It's not uncommon for a patient to say to a Christian Science practitioner, when asking for treatment, "Help me to lift my thought." That's a good starting point for anyone. But what do we mean by it?

Do we mean that we need to think positively and to hold good thoughts rather than bad? Good, constructive thoughts are certainly more useful than fearing, miserable ones! But lifting thought, as a Christian Scientist understands it, involves something other than mentally entertaining positive human views.

Mary Baker Eddy, who discovered Christian Science, explained there was an utterly crucial distinction between Christian Science and various mental approaches, improved as they might be over some tendencies of the human mind toward gloom and doom.

Perhaps we can see the distinction more easily by thinking about the disciple Peter as he attempted to walk on the water toward Jesus. His positive expectation that he could do it just wasn't enough! It was letting him down, and he was sinking! But when he reached out with everything in him to Christ Jesus he was lifted up. It is this Christ, the divine Spirit with which Jesus was at one, that still comes to lift human consciousness today.

If we're not turning fully in the direction of the Christ but are attempting to heal through our own efforts, we too may feel we're sinking. There is a great difference between wholeheartedly opening our thought to the Christ and attempting to cope with a physical illness or any other difficulty by marshaling some good human thoughts about God. Mortal mind, or the insistent, false sense of life and ego in matter, argues that any approach really amounts to about the same thing. But in fact there is an enormous difference!

When we let go of the fears, personal anxieties, human will, and many concerns of human thought, and reach toward the Christ with all our heart, something happens; we are lifted above the workaday sense of existence. With this lifting of thought, you could say, we "come to our spiritual senses." And so we see and think what we have not supposed possible when depending on the material senses and the world they presume.

Then it seems natural, for example, to feel the presence of divine Love and the great harmony of being that flows out from this Love which is the Principle of being. Illness, lack of ability, lack of inspiration, don't coexist with the actual presence of Love. Therefore they become more apparent as what, at bottom, they are—mistaken feelings that suppose the "absence" of God. They fade and no longer seem real to us. The result is healing. Mrs. Eddy writes, "By lifting thought above error, or disease, and contending persistently for truth, you destroy error." ^{Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 400.}

It is well to remember that thought is being lifted toward something—and that something is God. What Mrs. Eddy discovered was the all-pervasive reality of God which had such healing effect in the life of Christ Jesus. It was, you might say, the discovery of God without any reservation, the God who doesn't coexist with some other "reality" but the God who alone constitutes reality. In other words, to learn something of God in His allness is necessarily to see that our previous concept of what was real was false—was in error.

When thought is lifted above this error, we begin to see, in some part, what Christ Jesus saw. And at that point we realize we are no longer doing the lifting. Instead we are being lifted or inspired by a new view of everything. The counsel in the Bible, in the book of James, turns out to be supremely practical: "Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and he shall lift you up." ^{James 4:10.}

This reality that is appearing to inspired thought includes our individuality and our identity, our wholeness or health, and all our knowing. We realize we are not dependent on what we can manage to know as mortals but on all that God, who is the one Mind, knows and expresses in man.

This latter position isn't won at once. It takes continuous effort and regeneration so that we live more consistently from this spiritual basis. But recognizing that this is the scientific basis of healing, we will less frequently be misled into attempting to get an unenlightened human mind to apply the truths of Christian Science to a real disease or injury. We will know that our first need is always to have thought lifted out of the false sense of material life. As it is, we meet the Christ; we are uplifted with power beyond our own; and our new consciousness of this Christ-idea is healing in its effect.

ALLISON W. PHINNEY, JR.