Article June 22, 2015 Issue

Awake to spiritual reality

Peter Ross

As Christian Scientists, our ultimate goal should be to become increasingly conscious of reality. A better understanding of present perfection is essential in any Christian Science healing. Anyone who feels burdened by inharmonious conditions needn’t struggle to regain a former level of perfection because in actuality, we have never left perfection.

We might say, “But if I’m not feeling well, that certainly seems real to me.” While this may be true, the sickness we think we’re experiencing and feeling is actually part of the mortal dream of life in matter that we’re accepting as real. If we fall asleep and have a dream in which we appear to be in a dire situation, would the solution be to figure out how to extricate ourselves? No! We simply need to wake up. Likewise, when we are confronted with what looks like a huge problem, we needn’t fret or ruminate over what to do. Instead, the solution is to wake up from the hypnotized state of thought and see what is already true about us—that we are forever at home in the kingdom of heaven, never made to suffer. The Christ, “the divine manifestation of God,” speaking to our consciousness enables us to do this (Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 583).

If we are working out a problem in mathematics and come up with the wrong answer, this doesn’t indicate that there is something wrong with mathematics, but it does alert us that we haven’t applied it correctly. Likewise, if we are praying in Christian Science and we appear to be getting nowhere, it’s a good idea to ask ourselves exactly what we’re trying to accomplish. If we are attempting to make bad matter into better matter, we are working from the wrong standpoint, because there actually is no matter.

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Christ, whose glory fills the skies