Editorial December 8, 1973 Issue

One Consciousness

Geoffrey J. Barratt

Christian Science makes a unique and healing contribution to questions relating to consciousness, showing what it is, how it works, and if it has a hidden lower layer, subconsciousness. Psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis, attracting much attention in this century, generally include the theory that unconscious mental processes are primary factors shaping the life and experience of each one of us far more than we realize.

Mrs. Eddy, too, recognized that—in mortal belief—there is an unconscious area of thought that could hide beliefs producing discord. She writes of some instances of bodily discord, "The belief that produces this result may be wholly unknown to the individual, because it is lying back in the unconscious thought, a latent cause producing the effect we see."^{Christian Healing, p. 6;}

But Christian Science doesn't leave the situation in the realm of the seeming, of unconscious thought. It alerts us to this as a false claim that may need our specific denial when we are mentally treating disease in Christian Science. And we can make this denial from the basis of the oneness of divine Mind and consciousness. Through Mrs. Eddy's writings we gain the understanding of these spiritual facts and learn the way to demonstrate them in healing illnesses, no matter what forms they seem to assume.

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