Probably nothing is more important to the progress of humanity out of its still primitive limitations than the understanding that consciousness is fundamental to experience. This is true, whether one is considering spiritual consciousness, divine Mind's reflection, or its supposed opposite, material consciousness. Whether experience is subjective —in the mind—or is an external phenomenon is something humanity must decide; for true dominion depends upon a correct standpoint. The world may well be at a crossroads where a decision must be made.

Dialectical materialism declares for the external standpoint; scientific Christianity declares for the subjective. Christ Jesus taught (Luke 17:21), "The kingdom of God is within you." The Christian Scientist follows this metaphysical precept, and he looks within his true, spiritual consciousness to find the perfect concepts of divine Love's creating. Mary Baker Eddy says in the textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 475): "Man is idea, the image, of Love; he is not physique. He is the compound idea of God, including all right ideas." And in the same paragraph we read that man is "that which has no separate mind from God."

In the textbook we also find that one of the great points which became clear to Mrs. Eddy in relation to her discovery of Christian Science is that matter is a subjective state of the carnal, or mortal, mind, having no identity apart from the senses which observe it. Of equal importance was the discovery that the carnal mind is a myth and that it can be proved to be nothing.

Matthew tells us that when Jesus "went about all Galilee," one of his activities was the preaching of "the gospel of the kingdom" (Matt. 4:23), according to one translator, "the good news of dominion." The Master saw all things as mental—within consciousness—and his mission was to exchange false consciousness, with its limited concepts called matter, for real consciousness—the kingdom—with its unlimited, spiritual ideas.

He was not merely showing miraculous power when he was carrying out his mission in that little district we call Palestine. When he healed the sick, walked on the water, eliminated space, fed multitudes, stilled the storm, and rose from the grave, he was teaching a profound metaphysical lesson. He was proving for universal humanity that matter is a mental phenomenon and that the exchange of mortal consciousness for spiritual consciousness transforms present experience to higher mental altitudes and leads to full salvation from mortality. His ascension was his final proof that material consciousness is a myth.

It is to be noted that while Jesus benefited many others by his illustrations of the power of reality over unreality, he also did his work as an individual. His demonstration of reality went on within his individual consciousness. He was a law unto himself because he distinguished between the kingdom of God within man and its opposite, the subjective states of error called matter, and because he saw the latter as unreal.

Mrs. Eddy says in "Miscellaneous Writings" (p. 223), "Science proves, beyond cavil, that the tree is known by its fruit; that mind reaches its own ideal, and cannot be separated from it." The false theory that matter is the source of mind sets its own limitations at the outset, for matter is limitation's own selfhood; whereas the scientific understanding that divine Mind is the only Mind and that every concept in it reflects infinity sets thought at work to reject limitations of every sort and to prove the presence of God's kingdom of infinite ideas forever inseparable from the consciousness beholding them.

Scientific understanding influences everything appearing in the individual's experience: his health, supply, business, associations, transportation, home, church, and even his life. He will find it necessary to conjoin with others in social existence, for no one lives to himself; but his own thinking will govern even his relations with others. Matter will never appear in quite the same quantity or quality to the progressive Scientist because of the influence of his increasing spirituality upon whatever rests within his consciousness as concept.

To believe that any material thing is external to thought is to enter into laborious efforts to manipulate it into satisfactory conditions and quantities. But to know that matter is a mental misconception of what Mind makes is to begin to dissipate matter as an illusion, which claims to hide though never touches the kingdom of Spirit.

"The gospel of the kingdom" is the good news of the subjective existence of real, harmonious, and infinite concepts, which all may understand and bring to light. It is the good news of man's dominion over all the earth.

Christian Scientists have a tremendous but joyous responsibility to prove by the transformation of their own thought what "the gospel of the kingdom" really proclaims—that consciousness is fundamental and that God is ever present to reveal the works of His hands, which are included in it.

Helen Wood Bauman