Great interest in the future is being generated by the urgency and depth of many of mankind's present problems. What will the future look like? it's asked. How will people live? What can be done to make life in the coming decades more satisfying than today? How should people live? What social and economic conditions should we aim to bring about? How can technology be best directed? We can disembark from the time-train apparently carrying us forward, more or less helplessly, into a future of mixed good and evil. We can see that time-train as a delusion.
A well-charted future can be developed only as we become more aware of the spiritual realities of the present. Plans for the year 2000 based on mistaken, limited notions of divine Truth's creation and purposes today must be inadequate.
The right viewpoint is indicated in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy: "The ancient prophets gained their foresight from a spiritual, incorporeal standpoint, not by foreshadowing evil and mistaking fact for fiction,—predicting the future from a groundwork of corporeality and human belief." And further: "It is the prerogative of the ever-present, divine Mind, and of thought which is in rapport with this Mind, to know the past, the present, and the future." Science and Health, p. 84;
Admittedly, much more could be known and demonstrated of the possibilities of foretelling the future on a spiritual and eternal basis, even by Christian metaphysicians basing their lives on the teachings of Science as explicated in Mrs. Eddy's writings. But this admission does not in any way blunt the possibilities. It should sharpen our resolve to lengthen our vision of the value of Christian Science in helping mankind. The unique insights of Science offer valuable, basic truths on which individual plans and public policy can rest.
We need to cultivate intelligent familiarity with the infinite and infinitesimal truths Christ Jesus understood and which Christian Science floods with light. This urges us to make these truths practical in the minutiae as well as the broad areas of human experience. Increasingly we can show what a metaphysical, rather than a material, assessment of man and the universe can do for our present and our future. How a metaphysical outlook, understood, heals physically. How it brings one's present and future under the direction of the divine Mind.
So long as we think of man as a minute material and mortal item tossed about willy-nilly on the ocean of life, we are relatively helpless in coping with the present and future. Two contemporary thinkers about the future assert: "Even if there is an equation of history, as some who would model the future hope, man and even an individual man is an important term in that equation. Vary him and you change the outcome." Herman Kahn and B. Bruce-Briggs, Things to Come (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1972), p. 250; From the Christian Science point of view it is our sense of man that needs variation and change. The great demand is to view man as divine Truth made him—incorporeal, perfect, entirely spiritual. Misconceptions of man's nature and existence come from a limited or false sense of Deity. Gaining a clearer, more spiritually scientific definition of what God really is—Life, Truth, Love, Soul, Spirit, Principle, Mind—we have the basis on which to cope not only with the present and the future but with residual problems, troubles having their roots in the past.
A central spiritual fact in doing this is God's eternality. Christian Science shows that Deity does not live within a time-cage but throughout eternity. Understanding God's timelessness is the basis for comprehending that man is Truth's eternal, timeless idea. Far from being a speculative, extravagant, impractical notion, this is spiritual truth and is therefore demonstrable in everyday human life.
Our apprehension of spiritual facts does enable us to throw off belief in past conditions, which may seem to restrict us now. It can heal and adjust apparent problems arising out of circumstances today. And it can help us forestall the disasters that may be menacing us from tomorrow.
Reliable prophecy, totally safe foreseeing, can only come out of accurate present-seeing; that is, lucid spiritual vision, which looks at being through spiritual sense rather than through the physical faculties. These, informed only of unreal, material conditions, tell us nothing of the actual present; they can say nothing of time to come. We can think of divine Truth as saying of them, "The prophets prophesy lies in my name: I sent them not, neither have I commanded them, neither spake unto them: they prophesy unto you a false vision and divination, and a thing of nought, and the deceit of their heart." Jer. 14:14;
In the measure of our understanding of the metaphysics of Science, we become confident prophets—perceivers of what is true and real now and through all eternity. Mrs. Eddy gives us these lines indicating the possibilities and method of reliable prophecy: "Prophet. A spiritual seer; disappearance of material sense before the conscious facts of spiritual Truth." Science and Health, p. 593.
Our human future, either collective or individual, can be tempered and improved by the spiritual understanding that Truth and its idea constitute all reality, right now and forever. To claim the immediate allness of God, to acknowledge the omnipotence of immortal good as the truth of being in this very moment, is to lay the foundation for proving the immortality of good. This good is all that can be experienced in what we call the future. God, good, and man, His infinitely good self-expression: as well as being present fact, this is thoroughly reliable prophecy, the demonstrable truth of the future.
