The
Still
Waters
    
Where Does Evil Go?    
       
April 2009

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     "Now it happened as He went to Jerusalem that He passed through the midst of Samaria and Galilee. Then as He entered a certain village, there met Him ten men who were lepers, who stood afar off. And they lifted up their voices and said, "Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!" So when He saw them, He said to them, "Go, show yourselves to the priests." And so it was that as they went, they were cleansed. And one of them, when he saw that he was healed, returned, and with a loud voice glorified God, and fell down on his face at His feet, giving Him thanks. And he was a Samaritan. So Jesus answered and said, "Were there not ten cleansed? But where are the nine? Were there not any found who returned to give glory to God except this foreigner?" And He said to him, "Arise, go your way. Your faith has made you well." (Luke 17: 11-19, New King James Bible).




     In the above, biblical account of the ten lepers who were healed of leprosy, only one came back to acknowledge the power by which he was physically healed, or made whole again. He didn't know where the condition called leprosy went when it left his material body; but this historical individual knew that something miraculous to his human perception of things had met with the spiritually-active mentality of Jesus.

     And how did the Master respond to this new realization of the healed individual? Jesus pronounced, "Arise, go your way, Your faith has made you well."

     Isn't it odd that Jesus didn't say, 'I have made you well?' Instead of claiming any power of his own, Jesus told the man the spiritual truth of the healing—the truth that the leper's own belief in the spiritual power of God expressed by and through Jesus was the real agent of change in the physical body, from a diseased condition to the condition back to wholeness and health.

     So, here's a question: if the diseased condition called leprosy was a real condition, upheld by material laws of cause and effect, how could anyone's thought have anything to do with the banishment of such a condition? And here's another question: where did the evil manifestation of leprosy go when it vanished from the leper's body? I mean, if it was a real thing, it had to go somewhere.

     This, of course, begs the larger question: When the forms that evil takes in our human experience leave us, where does the evil (disease, poverty, hate, aggression) go when these things leave our experience?

     I believe that there is a simple, real answer: Evil, (the seeming lack of any God-ordained good, such as lack of health, lack of abundance, lack of peace, joy and love) goes into the spiritual nothingness of never-was.

     God is infinite Spirit, and the invisible-to-the-physical-senses universe of Spirit exists in ever-lastingness, with no loss of spiritual substance or spiritual perfection. Leprosy never existed in God's creation. Although it took a material form in the flesh, it never existed as a condition of our spiritual substance. Its only hold on humanity was the collective belief in such a diseased condition, or lack-of-wholeness condition. Christ Jesus reversed this belief in consciousness by knowing the truth of spiritual being; and the unreal, diseased appearance dissolved in the presence of the activity of mental discernment—mentally SEEING the real, spiritual condition, right where a material falsity appeared to be actual, but was not.

     This is why Jesus taught, "And you shall know the truth; and the truth shall make you free." (John 8:32, New King James Bible). Knowing and realizing the truth of spiritual being frees us from all the falsities produced by our acceptance of the material-worldy beliefs, which manifest only in physical forms rather than spiritual being.

     What determines our human experience is where we place our beliefs. When we turn to the divine Mind within to reveal truth to us, we hear a much higher Truth than material beliefs present to us.

     Worldly beliefs, or material mindedness, come from the physical sense of existence, which bases the reality of our identity upon material substance and laws of matter—of cause and effect being physical. All power is then perceived to be materially based. The term, 'human' is that state of mind which may believe in some spiritual reality and divine power (somewhere) but by far it embraces a more material sense of power and law as reality. That's why, in the activity of spiritual healing, it takes a spiritually enlightened individual to reverse the process of unhealthy flesh back to healthy flesh.

     Humanity tends to dismiss spiritual law as having any relevance in the human experience. The universe of Spirit seems irrelevant when held in obeyance to material, rather than spiritual, law. Thus, this conscious level of thought (which embraces both the spiritual and material sense as united in reality) this dualism, is what is meant by the term, 'human'. The collective consciousness is drawn into a conflict between physical and spiritual reality; when in fact, there is only One reality, and that One is spiritual in both substance and law.

     So, evil doesn't go anywhere when it leaves our human experience. Since there is no such thing as evil in the Kingdom of God (God's spiritual universe) there is, and never really was, such a thing as evil on any level of existence. But on this human level of thought, our false, material beliefs mentally accept good and evil 'power' as belonging to everything in existence. Thus, we experience evil materially because our shared beliefs produce the forms we collectively believe in, and these forms multiply throughout our world. They seem to latch on to us by appearing on or in our body form and daily experiences.

     Yet, despite all belief in material law, despite all collective beliefs in leprosy during the time of Jesus, the lepers were healed; and their conditions of leprosy vanished from within and without their individual, material body forms. The substance of their human bodies transformed back to wholeness. The evil they had lived with and resigned themselves to suffering, (believing that physical law and power were behind their shared plight) suddenly went into nothingness, just as soon as the truth in a higher power, governing a higher reality, called the attention of human consciousness.

     Due to the spiritually mental perception of Jesus, which cast out the belief in any power outside of God, Spirit, the Master's higher perception took over in the human scene. Perceiving the ever-lasting wholeness of all God's creation and creatures, the divine Law which Jesus recognized took over and corrected what was manifesting into the material forms of the lepers, at that time.

     But a spiritual Seer doesn't stay with somebody else forever. Once Jesus left him, the leper who came back to give thanks to God's power over the diseased condition would, no doubt, slip back into another acceptance of cause and effect in matter, and a new disease condition, or discordant situation, would again manifest in form, as he went on with his human sense of life. Yet, the erroneous condition called leprosy would never make a re-appearance for the one who came back, nor the other nine. What Jesus knew of the spiritual Truth for the lepers had proven to them that they were not lepers, and this erroneous belief had been cast out of human consciousness for all ten of them. Thus, it could not return, unless they turned their thoughts to the belief in leprosy again.

     None of the ten, except for maybe the one who came back, would know that human consciousness had anything to do with their years of suffering. The healing, itself, would sustain their faith in their wholeness for awhile. The had come to Jesus, declaring they were sick, and he showed them they were not. That was enough to dramatically change their lives. It is easy to see how the other nine were so filled with the joy of their healing that they didn't care what had healed them. Only one wanted to know.

     I've always wondered if the returning one would have stayed with Jesus, following him to learn more of what the Master was preaching to the masses. Would this one ever see the larger picture? Would he have, one day, realized that no one could really BE a leper…that as children of God, Spirit, they couldn't be sick in the second place, because they weren't really children of the flesh in the first place? They belonged to infinite Spirit. They were God's own. God never left them to any other powers or laws.

     Would the one who came back ever see how the healing process actually worked? Would he finally see that, since there is no such thing as 'spiritual evil' in God's creation, that this shared falsity was abolished by the spiritual knowledge of an enlightened one, called Jesus? Would he find out what Jesus knew—that the light of ever-lasting wholeness and life in God, applies to all God's spiritual children; and it is this recognition of spiritual law, ever-present and operating, which results in the transformation of matter back to the wholeness and normalcy of the human body form?

     Maybe the faithful leper wouldn't have discovered such metaphysical realizations during his time on earth. But after two thousand years since that occurrence, the rest of us have had time to learn a few things. Many are realizing that one individual, Jesus, who was armed with the spiritual truth of all real being, was all that was required for the dissolution and disappearance of any and all evil forms that disease takes.

     Yet, Jesus also discerned the faith that was present in the human consciousness of the one leper who came back to acknowledge the spiritual power which had healed him. The one with faith beyond matter came back, because he actually did realize something important; he had recognized the invisible power of God behind the healing (change) in the flesh, and in that day, faith outside of the physical realm was something rare.

     It seems logical to me that the healing of this faithful one would have been more complete than that of the other nine, carrying him into making changes in his life. He had a part in his own healing because his own consciousness had risen beyond materiality, at least this one time. And once material law was seen as powerless to him (in the realization of God's omnipotence) and the manifestation of leprosy had disappeared into the nothingness of its reality, in this same manner, new discords coming his way would disappear into the same nothingness—if he was able to perceive the truth of spiritual, rather than physical being, and mentally hang on to it.

     If you doubt my assessment of this healing of the ten lepers, and how important it is that at least one believer be present to heal in a spiritual manner, consider this biblical account, when the disciples of Jesus were having trouble healing an epileptic child: "Then the disciples came to Jesus privately and said, "Why could we not cast it out?" So Jesus said to them, "Because of your unbelief; for assuredly, I say to you, if you have faith as a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you." (Matthew 17: 19, 20).

     On another occasion, Christ Jesus went back to his own home town, a place where no spiritual healing occurred for anyone, because the people there rejected his teachings. The biblical account tells of the town's people who said, "Is not this the carpenter's son? is not his mother called Mary? and his brethren, James, and Joses, and Simon, and Judas? And his sisters, are they not all with us? Whence then hath this man all these things? And they were offended in him. But Jesus said unto them, A prophet is not without honour, save in his own country, and in his own house. And he did not many mighty works there because of their unbelief." (Matthew 13: 55-58).

     In telling the healed leper that his own faith had been involved in the healing, or possibly the permanence of his healing, Jesus demonstrated the fact that all of us can spiritually heal, just as soon as we learn the truth of spiritual existence. He taught his disciples to heal, and spiritual healing existed in the world for a few hundred years, before the churches and worldly beliefs in medical-only healing began to outlaw it by clinging to what is collectively believed to be physical laws and material 'knowledge'.

     Here are Jesus' words about all the healing work he did during his time here: "Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father." (John 14:12).

     Jesus came to this human experience to show those of us still chained by material beliefs that the Kingdom of God is still with us, although invisible to the physical senses. In proof of this invisible kingdom being ever-present to govern us, Jesus drew upon the spiritual, rather than material so-called 'laws' of being, when healing the sick, injured, dying, deaf, dumb and blind, never turning to one physical 'law' or remedy for help. He was the Master healer.

     Christ Jesus attempted to prove to us that, just as our kingdom is not of this world, our identities are not of this world. Our higher selves still live within the kingdom of God, and this Kingdom of God still lives within our spiritual perception of it. To use a classical illustration, we're like Dorothy in the land of Oz: we don't have to go home; we already are Home. All we have to do is awaken to it.

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