Article September 2, 1933 Issue

Individuality

STACY M. SNOW

One who took great pleasure in her garden focused extreme care and attention on a bed of choice narcissi, flowers of which she was particularly fond. For some time she watched the plants grow until the bed was so filled that the plot could hardly hold them. One day a neighbor who knew the ways of gardens noticed the overcrowded bed and advised that the plants be thinned out and given a better chance to develop. When the gardener awakened to the fact that although she had a bed of thickly-grown prize narcissus plants not a blossom had graced them, she realized the wisdom of the advice. After this had been done it was not long before there were so many narcissus blooms that people came to see them and there were flowers for many of the neighbors. This experience resulted in the unfoldment of a clearer understanding of individuality and its value for this Christian Scientist.

It was seen that one has no more right to hold loved ones in bondage to human will, to limit their endeavors, than she had to force her plants to grow unnaturally in a restricted area. It was also learned that just as the flower bed, wrongly cultivated and subjected through false human reasoning and ignorance to improper treatment, was unproductive of blossoms, so when human consciousness seems filled with erroneous beliefs and controlled by wrong conditions of thought it must be freed of these crowding errors or one is thereby deprived temporarily of bringing forth the fruits of Spirit.

Our beloved Leader, Mary Baker Eddy, has stated in the following lines from the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 531), the liberating process which is necessary to transform human thought and bring out manifestations of good: "The human mind will sometime rise above all material and physical sense, exchanging it for spiritual perception, and exchanging human concepts for the divine consciousness. Then man will recognize his God-given dominion and being." When one's endeavors are not productive of good, it is clear evidence that one's human consciousness needs to be purged of error and properly cultivated through spiritual thinking, for human experiences are but the expression of thought.

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