Pontius Pilate must have glimpsed something of the spiritual consciousness exhibited by Christ Jesus when he said to those who had accused Jesus, “I find no fault in him” (John 19:6). How could there be any fault in Jesus, whose whole life was a constant “yea, yea” to Truth—to integrity, wisdom, unselfishness, to the purity of God’s creation—and a “nay, nay” to error—to confusion, hatred, selfishness, to all that would contradict God’s perfect work?
Pilate found only truth in Jesus, even as Jesus had told him (see John 18:37). He found no faulty reasoning—no duality—in the master Christian. There was no ambiguity in Jesus’ understanding of God’s omnipotence and omnipresence, no holding to Spirit and matter, good and evil, the true and the false. No “I believe in God” and “I believe in evil also.” Our Master sought to lift people out of the double-mindedness of materialistic thinking and instructed his followers, “Let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil” (Matthew 5:37).
To consistently live ever closer to the faultless and fruitful example set by our Master is a worthy goal for anyone wanting to follow Jesus and heal himself and others. To feel and see some of what Jesus knew as the Son of God, we need to practice the spirituality of single-mindedness. To be wholehearted in our pursuit of purity, love, and correct self-identification as God’s child is not just a nice character trait. It is essential in our worship of God, and in achieving consistent healing results. Jesus pointed to this fact when he said, “If … thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light” (Matthew 6:22).
The demand to acknowledge only the one divine Mind, the sinless Soul of man, and thus be single-minded, was given in the Master’s injunction to all of us, “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect” (Matthew 5:48). Perfect in what way? Perfect in entertaining and expressing the thoughts we receive from the divine Mind—thoughts of justice, mercy, wisdom, reverence for God.
We can accept with joy that spirituality is our only condition of being, right now.
As human consciousness is consistently purified of various aspects of double-mindedness—or mortal-mindedness—an inner shift takes place, and we rejoice in man’s true nature, forever at one with his Father. We realize more of our oneness with God, and the joy and freedom this brings. We experience fewer of the emotional ups and downs commonly associated with daily life—one moment hopeful, the next moment despairing, one moment joyous, the next moment sad. We vacillate less between good and evil, but wisely choose what is good and true or what is the nearest right under the circumstances. We are less destructive and more constructive in our dealings with others.
To the degree that we understand the spiritual reality of one omnipotent God and His constant reflection, man, we are prevented from walking in incorrect mental paths, paths of fear and doubt. Single-mindedness bids us weigh our thoughts to see if our thinking is a compound of Spirit and matter, good and evil. And if so, we can remember the example of Jesus and his constant choice of God, good, as the reality. Profession and practice always met and matched in Christ Jesus, and they must increasingly do the same in us. The measure of Christ in us will always be the measure of our demonstration that we are, in truth, the faultless reflection of the divine Mind.
In our efforts to progress spiritually, we have Jesus as our timeless example of what we are working to achieve. He knew and obeyed only one all-knowing Father, or divine Mind. He healed people by refuting and defeating any devilish mentality, or mortal mind, opposed to the divine nature expressed in the perfect man of God’s creating. The Master knew the unreality of evil and practiced a spiritual single-mindedness.
Double-mindedness in its various phases is mental malpractice, which accepts as valid mortal mind’s deceptive pictures of persons and things. This false consciousness projects such pictures with the intention of involving us in personal thought. We think of ourselves and others as mortals, composed of physical organs, subject to growth, maturity, and decay, plagued one way or another with disharmonies all of our lives. Knowing and expressing God’s love for all, Jesus came to deliver us from the materialistic, faulty thinking of a mortal consciousness, which is at the base of all our mental and physical torments. Through his teachings he presented us with our true selfhood, the Christ ideal of immortal manhood as the spiritual reflection of God, which cannot be duped or mesmerized into accepting the lies of mortality.
In Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Mary Baker Eddy instructs us how to root out the belief that we are a mixture of mortality and immortality. She says that Christian Science “shows the scientific relation of man to God, disentangles the interlaced ambiguities of being, and sets free the imprisoned thought” (p. 114). An ambiguity makes no clear distinction between Spirit and matter, good and evil, right and wrong. Such ambiguity is the essence and error of double-mindedness, from which Jesus came to save us.
The twin belief in good and evil is so interwoven in human consciousness that it takes consecrated thought to be liberated from it. Ungodlike thoughts are actually spurious mental tares that are sown, not by us, but by the “enemy” (the carnal mind), as Jesus taught in his parable of the wheat and the tares (see Matthew 13:24–30). So “our” thoughts of sin and sickness do not rightly belong to us. They have no inherent strength or validity to resist our God-inspired efforts to disbelieve in them and cast them out.
The fundamental false belief we have been educated to accept as our own thought is the erroneous conviction that life is in matter. We need to keep separating out of our consciousness the belief in an alternative to spiritual existence. Just as the knots in a twisted wool can be removed one by one, so we can remove the knots from our twisted thoughts one by one. Step by step, thought by thought, we are able to emerge from any (and ultimately all) sense of matter’s supposed reality. When spiritual understanding exposes matter as the result of false education, it will then be seen to have no more substance than a mirage and no more sensation than an egg white.
If material mentality says today we are mortals with sensations, good and bad, we can begin to untangle these ambiguities from the reality by knowing that the true and only selfhood we have as God’s child is spiritual. We can accept with joy that spirituality is our only condition of being, right now.
The adjustment needed in order to make spiritual truth practical in our lives is always made in our own consciousness. Awareness of Spirit is all that you, as a spiritual idea, can ever feel. From this mental standpoint, no carnal-mindedness can mesmerize you and say, “Oh yes, there is something else to be felt,” and get you to believe it. As God’s child, you know that you are spiritual, never born into matter, never getting pleasure or pain from it, and never dying out of it.
Only by turning away from material-mindedness are we assured of spiritual progress, the transformation and cleansing of our consciousness. We can refuse to think from the basis of duality, believing that we are physical with some spiritual elements. Instead, we can pray to keep our thoughts anchored in the oneness of God and man. In this way we attain the biblical promise of God’s blessing, “Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee” (Isaiah 26:3).
If the false consciousness argues that it is too difficult to remain single-minded, we can always remember that God is working with us and in us. As Jesus himself stated, “I can of mine own self do nothing” (John 5:30). Our ability is founded upon God’s ability. Motivated by divine Love, we will not go down in defeat or succumb to hopelessness. God supplies the courage of true spirituality by which to triumph over any material-mindedness.
Man is eternally good. Whatever is not good is not man.
Man has always been man, the spiritual idea of God, and has never been anything less. Man is eternally good. Whatever is not good is not man. Identify yourself correctly as this man, and you will love everything about yourself. There is no such thing as a mixture of the spiritual with the material. Man is not a dual mentality; he is the undivided, perfect reflection of God. Let us raise our sights to see ourselves as God knows us, as He made us. We will take great joy in being that man. God is at all times the lifter up of our consciousness. But we also need to see that we cannot put off the false, mortal concept of man, the lying suggestions about him as lacking in every way, until we truly identify ourselves as the perfect man that God has made. Stand firm on the spiritual fact that there is only one you.
There is no such creation as diseased man, unhappy man, lonely man, dying man, deficient man. It is metaphysically incorrect to put together such words as disease, sin, poverty, handicap, or decline with the word man, the pinnacle of God’s creation. Mortal concepts are so unlike the spiritual that they can never merge with man, God’s sinless offspring, any more than the temporal and unreal can ever merge with the eternal and real (see Science and Health, p. 300). Spiritual single-mindedness, purified of contradictory concepts, gives you the stability with which to outface the lies of an unreal, mortal mind, never created or sanctioned by God.
By contrast, “a double-minded man is unstable in all his ways,” states the Bible (James 1:8). We sink into the quicksand of inconsistency if, on the one hand, we are quite happy to rehearse quietly to ourselves or audibly to others again and again occurrences of sin, disease, and wrongs done to us—giving evil the continuity of good—while at the same time, on the other, declaring that God alone possesses all action. We may in one instance rightly declare metaphysical truths about love and honesty and wisdom, and yet in the next instance wrongly act contrary to them by being selfish. “My brethren, these things ought not so to be” (James 3:10). When we find ourselves pulled down into the mire of inconsistency, we must turn to the healing Christ for liberation from double-mindedness. The Christly consistency of “Yea, yea; Nay, nay,” when applied to lingering false beliefs in consciousness, is the savior from halfway positions.
The faultless prayer of single-mindedness is seen when we follow Jesus’ loving method of healing. Complete reliance on God, our great Physician, is all that will keep our feet in the progressive path upward. And it is not a futile path, for the Bible assures us that God “healeth all thy diseases” (Psalms 103:3). God’s unchanging goodness and presence is a current, provable fact in our lives.
We cannot, however, be wholehearted in our worship of God as supreme Life and subscribe to a double standard of existence, limping from one side to the other, trying hopelessly to find common ground between Truth and error, Spirit and matter. Matter and Spirit, the unreal and the real, can neither combine nor cooperate. The notion that anything material has some intrinsic power to alleviate a physical discord is mesmeric. Matter possesses no healing properties by which to cure itself.
To take vitamins or food supplements for the purpose of improving health, to seek a physical self-diagnosis from information gathered on the internet—these approaches would be mixing our thoughts and our methods with material ways and means. They would be vain attempts to combine irreconcilables. But aligning thought in earnest prayer with the all-powerful and all-good God, and acting in accordance with His leadings, we experience His blessings, seen in healing and regeneration.
As we strive to lead affirmative lives—living the truths of perfect God and perfect man, expressed in integrity, justice, compassion—this single-mindedness results in healing the challenges that affect oneself and others. To work consecratedly toward a goal such as being more diligent in the performance of one’s job, being more punctual, being more appreciative of others, indicates that we are sincere in our effort to reflect God.
By contrast, it is double-mindedness that has undermined the progress of many human projects and robbed them of their rightful fruition. This was seen in the Israelites’ wandering in the wilderness for forty years. The double-mindedness of the Israelites, as had been displayed in their worship of the golden calf and other idolatrous behavior, took them on a circuitous journey and delayed their entrance into the Promised Land.
Man in God’s image is not a material personality with a built-in tendency to swing between the real and the unreal. He does not progress from bad to good, or even from good to better, but remains at the point of perfect knowing and perfect being, the eternal noon of perfection. That’s the single-mindedness practiced by our Master, and the secret of his successful healing work. Science and Health insightfully says of him, “Jesus beheld in Science the perfect man, who appeared to him where sinning mortal man appears to mortals” (pp. 476–477).
The rejection of a false consciousness is not the work of a moment, but it begins with a moment-by-moment rejection of wrong concepts. It was so for Jesus, too. Thought by thought he put aside the temptation to be double-minded until, in the supreme moment of his ascension—the result of his undeviating devotion to God, good—the material totally vanished from his thought. The single-mindedness expressed through a consecrated, scientific thought manifests the strength of Truth that mortal mind cannot resist, causing it to drop away.
The demonstration of spiritual perfection is destined to finally be attained by everyone, as indicated by the Revelator, who described a great multitude of individuals single-mindedly following the spiritual idea, the Lamb of God, so fully exemplified in Christ Jesus. In doing so, they demonstrate their sinless, spotless selfhood in the likeness of God. The Revelator says of them, “In their mouth was found no guile: for they are without fault before the throne of God” (Revelation 14:5). Thus is seen the end of all dualism, of all faulty thinking, and the spiritual fact of man’s oneness with the Father is realized. This is the reward the Father promises to all of us.
