A KITTEN seeing its reflection in a polished surface attempts to play with the advancing and retreating image. Observing these antics, one realizes that the kitten takes for objective reality its own playful reflection. In a manner somewhat analogous the human mind, unacquainted with spiritual realities, perceives its own beliefs mirrored in the form of material personality and a material sense of existence and believes them to be identity, substance, life, and intelligence. It classifies as real that which it cognizes by the physical senses of sight, hearing, smell, touch, and taste.
Our revered Leader, Mary Baker Eddy, with inspired wisdom writes in the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 337), "Material personality is not realism; it is not the reflection or likeness of Spirit, the perfect God." It is only through a spiritualized consciousness, wherein God is recognized as Spirit, Mind, and man as reflecting the divine nature, that true realism can be found.
One must first perceive in some degree "the reflection or likeness of Spirit, the perfect God," man created and maintained in God's image and likeness, in order to effect his escape from the bondage of a foundationless reliance upon material personalities. This spiritual view of man is basic to the scientific realism which apprehends the universe of God's creating, peopled with divine ideas, imperishable identities.
Man, showing forth the qualities of His Father-Mother God, knows nought of unreliable sense testimony, which is the source of the belief in material personality. The spiritually awakened thinker perceives that God, who is not a human person, is Principle, Mind, Soul, Spirit, Life, Truth, and Love, and that man is the individual idea of this one Mind. As the truth of this perception develops in one's thought, it progressively destroys the false concept of material personality. In the degree one sees man as the image of God, Spirit, Mind, Life, the omnipotence or all-power of Truth and Love eliminates suffering, sin, disease, and death, which are known only to the material senses and have no place in spiritualized consciousness.
To begin to free oneself scientifically from the material sense of personality, one must learn to recognize true spiritual relationships. Are we clinging to our mortal concepts of man, which include fear, resentment, fleeting satisfaction of the senses, unrest, unhappiness; or are we finding happiness, contentment, and freedom in a spiritual sense of the oneness of Mind's ideas, the sons and daughters of God? Who has not felt the keen disappointments that follow false reliance upon human personalities? Yet divine Principle, Love, is ever present for us to rely upon for guidance and support. Furthermore, all of Love's ideas, dependent only upon the Father, dwell together in harmony and joyous co-operation.
The spiritual qualities of man, God's idea, must be manifested in our daily experience: in compassion for those who may find the climb to holiness difficult; in love for our fellow men; in joyous, unselfish activity in home and business; in God-given dominion over the cares of the day. When one holds consistently to the right concept of man, he unfailingly rejects the false images of mortal belief concerning him and thereby increasingly brings to light true friendship and loving companionship.
Are we tempted to find fault with our brother and perhaps see him as selfish, ungrateful, even dishonest? If so, we shall probably find ourselves harboring, in addition, such thoughts as resentment, selfrighteousness, hurt feelings, which come directly from a false belief in man as being a material personality. One may also erroneously attach good qualities in those he loves to their human personality, thus losing sight of the truth that all good is of God, is universal, and is reflected impartially by all of Mind's ideas. Our progress Spiritward is expedited as we give up the belief that man is a human personality and accept the realism of spiritual identity.
Many were Jesus' explanations of truth to his twelve disciples; many were his demonstrations of healing the sick, the lame, the deaf, and raising the dead. Yet the disciples were slow in progressing toward their Master's demonstrable understanding of man as the image and likeness of God. We may wonder at them, but are we not in an equally unprogressive state of thought when we tend to personify good and evil? Jesus, seeing the necessity of breaking the mesmerism of a belief that good is a personal possession, was compelled to say to his friends (John 16:7), "It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I depart, I will send him unto you."
Though lost for centuries to material, human thought, this healing truth, or Comforter, discovered by our beloved Leader, is elucidated in the textbook of Christian Science. There she tells how the disciples received the Holy Ghost after Jesus' ascension. Thereafter, she states (p.47): "They no longer measured man by material sense. After gaining the true idea of their glorified Master, they became better healers, leaning no longer on matter, but on the divine Principle of their work."
The fading out of a false sense of material personality through the realization of man's true identity as a child of God is all gain. Though one may have desperately clung to a sense of material personality associated with some person, place, or thing for his supposed well-being and happiness, yet, if he relinquishes such false reliances through the recognition of spiritual man, he finds a truer satisfaction and a more substantial joy. How grateful, how joyful, the one who knows man to be the child of God ! We may know this true man by his expression of spiritual qualities, his individual expression of Life, Truth, and Love. Such qualities as hope, faithfulness, trustworthiness, honesty, kindness, joyfulness, consideration for others, spiritual-mindedness, courage, and moral strength are what -we admire in those near and dear to us.
Here then is the gain, for, unlike the beliefs of material personality, these qualities are imperishable and cannot be alienated from us by either time, or distance, or circumstance. In some dark hour of trial, when loss of that which we hold most dear may seem very real, divine Love is present to uphold and strengthen us until the sunshine of Truth reveals man, the image of Spirit, as unfallen, upright, and free, forever united with his brethren in the bonds of Love.
What a comfort to know that satisfying activity, true substance, freedom from fear of loss, dominion over all suggestions of a carnal mentality, and that peace which is of the kingdom of heaven, must come to every heart that learns the meaning of our beloved Leader's succinct statement (Miscellaneous Writings, p. 310), "To impersonalize scientifically the material sense of existence—rather than cling to personality —is the lesson of to-day."
