Article April 11, 1994 Issue

Spiritual sense reveals reality

A material sense of life can't open our view to the uninterrupted good that God gives.

Marian Cates

How do we know what we know? The usual answer is this: through our five physical senses and our interpretation of the data they convey. Yet we're aware of enough instances of illusory impressions to recognize that what the senses tell us can be unreliable. For instance, we have learned to reject the impression that the sun revolves around the earth and that airplanes get smaller as they fly away from us.

In the Christian Science textbook, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Mary Baker Eddy helps us see that we have a nonphysical sense that gives us an understanding of reality. "Spiritual sense," she says, "is a conscious, constant capacity to understand God" (p.209). Understanding God is generally believed to be beyond man's capabilities. But Christian Science holds that man, as God created him, possesses this spiritual sense, which enables him to understand all being—God and His creation.

Many people are ready to accept the idea that we have a capacity for knowing that goes beyond the five physical senses. It can be called intuition or revelation. Spiritual sense is, however, actually our one means of perceiving reality as it truly is, and not merely an addition to the physical senses. Although the five senses seem to be legitimate, they can report only a surface view of things, and thus are not our genuine means of perception.

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