One cannot but admire the expression of that which is generally termed poise in an individual. Educational institutions endeavor to foster it from graded school recitation work to university public speaking courses, laying great stress on the necessity for what they call self-reliance. The average man, however, if he stops to analyze poise and those virtues upon which he considers it to be based, namely self-reliance and cultivated ability, cannot but feel that his resources are at best uncertain. This is because he believes that he is relying on a humanly cultured self of his own, which is subject at any time to such moral vicissitudes as sickness, accident, or loss of memory. If this same average man, so depending, begins to interpret his experience in the light of Christian Science, he comes to very much sounder and more dependable conclusions in his analyses. And if the man who has always considered it his fate to admire poise and self-possession from afar begins to reason in the light of Christian Science, he will realize that he is entitled to express these qualities, and, furthermore, that they are already within his reach.
The word poise is defined in the dictionary as, "The state of being balanced by equal weight or power; equipoise; balance; equilibrium; rest." An admirably poised individual, then, is one mentally well-balanced and self-possessed, and when this is interpreted through Christian Science and the individual begins to depend on the scientific revelation of true poise, he finds that he does not have to rely on a self-constituted human mind of his own, trained in human self-reliance, but that such a so-called mind is merely a misunderstanding of the one Mind, which is God, and of which man is the expression. Then his means of developing and maintaining his poise and self-possession comes to be an earnest effort to understand the All-Mind and himself as its reflection. Self-possession, he comes to find, is a humble recognition of himself as God's idea, and this self-possession, the inheritance of God's own child. Self-reliance, then, is seen to be reliance on the selfhood of God, the source of man's being, that self which man expresses. The Ego of man is revealed as the great "I am," which man reflects, and he finds he has no self apart from God. Thus is he blessed with a self-reliance which never fails. With what glorious confidence he can then go forth to the accomplishment of any worthy purpose whatever!
In exchanging all belief in a self apart from God for this understanding of his relationship to infinite Mind, he must give up all belief of self as matter and ever recognize God's allness and the perfectibility of His creation. He will then be undisturbed amid sense testimony, and this peace is the true sense of poise or balance, the true sense of the last of the above-quoted definitions of poise, namely "rest." This poise is unswayed by any desire for human applause or by any fear of criticism. It seeks only to balance its account with God. It is never ill at ease or ''self-conscious" in the generally accepted meaning of that term, for it is ever conscious of the true self as God's expression.
