CHRISTIAN SCIENCE is freeing many people from the mental malady called hurt feelings, which, until overcome, often leads to irritation, ill-will, hatred, and sometimes revenge. From this sordid mental seedbed frequently evolve physical disorders which resist removal until the mental state they objectify is corrected.
What makes hurt feelings? What feels hurt? By what process can hurt feelings be destroyed?
An answer is indicated in the statement by the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, when she says in the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 262), "The foundation of mortal discord is a false sense of man's origin." Then the antidote for every mortal discord is the true sense of man's origin. Since hurt feelings are a form of mortal discord, they have their beginning in a false sense of man's cause. They disappear when this false sense of cause gives way to the true idea of God.
Christian Science acquaints men with God. It teaches that because man's origin must be intelligent, that origin must be perfect Mind, for intelligence abides only in genuine Mind. Man, the Bible teaches, exists as the continuous witness to or evidence of this forever continuing, causative Mind. But hurt feelings do not originate in intelligent Mind. Intelligence can evolve nothing that is discordant.
If hurt feelings proceed not from the one intelligent Mind, whence do they come? They derive from the ignorant, pseudo mind, described by Paul as "the carnal mind," which, he said, "is enmity against God" (Rom. 8:7). This carnal, or material sense of mind, is the evil one, the source of all discord. It claims to usurp the power, place, and prerogative of God, true Mind, and to evolve a material creation and man unlike divine Mind's good and permanent one. In this impermanent, material sense of creation materially minded mortals think as impelled by mortal mind, say and do that which is not kind, and so cause other mortals to feel hurt. Is this the true order of being? No. Why not?
Christ Jesus evaluated this carnal mind as nothing but a liar, that abideth not in the truth (see John 8:44). In other words, the carnal, material mind, its thoughts and all that hears, feels, and reacts to them, is never any part of true Mind or its identities. The negative and evil are forever excluded from the positive and good.
What hurts, and feels hurt, is an effect of this one evil mind, God's opposite. Let us suppose that this mind claims to make and animate a person called Mr. A, that it impels him with thoughts of unkindness toward Mrs. A or Miss C or Mr. B. Further, it claims to animate Mrs. A, Miss C, or Mr. B to feel hurt when Mr. A expresses such unkind thoughts.
But note that all this is a medley of negatives—a negative sense of mind and its negative thoughts, animating its negative material sense of selfhood. This phenomenon is, in its totality, without root in intelligent Mind, or its manifestation, and therefore without right to be accepted as a verity. From what is basically false, nothing can evolve which has the substance of reality.
How is this to be demonstrated? Jesus gave the answer in twelve words, "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free" (John 8:32). Christian Science shows us the way to know the truth, which must be the truth as to God and His kingdom, creator and creation. Mind is the only possible, universal cause, and man, individually and collectively, is defined in the Bible as the son of God, the highest evidence of genuine Mind. These are the facts that we must, and can, understand, or know, to be the only facts. So doing, we are freed mentally from the illusion of evil called hurt feelings.
What aggressively suggests to you or me that we are mortals with hurt feelings is the one lying mind talking to its own erroneous concept, or identity, which it says is our identity. Every time you or I accept the suggestion that our selfhood is a hurtable mortal, we must first believe that there is a second god which has given us a life and consciousness which are apart from the one God and on which another mortal can impose hurt feelings. This is a fabrication of lies, all deriving from the lying, evil mind, which never knows nor hurts God's man. In its entirety this depiction is unknown by the all-knowing Mind, God, and so is unknown to the knowing activity of any of the offspring of genuine Mind, who are perpetually conscious of what their continuing intelligent source is causing them to be conscious of, even the allness of God and His works.
A student of Christian Science, if he is confronted with the temptation to believe that he is a mortal with hurt feelings, challenges that suggestion as nothing but evil's mesmeric snake talk. He recognizes that the basic evil, mortal mind, has never actually caused him or his brother, for God, Spirit, is eternally the one cause. The identities that God causes are naturally forever like their source, wholly spiritual and good. They are controlled by the moral, spiritual forces of their Mind, acting through its legions of right ideas, the angels which make Love's control of all identities a continuing verity.
Man, as God causes him forever to be, can never do hurt or feel hurt. He is as unhurt and unhurtable as his Ego, positive Mind, with whom he blends, and whose immunity from mindless, evil forces he forever shares. Unkind mortal thought forces can never touch, or affect, the consciousness of the one who knows that the only true status of himself, and his brother, is forever hid with Christ, the illumining idea of God, in the Life that is Deity.
Many mortals believe that at some point in their past, evil somehow broke through the continuity of God's intelligent and loving control of His universal family of right-minded identities and impelled some of them to say, or do, that which left mental scars on the mentality of others. Nothing so argues but the evil one, the lying carnal mind. It argues not to the one infinite God or to His reflection, man, who is forever of and in omnipresent Spirit, Mind. Evil argues only to its own states of mortal consciousness. Into the kingdom of true Mind and its brotherhood it is impotent to come. What is negative and suppositional is powerless to project itself into what is positive and factual.
So our defense against the lie that someone has hurt us is that the only "he," the only "I," the only "us," that was real when lying mortal mind claimed it was staging this hurt-producing scene was the "I," "he," and "us," which God, the alone cause, was causing to be the true identities of those concerned. These identities were right then knowing the spiritual thoughts the one Mind was unfolding as their true consciousness and life, thoughts that were positive, intelligent, loving, and good; thoughts that were producing understanding, justice, and brotherhood. The false evil mind, with its false sense of identities, expressing false animation, speech, and action, never could substitute itself for infinite, divine Mind and its infinite manifestation, wherein all true identities forever safely and securely dwell.
Since the material mind claims all that belongs to God, it claims to feel. This is no more true feeling than mortal mind's sense of life is true living or its sense of substance is true substance. Only God, divine Mind, actually feels. Mrs. Eddy so affirms in the statement, "Science declares that Mind, not matter, sees, hears, feels, speaks" (Science and Health, p. 485). If infinite Mind alone feels, how can there be any feeling in its opposite? There cannot be, and what claims to be a mortal sense of feeling is non-sense, a denial of true sensitivity. The fact is that the only true selfhood of you or me never senses, or feels, the false thought forces with which the evil mind claims it can produce hurt.
Actually they are not feelable, because they are in the false sense of mind, which has no relatedness to the being of man, as God makes him to be—the individual expression of the seeing, hearing, feeling activity of the one Ego, intelligent Mind. Mind is forever doing all the feeling, and man's only feelings are the individualized manifestation of the all-feeling One. Because Mind can feel no hurt, no more can man, Mind's reflection. Hurt feelings in the light of these truths fall into the bottomless pit of falsity as the individual claims as his own his native ability to feel only what his God, Mind, is causing him to feel, even the harmony, unity, and peace that forever characterize Love's kingdom.
Jesus called our attention to the unhurtable nature of man in his great statement, "Behold, I give unto you power . . . over all the power of the enemy: and nothing shall by any means hurt you" (Luke 10: 19). He proved that all the malice of mortal mind could not leave any least sense of hurt in his consciousness. But where is the power to which he referred, the power the Christ gives each one of us over the enemy, the evil mind, which would claim it can hurt us?
The power is in true Mind, and it is made available to you and me in the legions of true ideas which Mind is causing to unfold as our only consciousness and life. In these Mind-empowered thoughts is the power of divine intelligence. It is the almighty power of real light, and it so enlightens our consciousness with the spiritual facts of being—perfect God and perfect man—that the lie of evil that we ever have been, or now can be, a hurt or hurtable mortal dissolves into its native falsity.
Because our Leader so clearly understood these truths, she could say without any qualification, "I say it with joy,—no person can commit an offense against me that I cannot forgive" (Message to The Mother Church for 1902, p. 19). We too must find our selfhood to be the forever unhurtable expression of our unhurtable God.
