Article November 1, 1947 Issue

AWAKING FROM THE MORTAL DREAM

HELEN WOOD BAUMAN

When Mary Baker Eddy exposed the impersonal nature of evil, she made it possible for the human race to progress toward full liberation from bondage to a false, sinful sense of existence. Her revelation, Christian Science, teaches that because God is infinite good, evil, the absence of good, is but an illusion; it is never a person. And its subtle claim to identity or ego must be rejected as absolutely unreal.

Mrs. Eddy explains material existence, in which man appears to be a physical personality capable of sin, disease, and death, as nothing more than a mortal dream, a suppositional realm which is entirely apart from real, spiritual being. She writes in the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 250), "Mortal existence is a dream; mortal existence has no real entity, but saith 'It is I.' " And after stating that the night dreamer is untouched by the experiences of his dream, she adds: "Now I ask. Is there any more reality in the waking dream of mortal existence than in the sleeping dream? There cannot be, since whatever appears to be a mortal man is a mortal dream."

Do the figures which we see so vividly in a night dream, which act and walk about, which say "I" to each other and to us, have real identity? Does not their fleeting claim to identity vanish with the dream sense at the very moment of awakening? Science discloses that the sense of man as materially personal which seems so true in our waking hours is no more the true identity or ego of man than are the phantoms of the night dream, and that this daydream, too, must fade away as humanity awakens spiritually to the understanding of real being. Spiritual reflection alone, God-derived and incorporeal, possesses actual identity. Nothing has real identity but the consciousness which has its source in God, the one divine Mind.

Send a comment to the editors

NEXT IN THIS ISSUE

Article

LESSONS OF A DIAMOND