"Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light." Eph. 5:14; In the Bible awaking from sleep appears as a metaphor for human turning away from the darkness of mortality and materiality to the spiritual light of divine goodness and power. In Christian Science the same metaphor is used. The mortal and material experience is spoken of as a sleep, a dream, from which human beings need to be awakened. This metaphor helps us to see the unreal and delusive nature of the whole mortal and material picture.
But here there's a very important point to grasp. Man, spiritual man made by God, has never been in a mortal material dream nor been any part of it. God's man is not a dreamer, an ex-dreamer, or an awakened dreamer. He has never dreamed, has never believed himself to be a fleshly mortal subject to the troubles, suffering, and temptations of the flesh. From eternity to eternity this man, the real self of every one of us, has been and is the wholly spiritual idea of God, of the ever-awake divine Mind.
The understanding of this is what finally dissolves the illusion of sickness and sin and sorrow. It reveals instead the light and glory of man's eternal and Christly being in the likeness of God, his Maker.
What then appears to dream? The dreamer is the man whom the Bible allegory calls Adam—a supposed man made from dust by a supposed man-conceived creator. One of the first acts of this allegorical man is to fall into a sleep, from which there is no record of his awaking. This supposed material man, living a brief restless span between birth and death, is all there is to a mortal dream and mortal dreamer.
This dreamer cannot leave his dream behind and awake, because he is himself part of his own dream. At the moment of waking this dream-consciousness finds itself, like its dream, to be illusion, nothing. As Mrs. Eddy writes, "A dream calleth itself a dreamer, but when the dream has passed, man is seen wholly apart from the dream." Christian Healing, p. 11;
A seventeenth-century Protestant catechism has this question and answer: "What is the chief end of man? Man's chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever." "West minster Shorter Catechism"; Mrs. Eddy develops this same point, using spiritually scientific terms. She writes: "The origin, substance, and life of man are one, and that one is God,—Life, Truth, Love. The self-existent, perfect, and eternal are God; and man is their reflection and glory." Miscellaneous Writings, p. 187; Man is the God-created reality, whose radiant presence understood and acknowledged dissolves the illusion of dream and dreamer, of suffering, sinning, limited mortality.
The example of Christ Jesus bears this out. He said, "No man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man which is in heaven." John 3:13; In him the power of divine Spirit was seen to set aside material procedures at every point from his conception to his ascension. He could perform his mighty works because he so clearly understood the relationship of God and man, eternal and unbroken.
Jesus knew that despite the appearance of coming and going, descending and ascending, beginning and ending, man really remains always in the presence of God, in the perfection and harmony of his divine Principle. In reality man's true selfhood is always in heaven, wakeful idea of wakeful divine Mind.
Today the healing practice of Christian Science, or the Christ Science, is the progressive step-by-step enlightenment of human consciousness until the belief of mortal dream and dreaming mortal are both dissolved. Instead man's eternal and indestructible individuality is revealed. This eternal individuality has never been a dreaming mortal or a mortal dream.
A familiar hymn begins with the lines:
From sense to Soul my pathway lies
before me,
From mist and shadow into Truth's
clear day;
The dawn of all things real is breaking
o'er me.Christian Science Hymnal, No. 64;
This depicts the dawning in human consciousness of the eternal facts of divine Truth, of Soul, God. This dawning heals the sick and reforms character. It brings renewal and fresh courage to every area of human endeavor. It even provides us with refreshing sleep to whatever extent we need it. And it leads us to the point where the human is ready to yield entirely to the radiance of Soul and Soul's individual idea, man made by God.
This dawning of Truth in human thought is described by Mrs. Eddy. In Science and Health her definition of "day" reads in part: "The objects of time and sense disappear in the illumination of spiritual understanding, and Mind measures time according to the good that is unfolded. This unfolding is God's day, and 'there shall be no night there.'" Science and Health, p. 584; God's day is not a few hours of light between dawn and dusk. It doesn't include night, is not preceded nor followed by night. Man lives in this eternal day, in the light of infinite, unfolding good.
That which believes itself a dreamer does not wake itself up from within its own dream. The hymn beginning "From sense to Soul" is followed in the Christian Science Hymnal by another hymn beginning "From glory unto glory" and later continuing:
As wider yet and wider,
The rising splendors glow,
What wisdom is revealed to us,
What freedom we may know.Hymnal, No. 65.
These words describe man as he forever really is — man's true selfhood always awake and in heaven.
Our perception of man as moving from glory to glory enables us most quickly to travel from sense to Soul. We speed this journey best, as we hold thought to the reality of man, not as a dreamer who will one day awake but as already and always unfolding from glory to glory in the waking radiance of God's eternal day.
