Addressing the question of how long it may take for sin to be destroyed, Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, wrote, “This may take millions of cycles, but of the time no man knoweth” (The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 160).
But does anyone really want to endure “millions of cycles” bound by the flesh?
Revealing the “fast lane” to heaven, a topic which occupied Christ Jesus’ life ministry, he said, “Whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it” (Matthew 16:25). Heaven, as described in the Christian Science textbook, is: “Harmony; the reign of Spirit; government by divine Principle; spirituality; bliss; the atmosphere of Soul” (Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 587).
By giving up the false sense of self which obscures heaven, the consciousness of heaven is revealed. Fortunately, there are no speed limits on the highway to heaven! We can all increase our current pace toward finding it.
We enter the “fast lane” to heaven by following Christ Jesus’ lead. This requires that we lose the false sense of self, if we’re going to find and feel the joy of heaven within. We need to realize the human mind won’t just give up and go away on its own. Like Jesus, we too must challenge the human mind and its personality traits head-on. And as divine Love begins to displace sinful thoughts and motivations, we discover ourselves becoming immersed in the infinite ocean of divine Love, wherein is revealed endless peace, eternal bliss, harmony, and home.
So then, isn’t it worth asking: Is heaven my all-consuming goal? Or are there competing goals inevitably adding “cycles” to the journey?
While the Bible gives no numbers of those Jesus healed, I’ve imagined it to be in the thousands, all within his short, three-year ministry. To heal as often and as quickly as he did requires continuously lifting thought to unite with the consciousness of God and heaven, or harmony, where health actually resides.
The activity of spiritual healing through Christian Science has given me a taste of heaven. In Science, healing through the divine Mind destroys the mental error manifesting itself as sin or sickness, thereby removing obstacles in our way heavenward. Think of it: The more often we exchange the sense of the reality of sin and sickness for the consciousness of Spirit, the more quickly we assimilate the character and nature of heaven, until we see it as the present reality it is.
The more often we exchange the sense of sin and sickness for the consciousness of Spirit, the more quickly we assimilate the nature of heaven.
In Science and Health, we read that the spiritual interpretation of this line from the Lord’s Prayer: “Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven,” is “Enable us to know,—as in heaven, so on earth,—God is omnipotent, supreme” (p. 17).
Because God is “omnipotent, supreme,” only the divine Mind can “enable us to know” precisely how to enter heaven. So, how is it done? Again, Jesus, through the inspiration and understanding of that Mind, was enabled to know God’s thoughts and pointed to self-sacrifice: “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me” (Matthew 16:24). But what does it mean to deny ourselves, and how do we do it? Jesus explained this, too, in the humblest of terms: “I can of mine own self do nothing: as I hear, I judge: and my judgment is just; because I seek not mine own will, but the will of the Father which hath sent me” (John 5:30).
Several years ago, my wife, who was a practicing medical doctor, and I took a vacation. Our first day involved a long hike, so we retired early. In the middle of the night, my wife suddenly jolted me out of a deep sleep. She appeared terrified. “I didn’t take my medication this morning,” she said, her voice shaking with fear. Years prior, she had been diagnosed with a life-threatening strain of hepatitis C. Now, some years later, she had agreed to be part of a medical trial to test the effects of a new drug to treat the disease, and her doctors had warned her that without this daily medication, the effects of the disease would be dangerous and even deadly.
My immediate response was, “Let me call the hospital,” but she replied with absolute certainty, “No. Please pray for me.”
Initially, I was stunned because my wife had never had anything but negative things to say about religion and prayer in particular, although we had managed to avoid these topics. But of course I said I would. Then I closed my eyes to pray.
In this heavenly atmosphere, it seemed my purpose was simply to witness Love delighting in itself and its manifestation.
At first, I felt her extreme fear and an intense pressure to heal her. Then, I went straight to God for help. In a few moments, I felt peaceful. I wasn’t seeking the aid of my own thoughts. Rather, the need in this extreme moment was to abandon my thoughts per Jesus’ instructions—to exchange my sense of having a mind separate from God for God’s view of His image and likeness—and to do so as quickly as possible.
What happened next was quite remarkable. As if someone had flipped a switch, my mind suddenly went silent. I could not hear myself nor could I generate a thought on my own. I was definitely in tune with divine Mind, unconfined by any human so-called mind. I know because I was receiving an inflow of pure, spiritual thoughts. No words were spoken. Instead, these spiritual thoughts were more like spontaneous feelings or “knowings,” where I completely understood them the very instant they came to me. For example, I absolutely knew, through the divine Mind, that all life was perfect, flawless, orchestrated by one intelligent source—one that was a tangible, all-pervasive Love. I knew this not because I believed it to be so, but because I felt and understood it was so.
There was no sensation of being connected to a body. Nothing in this uplifted mental state resembled a three-dimensional world. A mortal sense of self and material senses were nowhere—they had no purpose here. The overall feeling was that of being submerged in a warm ocean of pure, infinite Love.
Light emerged from everywhere at once, not from a single point. The atmosphere exuded a sense of serene, effortless order. Nothing indicated the passing of time. In this glorious dimension—clearly above and outside the illusion of so-called material life—I felt enveloped in a rarefied realm of gentle, pure Love, permeated with peace and an effervescent bliss. In this heavenly atmosphere, it seemed my purpose was simply to witness Love delighting in itself and its manifestation.
I found it interesting (thinking about it later) that no thoughts of my wife or her physical condition were permissible. Instead, the divine Mind’s singular purpose was to immediately immerse me in its presence. This action erased any possible thought of illness. I felt saturated in absolute, pure Love.
From the perspective of time, I’d say the entire experience occurred within a minute or two. And then in an instant, I was back, sitting in bed.
The fear in my wife’s eyes was no longer there. “I don’t know what just happened,” she said, looking surprised and confused. “All the pain in my liver is gone. I think I’m completely well.”
And she was. We continued our trip as planned, and my wife remained free from any pain or illness. After our vacation, during a routine checkup, two of the medical trial doctors, seeing that the disease was gone, retested her liver several times, thinking maybe the first results had been flawed. Finally, they acknowledged that she no longer had the hepatitis C virus, and she never had the problem again.
If heaven, harmony, isn’t our primary goal, how can we wholeheartedly appeal in prayer to the God of heaven? Wouldn’t our healing work be done far faster and more effectively by getting out of a mortal sense of ourselves and into God, where the consciousness of health, heaven, is revealed?
Each and every one of us will experience the consciousness of heaven as Jesus did. So why not increase our pace? Let’s turn moments of self-surrender to God into minutes, minutes into hours, and hours into days and months. Steeped in the nature of heaven, the ills of mortality have no alternative but to dissolve. And our forever home can then begin to appear within us.
