Just out of college with nothing to do for the whole summer but to pursue his two dearest goals: to gain experience as a recording engineer and to study Christian Science. This was the situation a friend found himself in.
He had just graduated with a degree in audio engineering and was to spend the summer working twenty hours a week as an apprentice at a recording studio. He expected the short workweek to leave several hours each day for reading and research in the Bible and in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy. For most of this time he and his wife were to housesit at a professor's home. Ideal conditions for study and spiritual growth, he thought. But it didn't happen. Day after day he went into the professor's office to study, but instead of getting the inspiration he expected, he would become drowsy and fall asleep. The summer ended with very little progress in gaining an understanding of God and man.
Why would this happen when he wanted so very much for it to be otherwise? As he eventually came to see, the so-called carnal, or mortal, mind —which would claim to oppose the omnipotence of the one divine Mind—resists our efforts to progress spiritually, and inducing drowsiness or sleep when we want most to pray or study is one of its prime weapons. At the time of Christ Jesus' great challenge in the garden of Gethsemane, even his most trusted disciples—Peter, James, and John— fell victim to this hypnotic influence. Three times, Jesus, facing betrayal and crucifixion, found them asleep when they should have been awake. See Mark 14:32-42 Christian Science specifically defines the hidden influence of mortal mind that would keep us from being spiritually awake as animal magnetism, the mistaken belief that there is mind in matter and that evil is power.
