Close your eyes for a moment and try something Herb Fitch asks of his listeners at the very start of this class: lose the concept of a physical body. Not "manage" it. Not "heal" it. Lose it — because, he insists, the body you've spent your whole life defending, medicating, and fearing for was never the real one to begin with. Underneath it, he says, is a body that has been with you "for at least several million years," and you may only just be becoming acquainted with it.
That claim sounds like poetry until Fitch starts being specific about what this spiritual body actually is and does. It is not a metaphor for optimism or a nicer way of thinking about your health. It is, in his teaching, a literal identity — one that was never born, cannot be injured, and has no concept of sickness because sickness belongs entirely to a self it does not share.
Five Things Your Spiritual Body Already Is
Fitch lays out what he calls the basics of the spiritual body with unusual precision. It was never born — "you were born to a woman... but the spiritual body was never born to a woman, and it never gives birth." It has nothing to learn, because it was "placed in the spiritual universe at its full maturity." It will never die or be harmed, "no matter what anyone says about it." It has no color and no gender — "whether you're black or white or red or brown, you share the one spiritual body, just like you share the sunshine." And it is already, right now, the possession of every child of God, whether or not that person has ever noticed it:
"The spiritual body is the child of God, and it was placed in the kingdom of God by the father without birth, without growing, without age, without fear of death."
Sickness Is a Vestige of the Past, Not a Present Reality
This is the claim that gives the class its title, and Fitch does not soften it. He is not telling listeners to pray for healing or to trust that God will eventually fix a condition. He is teaching that from the standpoint of the spiritual body, illness has no standing at all — it is a leftover habit of thought, not a fact of existence:
"When I get sick, it's a lie. Divine life doesn't know what sickness is. It's a vestige of the past which I am involved in remembering, and yet it's not a reality. I'll shake this off. I'm not afraid of it."
Notice what Fitch is not saying here. He isn't claiming the human body never experiences symptoms, or that this teaching replaces medical care. He is locating the deeper identity — "I am not bound by human law, I am not bound by time, I'm not even bound by space" — and teaching that as awareness shifts into that identity, the grip of the old self, and the conditions that belong to it, begins to loosen on its own.
You Cannot Use the Spiritual Body for Personal Ambition
Fitch is careful to close off a tempting misreading of all this: that once you "have" a spiritual body, you can direct it toward whatever you personally want — more money, a fixed relationship, a solved problem. He rules this out flatly:
"I can't use my spiritual body for personal ambition. It won't do that. The spiritual body is not at my beck and call — it is provided for God, and unless I am following God's beckon call, I am not in my spiritual body at all."
The practical instruction that follows is disarmingly simple: "pay attention, be still, and let the divine will guide you." The spiritual body isn't accessed by strategy or willpower. It's uncovered by yielding — specifically, by an ongoing willingness to stop judging others by appearance, since Fitch teaches that every negative thought about another person is really "a sword pointed directly at me," reinforcing the very illusion of separateness that keeps the human self in charge.
Rebirth Has Nothing to Do With Age
Much of this class returns to the conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus — a religious elder, "a senior citizen," as Fitch points out, bewildered by the idea of being "born again." Fitch uses this to dismantle a common excuse for staying stuck: the belief that spiritual transformation is for the young, or requires decades of preparation.
"You may think, I don't have enough time, I'm so many years old, I've only got 10 years to go — how can I be reborn? ...God doesn't think so. It just never occurred to God that you couldn't be reborn into God's kingdom, regardless of your age."
Rebirth, in this teaching, is not a biological event but "a change of concept from concept to the reality of being" — recognizing that you are the child of God rather than the child of your parents, and that this identity has been true the entire time, with or without your awareness of it.
Miracles Are the Ordinary Behavior of the Christ You Already Are
In the class's closing movement, Fitch reframes what a "miracle" even is. Every act attributed to Jesus, he argues, was possible only because Jesus lived in his spiritual body — and that same capacity is not unique to him:
"Every miracle performed by the Christ Jesus occurred because he was in a spiritual body. Do you think that your spiritual body is a different body and will not perform those miracles? The moment you are in your spiritual body, every miracle performed by Jesus is in your repertoire of things that I can do."
What Fitch calls the practice, then, is not asking for miracles but releasing the "I" that already carries this nature — letting that "I" live, rather than the anxious, aging, self-defending human self. He is candid that this isn't instant: "there will be many dark nights of the soul as you live with the eye in spite of what appears, until eye establishes itself." But the destination he points to is unambiguous — a body, already yours, that "does not even know night from day," because for it, there was never a wound to heal in the first place.