IN speaking of the earnest student "who gains the God-crowned summit of Christian Science," Mrs. Eddy says in "Retrospection and Introspection" (p. 76), "He thinks of every one in his real quality, and sees each mortal in an impersonal depict." This spiritualized consciousness, through which one perceives one's true identity in Mind, free from fleshly outline, material environment, or mortal parentage, is attained only through much self-correction, through subordinating the human sense of things to the apprehension of God, Spirit, Truth, and endeavoring to embody in one's life the Christ ideal of scientifically impersonalizing both evil and good. It is accomplished only by habitually cultivating the divinely inspired determination which asserts, in the words of Paul, "Wherefore henceforth know we no man after the flesh: yea, though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now henceforth know we him no more."
The understanding which unfolds to us in our study and application of Christian Science that matter, material men, and the material universe are false, mortal concepts leads us naturally into the realization that all we can know of ourselves or of others is that which is deduced from the truth about God. In the book of Job we read, "Acquaint now thyself with him [God], and be at peace." In order to have this peace manifested in our lives, we must prove that man, with unchanging identity as God's idea, is the only man there is. When we perceive that our individual concept of a person, a place, a thing is all we know or possess of them, in other words, that our affection, friendship, or association of whatever character is wholly a mental experience, we have grasped a metaphysical fact which helps to lift us above the illusion of life in matter or reality in finite personality into the perception of Mind and its ideas as All-in-all. Each one's concept is entirely individual and constitutes his thought world.
Our conscious experience, therefore, being wholly individual, is of our own making; we are responsible for its quality, trend, and scope. According as our thought models are temporal or eternal, we mold it either materially or spiritually. Hence only as we scientifically exchange the personal sense of ourselves and of others for the impersonal Christ-idea or divine ideal—man made in the image of God, spiritual, perfect, and immortal—do we realize something of the infinite source of supply, the omnipresence of good, and the limitless channels through which God— divine Life, Truth, and Love—is manifested.
