In her Liverpool 1965 Seminar, Margaret Laird talks about a “healthful ordeal.”
I pondered this idea: How can an ordeal be healthful? Or how can anything healthful be an ordeal?
The dictionary defines “ordeal” as a severe trial or experience. Historically, an accused criminal was put through a dangerous or painful test — an ordeal — to determine guilt or innocence. From the concept view, is an experience an ordeal — painful, difficult or unbearable? Also from the concept view, is an experience exciting, happy, comfortable and satisfying?
At times it takes the return or stubborn persistence of a problem, until it looks like a real ordeal, to get my attention. Finally, I am forced to look beyond the seeming, with a willingness to just leave the look alone and start acknowledging the one source. The cause of all Being, all there is, is consciousness — Mind conscious of Itself. With that awareness, the picture of an awful ordeal is dropped, and the energy on a belief is let go, allowing whatever picture is present to just go it’s way.
Now, standing in this space where nothing exists but Consciousness, sourcing the divine presence — complete, whole, perfect — the only Self that I am is the fact, alone with my own being. I go on, acknowledging the fact that only Health is present, and that the view, or “ordeal,” is just a sign of my Health coming to view.
My language world identifies this fact. The picture may, or may not, look like an ordeal (believed good or bad), but all that is present is Health, perfection, WHOLENESS.
The ordeal can indeed be Healthful! — everything which exists conceptually, relatively, exists divinely, absolutely. The concept is an evaluation of Reality, which is always present.
