Article January 11, 1982 Issue

Stone wall or gossamer web?

ARLINE WALKER EVANS

Someone who is hypnotized can be made to see and feel things that are not really there. Suppose a man, seated in a living room, is told to walk the length of the room by a hypnotist. The man proceeds to obey until he stops suddenly, winces, rubs his knees, and declares he can't proceed because he has run into a stone wall! If this individual knew how, he could nullify the hypnotist's suggestion of the presence of a stone wall in the middle of the floor. Then he could proceed across the room.

Sometimes we are confronted with difficulties that seem like stone walls, preventing progress, inflicting hurt, and appearing to be insurmountable. But such barriers have no more essential reality than a hypnotist's "stone wall." No person (or persons) has really created them. They are falsely imposed concepts. All difficulties are mortal mind's misconceptions. Because this false mind is itself unreal, and because the divine Mind is in truth always our Mind, we can reject troubles as hypnotic suggestion.

Christ Jesus impersonalized the whole material sense of life. He identified good always as God's, and man's by reflection, and evil as the lies of mortal mind, or the devil, which he called "a liar, and the father of it." John 8:44. Because our spiritual senses reveal only spiritual good, the material senses are the only witnesses to, or testifiers of, false concepts, or misconceptions. The material senses are mortal mind's own false senses, the medium of error. This false mind is an unreal dream sense that can cause nothing.

Enjoy 1 free Sentinel article or audio program each month, including content from 1898 to today.

Send a comment to the editors
NEXT IN THIS ISSUE
Poem
God draws His own
January 11, 1982
Contents

We'd love to hear from you!

Easily submit your testimonies, articles, and poems online.

Submit