Jesus made this stupendous statement about himself (John 8:14): "I know whence I came, and whither I go." As our Way-shower, he taught us that what he saw and did we could see and do also. Many of us are pressing forward eagerly to gain an understanding of where we are going, but are we as earnestly seeking to know and to contemplate where we have come from? Jesus also said (John 17:5), "Now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was." We too are privileged to pray that prayer and to recognize our primitive and ever-continuing spiritual selfhood as at one with God's glory and perfection.
As thought dwells on this grand vista of man's primitive, unassailable origin and continuity, consciousness rises to heights of inspiration and gains a clearer realization of true existence. True spiritual perspective enables us to learn more of our origin and our destination. Our Leader, Mary Baker Eddy, had this spiritual perspective to such a degree that she was able to write this revealing statement in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 429): "If man did not exist before the material organization began, he could not exist after the body is disintegrated. If we live after death and are immortal, we must have lived before birth, for if Life ever had any beginning, it must also have an ending, even according to the calculations of natural science."
It is only the finite concept of being that claims to chain us to a human span of years and seems to render us unconscious of the eternal life we always have lived and always will live. This limited sense must give way to the expanding truths of spiritual sense. Mrs. Eddy says in "Miscellaneous Writings"(p. 181), "Mortals will lose their sense of mortality—disease, sickness, sin, and death —in the proportion that they gain the sense of man's spiritual preexistence as God's child; as the offspring of good, and not of God's opposite,—evil, or a fallen man."
