"Precept must be upon precept, precept upon precept, line upon line, line upon line, here a little and there a little." Isaiah 28:10
"Precept must be upon precept, precept upon precept, line upon line, line upon line, here a little and there a little." Isaiah 28:10
I was feeling in such a fuddle! My hearing had gone in one ear, which left me with a constant whirling and low hum sound in my head; so when I was trying to get calm in thought and pray, I would just hear this sound even louder. Work was challenging, having lost a big commission; and worst of all I was doubting my ability to understand all I was learning in Christian Science, and was doubting my ability to heal. All in all I was feeling incredibly challenged and to me it felt like a really big problem.
I emailed my teacher to pour out the “woe is me” tale, and she emailed back suggesting it was time to have a chat the following evening at 9pm. I went to phone the next evening at nine but the line was busy. So while I was in my office I went onto the Association website. I clicked on ‘Fruitage’ and there near the top was a testimony I had sent in a few years before. It was a bit of an epic, but I felt compelled to read through this article, which covered over five years of situations we as a family had gone through.
As I read, I realised that in every situation we had been helped forward through constant prayer. In fact it made me so grateful for God’s grace, seeing how we had moved forward since that time. Then I phoned again and of course I got through. I explained all this to my teacher, and suddenly she said I needed to recognise that this is just false belief imposed on my thought. We talked for quite a while, and after the call the thought of something being imposed kept knocking. So I looked up “impose” in the dictionary.
Some of the meanings were:
To forcibly put a restriction in place
Exert firm control over something
Take advantage of someone by demanding their attention or commitment
The origin was the Latin word “imponere” meaning “to inflict, or deceive.” The word “impositus” meant “inflicted.”
I started to see why it was important to realise that this challenging belief had to be seen as an imposition. It was trying to restrict my spiritual movement. It was trying to take control of my thinking, trying to exert firm control over my thought, and it was definitely demanding my attention to the point of me doubting what I was studying each day.
Then I recalled a program I had heard on the radio about cuckoos. I love cuckoos, but there are some things they do that are an imposition on the birds around. In this radio program they tracked this one particular cuckoo which had come back to the same area every year to where the reed warblers lived. She was so in tune with them that she would a lay an egg that mimicked the warblers’ egg in their nest. When the cuckoo had hatched out of the egg, it would sit for a while gaining strength. Then while still blind, it would balance the remaining warbler eggs on its back and toss them out of the nest! That way the mother warbler would be committed to the cuckoo only.
I started to see an analogy between the cuckoo and our spiritual ‘thought nest.’ I realised bad, disappointed, discouraged, sad, or worried thoughts had nothing to do with my thinking. These ideas are inharmonious. They are thoughts imposed on me like a cuckoo’s egg being laid in my thought. They are thoughts that are trying to say they belong to me and are part of my make-up and thought process, but they are not. They are ‘cuckoo thoughts’ which error was laying and subtly disguising as my own. Then they were trying to consume my thought by pushing out all that was good and real.
As soon as I understood this, and could see that all the negative suggestions were no part of my thought, my ear was free. No more deafness or whirling – all clear! This ear thing had been going on for over a month, and now was no more.
The greatest thing I learnt form this was to recognise and stand porter at the door of thought to stop letting the imposter cuckoo thoughts in. The cuckoo thought is never our thought. It will suggest and try as hard as it can to mimic our own thought, but it is no part of our thinking. Mind is the beholder of our thoughts and no imposter can get in. As Mind knows all, we can recognise any ungodlike thinking and not allow it in. We are never vulnerable to imposters!