The term ghost is commonly associated with childish fear of imaginary specters. Mary Baker Eddy refers to this in her textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," but her discerning thought also enlarges this characterization by disclosing ghosts to be any unreal belief which claims to haunt either childish or adult thought through suggestions of sin, fear, disease, limitation, uncertainty, disability, and so forth. On page 353 of the textbook she writes: "The age has not wholly outlived the sense of ghostly beliefs. It still holds them more or less. Time has not yet reached eternity, immortality, complete reality." And she continues on the same page: "The true idea of being is spiritual and immortal, and from this it follows that whatever is laid off is the ghost, some unreal belief. Mortal beliefs can neither demonstrate Christianity nor apprehend the reality of Life." As the Christian Scientist's aim is to apprehend better the reality of Life, to this end there must be a laying off of ghostly shadows, which impede this apprehension.
One of the unreal beliefs to be laid off is that of time itself. This specter would impose upon mankind, through persistent suggestion, a sense of pressure, limitation, age, and mortality. Many fears of the human race accrue wholly from the false sense called time. As thought is lifted above futile mortal planning and the gauging of events, possibilities, health, strength, and life-giving energy within the limits of time, to the peaceful spiritual realization of eternal, infinite being as Christian Science reveals it, the pressures of time limitation lessen. Man is not a mortal, bounded within the calculations of mortal time measurement. He is immortal and spiritual, and He reflects God's infinite measurement of Life and Soul.
"Sun" is defined in the Glossary of Science and Health as, "The symbol of Soul governing man,—of Truth, Life, and Love" (p. 595). What a transforming restorative this spiritual definition presents! It indicates the stillness of the sun as symbolizing unending Life, eternality shining forth with the warmth, glow, and radiance of Spirit. No revolution of earthly thought can darken this ever-present light of Soul governing man or cut it into periods of time measurement characterized by limitation, age, and death.
