ONE day a Christian Scientist, while hurrying along a city street, recalled an irritating circumstance that had occurred several weeks before. As she was thinking of this, something forcefully flew into her eye. When her human attempts to remove it proved futile, the young woman began to search her thinking.
She saw the analogy between the irritating recollection of an unpleasant happening that had lodged in her thought and the present painful mote in her eye. The rankling memory had been allowed to remain latent in her thinking, to reappear at intervals. The instant the particle was in her eye, however, she wanted it out because she recognized it as foreign matter and was not willing to accept the physical discomfort. Sometimes, she realized, we fail to recognize an erroneous thought or belief as such and do not try to rid ourselves of it unless it is manifested as a physical claim. She saw that if we would be conscious of more harmony in our lives, we need to be as quick to detect and free ourselves from inharmonious thoughts as we are to remove the material object which we believe causes us physical pain or discomfort, for actually wrong thinking is at the root of all inharmony.
It came to her that she had not been obeying the injunction of our Leader, Mary Baker Eddy: "Stand porter at the door of thought. Admitting only such conclusions as you wish realized in bodily results, you will control yourself harmoniously" (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 392). She had allowed an unlovely thought to enter her mental door and remain, whereas she should have been guarding against such an intruder. She then acknowledged that the unhappy thought she had been entertaining so long was indeed foreign to her true selfhood in God's likeness. When she recognized it for what it was—an impostor without power or reality, because not of God, good—it departed swiftly and completely. At the same instant the sharp particle in her eye disappeared, and she had no further discomfort.
