In the office of a Christian Science practitioner, I was once asked this rhetorical question: “You do know that there is only one of each right idea, don’t you?” As I learned from this conversation, everything we think of as “material”—a body, a mortal, a tree—is only a mistaken sense of the one idea that is really there—the perfect manifestation of God.
As Mary Baker Eddy states in the Christian Science textbook, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, “Identity is the reflection of Spirit, the reflection in multifarious forms of the living Principle, Love” (p. 477). So even though all of creation shares the infinite array of qualities and elements that compose God’s ideas, the way in which we individually express those characteristics constitutes our unique identity.
Herein lies the impossibility that a spiritual idea can ever be less or more than what God created her or him to be as the image and likeness of Himself-Herself. There is no idea and no component of an idea, apart from the one concept God is imaging forth from His-Her own infinite nature. That one true concept is what we are to see and cherish in consciousness.
