Day 228: Mental Malpractice

451:8-453:5

All mental malpractice arises from ignorance or malice aforethought. It is the injurious action of one mortal mind controlling another from wrong motives, and it is practised either with a mistaken or a wicked purpose.

Show your student that mental malpractice tends to blast moral sense, health, and the human life. Instruct him how to bar the door of his thought against this seeming power,--a task not difficult, when one understands that evil has in reality no power.

2010

Day 228: Human Will & Mental Malpractice

451:8-453:5

These two ideas are easy to understand and diffuse on their own but in this reading, somewhere, MBE, ties them together. At least that’s the thought that I came away with.

Every Christian Scientist, every conscientious teacher of the Science of Mind-healing, knows that human will is not Christian Science, and he must recognize this in order to defend himself from the influence of human will. He feels morally obligated to open the eyes of his students that they may perceive the nature and methods of error of every sort, especially any subtle degree of evil, deceived and deceiving. All mental malpractice arises from ignorance or malice aforethought. It is the injurious action of one mortal mind controlling another from wrong motives, and it is practised either with a mistaken or a wicked purpose.

Day 219: The Trail (day 2)

432:9-434:7

I’m more focused on the trail today. I read it and thought how literal it was in that diseased Mortal Man is treated as a criminal – as though the disease is the natural reaction to fit the (usually) unknown crime.

I also stopped to consider the jury of Mortal Minds. While this is an allegory in the book, it is a very real phenomenon in the material world. It is very hard to silence our own thoughts at times, so I could only imagine the dire circumstances someone would feel if the jury of public opinion termed on him. Or worse, a situation leading to mental malpractice.

Day 190: A Simple Demonstration

375:6-376:32

I’ve been listening for angel messages. I heard this quote this morning in Church:

We must begin, however, with the more simple demonstrations of control, and the sooner we begin the better. (429:4)

The idea of a simple demonstration as a place to begin caught me. The simple demonstration I know I need to make is my own negative mental arguments inside my head. They are worse than pointless.

It is simple because no one else is involved and my body is not an obstacle to the demonstration. And when Mary Baker Eddy mentioned hourly and daily, this mental argument is what comes to mind. So I was pleasantly surprise when what I marked in the reading continued this line of thought:

No person is benefited by yielding his mentality to any mental despotism or malpractice. All unscientific mental practice is erroneous and powerless, and should be understood and so rendered fruitless.

And then how this idea applies physically:

The diseases deemed dangerous sometimes come from the most hidden, undefined, and insidious beliefs.

Then a simple idea:

…there is more life and immortality in one good motive and act…

Then instruction on the solution:

Therefore the efficient remedy is to destroy the patient’s false belief by both silently and audibly arguing the true facts in regard to harmonious being, – representing man as healthy instead of diseased, and showing that is it impossible for matter to suffer, to feel pain or heat, to be thirsty or sick.