One evening after church, when a friend and I paused to look up at the stars, I was unexpectedly filled with a deep sense of the vastness of the universe and a spiritual oneness—an inclusiveness with it—far greater and different from those times when it seems as if you can almost touch them.
Almost a year later, someone said to me that everything we see is already in our consciousness. We don’t see something outside ourselves and then know it; the spiritual sense of it is already in our thought. When I shared this with my friend, he responded that it was like the “microscope of Spirit,” referring to Mary Baker Eddy’s statement in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, “Matter disappears under the microscope of Spirit” (p. 264). I spontaneously replied, “Yes. And that microscope is our consciousness!”
To me, the story of Jesus healing the blind man (see Mark 8:22–26) indicates this. When Jesus first touched his eyes, the man said he saw men “as trees, walking.” Jesus knew that true vision is spiritual and involves “seeing” the real man. So Jesus touched him again, and this time the man could see clearly. Hymn 64 in the Christian Science Hymnal describes this type of seeing: “The vision infinite to me grows clearer, / I touch the fringes of eternity” (Violet Hay, © CSBD).
