A person’s physical health is often the causal effect of one’s spiritual health. This intimate relationship between mind and body is not earth-shaking news. Holistic medicine and healing practices treat this principle seriously. It can be summed up by the ancient phrase “As above, so below.” However, maintaining a healthy body goes beyond having a healthy attitude and cultivating positive thoughts. It ultimately involves sincere spiritual love.
Jesus’ commandments to “love God” and “love the neighbor” are more than religious dogma or heavenly arm-twisting. They represent a Divine understanding of brain science, anatomy, even physics. Salvation is not something that takes place apart from science.
What is not yet understood is that humans are recipient organic forms and vessels designed to receive life from the Lord God of heaven. The life force that flows into men and women from God (top-down causation) is from His Divine Love. However, in consequence of the fact that humans are born with hereditary traits of selfish love, and from this principle acquire actual inclinations toward evil, the human organism, brain and mind are all oriented against the inflowing life and influence from heaven.
From selfish and worldly loves, various evils and untruths cling to the human mind and its life, whereby a hardening results that affects a person’s health all the way down to the corporeal level of existence. So non-compliance and resistance to heavenly order begins the hardening process of one’s spirit, which sets the stage for a similar condition to develop (below) in the body.
One of the major maladies of modern life is the hardening of the arteries. In this condition plaque collects along an artery’s walls making it both less pliable and diminishes its ability to promote proper blood flow. Falsities and selfish intentions cling to our mind just as types of plaque adhere to the walls of our arteries and even the inner and outer membranes of our neurons (brain cells).
God’s love and truth acts as a solvent for cleaning up our spirit’s inner circulation. Why is God’s influence a solvent? Because when heavenly truth and order conflicts with our personal beliefs and behavior (like love of self, contempt for others, self-glory, hatred and revenge) a battle ensues. If God’s truth wins, and breaks down false principles, a man or women’s organic disposition becomes more yielding and compliant with heaven’s influence. This battle is sensed in our lives as various temptations, which are necessary for God to dispose our living structures into obedience. This is the only way spiritual love can be conjoined to our biological selves.
Selfish love hardens. God’s mercy softens.
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