EACH individual may be said to be well or ill, happy or unhappy, useful or inefficient, to the extent that he is what might be called materially or spiritually conscious.
There are few persons who cannot testify to the misery of passing through a stage of acute personal self-consciousness. This may have been for only a brief period, or it may have been for a longer duration; but the more pronounced the personal sense of self, the more poignant the experience. Nor was this condition changed until hampering self-consciousness was in some degree dispelled.
A personal sense of self always cloys, impedes, hinders. All it ever seems to achieve is to obscure the activity of the real man. When apparently most busy, it is accomplishing the least. Mrs. Eddy writes in "Miscellaneous Writings" (p. 230), "Rushing around smartly is no proof of accomplishing much." The business of personal sense is always error of some sort. However elaborate its plans, or however rose-colored its prospects, they invariably come to naught, because they lack the energy of true purpose and law. This personal sense has no directing intelligence, no ability to accomplish, no power of achievement, for it is not begotten of the Father.
