Barn House, 4th March 1999

When MBE says that it is the “correct view of man [that] healed the sick” (S&H 477:3-4) she is showing that there is no such thing as sickness, sorrow, lack, fear, decline, etc., for all these pertain to the incorrect view which is mortal mind, illusion, or mirage. You do not try to correct the distortions that you see in the early morning landscape, because they are factors of the mist and not of the landscape. They are mirage. They do not exist. In the light, the correct view, the landscape is seen as it always is. Mortal mind is a finite sense of the infinite; it is ignorance, a misstatement of what is. So it is not a power, it is not substance, it is not truth and has no identity. It is nothing. You cannot heal it: you let it dissolve in the light of Truth present as ideas in your consciousness. There is no question of a mortal having correct thoughts about God. God’s thoughts about God, about Himself, constitute all that is true of you or me. There are no mortal thoughts because there is really no mortal mind.

Man’s individuality in Science really means his indivisibility from the source of all Life, Love, Truth, for God and man are not two entities but two aspects of one Being. We read that God and man are correlated, coexistent, coeternal. This is like the singer and the song. Who can say where one stops and the other begins? God and man live as a duet sung with one voice.

There is no pain, sorrow, lack, fear, either as cause or effect. They are the experience of the human or mortal mind—a dream experience which has never touched you. See S&H 250:22-25.

Th September 2004

Whatever claim seems to come up we should always remember that there is only one infinite universe, in which everything is exactly right. The correct view of this universe is that which we obtain from and as the divine Mind beholding its own self and calling what it sees the perfect man. The limited, personal view of the same infinite universe presents it as finite, fragmentary, and localised, and therefore subject to every sort of discord. But the discord is in the limited view and not in what is being viewed. It is therefore nothing.

We waste time trying to tinker with the features of the wrong view when they do not exist. There is just one capacity, one consciousness, one substance,—all of which are infinite, and therefore not subject to duplication or alternative.

St March 2002

What we call human movement is just the mechanism of the human mind, and it is subordinate to the divine Mind. This is the only Mind there is and that you are. You are Mind to this picture (which is but a mental suggestion and nothing to do with you) and speak with the authority of Mind and as Mind. If the human mind is all that feels pain, as we read, then it is the belief that you could possibly have such a mind, rather than what it claims to feel, that we dismiss. It cannot speak to you. No medical verdict is other than a human opinion and our Mind contains no such thing. Love supports, Love abides, and Love constitutes, all that you are.

You do not have a body. Man is the embodiment, the temple, the body of God. You are that “shrine celestial.”

Th March 2003

The fact is the unbroken harmony of being, and I am delighted about the progress that is being made. A repetition of error does not make it more real. Mrs. Eddy once said, “A million noughts [or breakages] does not make a number.” Just a bit of scaffolding. S&H 502:7 reminds us that all the mortal deviations do not touch the straight line of Spirit.

Th April 2003

In Science everything comes from above. It is the pure water of the river of Life proceeding from the mouth of God. Only in belief do thought and experience come from beneath, and this offers no basis from which to advance. The perfection and completeness of being known from the standpoint of divine Mind is our only concern. Mind is as unaware of its incidental effect upon the human scene as the sun is when it dawns on the mist. The Lesson speaks about “…divine, efficacious Love, unfolding man’s unity with God…” (S&H 475:5). This unity is the eternal presence and oneness of Principle and idea, and this unfolding is all that is actually going on. What we call healing is a factor of Truth, and not of a change in the human scene.

Th April 2004

Many thanks for your call. Do not be taken in by the names Adam gives to something, even if it is in Latin! “The God of the whole earth shall he be called” (Isa. 54:5) That name is I AM.

These references are worth pondering from S&H 188:3-4; 250:22-25; 71:1-4, 14-17; 491:21-23 and margin.

Nd January 1983

I have been interested in S&H 351:5-7. We cannot be planted as a mortal and then invoke Truth. We have to be planted in Christ—in our blending with God that gives man dominion. This is the only radical reliance on Truth.

In our Lesson we have just read that “Day” is the spiritual idea of God. This is the same as man. Man lives as Day. He lives as noontide glory. Just as the eternal day of the sun, by being itself, causes darkness to flee and the dawn to make its inevitable progress, so you, as divine idea, cause what you are not to fall away like scales from the eyes. But the Day knows no morning or evening. You know only what God is knowing. Your only job is to have the Mind of Christ—and it is not even your job, since you have and are it. To try and express and understand God will be frustrating. Man is the understanding and expression of God, and this fact dissolves what is not true wherever it is.

No Date

It was good to hear from you and I trust all ways are now open in California. I AM where I AM. Belief, not Mind, says I am blocked off.

I have been so interested this week in S&H 199:9-12. The belief is that there is a human demand, called prayer, for a divine supply called healing. But this is not so, since the human is a term, not an entity. What is actually going on always is that the divine is demanding the opportunity to show forth its infinite everpresent supply. So demand and supply are one. This is why “Truth, Life and Love are the only legitimate and eternal demands upon man…” (S&H 184:12-13), and they are enforced by that irresistible law of Love that insists on all good. So we see the initiative to be always with Truth. The human never calls forth Truth, but Truth calls forth the opportunity to demonstrate itself.

So we leave the mortal basis of a person wondering if there is enough understanding to demonstrate Truth: there never is! And instead we take the standpoint of I, Spirit, and let this only Life dispel the belief in another, thus appearing to have an effect on the human mind and body (S&H 316:7-11). Since “The mortality of man is a myth…” (S&H 545:32-1) we cannot waste time tinkering with it.

In this year’s Association I am going to show a bit of paper perforated with holes. They will see how a light on one side appears as lots of rays coming out through the holes on the other side. Now in theology, we are taught that each ray is a soul and body on its own. Then, our first sense of CS shows us that the substance, life and intelligence of all is not in the effect, or ray, but in the original, or light; but, we keep the sense of many. But then we see what Divine Science is really saying, and this takes away the paper. Then we see that Life is light.

Barn House, 21 September 1999

Rud. 11:13-15 is interesting. Health, of course, means wholeness in every aspect of experience. We may start our work by denying the reality of some error, but in that sense it is a palliative to the human and not a healing activity. To work about a human situation is to give it credence. But the unconsciousness of anything but Love is the way in which Truth is so poured in with flood-tides of Love that there is no place for the human concept anywhere. The so-called healing is simply the passing away, the fading out, of a wrong viewpoint which contains in itself every problem.

Matter and Spirit are points of view. One is the correct view, which heals the sick because it only sees its own loveliness. The other is a so-called deflected view; and it is this view, or sense, that is corrected in Science, not the things that are seen from that false standpoint.

No Date

It is worth asking, how do I know when the work is done? Is it when the human picture conforms to what I humanly think it should be? Or, is it when I understand that there never was a human, limited sense of the one picture which is always divine?

One Mind means one man, which means one home because the infinite is one. The word in is obsolete, because man is not in a home but includes the idea home as a constituent part of that which the divine Mind is knowing about itself. (See S&H 588:22-23)

When some personal or world belief appears to come to a head (e.g., the economy, market forces, or even something in one’s own character) never think it is I, but see it is always some phase of mortal mind that has been prepared by impulsion of Truth to give itself up, come to the surface, and so dissolve in our Christ presence.

You are that Christ presence.

Th August 1985

Why should we think that good is the miracle? Good is nature-all because it expresses God’s nature, and this is the only law of nature that prevails. All else is a denial of law and has to be rendered invalid. Do continue the work to annul the belief that this condition belongs to your area or climate.

No Date

It is indeed a step forward to leave the realm of mortals thinking good or bad thoughts, and to recognise that the material picture is just an inversion. Also, that mortal mind, or mesmerism, does not cause a bad effect but constitutes it. Also, that the one Being seen through a glass darkly appears dark.

But the break-through is when we accept that both what is seen through a glass darkly and that which sees this way are the same mesmerism. It is not our cloudy perception. Our Mind is God, and can never be anything else. In the presence of this all-knowing, all-seeing Mind, the belief and the believer pass off as no part of our being. Otherwise, we have merely translated the physical into the mental and have seen what the margin calls ‘mental and physical oneness’, but we have not accepted the spiritual oneness of Principle and idea which is our being, and which knows nothing else but itself.

No Date

This Lesson has the verse “…I shall be innocent from the great transgression” (Ps. 19:13). The little transgressions are the things that mortals do wrong. The great transgression is the belief they are mortal.

No Date

I like the verse “Great peace have they which love thy law; and nothing shall offend them” (Ps. 119:165). You see, that when we see nothing but His law in operation, it leaves nothing over to offend or shock. We read that “Truth removes properly whatever is offensive” and it does so because Truth, which is the sum total of everything that is, contains nothing offensive. The only thing that could be offensive to God is the belief of something apart from Him, and this is impossible.

Th April 1983

…sometimes we let the ‘you’ (see this word in the Glossary) do the thing that most puts it out of thought and then we get on with what the ‘I’ is being. It is sometimes worse to identify with ‘you’ through overmuch praying about it and trying to make it a good, loyal CS, than to get it out of the way for a bit. Nothing stops what you are knowing. Nothing stops what we see, and we let the vision grow as fast as practical. The point is that nothing can alienate you from the “…sweet sense and presence of Life and Truth” (see S&H 303:32-1)—Life’s own sweet sense of its own being, for this is your sense of being and there is just the one sense for God and man. There is just this one Life, one Mind, one Being, one nature for God and man, cause and effect.

No good is but the good God bestows, and “human thought never projected the least portion of true being” (S&H 126:8). So this experience is not an alternative to divine Life. There is only divine Life, divine Love, divine precision, divine care and maintenance present, and this divinity is appearing despite the belief that you are surrounded by humanity!

You are a law to yourself, and you are alone with your own being: and there is no other law or mind to see you or touch you. You are hid with Christ in God.

Th August

The problem is not that you have had an accident, but mortal mind’s suggestion that accidents are known to God. In the first instance, it would appear as your problem. But in the second, it is just mesmerism. This is why “Disease is an experience of so-called mortal mind” (S&H 493:20-21). It is not and cannot be your experience. Mind does not know a problem either as cause or effect, and so there is no admission and no penalty. “I restore that which I took not away” (Ps. 69:4). You have no personal, private life separate from infinite all-constituting Life to experience anything other than God.

It is not that you seem to be supported by crutches, but the belief that matter can support man! There is no physical organisation to support the belief of life in matter.

Barn House, 30th January 1996

S&H 428:19-21. To cure matter takes time. To try and cure matter with Mind is mental quackery. To offset a mental misconception takes as long as changed thought, and this is Science.

There is no mind to hold a painful belief; no mind to think that a material law has been broken; no mind to pronounce verdicts and opinions; no mind to suffer consequences of that which was never cause. The only culprit is mortal mind trying to masquerade as your thought, and it can’t. Watch thought: not body. There is nothing wrong with either. But never weigh the human in the scale with the divine for that destroys the basis of Science. Be joyful. Jesus could do this when he saw Lazarus dead. So can you. You rejoice in what is true.

Barn House, 21 January 1996

“These things have I spoken unto you, that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full” (John 15:11). This is because “the sinless joy…” is all there is to man and no other sense of anything can remove from you that which you are. S&H 76:22. Nothing can close your eyes to the allness and presence of good. The sanctuary of Spirit shuts out error, but it is always open to Truth. See S&H 15:3-6 and Mis. 277:23-26.

You will readily agree that good is not in evil, but do you recognise that the belief of life in material form is the same thing and is evil? S&H 76:6-10. You are here to lessen this whole belief that anything true was ever in the supposition of life in matter. The human mind is all that feels pain, we read, and do you have such a thing? I am Spirit. Man, whose capacity to sense belongs to Me, is spiritual (252:32). I cannot experience a shade of gloom.

No Date

As always, you begin with God. We know no more of man as God’s image and likeness than we know of God. So to find out anything about man, you look at that aspect of God. To love yourself means to love God. Just take the synonyms and ponder how each is expressed, and then declare that every one of the qualities that characterise God characterises man also, for God and man are one—one Life, one Mind, one substance, one Truth. All that God is being, man is being. Don’t reason from person. You can’t. Loving God is being man, for man is the love of Love. Man is the understanding of God—God’s understanding of Himself. Loving and understanding God, you are being man in His likeness.

Barn House, 21st December 1995

Thank you for your letter following the visit to the dentist. You are correct in saying there is no compromise, but this is not because you are in a position of having to choose between alternatives. It is because there are no human, material laws, and what we call these laws is never other than “the echo of Spirit”—a misinterpretation of that which is actually always divine. See S&H 126:9. There is only one infinite, and anything claiming to be an alternative is a supposition, a finite concept of the infinite, and so without mind, substance, identity, law, process, location, or power.

We pour in Truth through flood-tides of Love. We flood out error, but do not fight or oppose it. Do remind yourself of S&H 127:4-8. Man is the truth of Truth. Man is the knowledge or understanding of God—God’s understanding of Himself. Knowing God is being man. You have nothing to do with man, for reflection cannot see reflection. Reflection is what Mind knows of itself. So in knowing Mind you are being reflection. In knowing the purity of Mind, you are being pure man. In knowing the contentment of Soul, you are being contented man. In knowing the peace of Love, you are being peaceful man, or manifestation.

Th January

I am happy to work with you. I should say though, that as a registered CS practitioner, I do use the Bible and the CS writings as my Textbooks and refer to them.

The point in our work is that we do not remove problems from person, but we do dissolve the personal sense of life which contains all problems. I like Ps. 81:6 in this respect. The basic error is the belief that we have a separate, mortal (dead) life of our own, separate from the one Life. Each age unfolds its own conditions, and today we see this whole picture of bits of life going off at a tangent in orbits of their own, and rebelling against Principle, coming to a head. This does not mean that there is something wrong with your thinking, but it does mean that we should be so aware of the one divine Mind as our only consciousness that the mental pollen of the world cannot enter the atmosphere of our thinking.

We see too that evil is never mind (even with a small m), but is just mirage. This thing has no more substance than a shadow cast on a wall. It is without identity, location, cause, law, process, beginning or reason, and it does not touch the wall. It is a phase of mortal material belief, a picture in mortal mind, and it is not your belief and not your mind. Mortal mind is the fictitious dreamer and the experiences and people and things of material existence constitute its dream; but you are neither dream nor dreamer, and you live outside the whole thing.

Your starting point is that your actual Life is God, and is spelt with a capital L. You are not a mortal invoking the aid of the divine Mind, but you live your divinity here and now and know that no material picture or condition can ever attach itself to you. You are exempt from it all. It has no validity, and you antedate the whole story.

“My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36) means that you do not try to apply ‘My’ kingdom to that of this world, but recognise that the divine Life living itself constitutes your whole experience, and there never was any other life or experience. There is nothing to put right: just what IS right. Watch thought: not body.

Rd November

I was delighted to hear about the progress of your friend. And why not?! Infinite, irresistible Love always appears in the form and language that we can appreciate. Never think it is not the provision of Love because human sense calls it by some familiar name.

You are the practice, and I know this divine activity has to go on unfolding as your whole experience.

No Date

I was so interested in your news. You are the practice. You give off God as a flower gives off perfume without effort or option. Your sole job is keeping the conscious oneness with your divine source. See My. 160:5-8. You are not in the realm of personal inter-relationships. There is no person calling for or giving help. That is all the dream. There is just I, dwelling in the realm of My own being, seeing, experiencing, enjoying My own glorious self constituting all.

S&H 114:1-6 shows there is no mankind or even humanity. All that is true is divinity. All else is, as a later margin says, just imperfect terminology. This ties in with S&H 513:26-6 and 554:5. No mortals. We cannot tinker with the dream. S&H 114:29 shows that the dreamer (mortal mind) experiences its own dream (material existence), but you are not identified with its dream characters. I do not dream the dreamer’s dream.

Barn House, 8th December 1998

As you know, to identify oneself as a patient is to join in the conspiracy against yourself. You start and stay with God, as the one Mind constituting of itself all thought, and the one Life constituting of itself all experience. The ‘patient’ is never person, but is a phase of mortal mind coming to you for acceptance or dismissal. It is never your problem or your experience. “Disease is an experience of so-called mortal mind” (S&H 493:20-21). It is illusion, therefore, and not disease. Nothing does not have to become something. See S&H 276:25-28 and 480:1-5.

The correct “treatment” is found in S&H 495:14-24. First, you recognise the apparent problem as temptation or illusion, and not a problem. Then you stay with the fact that all that really exists is the divine Mind and its idea of itself, constituting all of itself. From this standpoint you enjoy the recognition of painless and permanent life from the standpoint of Life itself. This then is the destruction, because preclusion, of a painful sense of that which Life is not. But the mist of mortal mind, or temptation as she calls it, no more touches you than the morning mist touches the landscape.

“Allow nothing but His likeness to abide in your thought” (S&H 495:15-16). Whose thought? Mind’s thought constitutes Mind’s likeness.

Barn House, 27th November 1997

I feel in fact that you have already arrived at the right answer because you have seen that it is not to be found within the terms of reference of the dream. We are told to have but one fact before the thought, namely, spiritual existence, and we also read that “When the illusion of sickness or sin tempts you, cling steadfastly to God and His idea.” See S&H 495:14-24. In other words, we do not come down to the dream at any point, for better or worse. The bad is just mortal mind’s suppositious opposite of good, and is only error’s bad and is nothing. On the other hand, the good you experience is always the good of God that cannot be entirely hidden by the mist of mortal mind. Thus we learn to impersonalise both the good and the bad, and thereby avoid limiting good or giving identity to the bad. Staying with God and His idea, we are really saying ‘What does the one I know at this moment?’ Not, ‘What do I know about some error’ but, ‘What am I knowing of My own omnipotence, My allness, My oneness?’

At the very moment and in the very place where the suggestion says, ‘How will I cope, I am afraid there will not be enough, I do not want someone to be let down or unhappy, I think it wrong that someone who is clearly not fit to be a mother should have this power, etc.’ right there I AM declaring My omnipotence, My omnipresence, My superabundance, My total independence of any material condition, My unprecarious joy. Only what I, Mind, Love, Soul, know about Myself is going on, and this is safe, eternal, indivisible, universal and ever-present. A suggestion is not a power. God’s demonstration is already made. Don’t weigh the human in the scale. The temptation is to try and use Science to separate the bad from the good within the dream. Science separates the whole dream/dreamer lie from the spiritual fact. See S&H 14:25-28. That which is forever separate does not have to be separated. Justice is a quality of God, and so has no opposite. Only the human belief about justice seems to have an opposite.

Barn House, 24th July 1998

S&H says that “Evil has no reality. It is neither person, place nor thing, but simply a belief, an illusion of material sense” (71:2-4). That which appears as evil or baneful may wear the disguise of person, place or thing, but this is the decoy, and the basic error is material sense of that which is good and spiritual. It is mortal mind, and so it is this so-called mind and not the disguise it wears, that is in every case the culprit. We get caught out if we try to deal with its phenomena, because this implies failure to recognise the one and only error, namely, mortal mind, or material sense.

In the early days, persons were found treating persons. Probably much of the early healing work could be best classified as faith healing. Much of it could be the transparency of Christian character which was in advance of its metaphysics. Often “A grain of Christian Science…” (S&H 449:3-4) was sufficient to heal inveterate disease. And, of course, all these phenomena were lovely, but they were only grounded on a safe basis in the understanding that what had occurred was never an improved human situation but the disappearance of mortal mind that claimed to hide the only situation that ever existed. Any belief that improved matter was the result of the work, or constituted Mind-healing, could only lead thought to being more than ever embedded in the belief that the mission of Science lay in human betterment, or the healing of persons and situations. To stay with this belief would then be to deny and lose sight of the true Science of Being.

There are a number of statements in S&H that show clearly that the real purpose of Science is to lay the axe at the root of the belief in good and evil, in personal lives and minds, and in material situations. The basic error of belief in existence as mortal is exposed in such statements as:

“There is no such thing as mortality, nor are there properly any mortal beings, because being is immortal, like Deity,—or, rather, being and Deity are inseparable” (554:4-7).

“From beginning to end, whatever is mortal is composed of material human beliefs and of nothing else” (478:24-26).

“Whatever appears to be a mortal man is a mortal dream” (250:24-25).

“This so-called mind and body is the illusion called a mortal” (293:9).

“The human mind and body are myths” (150:32-1)

It is clear from the above, and many other passages, that the attempt to treat mortals for the manifold problems they seem to experience is to focus attention on that which has no claim to reality in the first place. It is to try and change the experience of the inhabitants of an old castle, or a vacant domicile, when no such inhabitants ever existed. (See Un. 28:8-12 and S&H 478:8-13 and margin). Error has no name or local habitation. It is never what or where it seems to be. It is always mortal mind, illusion, which itself is a theory and does not exist. As we read, “Material sense is the so-called material life” (Un. 30:7-8). This is why “material sense does not unfold the facts of existence, but spiritual sense lifts human consciousness into eternal Truth” (S&H 95:30-32).

Everything is thought. The thought of something is that thing. It constitutes phenomena rather than just producing them. The material sense of being constitutes all that appears as material existence, and can only claim to emanate from so-called mortal mind. The spiritual sense of being is Science, or understanding, and emanates from and as the divine Mind and is man. The sense of things does not cognise anything outside of itself: it is itself. When you see the train on the next platform move and you think it is your own train moving, it is a false sense, or perspective, that constitutes the appearance of movement in your train. But there is no actual movement. In the same way, it is a sense of disease, penury, lack of activity, or bad relationships and so on, that constitutes these phenomena. They do not exist outside the sense of them. How futile, therefore, to try and heal or improve them. Conversely, the divine sense, or consciousness of wholeness, completeness, activity, oneness, etc., constitutes these phenomena. The sense, or awareness, of them is them.

Then, if things appear to be wrong, to what does this appearance come? To mortal mind. So it is mortal mind, material sense, illusion, and not the appearance, that is wrong. But there is no mortal mind, which remains just terminology, not fact. On the other hand, the rightness of being is always apparent to spiritual sense, or Spirit’s own sense of everything. So the remedy lies in having/being the Mind that is God, which knowing itself, precludes the consciousness of phenomena unlike itself. In every case, it is Mind that constitutes awareness. Man is Mind-manifest, and is the feeling, experience, knowing, and action that is divine Mind’s awareness of itself.

In the recognition that everything is thought, it follows that there is no simple or difficult disease, no critical or routine mortal situation, no degrees of a false sense. Reduced to mind, all error is nothing, and has no history, condition, name, location, cause, process or effect. S&H says that “…the author calls sick and sinful humanity mortal mind…” (S&H 114:2-3). So the claim is not sick and sinful humanity as such, but just mortal mind disguised as sick and sinful humanity. The removal of mortal mind may appear as better humanity, or mankind. Science does not really improve humanity but reveals man in God’s likeness. Hence the statement “health attends the absence of mortal mind…” (S&H 555:2 only). Mortal mind was never present.

Because sick and sinful humanity is not the basic error, it is important never to identify thought with a patient. I am not a patient. I do not live in that which feels pain, disease, or fear. That which feels this way is as much mortal mind as that which it feels. The patient is a phase of human belief, as Moses found to be the case with the ‘dread’ disease of his day called leprosy. It may be called other names today, but none of them leaves the realm of belief. The only Physician is the Christ—“…the real man and his relation to God…” (S&H 316:6). It is the Christ consciousness, in place of a belief in a personal patient and personal practitioner, that is all that is true. It is not “The highest human corporeal concept of the divine idea…” (S&H 589:16) that heals, but the Christ, “the divine manifestation of God, which comes to the flesh to destroy incarnate error” (S&H 583:10-11). The Christ is both divine Principle and idea (see margin to page 333:18) and is the Adorable One which constitutes present divinity. To the Christ there is no sense wherewith to cognise evil. “Jesus demonstrated [showed forth] Christ, the divine idea of God” (S&H 332:19-20). This idea, which Mary called Jesus, and that the world saw as the highest human concept, is revealed in Science to be the Christ, Truth.

Th June 2003

Please study S&H 303:16-20. In this sentence your identity is Science, since Christ Science is your name. What you are does not come down to the mortal scene to destroy the illusion, but causes the illusion to destroy itself in your presence. You do not have to wrestle with it unless you think you are a Child of Israel. Page 309 is most important, because the wrestler and the soldier had to be renamed in Christian Science, and the new name is Christ Science, divine idea, hallowed, holy, or I AM. Unity page 11 shows that Jesus did not stoop to human consciousness to deal with it at its level. He did demand a change of consciousness and evidence, but that was because the first constituted the second. Change the viewpoint and you change the view, but you never struggle with the old. Start and stay uncompromisingly with what you are, because there really is no alternative.

Th June 2003

There is a general human tendency to think that each day brings us nearer to a tomb, heaven, healing, or something better or worse. This is the error, because it postpones the recognition that the Science, or understanding, of what is being is now, and it is your divine Mind that knows this and does not include regret or expectancy in its consciousness. Deny all temptation to believe in a better or a worse, and stick to the wholeness of now that never knew the myth of a personal life.

Note S&H 293:9-10 and 300:5-8.

Rd June 2003

Many thanks for your letter and good news. If we begin with the fact that “All that really exists is the divine Mind and its idea…” (S&H 151:26-27) then our work is not for this person or another, but consists in the maintenance in consciousness of the fact that “…in this Mind the entire being is found harmonious and eternal” (S&H 151:27-28) No sense of imperfection, under any name or disguise, enters this harmony which you are.

Th April 2003

S&H 72:2-3. Mind’s communication is in terms of self-understanding. It speaks to, sees, hears, itself. It does not express itself through or to a medium. See page 73:30-32 and margin. You have eyes because you see, or rather, because Mind sees. The symbol is present because God is present, even though human sense will label this presence in terms of its highest point of perception. This point changes as the clarity of Truth makes the symbol increasingly redundant. It does not improve the symbol but lets it fade out in the presence of the idea behind it. But make no mistake, the symbol is God-present however it may be interpreted. Otherwise God, good, would so far as you are concerned, be absent.

Mortal belief, called discord of any kind, cannot touch God-present in the form that you can appreciate. It claims to cast a shadow, thereby giving the impression that something is wrong. But this is the lesson of last week in Ps. 115:2-9. The material body is just such an idol. There was never any power or presence resident in it, and only belief, or mirage, says there was. Remember, the straight line and the circle may appear to touch but they never actually do, and you live as the sphere of good. In this sphere or circle only God is going on.

Th February 2003

You may wish to ponder the following references from Science and Health 114:1-6; 555:2 only; 251:20 (mid sentence)-27 and margin; 116:2-5.

We see first that what appears as a problem is not a person with a problem, but mortal mind, or mesmerism, disguised as person. So we are not dealing with persons. If we try to, we keep the problem because we have kept all there is to it, namely, its disguise.

We then see that the only error is mortal mind, and that its removal removes that which holds the error and so the error as well. The improvement of mankind does not result from trying to do something to mankind, or a kind of man that is not God’s man, but from removing the veil of mortal mind which gives the impression of, but never makes mankind.

Health, or wholeness, is therefore seen to be incidental to the absence of mortal mind, which is what happens in the third degree, where health is seen to belong there and nowhere else.

No Date

You may care to ponder S&H 42:21-23. You begin your work from the standpoint that you live as the wondrous glory of God’s anointed, and not by starting with a problem that you hope to solve through Science. This is because the sense of a problem is all there is to it. You are not in the flesh, “...the supposition of life, substance and intelligence in matter” (S&H 586:18), because the thoughts, or sense of being, that constitute you originate in Spirit, the divine Mind. This is already the fact, and this is why nothing that mortal mind is saying about its misconception of you can disturb you, because it does not apply to you. Starting with Spirit, the one Ego, the belief of mortals (human material belief) is self-seen and self-destroyed, because there is nothing to the mortal but a self-constituted falsity (S&H 283:1).

Th August 2003

I still feel that you may be giving yourself more work than necessary. All study is wonderful for its own sake, but to focus our study on a problem can build it up. The reason is, the moment the problem enters thought we are tempted to begin our work from a so-called standpoint outside God, instead of beginning with God and reasoning/knowing as the Mind that is God.

We must begin as God, know as Mind, reckon as divine Principle, and feel as Soul. This is the only way in which we can have no other gods before Me. Interpreting from and as Principle, progress then consists of dis-covering, dis-robing, dis-closing all ignorant beliefs, because they cannot remain in the presence of I AM.

August 19th

S&H 292:7-16 is important. “Truth will be to us ‘the resurrection and the life’ only as it destroys all error and the belief that Mind, the only immortality of man, can ever be fettered by the body, and Life be controlled by death. A sinful, sick, and dying mortal is not the likeness of God, the perfect and eternal.”

Matter is the piratical belief of mortal mind, because this so-called mind has no cognizance of Spirit. To mortal mind, matter is substantial, and evil is real.

S&H 292:31-3 is important as well. “In his resurrection and ascension, Jesus showed that a mortal man is not the real essence of manhood, and that this unreal material mortality disappears in the presence of the reality.”

The whole purpose of Science is not to patch up the old man but to reveal (draw back the curtains on) the man that is God’s compound idea of all good.

Truth is God’s law and this is all that is going on. This law is either positive or negative. It is positive in the sense that it tells us what Life is. It is negative in the sense that it tells us, by definition, what Life is not. We learn that 2x2 is 4. We therefore see that it is not 5 or 6. These are not alternatives but mis-statements, and you can have a mis-statement only about something that is true. So the reverse of error is true. A negative in photography is nothing in its own right but it states negatively exactly what is in the positive. The reverse of the negative is positive.

We are tempted to work to remove suffering, because if mortal mind knew how to be better it would be better. But instead, we should just be opening our eyes to see what it is we are being told to drop as that which Life is not. It is just that some new phase of mortal belief and identity is coming to the surface to pass away. The whole of the mortal sense of man has to go, but this does not take one thing from our present experience of good, since this is God’s, and there is one Life and Mind. It merely reveals more clearly what we already are.

There is no human strength, human or good human health, human good or substance. All that is good here and now is the good God bestows, and it appears despite the belief that it is human. Science removes the dark glass, but nothing is seen through it. It restores everything to its correct classification as Mind.

Omnipresence does not take a journey because it goes nowhere to be omnipresent. You remain always as the central stillness and immovable Love. You do not journey to places, but what appears as different places and experiences are just new views of divine goodness and Love. You cannot go anywhere or meet anything else. They appear to you, but you do not go to them. So there is no strain.

“…man is in a degree as perfect as the Mind that forms him” (S&H 337:10-11). In what degree are you perfect? Only in the 3rd degree, where there is only man and all mortal mind has disappeared, and this is now. It is from the standpoint of what you are, that what you are not passes away.

Th June 2003

Many thanks for your letter. S&H 283: margin to line 6 and lines 4-11 are helpful. If “Mind, God, is the source and condition of all existence” (S&H 181:1-2) then material conditions not only have no effect upon man, but do not actually exist. The appearance of any material condition does not improve in Science, but is disproved. As Christ Science, you live as that which is already so complete in its exercise of faculties and capacities that any claim to an alternative is a non-starter. Science “strips matter of all abilities or disabilities” (Mis. 185:6-7). On page 282 of S&H lines 23-25 we see that all there is to anything material is material thought, but that does not mean that material thought ever made matter.

Nd August 2004

Many thanks for your letter. You are correct that every error is an argument or suggestion, but this does not mean that you have to argue with it. “Truth is affirmative”: it does not argue, but precludes all suggestion.

We know that it is impossible to have more or less of God today than yesterday, or tomorrow. This is true also of any idea of God such as supply, since they co-exist infinitely as one. The purpose of our work in Science, is not to acquire more of anything or to do protective work against the possible loss of something. This is because any sense of increase or decrease belongs to mesmerism, the supposition that there is a mind apart from God, and so has nothing to do with you or God or His idea. Only good is actually taking place.

Rd July 2004

I feel it would be very useful to ponder deeply and daily until it is your own S&H 280:10-15. Finite belief means every thought that begins from a so-called personal mind instead of the divine. By definition, it is a limiting thought. It would try to compress the infinite of Mind and its infinite resources within personal apprehension. It cannot do this, because it is not possible to comprehend the infinite from any standpoint outside it. You know the infinite as the infinite. This means letting thought ascend to the infinite perspective instead of trying to bring the infinite into the confines of personal sense, and thereby divide the oneness of Soul, the only Ego, into a myriad of personal minds and experiences.

Personal sense is the prince of this world.

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