Barn House, June 7, 1996

This question of dissatisfaction, often apparent as food intake and being overweight, seems prevalent in the USA. The reverse of error is true, and it is the unsatisfactory nature of the dream of material existence that is being self-seen and so being prepared by Truth to give itself up.

It is your divinity that makes you dissatisfied with the external, because you are learning that your self-completeness is the established fact. And it is from this standpoint that, incidentally, objects that before were invisible become visible. (See S&H 264:13-15) Be so grateful that you are finding out how unacceptable is the dream!

Barn House, June 8

So good to hear from you. “Every function of the real man [thought] is governed by the divine Mind” (S&H 151:20). All there is to what appears as any limb, faculty, or organ is some aspect or idea of Mind and there is only one idea of each because each idea is infinite. There are no personal organs, and the error is not that something is wrong but the belief that, in some form, there is life in matter.

No discomfort pertains to man but always to mortal mind, for “Disease is an experience of so-called mortal mind” (S&H 493:20-21) and so is mirage and not fact.

January 1, 2004

The Lesson this week makes it clear that it is only material sense (an upside down point of view) that appears to cripple capacities, enfeeble limbs, and deface being. In fact there is no crippling, confinement, deterioration, or any other ill, because nothing can actually touch what Life is being. All these pictures are contained in the illusion or mesmerism that we call mortal mind, and this is no mind at all, nothing other than suggestion. They are false claims that have no existence, and the Mind that is ours is incapable of knowing or accepting these claims.

Don’t be diverted into looking at body, since mortal mind does not just control its body but constitutes it. In other words, all there is to body, either in belief or in Truth, is thinking. Therefore, our only concern is to watch what thinking is being embodied as ours, and in this way we “Take no thought for your life…” (Luke 12:22).

December 26, 2002

It was so good to have your call from home yesterday. I like S&H 108:30-32. This refers to mortal mind’s sense of body and not to your body. This mind’s sense of body is mortal mind, because its body, matter, is not separate from this so-called mind. Mortal mind alone says, ‘I can’t take it any more’, and this is just mortal mind talking about its sense of movement, sight, or anything else. This is all imitative, and the so-called body is as much mortal mind or mesmerism as the mind itself.

None of this dream experience, where a “theoretical mind” (S&H 295:25) talks to itself about itself, comes within an infinite distance of what you eternally are. Therefore it has not been said to anything outside of itself, and is not your concern. Beginning with Truth, you can say ‘I AM light, and in Me there is no darkness at all.’ (See John 8:12)

May 5, 2004

Belief says that your body is working several hours a day in that house. Science says that you live outside of material selfhood and are therefore not involved.

Please see S&H 416:16 only, and 417:16-18. The witness to be silenced is the belief of material selfhood, and not the particular thing that it thinks is the trouble. Hymn 49 is very appropriate!

July 21

Thank you for your very sweet letter. I am so very happy that ‘ces’t fini’! It has been a joy working with you. It is where we are mentally dwelling rather than what we are physically seen to be doing that is important. You have put this particular bit of matter out of the forefront and so are freer to enjoy the lens of Spirit, the third degree view of being in all its aspects. Then if this is the purpose, an experience such as this can only bless.

I have so enjoyed this week page 78:28-32: “Spirit blesses man, but man ‘cannot tell whence it cometh.’ By it the sick are healed, the sorrowing are comforted, and the sinning are reformed. These are the effects of one universal God, the invisible good dwelling in eternal Science.”

No Date

When you construct a church you may have to have scaffolding to prop it up whilst work is in progress. The scaffolding is not part of the structure, and is to be taken away as soon as possible since it only hides the true outline of the church.

In Science, man and church are synonymous, both meaning the structure, or embodiment, or body of God, and both referring to that divinity by which God is known. In daily life, it would seem that we need various bits of scaffolding to meet human needs, but these will take their proper place when we stay with what is true about structure, and recognise that anything temporary is to be removed as soon as practical.

Barn House, August 31, 1998

My teacher used to talk about putting a sieve over our thinking so that those thoughts which come from Mind are accepted and all others are rejected.

I can well understand the human saying, ‘It is very difficult to see this when the body is uncomfortable’ but this is the point: the mortal body is mortal mind’s upside down view of body and it will never feel totally right. Therefore, taking the standpoint of the one I, or Mind, we are able to recognise that any feeling or thought that does not stem from this one Mind is an imposition, however real it seems to the so-called mind that is feeling and thinking. It is not My thinking and feeling!

In this Lesson we have 267:5-7: “God is one. The allness of Deity is His oneness. Generically man is one, and specifically man means all men.” Because there is really only one source of all thinking, feeling, acting, it follows that Mind, your Mind, has always to be thinking and feeling in terms of allness, oneness, universality, indivisibility, eternity. There is not one bit having thoughts and feelings about other bits, but just one source or centre of all feeling and thinking, the divine Mind, not a mortal.

I, Mind, know and My knowing constitutes man. I, Mind, AM omnipresent, so My manifestation, or man, is as present as I AM, and is what I AM because I AM. There never has been another Mind, another capacity, another sort of life, substance, or mind.

Barn House, November 24, 1998

As you well know, everything consists of thought experience. There is no physique. As thought, you do not have a mind to think right or wrong thoughts, and so you do not have to get rid of wrong thoughts from any such mind. “God’s thoughts are perfect and eternal, are substance and Life” (S&H 286:21-22) and God as Mind is the only thinker. Man, as effect or thought, does not think, but consists of the thoughts that Mind, Love, is thinking. Man is the embodiment of these thoughts, of God’s thoughts about God, and so is in reality the body of God. Man does not have a body: he is the body, or embodiment, of God, good. This body is exempt from anything that does not emanate from the divine Mind, for man as thought is the emanation of this Mind.

The human mind, so-called, and the body or embodiment that this mind claims to have, is illusion (S&H 293:9-10). It is sheer mesmerism. To the one Mind, which is your only capacity to know, see, hear, feel, move, neither aspect of this lie is even known. Thus you never have to think in terms of improving your thought in order to improve your body, but rather to know that there is just one Mind that constitutes of itself all feeling, knowing, acting, and that is all that exists here and now.

“…have but one Mind, even God; for this Mind forms its own likeness” (S&H 216:32-1). In this Mind which is all, there is no ‘otherness’ to retain or eliminate. The infinite Love that “…is indeed adequate to unclasp the hold” (S&H 412:14-15) does not see or know that which would attempt to hold Spirit (Me) in the grasp of matter.

I love the bits in S&H 403:14-20 and in 301:5-9. The Bible says that “if a man think himself to be something, when he is nothing, he deceiveth himself” (Gal. 6:3). This means that it is only to a false sense of things that mortality is real, and in Science we find that neither this false sense nor the man it perceives is other than a state of self-deception. (See Peo. 5:23-24)

Always begin and stay with what is, namely the totality of good that has never been exposed to an alternative. This is the Science, or understanding, of being.

Barn House, December 6

We are never dealing with the phenomena. It is always mortal mind, illusion, that casts a shadow on man, calling it mankind, and says this or that is wrong. There is no such mind and no shadow. There isn’t man and mankind. Just man as Mind-manifest and untouched by the claim of a shadow.

It is mortal mind that says, ‘i am a physical body. i have this or that wrong with me, and i give my condition a cause, like age or circumstance. i would like to be better, but do not know how to be.’

The Christ says, ‘you, mortal mind, are a self-constituted fallacy; you cannot be better because there is no such thing as a better lie. Because I AM All, you have never had a place in My allness, and you have never touched or cast a shadow on what I AM. I dwell in light, and can see no darkness at all. I dwell in and as Myself, and a knowledge of aught beside Me is impossible.’ (See Ret. 61:12 and Un. 18-26)

Your co-existence with Love, your cause, is the co-existence of the divine Mind and its thoughts, and these cannot be invaded. You are not physical, you live outside the whole dreamer’s dream of life in matter. Love preserves what expresses Love, and this means the qualities of Love which are free and eternal.

September 7

We should always remember that when MBE speaks of the body conforming, it does not mean that knowing the truth actually does something to a material body in order that it then conforms to what we think is the normal. The only body is God’s infinite, universal embodiment of ideas, and this is perfect, omnipresent and harmonious. In the understanding of this only body and the unbroken, unfallen, harmony of being, the belief of a personal, material, localised body fades out and it is this fading out that constitutes healing. All there is to any material condition is belief, but “Mind, God, is the source and condition of all existence” (S&H 181:1-2). Boundless thought walks enraptured, and nothing else is walking or could.

To think in terms of improvement often leads to a plateau where there is just a half-way result. To think in terms of the disprovement of the whole material lie, lets the completeness of being come forth. There is no recovery; only discovery.

The fact is that like Lazarus, you never lived or did anything in material body, and so you do not bury it in the sepulcher of material thinking. The standpoint of the work is always “…thou art made whole…” (John 5:14). It is just the way you are, and that alone takes care of what you are not.

Barn House, April 13, 1997

My. 357:22-25 is the basis of the work. Only by accepting the testimony of the senses do we accept the illusion that there is something to deal with, and the consequent suggestion that there are alternate methods of dealing with it. I, Mind, have always known the only body to be constituted of My divine thoughts about Myself. I maintain this body as My thought, which never leaves My own conception of My allness. My thought has never lapsed from Me, nor changed its divine nature and essence. I have never known or been flesh—“A supposition that life, substance, and intelligence are in matter”, (S&H 586:17-18)—and I AM not made up of flesh, blood and bones. My body is made up of My thoughts of joy, purity, goodness, abundance, eternality. There is nothing outside of Me to change, heal, or be enlightened. The mirage of a separate mind and life is unknown to Me. I AM insensible to it. One means ONE. In the 10th Edition, MBE wrote “Mind always has its body with it, and this body is subject to what Mind knows about it.”

There is no human mind trying to make a better body and doing well or badly in the process. You are never a patient waiting for something to happen to you. You have always lived as the Christ, “…the real man and his relation to God…” (S&H 316:6-7) and you have never entertained a thought that was less than whole, satisfied, free.

Barn House, December 24, 1996

Thank you for your card. I will not help you with appetite, because this means starting with the problem and thereby building it up. In Science “…we begin with Mind” (S&H 467:30), and it is God that begins with God, not person. In this beginning, or only, there is just Soul enjoying its own satisfaction, replete in Love, and partaking of its own divine nature.

Begin aright! And rejoice in what is already true. Why take it the hard way?

Barn House, October 26, 1995

I shall look forward to talking with you when you return. I feel you should not be starting with what you humanly think you should or should not do, give up or not give up, etc. The human cannot rise above itself, because a fountain cannot rise above itself.

It is only by starting from a higher standpoint that we rise spontaneously. This higher standpoint is not human at all. A false sense of substance cannot improve. It can only fade out in the presence of the reality. This starting point is the divine Mind, or I. From everlasting to everlasting, I have never ceased to experience My own being. In this there is nothing to be changed or eliminated. I have always lived as My self-experience.

There has never been a finite I to be dealt with, seen through, enlightened. There is just Principle’s idea of I, and never a personal sense of I. The mortal has never been other than an allegory, a myth. Mortals, therefore, cannot demonstrate. See S&H 278:24-26 and 352:31-32.

There is no mortal anywhere doing right or wrong. There is just My eternal, flawless, satisfied Life now. A finite sense tries to deal with something outside of itself. The infinite is all-embracing, enjoying its own infinite experience and nature.

This suggestion has nothing to do with food. It is a matter of satisfaction, and satisfaction is a quality of Soul. I, Soul, the only Ego, am always satisfied, and man is My state of satisfaction, the satisfaction that I feel.

Barn House, October 5, 1995

I feel I might add something useful to my letter of yesterday. It seems from re-reading yours that the basic problem lies in the belief that, in some way, person can learn to live as Christ Science, person can demonstrate Truth, person can cling to Truth, person can feel Truth, etc. Yet, we know that “the natural man receiveth not the spirit of God” (1 Cor. 2:14) and that material sense can only report a mortal, material sense of things.

You say, ‘I know that there is no matter, but I do feel it’. This is wrong reasoning. Jesus did the work of proving that there is no matter not because he knew it, but because there is none. “Matter is a misstatement of Mind” (Mis. 174:2-3). So it is Mind misconceived.

There is one body, the graceful, flawless embodiment of God. When material body claims to speak, know that it is always suggestion, and not your body reporting its conditions. See S&H 210:25-28. All you have to watch is what is saying ‘I’. If it is the personal ego, do not give it a voice or a listener. If it is the I that is one with the Father, then it speaks with the power of the Word. “…have but one Mind [I], even God; for this Mind forms its own likeness” (S&H 216:32-1).

May 1

You do not have a body. You don’t have anything. Man, effect, is the experience of all that Mind, Love, is unfolding as Itself. There is no ‘my’ body, home, supply, happiness, activity, etc. It is all the Father’s, and “he [the Christ] shall take of Mine, and show it unto you” (John 16:15). The Father is just showing you all He is being and doing. What we call the material, is the spiritual seen imperfectly. We do not have better imperfection, just less!

Everything is. God’s kingdom is all there is and is. Problems do not pertain to man, just to mortal mind, the veil over all nations. We do not make statements of Truth to eradicate problems, for that would build them up. We state Truth because there is nothing else to state.

Only watch thought, that the ideas of the divine Mind occupy it, and leave their outlining to God. Yours is a new Life now and owes nothing to an old. The ideas of God are God’s embodiment or body, and they have life, substance, beauty, intelligence, joy, etc. to see and experience. These qualities are all that God is being. There is no other life. A mind that knows any evil to deny is human and not divine, and a human mind cannot heal itself. There is ONE Mind.

I shall look forward to good news about your vacation, and you are both much in thought.

Yew Arch, July 31

Fundamentally we get back to the simple fact that all that lives is consciousness: is Mind manifesting itself as man. Any other suggestion of living, of consciousness, of activity that is not this divine Mind, is mirage and so nothing. Your divinity is what Mind knows of you as Mind in self-expression, and it is the only way you live. You do not have a body, but you live as the embodiment or body of God, as the integration of all right ideas. In the 10th Edition, MBE wrote, “Mind always has its body with it, and this body is always subject to what Mind knows about it.” She also wrote, “I am the body which God cherishes as His own immaculate self.”

The moment we enter the mirage-world of persons, inter-relationships, things, we deny our present divinity. Actually we don’t do this; for it is fictitious mortal mind’s own belief that it could be separate from God that constitutes its own experience of this separation. And you are neither belief nor believer.

November 17, 2002

At the risk of repeating myself may I say that we are never starting from the standpoint of having a problem to meet in Science. To do this would be to accept the report of material sense that a material body has something to do with you. Starting with a problem and then trying to heal it in Science is rightly defined as mental quackery. We are not in the problem solving business but in the problem preclusion business. Specifically, we would not be trying to heal the malfunctioning of a faculty, but are resting in the fact that the only thing to be healed is the belief that some faculty is material.

The statement in Mis. 201:3-6 is most important because it warns us not to allow the qualities of Spirit to be conditional upon any material factor, good or bad. Progress is the dropping off of human shackles, which were never attached to you in the first place.

If scientific being begins with One, then where has the belief of another or second come from? Being is already full of the One as all presence, power and knowledge, and there has never been an opportunity for anything else to enter being, or indeed, for you to be aware of anything else.

Just stay with what you are, and that will take care of what you seem to material sense to be but are not. It is this false sense of being, and not just its contents, that Science precludes.

October 22, 2002

Please understand that when some diseased condition presents itself it is never your material body reporting to you its state, but always an impersonal, unlocated and substanceless suggestion or belief about the one, infinite, universal body, the divine em-bodi-ment, which we are. The belief about body is mind-less, and so, having no mind or ego, it has no way in which to embody itself as experience. The material body, and all you have been educated to believe is your personal experience and identity, has nothing whatsoever to do with you. It is always a lie about you: a misconception, or misstatement, about what you eternally are. You cannot treat a misstatement, but the scientific statement of being, or man, which is Mind’s statement of being already made, preempts the possibility of either a belief or a believer in any material identity.

Only by giving identity to error by holding it as our or somebody else’s personal problem do we perpetuate the lie, whereas to understand its impersonal nature is to give belief the opportunity to fade out in your presence, thus revealing the one man or body of God. It is never a matter of a person suffering from a problem, but always an impersonal suggestion disguising itself as a problem. S&H 114:2-3 and margin. It goes without saying that the capacity to know and prove all this is not that of a human mind enlightened by Truth, but Truth itself.

All belief in a medium for a misconception, whether called eyes, ears, muscles, etc., remains without a cause. Man, for example, does not see. Mind aware of itself constitutes true vision, in which the medium, or blindness of belief, is dispensed with.

You may wish to study S&H 416:16 only; 261:21-24; 321:16-18; 188:15-17; 395:21-23.

August 21, 2003

Just to remind you that in Retrospection it says, “…every spot and blemish on the disk of consciousness…” (Ret. 94:14-15)—there never was any. The removal of a shadow leaves no shadow behind.

January 11, 2005

Thank you for your letter. With regard to the matter you mention I think the fourth erroneous postulate (S&H 91:32) will be helpful. The prime error is the belief that man is mental and material, which leads to the belief that our thinking is responsible for our experience. But it continues by showing that the belief also includes the suggestion that man has a body and therefore something upon which his thinking can have an influence. The fact is that man does not have a body, because man is the body or embodiment of God, good. The only body, therefore, is what the divine Mind is knowing about itself, and the whole suggestion that there is another mind forming another sort of body is a complete lie. A mortal sense of body is just a mortal mind thought, or fiction, with no location or identity until we put a personal pronoun in front of it and make it ‘our’ experience. We then give it an identity and history, even though it remains nothing but a composite suggestion or lie.

I have been thinking very much lately about Truth asserting itself in a way that cannot be resisted. We are taught to think that someone appeals to the truth for help with a problem and that sometimes the medium for this is a practitioner. The fact is that the whole initiative is with Truth itself, which is sweeping down the centuries and enlightening human consciousness just as the morning dawn sheds light upon the landscape. The human is not a partner, and what appears as a human asking for help is really the self-assertion of Truth itself, already whole and complete. It is not the person appealing to Truth, but it is Truth, Spirit, enforcing its own conditions. Therefore, in a sense, the moment there is an appeal is also the moment when healing is present, because Truth is wholeness and does not have to be invoked.

Barn House, January 28, 1996

All material forms are just mortal mind’s upside down view of the spiritual forms which MBE once defined as “the will of God made manifest”.

Any suggestion that there is a physical body needing sustaining, satisfying, resting, entertaining, is false, because the illusion called a mortal (S&H 293:9-10) does not have a material body or a human mind. It is mirage. We do not condemn or abuse the human corporeality, but let it fade out in its demands through the recognition that the I is Soul, always satisfied, complete, full, happy, because of itself and for no other reason. To condemn it is to build up an error. To treat it with the disdain it deserves dissolves it.

There is no material substance, just a material weighty sense of substance. And whose sense is that? Not yours, for your sense is Soul, God.

Barn House, February 6, 1996

Again, thank you for your card. Please never hesitate to call. You never bother me and this is why I am here.

I feel the need to get right out of the arena where we try to apply Truth to something. Everything is consciousness, and the consciousness of Truth does not include a sense of error, even as something to be healed.

If our enjoyment of the allness of Truth (and this is what CS work is all about) happens to throw up some picture that denies what we are saying and feeling, then we pause long enough to reject it and see the spiritual fact in its place, but that is all. The statement of the allness of Truth necessarily carries the inversion, which is the nothingness of error. “I am the substance of all” (S&H 253:7-8) has, in its inverse statement of the same fact, “i, mortal mind, am not substance.” And when mortal mind speaks the truth in this way it dissolves. You do not have a body, or teeth, or anything material. You are the body, embodiment, or consciousness, of Mind, God. Mind knowing, Soul feeling, Life living, Love loving, etc. constitute your conscious experience.

Consciousness is not about something: it is everything. I am not conscious of abundance or beauty, but the abundance and beauty that characterise My consciousness, constitute abundant and beautiful man.

Beauty, outline, form, colour are all facets of divine consciousness, which is man. You cannot fight error with error: that is, a belief of a problem is not the consciousness that can fight and overcome the problem. It is the consciousness of what already is divinely fair and satisfying that precludes an opposite to itself. Self-abnegation includes laying down the belief that you have to do God’s work of proving His allness.

Barn House, May 12, 1997

Now you are back I look forward to talking with you.

S&H 246:20-25. Mind maintains because Mind constitutes its own sense of itself, and this is the embodiment or body of Mind, and is pure thought and nothing else. This body is not maintained through diet or exercise because God’s thoughts about God are all there is to it.

There is no private body because no private mind, and so no mind to be depressed or discouraged; no mind to undervalue itself; no mind to manifest itself as fear or hate, or dissatisfaction. The underlying culprit is the belief of life in matter, and this belief is held by a wholly fictitious mortal mind only. Science is here to destroy the basic error, and not to tinker with its phenomena. See S&H 178:18-22 and margin.

Fir Tree Cottage, March 22

I think it is helpful to remind yourself of My. 241:19 through 242:14. This makes clear your basis.

It is from the standpoint of the fact that you are the light of the world that the phantoms of error flee in your presence. You will read about this in S&H 215:12-14 and 19-21. Never think they are your phantoms, however much they claim to be so.

All medical tests are made about mortal mind’s misconceptions about you as a mortal. They are not helpful, because they do not refer to you in the first place and tempt you to identify with that misconception in the second. We are not treating a physical problem ever, but always letting false supposition dissolve in the presence of the Word of God stating I AM All.

The whole thing is your present inviolate nature that is totally outside the belief and dream of material existence. You do not merely ignore the human but you see that because the human is just a limited concept of that which is actually divine, the more you stay with your present divinity the less what others see as your humanity can obscure the truth.

Barn House, May 22, 1997

Man does not have a material body, or have any sort of body. God, as Spirit, has to be incorporeal, that is, without physical body. God is manifest as thoughts, ideas, and these constitute the embodiment or body of Mind which you are. You live as this body, temple, ‘shrine celestial’ of God, good. You live as that which has never been confined in time or space, for Mind is non-local and Life is indivisible and universal. The temple of the living God is what infinite Mind knows about itself, and this I AM is the only body there is.

Mortal mind’s misconception of the infinite One is divided into bodies personal and many, and then this so-called mind asks you to come down to and treat this misconception for what it says is wrong with it—when all there is to it is shadow! I have never been in it. It is always “A vacant domicile” (S&H 478: margin note).

The Mind that was all there was to Christ Jesus never came down to the mortal picture, for it saw instead the perfect man: the son who liveth, the daughter that was made whole, the life that was not vulnerable to matter. This Mind was the infinite that recognised no disease, because this infinite is made up of infinite Love and its divine nature. (See Un. 7:8-12)

You can’t alter what is being, because God, good, is being it. Being is. Man is God-being. All else is just the misconception of mortal mind which comes to you to lay itself down on the altar of your divine Science. There is no other place for error to go to give itself up. Be kind to it and let it go, rather than work hard about it and thereby keep it!

July 8

After your call I just kept thinking of a line from Hymn 23, “Fill us today with all thou art”. Also the prayer, “Give us this day our daily bread, feed the famished affections” (S&H 17:4-5). The Father’s bread is the truth that sustains. It is the sweetness of Life itself. It leaves no deficiency, no imbalance, no fear or shortage. It is never threatened, for there is just this one satisfying Life for Father and Son, so complete, invulnerable, whole.

Jesus referred to this in his talk with the woman at the well, when he said that the water he would give would mean that there would be no need to hunger or thirst again. This water is the well-spring of inspiration within, which never ceases to satisfy, and needs nothing from outside for its evidence and completeness. It is your well-spring.

October 28

Do not worry yourself too much about the insulin because we are not working from the standpoint of a material body. As we see our identity, or I, is not in material form, so we find ourselves free from the so-called laws that apply to this form. We ‘renew the body only by transforming the mind’—that is, as our thinking rests on and proceeds from the divine Mind, so this takes care of the body. But we do not start with a body that weighs more or less each week! We do not retain a false identity and try to lose its conditions, for they go together as a package deal. But, in finding what we spiritually are we cannot help transforming the human situation, for that is a package deal also.

Just keep this happy sense that Life is God, and this divine Life is doing all the living there is and is living you in every detail of experience. S&H 119:27-6 gives an idea of the fundamentally new standpoint that is taken.

No Date

Don’t hit the wrong problem! You quote S&H 388:31, “If mortals think that food disturbs…” So the basic error is identity as a mortal and not with what that mortal finds disturbing. What is a mortal? See S&H 478:24-26 and 250:24-25. How can you expect to patch up a dream? If you hold yourself as a mortal you are obeying physiology. If you know that all there is to you is the functioning presence of God, and that you have no life or mind separate from the One, then that is Science. Start with what I AM. The first definition of God is “the great I AM”, and the first description is “incorporeal”—that is, without physical body.

Mortal finite sense craves for something outside itself to satisfy its longings, and then condemns itself for trying to do this. In both cases the error is the acceptance of a mortal self. Concentrating on what you are not, inevitably leads to giving the mortal a sense of importance that it does not deserve. Love yourself as God-being. Divine Love is not puffed up.

It is a false sense that ‘expands to its own despair.’ (See S&H 252:28-29) Let thought stay with the beauty of holiness. All is thought and that is why the model before thought is important, as we see on page 248:3-29. Start and stay with what you are and not with what you are not. A false belief is both tempter and tempted.

No Date

Thank you for your letter and call. The starting point is your present divinity. That is all that is true about you, with Love constituting all functions and capacities. This is not so because a mortal is working hard about something, but because it is true. There is not a divinity and a humanity. The divine embraces the human as light embraces darkness, revealing only light and never knowing dark.

You do not condemn anything in your humanity as it appears to be, but you recognise that your divinity is all that is true. Thus you do not condemn eating, but you recognise that the only thing taking place is “Christ, Truth, gives mortals [so it seems] temporary food and clothing until the material is transformed with the ideal, disappears, and man is fed and clothed spiritually” (S&H 442:22-25). Christ does not actually feed and clothe mortals, but the spiritual nourishment of the famished affections, the bread that cometh down from heaven, is all that is true about what is called having a meal. The meal is not your divinity in itself, but is the divinity of your experience appearing in “the highest type of divinity, which a fleshly form could express in that age” (S&H 332:29-30)—state of thought. If you condemn the highest appreciation, you leave a vacuum and there is no feeding at all. If you recognise that all that ever takes place in any detail of your experience is the divine, you will neither condemn eating nor over-eat.

But you have to love what you are for what you are, and that love takes care of what seems to be the highest right. MBE says clearly that to stop eating and sleeping is not scientific. Rest is the spiritual fact, and it appears in an appreciable way either as sleeping or as no tiredness. Nourishment is spiritual, and it appears in the most natural way. The moment you have divinity and humanity, you make two of yourself, and that is torment!

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