Article October 3, 1914 Issue

States of Consciousness

MARTHA R. WHITE

The great thinkers of the world who have pressed home the question of the sources of knowledge, have shown that in the last analysis all we know is thought, since the process of knowing is itself a process of thinking. Therefore the only world we know is a mental world, the circle of our own consciousness. Whence spirings that consciousness, and by what is the river of thought fed? This has become the important question.

Men have called the creative Principle by the name of God, and sought in many ways to find the nature of God as thus conceived. Christian Science shows that since like produces like, the creative source of conscious being is Mind, and that life is to be found and understood by keeping to this definition, and not by seeking to belittle God by interposing another creator of opposite nature, called matter. Since we know only mental things, matter must be a guess at something different from the mental. Experience of Christian Science demonstration proves that the Principle of all things is indeed Mind, and that this Mind is Immanuel, "God with us." Christian Science demonstration—healing the sick and blotting out evil conditions—is the bringing into daily manifestation the beneficent and all-powerful Being whom Jesus called our heavenly Father.

The activity of Mind is reflected in the unceasing flow of pure thought, the book of Revelation telling us that the "river of water of life" (the stream of consciousness) is "clear as crystal," because it proceeds "out of the throne of God." In thought is our recognition of life and identity, and "real consciousness is cognizant only of the things of God" (Science and Health, p. 276). Therefore, as mankind rises to higher modes of thinking, the evils that now befog the way will no longer appear. It has been said that if mankind, instead of the five senses they now possess, had other totally different senses, the world would seem an entirely different place. This is very true, and Christian Science is teaching how to gain the spiritual senses of man, which are attuned only to good, and which can no more and respond to a suggestion of error than a tuning-fork can respond to a note that is out of its key.

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