Article April 24, 1971 Issue

Purifying the Past

SIR GEORGE E. J. MAHON

How can one purify something that has already happened? Many people feel that the past has made them failures or that the mistakes of others have adversely affected them. Perhaps they have memories of sicknesses or injuries that have scarred their attitudes or bodies. How, they wonder, can they possibly get rid of these scars?

To see whether it is really possible to deal with the past, let us first consider just what it is comprised of. What is its entity? What nature does it actually have? When we examine it logically in the light of Christian Science, that Science which demonstrates, in every healing it accomplishes, the mental nature of experience, we find that the past is not as solid as it seems. It is just a sort of cavalcade of mental images passing before our gaze in very much the way a film show does. The extent to which it hurts or harms us depends on ourselves, depends on how we react to it and what we make of it.

In other words, the past and its effect upon us is subjective. What we currently regard as past is an image in our own current thinking. Indeed, what we call past actually exists for us only in our current thinking—nowhere else.

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