Age isn't years; it's entrenched belief. Control belief, and we begin the essential job of challenging aging. Years don't cause mortals to decay; it's belief of life in matter, with its pleasures and pains, that forms the basis of deterioration. Riding planet Earth a number of times on our solar merry-go-round doesn't cause mankind to weaken and disintegrate. Deterioration is aided by an inherent mortal emphasis on those revolutions and by accepting humanity's belief of what years do. Destroy erring belief— the belief that matter is substantive and we are born into it—and we cease to let age rule us.
Man isn't a mere physique riding a time machine. Actually, we are something altogether different, something else entirely. Instead of bone and muscle, flesh and blood, variously aged, we are, in Science, individual ideas of one all-encompassing Mind, God, who is Life itself.
Why do mankind misconceive what they are? Isn't it because the material body appears to be the only man we have to work with? Our five senses testify that the aging mortal body is here and is our identity. We can be grateful that this is not the case, because a mortal isn't the truth of man. He is not, in fact, man at all. As the image of Spirit, man is spiritual; he cannot be material. Spiritual man, the only man there is, is the idea of God, divine Mind. How inconceivable, how truly impossible it is for this idea to age—to be too young, too old, or to wear out from careless use or overuse. Evidence of this genuine man breaks in on the human scene at many points; and we must learn to claim this right identity.
