Two weeks ago, I came into my office one morning and a large spider web had appeared over night between the legs of a table I have sitting in front of my window.
I wiped the web away and proceeded with my day.
The next morning, I came into my office, and another large web spanned the same two legs of that table.
I swiped it away with a cloth and proceeded with my day.
As I sat at my desk, though, looking at the clean legs of that table, I realized the mesh was going to appear again the next day if I didn’t remove the critter that weaved the construct in the first place. Webs don’t appear by themselves! I reminded myself.
So, I hunted down the eight-legged creature responsible for the web and shooed him out the door.
Ta da!
There have been no more webs since then.
Then I pondered the relevance of this lesson to spiritual healing.
As a metaphor, I decided the web was like symptoms on the body, and the spider was the mortal mind belief producing the symptoms on the body. If one focuses only on removing symptoms, either with a medicine, a surgery, or through human will power, there may be temporary relief, but the problem recurs until the underlying error in thought has been destroyed.
I remember a time when our daughter was around 4 years old. One day, she was complaining about pain in her legs. I prayed with her. No relief. When I tucked her in at night, we talked some more about healing the pain, and she mentioned something about riding a horse recently. I quizzed her some more, and she said that her legs hurt because they got stretched too wide straddling the horse she had ridden.
I suddenly saw that in her mind, her legs hurt because of straddling the horse, and until we removed that belief from her thought, she was holding a justification for suffering in her mind, and the pain would continue until that belief was removed.
So I targeted the “spider”—or belief—at work behind the scenes causing the outward suffering. We talked about how riding that horse was fun and no harm could come from it, even if our legs got stretched different than normal. She happily agreed, quickly fell asleep, and that was the end of the pain.
So, the moral of the story is, if you don’t want anymore webs of error woven in a particular area of your life, eliminate the critter behind the scenes weaving the maze in the first place. It’s a lot easier that way because you don’t have to keep repeating your work.
Nice! But what if you’re not clear on what the ‘critter’ is that’s spinning the web?
That’s a great analogy. I’m always clearing the cobwebs and not removing the spider. But the previous post has a good point. What if you can’t find the spider? Or what if you’ve found it, but can’t get it out the door! Or worse yet, you think you’ve removed the spider, but the web still keeps coming back.
Removing the spider is not as easy as it may seem, i guess.
I know of two ways to “get the spider.” One is to see it, as described above. The other is to flush it out.
In agriculture, when wanting to rid an orchard of pests, an orchardist fills the space surrounding the trees with pesticide. The permeating presence of the pesticide eliminates all pests, hiding or not hiding.
In metaphysics, the pest is any error belief. The pesticide that annihilates these error beliefs is Truth. Truth is death to error. So, in line with the agriculture metaphor, as your mental space is filled with the omnipresence of Truth, any pest in that space will be killed, hidden or not.
Excellent! I love that analogy.
Earlier I prayed to God to show me His words [in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy], in simpler words I could understand. Then came the opportunity to be connected to this Blogs of yours, Evan. I have been and still am working on my healing with a CS practitioner and there’s a lot I have learned along the way. Just recently as I had been reading many of your blogs I was certain of what the ‘critter’ is which though I wasn’t sure it was it at the very start, I was already sure of it a few days ago. And now I came across this blog of yours. Thanks much again for the great ideas you shared on how to flush out the so-called critter. I heard it from my ‘supporter’ but as is said practice makes perfect. Reading this blog and some others encourages me more and makes me feel the enjoyment of the learning which frankly speaking, it was so vague for me.