A genuine spiritual healing of the physical body will always produce spiritual results. That is, it will produce an inner change in the character of the person healed. But when this happens it means that some kind of wrong thinking or wrong feeling is the real cause of his physical sickness. For instance, thoughts of bitterness, resentment, criticism, and condemnation strongly held and long sustained against other persons can and very often do easily produce liver trouble. So long as that kind of thinking and feeling continues, so long will the liver trouble continue. The proper way to heal it, therefore, is to get at the psychological seat of the trouble--that is, effect an inner change. Where spiritual healing treatment influences a man to give up the wrong thinking, so that it leaves him utterly, the physical effects of the change may show themselves suddenly and miraculously or slowly and gradually. Although they show themselves as a cure of a physical malady, note that it first began as a mental malady or as an emotional malady. And if the inner change is an enduring one, the following cure will be an enduring one too. This is the only type of healing which can truly be called spiritual. All other kinds of so-called spiritual healing are merely mental healing or hypnotic healing, and the cure can never be equal in quality or durability. Quite often, they have only temporary results and the sickness reappears because the inner man has been left with all his psychological neuroses uncured. Mental healing and hypnotic healing are not, strictly speaking, healing at all. They are suppression of symptoms, and at the cost of retention of the hidden causes of these symptoms.
-- Notebooks Category 10: Healing of the Self > Chapter 5 : The Healing Power of The Overself > # 4
