Article June 23, 1980 Issue

You don't need drugs

PAUL O'BRIEN

The desire to use drugs arises basically from a false sense of identity. In reality, everyone's identity is perfect, spiritual, perpetually concordant. This identity exists in perfect unity with Mind, God, and His entire universe of ideas. However, mortal mind (the term Christian Science adopts for a supposed mind apart from Mind) would claim we have an incomplete, material identity, which must be made complete through the intake of some form of matter. Drugs claim to offer the exaltation, relaxation, or escape— even the added aggressiveness in sports—mortals long for.

This search for completeness of identity in matter results from allowing ourselves to be limited by mortal beliefs, opposed to our true, Christly identity. The desire to "complete" ourselves materially, in the eyes of a peer group, gives drugs whatever glamour (and the word "glamour" originally meant "a magic spell") they may seem to have. This "spell" must be seen as powerless to affect man's true, perfect selfhood, since God is all power.

The realm of God's ideas is that state of bliss wherein man reflects creativity, beauty, fulfillment, the glory of Spirit, of Soul. Society affords only occasional glimpses of this ideal. But unless we reject the picture of an imperfect human society for the reality, God's family of perfect ideas in which we are forever embraced, we may feel tempted to turn to some form of matter to supply whatever seems missing from our daily lives. Man is Spirit's, Soul's, complete idea, forever including everything he needs by reflection. Only a clearer view of this fact can remedy the emptiness that accompanies immersion in a counterfeit, material sense of things.

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