The Sabian Path

Part Six: "Health & Spirituality"

A brief condensation of a chapter, "Healing, Spirituality," from "The Sabian Way" by Jonas R. Mather. The text is pure Marc Edmund Jones, compiled from various primary sources.


Healing is the constant element in all growth whether physical or spiritual . . . Healing thus is far more than the an elimination of symptoms and is certainly more than a diminution of suffering. It is true aliveness. Let us here define healing as a process of adjustment or a technique of self-orientation in the continual development of a need for man to make and receive contributions from his immediate situations on the various planes of being. . . . Thus all healing is an effort to endow a sufferer with the point of view adequate to permit his full opportunity for making proper choices and gaining life anew. There can be no real understanding of spiritual healing as such without some basic grasp of self at root. Healing brings about the necessary recognition of self by encouraging perspective in the self and making it possible for the self to act in relationship to the reality that otherwise denies it. . . . An amputated hand cannot be restored literally, but it can in subjective fact by an adaptation of skills. Illness must be seen at all times as inherent, not in reality but in reality's perspective.

Healing is never genuine when its seeks any root result other than a change in perception and consequently in attitude or inner perspective. We are dealing with wholes, not with parts. Everything remains whole and complete in and of itself. A part is a complete whole, in its own integrity. The basis of healing is a reconciliation in terms of the whole. So the basis of healing fundamentally is the matter of reconciliation with the self. The work in pure consciousness is the healing ministry, where mind functions in an overall perspective of eternal potentiality. Proper work in consciousness is particularly a soul agony of effort and not just a lazy relaxation into the spirit of Let-George-do-it, George being the godhead.

The word God is an element for the participant other than self in the religious experience. The attitude towards God which maintains an element of experience is assimilated to God as the presence of God. Individual or personal experience of God is possible whenever the soul has reached out of itself to the cosmic universality and so momentarily transcends its immediate limitation of being. God cannot extricate Himself from the world, and nothing is intellectually more naive than the notion than spirituality is personal extrication or achieving more of God by being less of what God must be and doing less than what God must do, or flowing fully and constantly into all of the least as well as the greater aspects of the whole.

God is what He is because He does not derive from an anterior reality and does not depend on future certainty and is not in any way either limited or defined by spatial consideration. Man when he is taken in the image of God is at once removed from time and space in exactly the same manner. When man acts in God's nature, it is possible for God to participate in His own, and when man seriously stirs to awareness of the immortal flame within, he is creating God in a practical sense through the endless process in which every aspect of divinity is brought to center through self. A true spiritual work grows out of a cooperation of one self with as many others as possible in a continuousness of mutual and personal furthering of spontaneous creativity in every possible field. No individual ever achieved his salvation alone because it is only as two or three are gathered together in some group entity that a greater dimension of reality and existence is possible.


Copyright © 1993 by Jonas R. Mather
All Rights Reserved


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