Harmony is a manifestation of God, a condition of divine Mind expressed or reflected by man. It is a state of consciousness which is attained by letting the one Mind be in us "which was also in Christ Jesus." Attaining unto it therefore demands humility and trust and obedience, and it also demands the giving up of material desires and human planning and outlining. If we wish to be free and harmonious, we must accept the truth of man's being, which comes from God. We must stop waiting for something to happen that will make us harmonious, and must acknowledge as the present reality all that is true. In so doing, we shall stop accepting that which is a denial of Truth; we shall stop manifesting false beliefs that are actually nonexistent.
It is not our province to prescribe how spiritual harmony shall be brought about, because it is not through the shaping of circumstances that harmony is attained. Indeed, it is the other way round! The acknowledgment and understanding of our eternally harmonious spiritual selfhood, the bearing witness to it and being mentally at one with it, are what shape the circumstances harmoniously. As we are humbly and trustingly about the Father's business, as we let God be God to us; as we learn in everything to acknowledge the allness of God and the nothingness of evil, we find our thought soaring towards the light, and our burdens dropping away. We find ourselves tasting the blessed freedom and harmony of God's image and likeness.
Bondage of any sort, be it bondage to sin, sickness, unhappiness, lack, unemployment, depression, discouragement, fear, et cetera, is not God-ordained, is not divinely sanctioned, is not normal. And because it is not God-ordained, not divinely sanctioned, and not normal or right, it is not true. This is not alone a beautiful idealism, it is a sober fact which we all must learn to prove. But we shall never prove it true so long as we are seeing the bondage as real. And here is where we have to be watchful. Daily and hourly we are in "the valley of decision," to which the prophet Joel referred, and it is our work, our duty, or rather our privilege, to decide whether bondage or harmony shall be real to us.
