In an everyday sense, matter seems very real, very "there." It seems to be a concrete, kickable certainty, and that's that. But is it?

There is a great aid open to us to help determine what is real, and what's not: Christian Science. Here is a pause-giving take on the situation by its Discoverer, Mary Baker Eddy: "Everything is as real as you make it, and no more so. What you see, hear, feel, is a mode of consciousness, and can have no other reality than the sense you entertain of it" (Unity of Good, p. 8).

What difference can this point of view effect in our life? Developing spiritual, scientific understanding, and progressing in its demonstration, we can make matter less and less real to us. This has important consequences.

We may still care to sit on a chair that's firm! But as we see increasingly why matter is delusive, more happens than matter seeming a little flimsier. Bit by bit we gain more control over troublesome material conditions and hurtful or destructive situations. This leads to their amelioration, healing, and correction. Those conditions and situations control us less. We're more in charge of them and less in their charge. We're diminishingly bluffed by difficult physical challenges. All of that is immensely rewarding. As Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, also by Mary Baker Eddy, indicates, "Detach sense from the body, or matter, which is only a form of human belief, and you may learn the meaning of God, or good, and the nature of the immutable and immortal" (p. 261).

From the vantage point of Christian Science, we're never actually dealing with objects in external space but images in thought. Yet to wipe out matter is not to wipe out everything! Because matter is not everything. It's nothing—given the allness of Spirit, God, the only substance. The challenge with questioning and denying the reality of matter-substance is that it seems so solid, so hammerable; that is one's habitual way of thinking, the standard assumption. But seems is the crucial term here. Plenty of things in everyday life seem to be this way or that, yet are not. In a well-made movie, earth may quite persuasively seem to be visited by bizarre creatures space-shipped here from a far, strange planet. Even in the midst of our watching, though, we accept that it is not really as it appears. Our perception has simply been temporarily misled. There are many things we believe with high conviction, but as we mature, or find a new perspective, or walk out into the fresh air of spiritual reason, we admit we were mistaken in our belief.

The serious Christian Scientist is not dispelling matter as a concrete fact but as a mistaken mode of seeing. He is affirming—and has the common sense to prove as consistently as he can—that God is infinite, good, the All of being. Only that which is created by or included in God, Spirit, is visible to spiritual sense. Wasn't Jesus implying something akin to this when he remarked to his disciples, "I have meat to eat that ye know not of"? (John 4:32)

But merely stating that something is fictive doesn't get rid of it or its limiting effects. Expecting this would be absurd. Matter is not a reality to be changed—magically—into a nonreality but a belief to be replaced in thought by a Mind-made, God-created idea. When matter can be seen as a belief or shadow in mortal consciousness—that is, in the matter-believing false mind of mortals —then it is not so astounding to accept that this belief (as all baseless beliefs) is even more ephemeral, momentary, than the flickering light of a firefly.

Science, in practice, calls on us to replace and translate a material appearance with something solidly spiritual and spiritually solid. Science and Health sets forth the method for doing so: "Divine Science, rising above physical theories, excludes matter, resolves things into thoughts, and replaces the objects of material sense with spiritual ideas" (p. 123).

Christian Science is not nihilistic. It is not as concerned with brushing aside matter and dismissing vagaries of human belief, as with affirming the realness of God, Spirit; in fact, it is on this basis that it "nothingizes" matter. Getting to this point of matter's illusiveness, some may ask worriedly—and not unnaturally—if we dispense with matter, what happens to people, to us, to you and me? Aren't we material? Do we dissolve into nothing, our self become as something thinner than steam? Am I going to lose myself?

In truth, it's only as we take hold of the unreality of matter that our true substantial identity—matterless and eternal—can emerge. This makes way for seeing man as he genuinely is: Spirit's representation.

It is a matter-body that falls sick, a matter-body that appears to deteriorate with age. It's materialistic lust that leads to greed and skirmishes, or worse. It's belief in matter that hems in the human intellect, limiting its capabilities. This unreality of matter, then, is of much practical consequence—to us, as it was to Mary Baker Eddy. Citing her, "My insistence upon a proper understanding of the unreality of matter and evil arises from their deleterious effects, physical, moral, and intellectual, upon the race" (Un. p. 8).

So what is real? Whatever is eternal. Indestructible. Unchanging. Universal. Concordant. Substantial. Good. In other words, God, Spirit, and His spiritual manifestation as the matterless universe and man, the totality of all that is real.