The thoughts we entertain are far-reaching in their effects on our physical health and well-being—therefore we should control them. Good thoughts appear as healthy, harmonious bodies and conditions, while corrupt thoughts produce discord and disease.
Mortal thoughts don't just lie dormant in secret compartments of the mentality, doing no good and no evil, even though we may think we are concealing them. They are always liable to be objectified to the physical senses as matter and material conditions. It is highly important to our human welfare, therefore, to take good care of our mentalities and accept into consciousness only that which will be productive of health and harmony, and refuse admittance to evil, matter-oriented thoughts, which will inevitably result in discord.
Mrs. Eddy makes this clear in her book Retrospection and Introspection where she writes, "The mortal body being but the objective state of the mortal mind, this mind must be renovated to improve the body." Ret., p. 34; And in Science and Health she warns, "We should become more familiar with good than with evil, and guard against false beliefs as watchfully as we bar our doors against the approach of thieves and murderers." And she continues farther on, "You must control evil thoughts in the first instance, or they will control you in the second." Science and Health, p. 234;
It is particularly desirable to keep alert to this advice today. Probably humanity has never been bombarded so heavily before by words and images that tend to direct thought away from Spirit to matter. Under this noxious influence unguarded thought plummets earthward to contemplate physicality rather than spirituality and to indulge the lower traits of mortal mind, which degrade and make sick, rather than to express the higher qualities of God, the divine Mind, which elevate and heal.
One can hardly be unaware, for instance, of the recent sharp increase in the availability to the public of degrading and pornographic material, both literary and pictorial. The current exploitation of sex and violence, sometimes even in the name of art, is alarming to those who care not only about their own and others' mental and physical health, but about the general mental climate of their neighborhood and the world.
It is evident to those who understand the effect of thought upon the body that lustful thinking is likely to be manifested in some inglorious physical condition. They know that if humanity is to enjoy a better, happier, healthier life, the earthward trend of thought promoted by the worst in literature and cinema must be reversed. Evil influences must be controlled and the natural attraction that Spirit exerts on the real man must be established as the only power affecting us in human experience as well as in the divine reality.
Christian Science explains that God's law provides the means for us to free ourselves here and now from the mesmeric attraction of material sense. Christ Jesus told his disciples, "The truth shall make you free," John 8:32; and Science shows us the spiritual truth that we are already free from the influence of matter and material sense. We have only to prove it.
Man is the immortal image, or idea, of God, divine Mind. He dwells in Mind and is held by indissoluble bonds of spiritual attraction in constant relation to all that is good and true—and with nothing else, since there is nothing else in the allness of God's goodness, and no attraction exists other than that of Spirit.
Man is fed exclusively by the one Mind with purely spiritual thoughts. God, Mind, is immortal Love, eternal Life, the only Principle or source of being, so the only thoughts the real man entertains in consciousness are lovely, vital, and healthful. These good thoughts emanating from divine Spirit constitute man's unfolding being. His senses are spiritual, and he is always fully cognizant of God's spiritual ideas and finds them satisfying and heavenly.
This is the only, eternal truth of our own being. Any other seeming condition of physical rather than spiritual sense is imaginary—a kind of evanescent dream experience. The material, worldly images depicted in it—both good and bad—are dream-images. They are no more real or permanent than the dream itself, and both the images and the dream are first controlled and then destroyed when God, divine Mind, is acknowledged as the only power.
The Bible tells us: "Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever." I John 2:15-17.
But what if our human inclination is to linger in the dreamworld, to wallow in its voluptuous images, and indulge in the imagined pleasures of the senses? What if we have no desire to seek Spirit's control over human thought and to establish the fact that exalted thoughts emanating from the divine Mind alone constitute true consciousness?
By God's grace the scene changes. The picture of pleasure in matter turns to dust, and pain and desolation take its place. We then become more willing to give up the dream and to welcome the control of the divine Mind over the human mind, Soul over sense, Spirit over matter.
At first the consequence of this renovation of the mind is improvement in the body. The body, being the objectification of consciousness, responds beneficially to the better, more spiritual thought. But this is only the beginning. Under the control of Spirit, our thought must continue to rise until eventually we ascend altogether in consciousness above the belief in matter to the acceptance of Spirit as All. This point attained, the world will pass away and we will be found in our true nature, wholly and forever awake to that which is spiritual and Godlike.
