The common worldview holds that there are several causes or influences driving our experience—that at any time some impelling force can manifest itself to our detriment. We can wake up one morning and be led to think a hereditary disease has decided to make an appearance. Or we can walk into the office and find that “downsizing” has deprived us of a job. Or we can learn that a cherished relationship that seemed “unshakable” has suddenly lost its footing.
What it all boils down to is that from the human viewpoint, there is a pervading sense that our lives are not under control. There does not seem to be one overriding causal influence “running the show” as it were. There does not appear to be an infinite God with a totally embracing pervasive influence.
But this verdict contrasts markedly with God’s dictum in Genesis: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth” (1:26). To our sense of things that dominion just does not appear to be part of our experience.
How can this be? On the one hand we have the Bible indicating God’s creation is perfect and ever present—while our experience is totally different. The answer to this paradox lies in a bold precept of Christian Science that Mary Baker Eddy shares with us in Science and Health: “Mortal mind sees what it believes as certainly as it believes what it sees” (p. 86). This precept indicates that the human mind—the faculty of thought we appear to be operating with—sees the products of its own belief. And in the case of all these things that appear to go “bump in the night,” the belief back of thought is that more than one cause or influence is operating in our lives.
Now although that appears to be the case as far as the human mind has it, for Jesus Christ, the great demonstrator of divine Science, there was only one cause or principle operating—or capable of operating. For Jesus there was only one entity, one God, one Mind, one cause back of everything. He could pray, “For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever” (Matthew 6:13) because he refused to acknowledge anything other than a perfect spiritual creation. This paradigm held sway in his entire earthly experience, and healing resulted. Why? Because he had the humility to realize that the divine Mind was his mind, and therefore his experience could never be divorced from that of God, who knows only the perfection of His own creation.
For Jesus not to be taken in by, or react to, what the physical senses were telling him, he had to realize that the evidence of the physical senses is both illusory and mesmeric in nature. Agreed, it takes a great deal of courage for anyone to accept that the appearing of mankind as corporeal, material, and mortal is simply an illusion. And anyway, why would we want to do so, when we see that Jesus, by reducing the human condition to an illusion and holding to the fact that heaven is here, right now, and that it is everyone’s present reality, effected healing. It was his absolute refusal to accept any other cause besides God that empowered him to be a blessing in the world.
That being said, it follows that we obviously need a clear understanding of God’s presence in order not only to perceive such power but also to see it operate within our experience. In my own case, I had an “ aha” moment when I realized there was a rule in the so-called natural sciences that aligned with the absolute laws governing God’s creation. We know that pure water always freezes at zero degrees centigrade. It is a phenomenon which always occurs under freezing conditions—an invariable phenomenon or law.
In her exposition of the “Science of Being” that is the foundation of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy pointed me to the absolute phenomenon of divine laws, operating in exactly this same manner. She gave me to understand that if God has determined that man is made in “the image and likeness of Spirit” (Science and Health, p. 172), then this rule which governs creation is always in operation, and hence no other determination about the nature of man is valid.
How else, a few pages later, could she have written with such assurance: “The evidence of divine Mind’s healing power and absolute control is to me as certain as the evidence of my own existence” (p. 177) unless she understood such divine edicts as being absolute?
From that statement we can conclude that there are no real consequences to any human “event.” I think it’s safe to say that most of us would admit that when something goes “bump in the night,” we are more fearful about the repercussions than the so-called “event” itself. For this reason we need to be adamant that it is God, Mind, that reigns, rather than circumstances. To illustrate, some months back a friend called to indicate that her husband had just had a stroke and one side of his body was paralyzed. An air-ambulance was about to pick him up and take him to hospital. During our phone conversation I emphasized to her that this event could have no consequence because divine Love had never sanctioned anything other than evidence of itself. There could be no “fallout”—no separation—from this divine Love. She telephoned the next day with a real sense of joy to tell me that, much to the bewilderment of the medics, at the end of the helicopter ride her husband walked off the plane totally healed.
While we cannot dictate how the power of God will be manifest, the important thing for us to know is that His laws do exist and that they will operate unfettered to maintain His perpetual harmony. In the end, it is the nature of God’s creation that the spiritual man has dominion over all things, and is untouched by the human condition. We can triumph in this most glorious Science and rejoice that “even the devils are subject unto us” (Luke 10:17). We find that divine Love alone operates in our lives when we understand it is the only power that can operate.
Such understanding makes all the difference.
