Editorial December 10, 1949 Issue

THE RIGHT STATE OF MIND

George Channing

In Christian Science it is the state of mind and not the state of matter that is of importance. If the consciousness of good, the outcome of the divine Mind, God, is made manifest as the consciousness of the individual, matter, so called, may well be left to its own inability to interfere with that consciousness. By the consciousness of good, matter is understood to be without power or entity; and as the understanding is, so is experience.

The primary importance of one's state of mind is often emphasized by Mary Baker Eddy, Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science. For instance, in her textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," she states (p. 161): "Holy inspiration has created states of mind which have been able to nullify the action of the flames, as in the Bible case of the three young Hebrew captives, cast into the Babylonian furnace; while an opposite mental state might produce spontaneous combustion." Clearly, it was the state of mind of those three youths that ensured their immunity from harm, and the state of the furnace was of no consequence, except to provide the opportunity for proof that matter, in whatever seeming state of fury, can make no impression upon the right state of consciousness. Making no impression, it is relegated to impotence, nothingness, and ceases even to seem to appear in any form of limitation.

Naturally the uninitiated in spiritual understanding and demonstration will ask how this is done. "What is the right state of mind, and how can it be acquired, and, once acquired, how can it be maintained?" The answer is that one must cultivate genuine intelligence, which truly loves God. God is the one infinite Mind. He is the Mind of every individual, every varied manifestation of Life. The right state of Mind is the state of that one and only Mind. The appearance of any other state of mind at variance with the state of the one Mind, God, is illusion, mirage, myth.

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