Appetites and materialistic leanings must be brought out into the light of divine Truth, unmasked, and progressively abandoned for higher desires and more spiritual allegiance. Spiritual understanding unfolds into greater spiritual understanding, and as we yield to its demands we move away from the unreal, unreasonable demands of mortal mind.

The truth of being is simple. To demonstrate it seems less so, because mortal mind, the supposed consciousness of life in matter, is self-deceived and deceiving. We can be caught up in its self deception to the point where we don't recognize that we are, in effect, fooling ourselves.

If man is mortal—so one kind of fallacious reasoning goes—he is subject to material life with all its frustrations and to the final tragedy of death; therefore, as some of the ancients have advocated in a half-desperate attempt to escape mortal confines, "Let's eat, drink, and be merry!" But do mortal actions and reactions make mortals less mortal? Do they postpone or even ameliorate the effects of mortality? When we are unblinded by self-deception, we see that the acceptance of appetites of any kind would vindicate mortality.

The indulgence of passions and appetites feeds the belief of mortality—shores it up in human thought and gives it supposed life and intelligence. From the basis of spiritual understanding—knowing God as All and man and the universe as spiritual—we have to discard erroneous beliefs. Intelligent matter is one such belief. Matter has no intelligence of its own, or indeed any existence. Mortal mind attributes intelligence to matter, but matter does not possess intelligence. The belief that man is mortal is also a mistake. There is, then, a Christianly scientific approach to conquering false appetite.

When we first come into Christian Science we may be eating to gratify the palate—for pleasure. Or we may go through a phase of overreaction to newfound spiritual understanding by believing food to be evil or unnecessary and neglecting as much as we can everything to do with it. Eventually most of us come to realize that eating—like everything considered to be a human necessity—has to be subjected to the control and regenerative action of prayer.

Christian Science advocates neither starvation nor gluttony, neither dieting nor undisciplined intake. Human manipulation is no substitute for the divine control. But neither do we willfully tempt God by saying it doesn't matter what we eat because God will take care of us anyway. The Bible tells us, "Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God." ^{Matt. 4:7;}

Someone may say, "Ah, but Christ Jesus told us, 'Take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink?' " The New English Bible gives this as: "No, do not ask anxiously, 'What are we to eat? What are we to drink?' " ^6:31; Isn't the emphasis on the word "anxiously"?

When we know God to be our all-caring, all-loving, and all embracing Father-Mother, we can successfully rout anxieties and the negative habits they seem to bring. Compulsive eating, for instance, stemming from unhealed anxiety, appears to be one cause of obesity. But understanding can lift us out of this sorry state. "Reform comes by understanding that there is no abiding pleasure in evil," Mrs. Eddy tells us, "and also by gaining an affection for good according to Science, which reveals the immortal fact that neither pleasure nor pain, appetite nor passion, can exist in or of matter, while divine Mind can and does destroy the false beliefs of pleasure, pain, or fear and all the sinful appetites of the human mind." ^{Science and Health, p. 327;}

Our Father-Mother God feeds us with continual inspiration by means of which to conquer fear. Spiritual enrichment alone permanently satisfies and sustains. Ample spiritual nourishment—keeping thought well filled with Truth through prayer, study, and proof—is the only cure for nagging appetite.

When we seem to be pushed around by cravings of any kind, it's time to listen for Mind's prompting. What's happening is that we are exerting the push—human, mortal will. We are saying, in effect: "I want to be mortal. I like believing that matter can rule me."

Scientific prayer delivers us from this predicament. We realize through identifying ourselves correctly in prayer that even if we wanted to we couldn't actually be mortal, because in reality we are divine Mind's incorporeal ideas. As such we are complete, needing nothing added to or subtracted from our perfect being in God's likeness. We are not in the arena where supposed physical forces can affect us. As this understanding grows, we can see the fulfillment of Mrs. Eddy's promise, "Pride, appetites, passions, envy, and malice will cease to assert their Caesar sway when metaphysics is understood ...." ^{Christian Healing, p. 18;}

The right human course is made possible because of the spiritual fact. Mrs. Eddy sums up the work we have to do in this passage: "We cannot build safely on false foundations. Truth makes a new creature, in whom old things pass away and 'all things are become new.' Passions, selfishness, false appetites, hatred, fear, all sensuality, yield to spirituality, and the superabundance of being is on the side of God, good." ^{Science and Health, p. 201.}

Man is perfect, satisfied, complete. Clinging to this truth and applying it in every situation, we begin to prove it. Dominion, wholesomeness, and flexible but wise living habits will be the result.

O send out thy light and thy truth:
let them lead me;
let them bring me unto thy holy hill,
and to thy tabernacles.

Psalms 43:3