Troubles often jolt our progress. But it's preferable to progress through spiritual understanding from the start rather than through the goading of worries. The spiritual truths we come to grasp stay with us through our life and forever. Though struggling out of the quicksand of trials may strengthen our characters and toughen us in other good ways, it may leave us believing somewhat in the quicksand as reality. Progress through spiritual understanding— through consciously being alone with reality —certainly never does this.
Being alone with reality, we're not lonely. Seeking aloneness with reality doesn't mean slinking away from responsibilities and hiding in a dark corner. Being alone with the truth of things, we know we're coexistent with, and include, God's permanent, spiritual ideas. We're away from the cluttering complexities of material so-called reality.
It's the creation of Spirit that is real. Matter, Spirit's reverse, is not real. Nor are material space and time. Believing that matter, space, time, are realities, we run around in the same box as our problems and never actually resolve them. To be alone with our true being and with the reality of all things is not to leave the concrete and actual. It's to know and feel Truth's omnipresence—to know and prove we've jettisoned lies and lacks of material sense.
We can neither be separated from our true being, metaphysically viewed, nor be less than it. Being is not in a location, somewhere to go to, but is realization. It's Mind and Mind's consciousness of its allness and eternality. The realization of true being is not something we humanly do, then, but is something that divinely is.
Placing ourselves with reality instead of with delusion—doing this with the fullest spirituality we can muster—we know with unshakable certainty we're comprised of reality and exist in accord with it. We don't include delusion or live in a dream. In consequence, we can stop believing we have internal trouble, a growth, or something not working, or that we face some external threat. If we've been suffering from twinges or surges of discouragement or pain, these lessen and disappear. Alone with our real being, we know and evidence spiritual being and our incorporeal, immortal selfhood.
It's the nature of divine Life to unfold or express itself. It's the nature of that expression to carry with it the purity and immortality of Life. It's the nature of that expression to be always one with its source. That expression is God's man. It's the only type of man there can be. We can have no other selfhood but that which expresses Life. This selfhood can never be severed from the reality of things. It is reality, individually expressed.
Knowing this through Christian Science, each of us may cross the line separating delusion from Truth. And having done so, we know there is no delusion in Life and no borders to Life. To believe ourselves to be sick is to be deluded and to be a delusion. Understanding reality in Science and being consciously alone with it thaw and evaporate delusion. This event surfaces in our experience as healing and restoration.
Being alone with reality helps us care more—and care better—for others. We care more for others because the fears and limitations they seem to have, we recognize, would perpetuate themselves by claiming to be our realities. Moreover, true being belongs as rightly, and as inevitably, to others as to ourselves.
Aloneness with our own being fans out and broadens our experience. It's the perfect defense against withdrawal into the little dollhouse world of material sense with its tiny furnishings and minuscule events. When we're consciously alone with reality, our lives extend because we're identifying ourselves with the divine infinite. This identifying works in our thought and outlook, stretching them. Our concern and understanding break out of the domestic into the local, into the national and international, and beyond and still beyond into the universal.
Alone with the reality of all, we're at one with the eternal. We slip out of the manacles of time, escape from the strictures of a temporal past and future. We keep abreast of current developments and thinking. Whether in church affairs or in the academic or business worlds, we don't waste energy and time trundling pushcarts few people are now interested in buying from. Eternally-minded, we think and do the timeless and fruitful thing. We appreciate and enjoy what is best in the contemporary world. We delight in proving the exhilarating truth that opens the Preface to Science and Health, with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy, "To those leaning on the sustaining infinite, to-day is big with blessings." Science and Health, p. vii;
True being is ours because we belong to it and not to false material being. If ever anyone was thoroughly convinced of this, Christ Jesus was. The sum of his living and healing verifies this. John records the Master's gentle words to his disciples: "If I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also. And whither I go ye know, and the way ye know." John 14:3, 4; Through what Science teaches of reality we can begin sensing what this means and can know and follow the way to our place in spiritual being. "The Christian Scientist," Mrs. Eddy writes, "is alone with his own being and with the reality of things." Message to The Mother Church for 1901, p. 20.
