HEALING in Christian Science is more than anything else a process of awakening. This awakening is brought about in different ways— through reading the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," and other writings by Mary Baker Eddy; through treatment from a Christian Science practitioner; through listening to a lecture on Christian Science; through reading an article or articles in the Christian Science periodicals. Through any one of these avenues for gaining an understanding of God healing may come.
What is it from which we must be awakened, if we are to be healed? It is the belief that there is life and intelligence in matter; the belief that man is mortal, material, and that evil is real. On page 188 of the textbook Mrs. Eddy writes, "Mortal existence is a dream of pain and pleasure in matter, a dream of sin, sickness, and death; and it is like the dream we have in sleep, in which every one recognizes his condition to be wholly a state of mind." To what do we awaken when we are healed? We awaken to the truth of being, to that which really is—perfect God, perfect man, and perfect universe. As the process of awakening takes place, we come to perceive that man is not mortal but immortal, not material but spiritual, and that evil is illusion, without entity or reality.
In the proportion that this awakening to what is, takes place in one's consciousness, ills of the body, maladjustments in business and other relationships, mental distress and financial lack disappear, and then we say that healing has taken place. Through this awakening process, however, nothing has been done to the body that seemed to be ill, nothing has been done personally to the one that seemed to be contrary-minded or estranged, or to material things such as money, bonds, investments, or articles that seemed to be involved in the business problem. The healing, as we call it, has taken place because some measure of wrong thinking has been corrected, some measure of blinded, mistaken, or misinformed thought has been instructed by Christian Science, and some measure of materiality has been displaced by spirituality. Healing, then, is an awakening out of the dream of that which is not to the realization of that which is.
