Editorial January 17, 1976 Issue

Silencing the Senses

Geoffrey J. Barratt

How much of our concept of reality comes from the avenue of the five personal senses—seeing, smelling, tasting, hearing, feeling? In Christian Science this "reality" is identified as, in fact, unreality. Science, not the senses, must inform us of reality, the reality of infinite Truth and its spiritual creation. And to be enlightened by Science is to be able to heal. To be fully informed by Science is to heal at once. "Science speaks," Mary Baker Eddy points out, "when the senses are silent, and then the evermore of Truth is triumphant."^{Miscellaneous Writings, p. 100;}

Our ability to silence the senses and to recognize Truth already triumphant must be cultivated. How may we do this efficiently? Through exercising spiritual sense. Through right reasoning—reasoning that admits as the only valid premise the omnipresence and goodness of Truth, Spirit; through reasoning that begins with the infiniteness of Spirit and concludes with the spirituality and perfection of man, Spirit's expression.

Such reasoning exposes the invalidity—the total nothingness—of the information and pictures of the corporeal senses, claiming as realities disease and deterioration. In Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures Mrs. Eddy states, "Reason, rightly directed, serves to correct the errors of corporeal sense; but sin, sickness, and death will seem real (even as the experiences of the sleeping dream seem real) until the Science of man's eternal harmony breaks their illusion with the unbroken reality of scientific being."^{Science and Health, p. 494;}