True self-consciousness is consciousness of the real self, which is known to God, but not to mortals, and is desirable. The self-consciousness which is a deterrent to human advancement, and which seemingly hampers some whose duties bring them before the public, and also many in private life, is the belief in a counterfeit, reversed sense of a self totally unknown to God.
Searching by means of the Concordances to Mrs. Eddy's writings for a clear distinction between the real and the unreal self, the student may find, on the one hand, such terms as self-aggrandizement, self-mesmerism, self-assertion, self-justification, self-deception, self-distrust, and on the other, self-surrender, self-respect, self-oblivious, self-immolation, self-denial, self-consecration, self-control, self-offering, self-government, and their like. A clarified understanding of the distinction between the real and the unreal self enables one to contradict intelligently all false, masquerading forms of self. The word "contradict" means "to assert to the contrary," as well as "to deny the truth of." The quality contrary to self-aggrandizement evidently is self-abnegation. Self-distrust would be reversed by self-government, and self-justification would necessarily give way to self-surrender.
When one's own or another's false sense of self has seemed rampant, the word "unselfed," with all that it implies, falls blessedly on the ear. In her message written for the dedication of the Extension of The Mother Church (The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 6) Mrs. Eddy has used a gracious and descriptive phrase in her statement, "To abide in our unselfed better self is to be done forever with the sins of the flesh, the wrongs of human life, the tempter and temptation, the smile and deceit of damnation." Here is a definite rule for healing sin and human wrongs, namely, to abide in, to live continuously in, "our unselfed better self."
