In all God's earth and heaven there is nothing personal to anyone. It's all His—everything that really is. Beauty is His; so are innocence, creativeness, joy, love. All the good that is, derives from and belongs to God. It does not belong to a person but is reflected by all individuals.

Scientific Christianity lifts us out of the personal sense of life and worship into the recognition of individual spiritual being. Life is God, and true worship is healing—an astonishingly beautiful journey overbrimming with peace, freedom, and clarity.

Mrs. Eddy states plainly, "This great truth of God's impersonality and individuality and of man in His image and likeness, individual, but not personal, is the foundation of Christian Science." And she adds: "There was never a religion or philosophy lost to the centuries except by sinking its divine Principle in personality. May all Christian Scientists ponder this fact, and give their talents and loving hearts free scope only in the right direction!" ^{The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 117;}

Personal sense is the belief in non-God, non-good. It's the physical concept of oneself, with its various shortcomings, out of good's control. Personal sense accepts an assortment of habits, dispositions, and weaknesses shaped by the mistaken beliefs of millennia and this sense's trailing bag of negative memories. The fiction is that evil has a specific and real origin, that good is limited and God distant or nonexistent.

Much of the trouble of the world can be attributed to personal sense; it's a deceiver, which brings sorrow. A personal sense of things has been promising pleasure and delivering pain since the Garden of Eden; it gloats with pride, but ends up ashamed; it lusts for power, but is the seedbed of fear; it vainly seeks comfort in sympathy while it incessantly partitions itself, creating its own enemies, its own otherness, at every turn; it thinks it is a sort of life, and yet it dies.

But there is no distance from God for personal sense to feel, no limits to God for it to seek to remedy. There is only God—ever present with you and me, and without whom we are nothing. "If a man think himself to be something, when he is nothing, he deceiveth himself." ^{Gal. 6:3;} The deception is personal sense.

Our talent, our ability, our uniqueness, our spiritual endowment of goodness and love are not personally ours; they are the self-expression of God's own infinite individuality. And to realize this doesn't make our identity feeble or our sense of reality fuzzy. The recognition of our spiritual individuality heightens present existence. We become aware of ourselves as specific, eternal instances of God's goodness, satisfied with clear, spiritual identity.

We can never be as consciously certain of mortal birth or death as we are of our present individuality. Indeed, our individuality is now what it always will be; it was never born, is never sick or unhappy, and will never die, because it's the very emanation of God. Birth and death are found to be illusions as we travel the spiritual path that leads out of the personal sense of ourselves and others.

When we are confronted by troubles appearing to come from the faults of others—such as jealousy, hatred, or dishonesty—they are not likely to go away until we impersonalize them. We need to see that the jealousy, hatred, and dishonesty are not persons, or even from persons, and never could be. The trouble has its origin in personal sense beholding its own false concept of external hostility. The coveter, hater, criminal, is a fancied contradiction of God's presence to be understood as nothing—nonpresence—rather than someone to change or to be got rid of.

Similarly the evil that seems to find expression in you and me— the uncontrolled appetite, the disease, the selfish traits of character —has absolutely nothing to do with what you and I truly are. We need to stop indulging in a false, personal, and finite sense of ourselves, and instead behold and take hold of our real identity in God, which is already free. God doesn't change disease into health; He reveals to us real being, in which there is no disease. And so we experience that fact.

It's a bit harder to impersonalize the good—to see that the qualities we love don't come from people, but from God, and to know that we can express the intelligence, the wisdom, the beauty of God but that we are not personal possessors of these. With God instead of person as our central love and only source of worth, we cannot be devastated by the changes that inevitably occur on the human scene. We understand good to be immortal, as goodness has to be, and we become effectively responsive to need, instead of weighed down by a personal sense of responsibility.

This impersonalizing may seem theoretical in view of the world's plethora of personal evidence. But if impersonal good, the kingdom of God, is within us as Christ Jesus said it is, it must appear to us individually. And the external evidence to the contrary has been proved powerless for centuries by those who have been willing to turn to Spirit and to the spiritual center of themselves. The Bible and the history of Christian Science are studded with proofs of the power of Spirit and spiritual sense over the personal senses.

To unfold His Christ-image as the truth of us all is the ongoing activity of God. No one can permanently resist this development. Instead of clinging to the aboveground entombment of personal sense, we find there is nothing to fear in letting this finite sense of self fall away and be buried in oblivion. Then more and more our true, Christly identity, unselfish and invincible, shines through each daily experience.

Like St. Paul we can let personal self "die daily." ^{I Cor. 15:31.} We can give up personal views, selfish aims, limited outlooks, and surrender to the peace of God's love. It is through the authentic relinquishment of a sense of personal self that we consciously behold and touch the Almighty. Instead of worrying over goodness and life as personal possessions, we celebrate our being as the possession of God that it is—the individual, conscious unfolding of His unending joy.