illness is at the point of surgery, the practitioner can bring to conscious realization and demonstration the complete healing or unfoldment of divine harmony. When the practitioner’s consciousness is at all conditioned, then the healing can only come through in proportion to the degree of conditioning of the practitioner’s consciousness. In order to complete the experience of instantaneous or complete healing, the patient also must approach this work without the conditioned thought of believing that the power of God can bring one through illness, even though not able to perform the entire unfoldment of harmony without the aid of surgery. At least, the patient should be able to relax with no preconceived thought or opinion as to what will take place and let the divine consciousness of the practitioner have full sway.
You can readily see that the main responsibility rests with the practitioner. When the practitioner truly rises above the pairs of opposites to that state of consciousness in which all sense of both health and disease are absent, and when any phase of the human picture does not bring a reaction which has behind it the desire to heal, correct, save, renew or regenerate, then in that spiritually illumined state of consciousness, the practitioner will bring through greater works.
As you approach that state of non-reaction to the world of appearances whereby you do not react happily to the good appearances, and certainly do not react fearfully or doubtfully to the evil appearances, you will do far greater healing works, and will be able to impart to those who come to you a greater confidence in the great Truth that God IS, which means that harmony IS, perfection IS, reality IS—and, in spite of all appearances to the contrary, good alone IS.
1 This excerpt is from The Heart of Mysticism, Volume 2, The 1955 Infinite Way Letters, in the March Letter titled “Protection.” It is posted with kind permission from Acropolis Books and the Estate of Joel S. Goldsmith, which holds the copyright on the books.