There seems to be a certain mesmerism about mistakes, which is of course, entirely foreign to the truth and to that which intelligently bears witness to this truth. A teacher, writing on the blackboard examples in mathematics, to test the children's understanding of mathematics may sometimes write the wrong figures simply to see which of the pupils are sufficiently awake to detect the mistake, and it may happen that students who themselves know how to work out the problem, lazily respond to the suggestion and accept the mistake as correct. Only the alert student recognizes this suggestion for what it is, and instantly replaces the mistake with the right answer; and this ability to detect and correct a mistake comes not because of any special study of or familiarity with mistakes, but rather from knowing the truth so thoroughly that anything foreign to this truth, even though presented as true, cannot deceive one. It is essential not only to know the right answer to the problem, to know the truth, but to know that one knows it. Then one cannot be entrapped by any subtle suggestion, even though presented or apparently accepted as true by the most advanced scholar or renowned teacher.
This, of course, is but a simple illustration showing how the human mind responds to mesmeric suggestion. And this very trait shows the instability of human belief. Only a few centuries ago it was believed that the earth was flat and stationary, and that the sun traveled; but now astronomers tell us that the sun is at rest and the earth and the planets revolve around the sun. When this astronomical discovery was proved to the satisfaction of astronomers, and when it finally found general acceptance it was conceded also not only that the world was now a sphere but that it had been so during all the ages in which it had been universally believed otherwise, and that despite the universal false belief during all those centuries of ignorance of the workings of the planetary system, it had been the earth and not the sun that revolved; so that this very discovery was also conclusive proof of the utter unreliability of the material senses. That the whole world had believed the testimony of material sense had not changed the actual fact one iota, but had simply illustrated the tenacity of human belief, unsupported by any proof except the false evidence of sense testimony.
And yet, the physical shape and nature of the earth planet sinks into insignificance against the still popular misconception of the science of being, of man and the universe and their relation to their divine Principle, God, infinite Spirit. For with even greater tenacity, apparently, than mankind once believed the earth to be flat, human belief still clings to the illusion that there is a reality, a life and being, apart from the one Life, God, and that this mortal, material life is governed by a so-called mortal mind apart from the divine All-Mind. This is the mistake from which mankind must awaken, and when the mistake is recognized for what it is, it will be seen that the truth of being, the glorious fact of spiritual existence, has remained unchanged by all the misconceptions of erring, human belief.
