"IT depends on how you look at it" is a phrase often heard when two or more people see the same situation in different lights. The individual who wishes to demonstrate the healing effect of scientific prayer finds that the result of his work always depends on how he looks at a problem.
The importance of a positive outlook was illustrated by a pupil in my Sunday School class. She rushed in one Sunday morning to tell me that her little brother was having help from a Christian Science practitioner. When she started to mention the physical symptoms, I thought this would be a good time to tell her that it would be better for her brother if she did not talk about his problem. She interrupted with: "He's not having a problem. He's having a healing!" Such positive knowing that good is going on in the face of physical evidence to the contrary is the type of consciousness that accomplishes healing.
The correct way to look at any person, place, or thing, according to the teachings of Christian Science, is in the light of spiritual understanding, which reveals that there are no human opinions or mortal beliefs and that the perfection of God and man are discernible. If an error—inharmony of any nature—is looked upon as real, the mental work, or prayer, concerning it will not be scientific; only when its unreality is understood are we praying from the right standpoint. As we base our work on the truth of perfect God, Spirit, and His perfect spiritual creation, healing can be confidently expected.
Mrs. Eddy discerned that this was the way in which Christ Jesus accomplished the healings recorded in the Bible. In Science and Health, she writes (pp. 476, 477): "Jesus beheld in Science the perfect man, who appeared to him where sinning mortal man appears to mortals. In this perfect man the Saviour saw God's own likeness, and this correct view of man healed the sick."
When healing the man blind from birth, Jesus did not attempt to change him from a mortal who could not see matter at all to a mortal who could see matter well. Instead, he was conscious of man's true being, spiritual and incorporeal, unaffected by so called called laws conceived by a false mentality called mortal mind. The disciples, however, must have been swayed by the physical condition, for they searched for a reason for the blindness. Jesus' answer to that was (John 9:3), "Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him."
That Jesus viewed the situation spiritually and scientifically was proved when normal vision came to the man. Humanly, the effect of spiritual knowing is physical well-being. This does not mean that matter only has been improved; it means that the one healed has become conscious to some degree that his life is actually spiritual, not material.
What were the works of God referred to by the Master? The first chapter of Genesis declares, "God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good." Understanding the fact that the divine Mind, God, creates only good eliminates the belief in evil in any form, mental or physical. Blindness is not real, because God did not make it. By reflection the real man sees only the good which God made.
Understanding his status as the Son of God, Jesus was able to see through the physical world's erroneous claims and recognize the perfection of spiritual creation. Each individual is in reality the child of God, capable of seeing the perfection of man's identity as God's idea.
The student of Christian Science finds that it takes a conscientious effort to shut out what the material senses would have him believe about himself and mankind in general. His thought must become like that of the child who visualized healing while others were looking at sickness. It takes more than reading the Bible along with Mrs. Eddy's writings and merely concluding that if God made everything good, and there is no evil, there is nothing to do but enjoy this happy state. Unless we use the spiritual facts we have read about, Science will do little for us, and we shall gain little from it. To be effective, right thinking must be followed by right actions in human affairs.
In the make-believe world of matter, man may appear as a diseased, disturbed, greedy, ill-tempered, or domineering mortal. To benefit the world, we must be willing to exchange the false picture for the true, as each suggestion of the carnal mind attracts our attention. If our neighbor seems to have done something that would convince us that man can be unfair and unkind, that is the time, no matter how difficult it may seem, to change our view and know that this is a lie about man.
We must know that injustice and unkindness are traits of mortal mind and that man, the likeness of God, includes the qualities of justice and love. Such knowing will help to stamp out in our own thinking the self justification and self-pity which argued so convincingly that we were right and the other wrong.
Man, as God created him, expresses intelligence, integrity, mercy, strength, purity, beauty, stability, and joy. Hate, resentment, timidity, envy, lust, selfishness, conceit, injustice, and dishonesty belong to no one. They are errors of mortal mind which can be overcome as we exchange wrong thoughts for right ideas. Divine Mind supplies us with right ideas when we let go of personal opinions and pray with unselfish motives.
If we found ourselves watching a television program that was objectionable, we should not hesitate to turn it off or switch to something better. Ought we not, then, to be just as selective about the mental images in our consciousness? Each day our mental picture must be changed from the material to the spiritual. Then we must make the effort to hold it there when error would tempt us to take in something that does not belong in God's universe.
Science and Health assures us (p. 516), "The substance, Life, intelligence, Truth, and Love, which constitute Deity, are reflected by His creation; and when we subordinate the false testimony of the corporeal senses to the facts of Science, we shall see this true likeness and reflection everywhere."
