Editorial May 12, 1980 Issue

Being there through spiritual sense

GEOFFREY J. BARRATT

Imagine a man who since childhood has been isolated in a large house. He has spent his life tending the garden, his knowledge of the outside world almost wholly garnered from television. In middle age he must leave the house. This is the theme of a recent film. It explores the central character's confrontation with a reality different from that to which he has been conditioned, the reality he has absorbed in switching from channel to channel, program to succeeding program, with their exaggerations and oversimplifications.

Circumstances finally force him to leave his small cosmos and its several TV sets. He soon faces a young street tough with a knife. He tries to switch off the situation by pointing at it a TV remote control device he has taken along in his pocket. And so his extraordinary adventures in a "new" world begin to unroll.

What we believe to be real is largely determined by what we elect as the means of looking. Christian Science is the medium for gaining a wholly different look at things, a look that heals. When we consider existence through scientific sense, we don't have a naive, unsophisticated sense of being, of unreal mortal existence. What we have is an innocent, pure view of reality: of God, man, and the universe. Until we begin to cultivate spiritual sense, we're not seeing really well. We don't see with either breadth or penetration. But, "Science," Mary Baker Eddy says, "reveals the glorious possibilities of immortal man, forever unlimited by the mortal senses."^{Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 288;} And the Bible points out: "Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, ... the things which God hath prepared for them that love him. But God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit."^{I Cor. 2:9, 10;}