As I was growing up, if a family member voiced fear, frustration, or even symptoms of sickness, my dad would say, “Those are not your thoughts.” He wasn’t dismissing our valid concerns—certainly we were expressing things that felt very real to us; rather, he was helping us recognize that when an inharmonious thought or experience comes to us, we have a right to question its origin.
The basis for examining our thoughts comes from the study of Christian Science, which rests squarely on the teachings of the Bible. For example, the Apostle Paul expressed the need to examine the origin of thoughts when he declared: “They that are after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh; but they that are after the Spirit the things of the Spirit. For to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace” (Romans 8:5, 6). And Mary Baker Eddy, who discovered Christian Science, wrote of the importance of thought-examination in order to increasingly achieve what Paul termed “spiritual mindedness”: “Anatomy, when conceived of spiritually, is mental self-knowledge, and consists in the dissection of thoughts to discover their quality, quantity, and origin. Are thoughts divine or human? That is the important question” (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 462).
This is the important question because the truth in any situation is what is expressed by divine Mind, God, and when we are mentally in accord with Mind’s knowing, we are being, as Paul calls it, spiritually minded. This is crucial because there is a direct relationship between knowing as God knows and our human experience, as explained clearly by Mrs. Eddy: “If we look to the body for pleasure, we find pain; for Life, we find death; for Truth, we find error; for Spirit, we find its opposite, matter. Now reverse this action. Look away from the body into Truth and Love, the Principle of all happiness, harmony, and immortality. Hold thought steadfastly to the enduring, the good, and the true, and you will bring these into your experience proportionably to their occupancy of your thoughts” (Science and Health, pp. 260–261).
We have authority to question whether or not thoughts come from God, good. If they aren’t from God, they don’t really belong to us.
This is what my father was trying to teach us—that we have authority to question whether or not thoughts come from God, good. If they aren’t from God, they don’t really belong to us. And, as Mrs. Eddy teaches, when we bring our thoughts into accord with God’s truth, we find our human experience also comes into accord with it. Our life will express God’s goodness. This can be true in all areas of our lives. When they result from spiritual understanding and demonstration, our health gives evidence of God’s strength and freedom, our finances manifest Principle’s stability and abundance, our relationships embrace the satisfying delight and harmony of divine Love. We are also in a position to think clearly and effectively in praying for solutions to world problems because the nature of infinite Mind hits no roadblocks of insolvability. We can confidently apply the truths of God’s creation that bring healing, and with healing will come creative and inspired responses to world needs.
So our practice must include quickly catching any negative thoughts and realizing these do not come from God. Since we are His ideas, reflecting the Mind that is God, they are not authentically ours. We can dismiss them as we would a package delivered to our front door without our name on it.
But sometimes such thoughts do sneak in and even stay with us for a while. If we have taken in such thoughts and identified with them for some time, even quite a while, we don’t have to waste time feeling bad that we’ve been duped. We can dismiss them summarily and turn to God for true ideas. The great joy of knowing “These are not my thoughts” is the fact that they were never ours. We did not originate them and don’t have to feel bad for having them. What appear as their effects are corrected not by trying, through human thinking, to have better thoughts, but by listening to God for His messages and willingly giving up any fear of, interest in, or ownership of materialistic fears and concepts that are not ours.
This isn’t always easy. Even when we know about mental anatomy, sometimes experiences seem so real, we neglect to challenge them. Pain and sensations of sickness, for instance, can sweep over us in a way that makes it seem difficult to reject them. Sickness can feel very real, very much a part of our personal experience, and sometimes suggests we have no control over it. But knowing that God, our divine Parent, loves and cares for us, gives us strength and authority to counter these appearances as not from Him, and so not a part of our genuine identity. We are, after all, made “in the image and likeness of God” (see Genesis 1:26, 27). As Mrs. Eddy tells us, “Matter is not that likeness” (Science and Health, p 475). We have authority from God to reject pain and sickness as decisively as we do any other inharmonious suggestion. Thoughts of sickness are an imposition and never our thinking, no matter how aggressively real they seem, because they do not originate in the divine Mind, which is the only source of true thought and experience.
I remember a time when I was a busy mom of three young children, had a full-time career as a Christian Science practitioner, as well as all the other obligations of home, family, church, and community activities. One night at our Wednesday evening Christian Science testimony meeting, a woman who had known me in high school was visiting from out of town. I shared a little of my joyous activities with her after the service. She shook her head and said, “I don’t know how you young girls do it!” I took her comment as a compliment for doing a good job with my many demands. But subtly I also began to think, “Yes, how do I do it? I’m really busy!”
Our true thoughts are from God and they are perpetually good.
I went home from church feeling burdened and heavy in thought. By the next morning, I had lost my voice. I prayed for myself for several days, rejecting the bodily symptoms and replacing them with the truth of my being, but the symptoms continued. Finally on the third day, after I’d spent some particularly precious time in prayer, drawing close to God, knowing and feeling His love, this woman’s comment came back to thought as clearly as if I had been listening to a replay of a phone message. Quickly I realized this was the more basic thought that needed rejecting, and, indeed, it was not my thinking at all. God was always giving me joyous thoughts about my activities, and I did not need to accept martyred or burdensome thoughts, or suggestions of being worn out as my own.
I also realized that this was not this woman’s true thought, either. She may have voiced it, but the suggestions of burden or busyness were actually impersonal, general beliefs about how members of a young family might feel overwhelmingly busy. With this uncovering I was able to drop the negative thoughts, and identify with and act upon my natural and true thoughts of joy in every right activity. My voice returned within a few hours.
A Bible passage reminds us: “For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind” (II Timothy 1:7). Our true thoughts are from God, and they are perpetually good. We know that when un-Godlike thoughts are presented, we are free to reject them, and “let this mind be in [us], which was also in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 2:5). Our remedy is always at hand. Inspired prayer, turning to God with all our heart, can reveal exactly what we need to know under all circumstances and in every instance, with healing results.
