It was a beautiful autumn day at the United States Air Force Academy, but I wasn't enjoying it very much. Instead of being inside the auditorium at a conference, I was outside struggling with nausea and weakness. Just sitting upright and remaining conscious required enormous effort and stubborn determination.
Towering high above a nearby parade ground was a magnificent flag, whose fabric rippled in the bracing wind. Occasionally, a white fleecy cloud would, for a time, obscure the sun. During the interval when the sun was shining, a shadow of the flag would appear, linger, then vanish from the parade-ground plane. At one of these intervals when a flag-shadow appeared, my gaze idly traced its silhouette. It began with an elongated, slender form and ended with what could be imagined as a gyrating, grotesque head. I found myself imagining how substantial and terrifying this shadow would appear if I were under the delusion that it was real or was produced by a real head. But of course such a mistake was not really possible, since I knew the unattractive form was but the shadow of a thing of beauty.
The shadow and substance of the flag brought to mind the following statement by our Leader, Mrs. Eddy, in the Christian Science textbook: "Tumors, ulcers, tubercles, inflammation, pain, deformed joints, are waking dream-shadows, dark images of mortal thought, which flee before the light of Truth."
Science and Health, p. 418 Almost immediately I realized that nausea and weakness are not real states of malfunctioning matter but, rather, "dark images of mortal thought" shadowed forth on the dismal plane of material sense. And obviously these "waking dream-shadows" could no more hamper my real being than parade-ground shadows could interfere with the flag.
