Barn House, 18th April 1997

Do remind yourself of S&H 298:8-10 and do not ask mortal mind to do the impossible. It can only see itself!

Also page 299:26-30. You are the light that knows no shadow. This is Science, or understanding, and its rule is universal harmony and it is not perceived by material sense. We are obedience to its laws.

Yew Arch

I feel the whole thing that has to be seen is in the opening pages of the chapter on Christian Science Practice. What are you prepared to give for the pearl of great price? What value do you set on it? It will be as valuable to you as the value you set on it and it will not be useful to you beyond this. Unless we are ready to ‘give all for Christ’ (see S&H 32:33)—that is, relinquish everything that is thought from a mortal standpoint—we have not begun to earn our freedom from indebtedness to matter. You have to forgive your debtor before you are forgiven your debt.

There is no question of Science coming down to the human. “Even Christ cannot reconcile Truth to error…” (S&H 19:5). Science takes thought where it finds it and lifts it higher. Healing is incidental to this.

This particular complaint is always when one has got run down and one’s defenses are open to attack. If your true defense is of the Most High, then you cannot, above all things, neglect your defenses. You cannot be like the foolish virgins, turning to Truth only when they were in a fix. Unless you are really prepared to put Science, understanding, above all else, above all belief, you may as well drop it.

How much do you love? What is Truth worth to you? Is it a nice etcetera to daily life or is it Life? Only you can say.

Yew Arch, August 27

Always remember that the spiritual fact is there first. We read this week that Truth challenges error: error does not challenge Truth. It is what you are that shows up in relief what you are not, so that you can dispense with it. 2x2=4 challenges 5 or 6, but 5 or 6 do not challenge 4.

The fact that being is safety because it is God and God is all, causes the belief that being is ever anywhere outside this allness to be self-seen as an impossibility.

No Date

You may like to study S&H 463:6-20 and margin. The new idea of anything is included in the new birth—work, home, anything. You first detach thought from its material surroundings—all the material, human pros and cons—and then listen to what the divine Mind is saying and outlining. You then see the sturdy growth of the idea because in fact it is not something new coming about, but the eternal Truth appearing irresistibly as experience. “All that is true is a sort of necessity, a portion of the primal reality of things” (’01 1:18). You then find that instead of waiting, you realise that Truth is here and has fulfilled its perfect work.

Man is the work, not the worker. There is only one job and that is being.

November 10, 1998

We read this week of the “…fleeting concepts of the human mind” (S&H 264:1). They are never your concepts. The human mind is a term and not something you have. In S&H on page 220:18-21 we read of the kitten. The kitten is the human mind, and it thinks that what it sees in the mirror is something separate from itself to be blamed, feared, loved, or hated. The temptation then, is to try and alter the concepts of the human mind to constitute the substance of a reflection. The real work is to know there is no kitten, no human mind. This means that every single human concept born of this so-called mind is unreal and unrecorded. You never included any fleeting concepts, for you live as the experience of the one Mind, Love.

Note on page 259:3-5 that man is not an isolated idea but lives as the sum of all substance. You never lived as a bit of existence called a human concept. You live as Mind’s manifestation and so as Mind’s universe. And that is your Mind, so you live as the Mind of your universe and you are your universe. This is why “in this Mind the entire being is found harmonious and eternal.” S&H 151:26-28.

There has never been another sense of man than Love’s own sense (see S&H 573:17-18). Then we see why this is so, for the moment we drop a corporeal, objective sense of being we find the kingdom within, intact, universal, and forever unthreatened.

Barn House, September 20

I think there are two references that might help about purpose: My. 160:5-8 and S&H 326:16-20 and 23-25. This second one is fairly profound. You see, the human sense of Paul struggled between alternatives. The word ‘of’ indicates a choice. This sense of duality, and also the sense that he was a chooser, had to yield, not to a spiritual sense of right, but to spiritual sense which is right.

What is the sense of being? It is Spirit’s own sense, Love’s own sense, Principle’s own sense. The one Principle is above what it reflects, and this is the order of Science in which everything is one grand concord. Man is the being that God, Principle, is being. “God’s being is infinity, freedom, harmony, and boundless bliss” (S&H 481:3-4). This is what God is being, and thus what you are since God is being you. Mind is the knower and man the knowing. God thinks you. You are not the thinker. You ‘take no thought’ for tomorrow because man is not a thought-taker. Man is the thought that Mind is taking, and thoughts never leave the Mind that thinks them nor depart from its nature.

Don’t waste time on human wrestling and wondering. Let the unquiet spirit yield to that which is already moving in harmony in the order of Science.

Barn House, February 3, 1998

I was glad to have your call. The references I gave you came to me over the last few days since you first called, and everything comes back in Science to the fact that all-inclusive divinity precludes the possibility of ‘otherness’. The belief that personal identity has anything to do with you, and the secondary belief that this so-called identity has faculties that may or may not seem to it to be working, is effaced. We find that “the human mind and body are myths” (S&H 150:32-1) and that the belief in them is an illusion (S&H 293:9-10). You can’t fight an illusion. Those that sit in prison darkness are not persons but waking dream shadows! The absence of light suggests they are personal identities with personal problems, but when the light of understanding is switched on, it is found that there are no prisoners, no prison, and nothing that is not eternally in and as the light. You are the light, and that is why you are never a patient. The patient is a form of human belief and the physician is your Christ, and the patient comes to you to give itself up on your altar of divine Science. What you eternally are appears to draw to you that which you could not be, in order that the lie can be self-seen and self-destroyed. But the initiative is with Truth.

The lesson on 252:31-8 starts by saying “I am Spirit.” My manifestation, whose senses belong to Me and reside in Me, is My likeness with no capacity of his own. Man does not hear, but the divine sense of hearing constitutes man. Then we read on line 9, that the reader is invited to join in the experience of Spirit from the standpoint of Spirit, for there is one I for God and man. “All we correctly know of Spirit comes from God” (S&H 84:28). Only God knows, hears, feels, sees God—and God is good, Life, substance. I AM the Life, the Mind, the substance, the activity of My universe, and there is no one but Me.

Barn House, November 16

All communication is from Principle to its idea. There is no communication between ideas. One Mind communicates, expresses itself, as all thought and action. This is all there is to what appears as a teacher or pupil. There is not one mind instilling something into another, or one mind unable to absorb what comes from another. There is one Mind, infinite Love, constituting all there is to what appears as all parties.

There is one standard and that is perfection, and “Perfection is gained only by perfection” (S&H 290:19-20). This means we start and stay with the present perfection of being. “Known unto God [your Mind] are all things from the beginning of the world” (Acts 15:18). I know everything, and I don’t have to be taught it.

There is no mind called a parent to be afraid.

Barn House, 23 September 1997

Never work about a situation. The temptation is to know the truth about a husband or an income or whatever. But it is never a matter of what ‘I’ know that is true of ‘him’ or even of what God knows about ‘him’, but what I, Mind, know about Myself in the very place where an ‘I’ or a ‘he, she, or they’ appear to human sense. This is what is implied in Ps. 35:24 where it says “Judge me oh Lord my God, according to thy righteousness [right knowing-ness]”. In other words, let the only judgment of anything be out from the standpoint of Mind that is knowing itself and nothing else.

The Bride is defined as “conceiving man in the idea of God”. See S&H 582:14. Anything we wish to know about man has to be sought first in God. To know the activity of man we enquire into the meaning of the activity of God—His omniaction, His universal, rewarding, useful, changeless activity, and then we find that the consciousness of God’s activity is the idea of activity called active man. In the same way, to find out about abundance we seek the meaning of this word as a quality of God, and we find that the consciousness of God’s abundance is the idea of abundance called abundant man. Man is the idea of God, and this really means God’s idea of Himself.

Lester’s Cottage, July 20, 2003

S&H 191:8-15. That which dawns on human thought is the full recognition that being is Spirit. Like the morning dawn, it does not concentrate on particular shadows because it is indivisible. Being is indivisible, and that is why the Psalm says “I will walk in mine integrity” (Ps. 26:11). Everything takes place in “God’s grooves of Science” where there is no “friction of false selfhood” (Mis. 104:18-21).

There are no pulls between different aspects of the one Life—nothing to jar and nothing to disintegrate. Sometimes when there has been a strong focal centre to someone’s experience, which is then removed through retirement or what have you, it can seem that a dozen peripheral activities fill the gap. But these are still all aspects of one Life, and the central core of your existence is “…the Science of celestial being…” (S&H 26:16-17) and not any human activity. “the whole body [is] fitly joined together…” (Ephesians 4:16) because the body or embodiment of God is one integrated whole, with nothing out of phase with any other phase.

Barn House, July 26, 1998

I will give you a line of thought because your thinking is good and you are not going to be taken in by the mental quackery that makes disease a physical reality and then attempts its cure through Science. (See S&H 395:21-23) This is why you do not pray about situations. Your starting point is, as we see in the last Lesson, page 264:28-31, “the way in Christian Science”. This way is to recognise spiritual being from the standpoint of God and not to attempt to do this from the standpoint of man. Then we behold as God does all the glories of earth and heaven and man. There is nothing else to see. The belief in another state fades out because it has no believer.

That which knows it has always lived as a gorgeous butterfly has no awareness of the chrysalis state, or the labour of emerging into butterfly life. You no more believe in matter-life than a butterfly believes in the necessity of a chrysalis. But Science does not just deny matter. That was Jesus’ work. Science “translates matter into [its original language] Mind” (Mis. 25:12). All is Mind and Mind-manifest.

There are not hard lumps of any kind, no hard experiences, no hardness of mortal mind, no “personal attachment” (Man. 40:5)—i.e., no person to which error can be attached in any form. That which dissolves the adamant of error is Love, and Love is “the underived” (Mis. 249:29), the consciousness that everything exists in and of itself, and that there is no ‘otherness’ anywhere. The substance of yourself and of all you know is Love. Stay with this, and anything that needs to fade out has to do so. The spiritual foundation of your whole Life has no pain, and no anxiety.

The ‘right and left foot’ means that, whereas temptation tries to make you deal with phenomena (and not get anywhere), Science takes away the underlying error that there is a mortal mind. The dominant foot—spiritual power—rules out this mind. The temptation is to be left-footed and deal with the wrong thing! Jesus said, say “unto this mountain [the mountainous problem], Remove hence to yonder place…” (Matt. 17:20)—in other words, be translated from thing into thought and then be reduced to elementary mortal mind which has no substance, life, intelligence, identity, cause, process, or effect.

June 16, 2004

Thank you for your letter. I would be most happy to work with you. We do not do this from the standpoint of a mortal trying to understand and attain more of the divine abundance. Instead we start, as we are told, by interpreting everything from the standpoint of its Principle, God. This means in practice, accepting the Mind that is God and is the Principle or first cause of everything, as your own Mind. Looking out then from and as this Mind, you see your universe in terms of the infinite abundance and completeness that it is.

I am enjoying Mis. 185:7-16. Lines 7-10 define Science and this involves the shedding of all belief in a material history, together with the acknowledgement that man is the, not a, child of God. This means that you do not live as a bit of life, but as infinite Life in self-expression. The result of this is then seen in lines 11-16, where the flood-gates (not the sluice gates) are opened so that infinite good flows into every avenue of your experience. Will you take this passage into your thinking and enjoy it?

October 5, 2003

Forgive me if I have misread your letter, but I am anxious that you should not get involved in the rather torturous exercise which I call mental gymnastics. By this I mean that we do not start with the material picture and then item by item try to see the spiritual fact about it. You start with the fact that the all-knowing, all-seeing, all-acting Mind is your Mind here and now, and that all functions and capacities belong to that Mind, which is carrying on its own harmony.

Study, then, does not involve a human mind trying to learn more about Truth in order to attain some humanly desirable result, but is in effect the all-knowing Mind itself operating as your consciousness, and dispelling the beliefs about your capacity in the process. It may well be that certain specific points pop into thought for you to take up as you work, but in every case we begin with the total perfection of present being and know that the beliefs about what is being cannot remain in your presence. Then progress becomes the gentle unfoldment of what is, rather than laboured accretion. S&H 216:30-1 and margin is helpful.

No Date

I find the following part-sentences helpful in S&H: 505:16 only; 506:5 only; and 84:28 only.

We learn that understanding is not just a quality of man but is the way man’s Principle expresses itself. Man is understanding, like it or not. As understanding, man refutes belief, not through human effort but through divine acknowledgement.

Mary Baker Eddy was always wise in her choice of words, but we can look at statements such as S&H 390:7-9 and 241:19 and see that really she is not talking about something separate from God trying to approach, understand, or be devoted to God, but which is the very presence of the divine Mind understanding itself and calling what it understands, man or reflection.

My love to your mother when you are in contact. Not only did she never dream this dream, but you never dreamed the dream of her dreaming either!

P.S. True reasoning begins with God and not reflection, the latter having no power to think anything. On the other hand, the one Mind is forever stating, ‘I am the source of all action and every function. Every thought or action is constituted of Myself, and partakes of the nature, order, ease, and continuity of My own being. My reflection consists of all the wonderful things that I know about Myself, and is wholly subordinate to what I am knowing.’ Reasoning from cause to effect, you reason with and as the power of Mind itself, instead of the attempt of something separate from Mind to declare the Truth. All that is true about man resides in God, cause, and never in man as reflection.

No Date

The human concept is always erroneous, no matter what it refers to. Let this concept be entirely incidental to the Life that you are living. At best it is a shadow that is suffered to be so now—such as eating, sleeping, etc.—but the reality is the underlying perfection of everything, which is your divinity. All that is present, all that is going on, is God. Even the convulsions today are the evidence of infinite Love overturning all belief in the nothingness of evil.

What is called chemicalisation is Truth urging on mortals its resisted claims, and if we do not resist Truth and the consequent passing of all concepts that do not have ground, we do not experience chemicalisation.

February 15, 2004

I cannot stress sufficiently what I have probably said before, which is that our work in Science is never reactive. We do not take what human sense says is a problem and try and make it into what human sense says is a solution. We are outside of the whole judgment arena where we humanly try to distinguish between good and evil. That immediately puts thought into duality and “…his uncertain sense of right…” (S&H 326:24). Our starting point has to be that, no matter how human sense may interpret it, the only thing going on is Good, God.

It may be that through conscientious study, mental self-discipline, etc. we may effect a change of belief, but this is not CS healing. True healing starts and stays with the fact that all is Mind here and now. Mind manifesting itself constitutes God, man, universe. The message that God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all, is that of Science. This is the revelation—a word that means to reveal or lift the curtain on something. Thus we read that “divine Science lifts the curtain on … man as coexistent with God.” (S&H 557:18-21) This revelation includes no human effort and no human mind. It causes the belief in a human mind, in which every problem resides, to fade out as darkness before the light. But this is only the human sense of that which to the divine Mind is unknown. This Mind knows neither crucifixion (the disappearing of the mortal) or the resurrection (the reappearing of Truth). It lives in and as the ascension (the exaltation above all material conditions) which is unaware of anything taking place outside of God-being.

See No and Yes 36:6-20. This refers to your true and conscious being. In the First Edition, Mary Baker Eddy writes, “the purpose of Jesus was not to heal the sick but to reveal man”.

February 16, 2004

Thank you for your letter, though I do wonder if you got the message I was conveying in my letter of yesterday. Science is defined as “…the law of God, the law of good” (Rud. 1:1). It is not something to which something else outside this law turns. This law is “I am All”. There is not All and something else to rely on it or turn to it. There is no other mind or existence called a patient or a practitioner. In this All there can be no sense of a problem, because there is no room in it for anything else. This law allows no belief in personal sense, or a separate life that can or cannot demonstrate. Demonstration means to “show forth” and it is God who shows forth God. Man is the demonstration, but not a demonstrator. The whole effort in the movement is thinking that man has to demonstrate something.

What human belief decides to do within its terms of reference—within the dream—is secondary. It will be the lesser of two evils, but will stay part of the dream. It is of no concern to the I that is God, the one Mind that knows no alternatives. The law of God is the law of Love. Its purpose is not to make the personal sense of existence more comfortable within the terms of reference of that sense. It is the inevitable law of Good, which exists and so precludes, any sense of being or experience that is not divine. This law will appear to human sense in the language that it can understand at any moment. It may appear as the unfolding of some lovely new view of good. It may call itself the exposure of some error that Love causes to be self-seen and so self-destroyed. It is only if you identify with the error through fear, love, effort, or habit, that you can seem to incur the “wholesome chastisements of Love”, which are inflicted on error but never on man. It is always a sign of error becoming too uncomfortable to retain. That is why you do not direct your efforts to trying to change the error into some form that you humanly deem desirable. The whole effort of personal sense is to make this sense the proof of God, good, which is already present. This is the source of all struggle, disappointment and self-condemnation for ‘not making our demonstration’. What rubbish!

I will call you before your appointment. I am happy to support your understanding that in His light you see light, and there is no darkness at all. I only refrain from the business of trying to produce rabbits out of the hat. I have no sense of failure if you feel that something else may help a material organ, only if you descend to the level of thinking that this organ is the medium for sight.

April 15, 2003

It would be helpful to remember S&H 92:32-9. If you think the time for healing has not yet come you will also be thinking that the time when Jesus did his work has passed. In each case, we deny that now is the accepted time. While I am sure you will enjoy a change of tempo which allows you more time for study, it can only be for the study of Truth and not to have more time to work out a problem. That would just build up the problem. It is one moment of divine consciousness and not hours with your nose in the books that is effective, though naturally the more that we learn about Truth, the more what is not true disappears from experience. Mis. 201:3-6 is salutary. To make some desirable experience dependent, for instance, upon time would be to oppose bringing some quality of Spirit, like wholeness or any other good, into subjection to Spirit and not subject to any material factor. This is what Mrs. Eddy defines as human will, which is “the sensuous reason of the human mind”.

We should remember that the whole impetus of enlightenment comes from above, and not beneath. We see this in such passages as S&H 557:18-21; 255:1-6; and 191:8-15. The human mind is not a factor in this dawning, and there is nothing to the mortal but mental swaddling clothes.

February 21, 1997

Thank you for your letter. The whole thing is that there is no personal life or mind, and thus, there are no ‘others’. Alone (all one) with your own being, you see, feel, hear, know, act as Mind and as the experience of the harmony, peace, purpose, fulfillment, completeness and joy of Mind’s own divine sense of being. Man does not have a sense of anything. Man is just what divine Love is knowing and being.

“Take no thought for your life…” (Luke 12:22). Idea cannot take thought for idea. God, good, is just being all of you, and the substance of yourself is God, not person. There is nothing outside to which you have to communicate, or which you want to help. See S&H 226:22-24. If we long to help, then the experience in lines 29-2 seems to follow. Divine acknowledgement is the only way that appears to help others because there is nothing in that acknowledgement to help.

Just take S&H 252:32-8 and know that this statement of Spirit is the statement of the I of your being about itself or man. Really ponder it. It is the light that you are that does its own work of lightening the darkness which it never knew.

June 28, 2003

Thank you so much for your letter. Progress is simply throwing off human shackles, and not a human getting better. All there is to the human is a shackled perception of that which is divine. The divine has never been shackled.

May I make one remark about something which could be fairly fundamental in your letter, and it would be in the context of the remarks about mirror image in S&H 515:25-4. A habit has crept up in the movement through incorrect teaching of investing the image with the power to say ‘I am a reflection of God’. Yet the Textbook says, “Error says, ‘I am man;’ but this belief is mortal and far from actual” (S&H 478:23-24). It is always error to say I am from the standpoint of man, image. Image has no capacity whatsoever to say anything. God says “I am Spirit” and the lips of the image say the same. The lips could not say I am a spiritual idea. Mind makes a statement and man is the statement, and they are one. Because your Mind is God now and is the I of your being, any statement about your universe is made from the standpoint and with the power of Mind itself. Mind declares: man is the declaration. This does not mean giving to man a status that is not true, but it does mean removing the I or capacity from man, where it never belonged, to God.

This is why Mary Baker Eddy said often in the First Edition, “Remember you are Soul, and not body” and “The I is God, not man.” Only as we reason, interpret, and experience from this correct standpoint do we feel the power of the Word, and avoid the struggles of the mortal trying to attain a position higher than itself. The few lines from Pan. 12:12 show the way to avoid the process of the way-seeker.

August 20, 2003

Thank you for your encouraging letter. Since “Mind, God, is the source and condition of all existence” (S&H 181:1-2), this picture has always been a suggestion not a condition. That is why its disappearance, though gratifying, is not surprising. In the sentence on page 275:20-24 of S&H, you will read that all is Mind and all is the manifestation of Mind. There is only one All, and that is Mind’s self-manifestation and experience of itself.

February 19, 2004

Thank you for your letter. Sometimes the very effort of thinking we have to fight something builds it up as an antagonist. Better to keep it simple and take what comes at our highest point of perception in every case.

Do not think in terms of Love being all around you. That is duality: you and Love. Love constitutes of itself all that is true of you. That is why “Principle and its idea is one…” (S&H 465:17). Nor can we say that good comes out of something: good is whatever the something seems to be.

May 26, 2003

Yes, you are right when you say that healing takes place in the mind of the healer. But the only healer is divine Mind, not person, and it heals because it knows nothing to heal.

August 5, 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 on a problem we 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.

January 24, 1979

Wholeness, being a quality of Spirit, is in subjection to Spirit, and is therefore not subject to a human process called treatment. Treatment is simply the name we give to that self-assertion of divine Mind over its so-called opposite that reveals any sense of duality called patient and practitioner to be dispensable. So rejoice now in your total wholeness, underived from any material situation.

“Live [above] corporeal sense and correct it” (S&H 167:7). Give everything that calls itself ‘i’ and is not the I AM the “T” treatment—that is, add the ‘t’ to the ‘i’ and see that all that is talking is “it” and not the I of your being! And then, with the authority of Spirit, say “Who art thou that repliest to Spirit” (S&H 181:4)—to the I of my being?

October 25

Thank you for your letter.

Un. 6:4-6 is helpful. Any renovation to human nature is incidental to the understanding that the one and only nature is spotless, with no taint of past, no vestige of mortal inheritance, no accuser, condemner, accused, or condemned. There is no spot and “…blemish on the disk of consciousness…” (Ret. 94:15) because “All consciousness is Mind, and Mind is God” (Ret. 56:18).

S&H 253:32-2. All that is scientific is present perfection. The indispensable human footsteps are just the limited, human sense taking retreating steps in the presence of our divinity. It is therefore indispensable that the human experience appears to be better, healthier, freer in every way.

“I will put my law in thine inward parts” (Jer. 31:33). There is nothing within to upset.

I am glad what you say about work. Yes, in a sense all business is to be of service, and we get this higher sense when we see that is just the useful activity of Mind, and not an actor. Mary Baker Eddy was once asked if there was anything to man but obedience, and she replied, “what vision!” Man is not an obedient servant: he is obedience.

Truth heals because it knows nothing to heal. There is not Truth and a problem to work about. That is the great mistake. Truth precludes problems.

June 18

Work in Christian Science is always on the basis of “Open thou mine eyes that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law” (Ps. 119:18). As we see the presence of all good, it appears as “bring my sons from far and my daughters from the ends of the earth” (Isa. 43:6)—in other words, the plentitude of being coming into view.

All limitation and fear is error’s error, not yours. We see this in Mis. 260:14-18—a page where Mary Baker Eddy uses the phrase “pure Mind” three times. This pure Mind, that is yours, is consciousness with no single element of mortal mind and its experiences.

S&H 88:18 only. “To love one’s neighbor as one’s self, is a divine idea.” It is a divine idea because it is God’s idea of the one man. Hence the impossibility of division of good into here, and too often, there! And on page 91:17-19 we see that in denying material selfhood we deny all beliefs that seem to support that material selfhood, leaving only Love, the underived, that alone is Life.

Barn House, April 25, 1999

I think it important to see that you do not vacillate between Truth and error. The I is unchanging Principle, and it would be hopeless for a person to try and demonstrate or live as this I. That which begins with God is God and not a person, and it is in the understanding of God that the belief of personal sense, with all the errors that it includes, fades out. So don’t give yourself a hard time!

The fact that Christian Science appears to produce many physical healings should not blind us to the basic fact that these changes in the physical picture are entirely incidental to the disappearance of the ignorance of mortal mind, and nothing whatsoever to do with the material situation.

Science is not concerned with the eradication of disease but with the allness of Truth. Mary Baker Eddy makes it clear in many places that the words “matter,” “evil,” and “error” are equated. There is no more truth or substance in good matter, than bad. The transition from a bad to a good material state is in itself not the demonstration, and we should not seek after it. It is all related to the disappearance of ignorance and so our one concern in knowing and understanding Him whereby we learn what we are. See S&H 390:7-9.

All material knowledge is duality and so is evil, even if one half calls itself good. See S&H 92:13-16 and 26-27. People tend to go after the wrong thing and then get disappointed and say that Christian Science doesn’t work. What they need is Christian Science! To be exempt from material conditions is in proportion that material conditions—be they physical, marital, financial or anything else—cease to be a factor in thought. Only then do we have but one fact before thought, namely, spiritual existence. (See S&H 492:3-4)

No Date

[A letter in response to a question about treatment by argument in Christian Science—and wondering how one could possibly counter which specific error, among all the different possible suggestions of mortal mind, that may have caused a specific disease.]

I think it is helpful to remember that the chapter on Christian Science Practice is divided into two halves. The second half, “Mental Treatment Illustrated” which begins on page 410, seems to contain the matters that cause you problems. The passage on page 411:3-10 sets the scene. In this case “the student” was Dr. Eddy himself, and this part of the chapter is devoted to the student who is “not perfectly attuned to divine Science” and still is in the realm of probing error to the bottom, not realizing that at the bottom of 2+2=5 is nothing.

Your instinctive wish to start with Truth is correct. It is our alignment with Truth that rules out all belief in error, whether it is called by our name or that of another. While in this section MBE deals with arguments, they are a last resort and we read that “Truth is affirmative…” (S&H 418:20). Therefore it does not argue.

It may be in a general way that you deny something which is obviously untrue and see the spiritual fact instead, but normally your adherence to Truth will show up, if necessary, anything specific that requires attention, even if it does not appear to have much relevance to the case. The more thought stays with the oneness and allness of Truth, the more it is the light that deals with darkness just because it does not know it. As you rightly suggest, any attempt to deal with all mortal thoughts, one by one, would not only leave you breathless but would be like someone telling their beads. You are bound to miss one.

Please come back at me if this does not answer.

October 1997

It is so important in the work to avoid starting with the human concept of anything. The human concept is always that which hides the divine idea, which is the only reality. This is made clear in S&H 277:24-2 and all of that paragraph. The human concept is the mirage. It is nothing in its own right. The human concept comes and goes, but that is all in the dream and you do not put it right from within the dream. The only healing is the disappearance of the limited concept in the presence of divine reality.

You see this clearly in Miscellaneous Writings 204:12, the Second Baptism. Reading this, you find all the desirable human effects of this baptism, and you understand that Christian Science ‘relates to the human.’ But this never means it becomes relative. It means that these results are, again, nothing in their own right, but are the divine reality that is not wholly hidden by the mists of obscurity (see 205:3-6). You can’t work about the mists of obscurity, for they are mirage only.

Likewise, in S&H 115:25-5, the “transitional qualities” under the heading of “humanity” are, again, nothing in their own right, but are the “reality” of the third degree shining through the belief that there is any other state of being. In this degree, which is where we start, the ignorance of mortal mind disappears and man, the divine idea, appears. To enjoy Life as God (Mis. 189:19) is not ‘asking too much.’ It is living as pure Mind unfettered by the fallibility of the human concept, and so untrammeled by the so-called events of the human dream.

You do not live as part of presence, but as “the full representation of infinite Mind.” Hence S&H 267:27-28.

Live your divinity now. Nothing has ever disturbed being.

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