The telephone rang; it was a long-distance call. "Where are you?" I asked the patient who was calling. "I am in Chicago," he replied, "and I am in trouble." He gave the details. Later came a call from one who said she was in San Francisco and was "in great fear and confusion." As I listened to these statements the questions presented themselves: Is what they are saying as to their whereabouts true? Is the child of God, the one and only man, actually in what human thought says is Chicago, San Francisco, or any other humanly defined place? Is the idea, or reflection, of divine Mind in trouble, in pain, in fear or confusion? Can the individual evidence of positive Mind be in anything but Mind? The answer was an unequivocal "No."
The postman came. In the mail were letters asking for help from one who said he was badly in debt; another stated she was in a position where she was the object of jealousy; a third declared she was in an unhappy home. A fourth was concerned with problems incident to his being in politics. Again I realized that in order to help these individuals I had to see the spiritual fact: that no child of God can ever be in any state of mortal mind's making, because all individual being is of, and in, and conditioned by the one causative Mind, God.
I looked out of the window and saw two men in an argument, two dogs in a fight, a woman in a hurry, and some people in a bus. Apparently all were believing they were in physical bodies. The little word in, when used to describe the whereabouts of individuals, I saw, was very meaningful. If used materially, it completely misstates man's whereabouts. Used spiritually, it describes man's living oneness, or unity, with God. How careful we need to be to keep clearly before us just what we and our brother are "in," and so correct the false suggestions of the human mind that we are where we are not. In her work "Retrospection and Introspection" Mary Baker Eddy writes (p. 93): "St. Paul said to the Athenians, 'For in Him we live, and move, and have our being.' This statement is in substance identical with my own: 'There is no life, truth, substance, nor intelligence in matter.' It is quite clear that as yet this grandest verity has not been fully demonstrated, but it is nevertheless true." The nothingness of matter points to man's includedness in Mind. What Mrs. Eddy called "this grandest verity" is that man lives in God, and not in any form of substanceless matter, animate or inanimate. Here, then, is the objective of our being, to demonstrate, step by step, this grandest of verities.
What says and argues that man is in matter and material conditions, or environment, is the fictitious mortal mind, Truth's opposite, claiming it is a god, that it has evolved a material creation through which to assert itself, peopled it with materially-minded mortal personalities, embodied them in matter, surrounded them with humanly conceived environments, and forced them into conditions of pain, trouble, fear, and strife. Mortal mind claims to include in its suppositional selfhood all of its thoughts and concepts, even as, in reality, divine Mind includes in its infinite allness all of its ideas and identities.
The basic error, mortal mind, would argue that it embodies its mortal sense of man in flesh, which it environs in a material home, located in a material place that is in a material universe of many worlds. In this nest of material concepts, small and large, it claims to imprison all that it evolves, containing all within its own finity. Here is the sum total of falsity, the all of evil. Here is error's denial of the scientific fact, revealed in Christian Science and thus stated by Mrs. Eddy: "Omnipotent and infinite Mind made all and includes all" (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 206). The eternal, unlimited presence and all-inclusiveness of God precludes the pseudo presence and pseudo inclusiveness of lying mortal mind and its substratum— matter—precludes mortality in its entirety.
Much thought has been given by men as to what man is; much thought needs to be given by all of us as to where man is. Actually, what man is determines where man is. If we accept, in theory, the fact that man is God's likeness, or expression, but think, talk, and act as though man were in and of God's opposite, mortal mind, or matter, we expose our ignorance of man's true status. Our work is consistently and radically to disassociate our sense of life and selfhood from all that matter claims it is, has been, or may be, and increasingly to realize that because God only is our cause, we are only what God eternally makes His man to be, and are only where God causes His son eternally to be—in and one with the one originating Life and Mind. Since God is the only presence, is there any place for man outside of Mind's omnipresence? Can man be outside of infinity? Yet mortals habitually think and act as though he could be, because they believe there is another presence, another creator, creation, man, and substance besides the only living, omnipresent God and His expression.
The discovery of Christian Science includes the discovery of man's oneness with God and the way of its demonstration. Christ Jesus made it plain to us that man's oneness with God is not a theory at present, later to become a pleasing fact. It is the presently understandable and demonstrable fact. He showed us that man is eternally outside of matter and inside of Mind; that God, the only substance, is inevitably within and without all things. Regardless of what mortals thought, said, or did, by consistently loving and living the good that is God, which he knew is man's only substance, he proved man to be in God. Our individual spiritual being is eternally one with the Supreme Being, even as was his. In the eternality of God's all-inclusiveness he and we dwell, in the holy family of God's ideas.
Fear evidences, on the part of the one entertaining it, more belief in error's lie that man is of and in matter and subject to its negative forces than faith in man's oneness with God's allness. Sin and sickness derive from the false belief that man is of and in the so-called material mind, or matter, and hopelessly subject to its enslaving, afflictive, and destructive forces. Selfishness, self-will, self-love, criticism, resentment, and gossip comprise some of the false thinking that shows one is clinging to the lie that man lives in, and is animated by, the one evil— mortal mind—rather than accepting and demonstrating the truth that he is only in the all-loving Spirit that is God.
By persistent daily effort each of us can successfully challenge and overcome the lie that we are materially made, motivated, or contained. Each individual has the ability from God to claim, and progressively to demonstrate in his thoughts, words, and acts, that he is of and in the Life and substance which are Love and Truth, and is not of, or in, the false sense of substance and life, called mortal mind, material sense, and material self. He may not accomplish the complete annihilation of error's false sense of cause and effect forthwith, but he will never do so except by starting on the way of thinking and living which glorifies God. This way sometimes seems narrow at first to the willful human self, but it rapidly expands beyond any sense of narrowness as we walk in it. It is the one way to the demonstration of God's allness.
The Scriptures repeatedly tell us that man is in God, not in matter. Is it not time to begin daily to accept and prove this? Let us know this divine fact with increasing clarity and conviction and demonstrate it in more godly, selfless thinking, in purer, holier living, and in more constant recognition of the present and eternal allness of God and realize that all that is true is now of and in Him, moving in Love's grand symphony of rhythmic reality.
A marginal heading on page 308 of Science and Health reads, "The great question." The text of the paragraph shows "the great question" to be, "Where art thou?" Are you in matter or in Mind, God? Christian Science fully answers this question. But the answer as to man's whereabouts is not found in words and theories, but in thoughts and lives. It is the same question that Adam heard when shame and uncertainty appeared in his thinking, which was accepting the lie that he was of and in matter. The question comes sooner or later to every mortal. Each one must, and can, find the answer in the Christ-idea of being, which reveals man's eternal oneness with Spirit, God, and his eternal separateness from lifeless, mindless, truthless matter and its false sense of mind, life, and identity.
In the paragraph in Science and Health just referred to we read, "Above error's awful din, blackness, and chaos, the voice of Truth still calls: 'Adam, where art thou? Consciousness, where art thou? Art thou dwelling in the belief that mind is in matter, and that evil is mind, or art thou in the living faith that there is and can be but one God, and keeping His commandment?' "How willing are we joyously to face "the great question" and day by day to demonstrate its answer in God-expressing lives that show we are striving to understand, as did our Way-shower, the basic fact—the "grandest verity"—that matter is nonexistent and that the Science of Life is summarized in his God-given words (John 14:11), "I am in the Father, and the Father in me," and (John 10:30), "I and my Father are one."
