Christian Science treatment heals your human mind and body, but can it also transform the universe of experience that appears outside yourself in space and time?
When I was a teenager, one Saturday morning I felt lonely and began to pray about companionship. Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, writes, “I make strong demands on love, call for active witnesses to prove it, and noble sacrifices and grand achievements as its results” (Miscellaneous Writings 1883–1896, p. 250). Remembering this, I claimed my identity as Love’s complete idea and demanded a tangible expression of this fact in whatever way God might supply.
Soon the doorbell rang, and there stood a lovely girl, a relative of neighbors, who had brought their dog to meet mine, since both were Pomeranians. We spent that morning together, which filled my heart’s yearning.
This experience showed me that Christianly scientific prayer can adjust what appears to be a configuration of people and places “out there” so as to conform to the spiritual fact “right here” in consciousness—in this case, Love’s presence. How is this possible?
The appearance of any lack of God’s goodness is a hypnotic dreamscape.
Christian Science reveals that we live in a world of thought, not a world of things. Mrs. Eddy states in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures that divine Science “resolves things into thoughts, and replaces the objects of material sense with spiritual ideas” (p. 123). The world of human experience is not happening in a place external to consciousness. Again, our Leader says, “Mortal existence is a dream of pain and pleasure in matter, a dream of sin, sickness, and death; and it is like the dream we have in sleep, in which every one recognizes his condition to be wholly a state of mind” (Science and Health, p. 188).
The appearance of any lack of God’s goodness is actually a hypnotic dreamscape rather than a fixed landscape of external reality. And prayer in Christian Science pierces the veil of this hypnotized perspective so that we wake in sufficient degree to see that, whatever good and real idea we seem to need, we can prove we have, without time or distance required to possess or express it.
These lessons helped me in my career on two occasions. The first was during my senior year of college, when I was looking for a job with a legal career path, seemingly without success. Distraught after meeting yet again with my college’s career center director a few weeks before graduation, I thought about the great faith of the prophets and apostles, such as Peter, who trusted what Jesus told him—expecting to find the money they needed to pay their taxes by reaching into a fish’s mouth. I also thought about Jesus saying we should have faith in God to move mountains. So I asked myself, “Do you believe God could move a mountain right now if it were needed?”
I told God I didn’t care about getting a job—I just wanted complete confidence in my prayers. In other words, I hungered to have the Mind of Christ, not the results that follow.
Eventually, I concluded, “God is so great He could—if it is His will—transform the world around me so as to cause someone to knock on my door and deliver the best job I can imagine. Instead of human networking, all I need is God working. This is how much God loves me.”
I reasoned further that I am a divine idea living in divine Mind’s universe of right ideas. So the right ideas of abundant supply and meaningful, excellent employment were already tangible aspects of my being, instantly available as I declared divine Mind’s ability to show forth their evidence. I glimpsed that there was no such thing as a human job “out there” in a world of time and space. That is simply the human mind’s limited depiction of the real thing—the divine idea of productivity and abundant supply that is already “right here” in Mind. And this perfect Mind can never confuse the presence of abundance with an inverted appearance of poverty, which does not express Love.
I saw that in Christian Science we are demonstrating the presence of real, spiritual ideas. Things human and material—a job, body, or events in time and space—are no more tangible or authentic than shadows, which are merely incidental depictions of the substance they pattern. Grasping after shadows as if they were substance, we never find the actual stuff of the universe: spiritual ideas. To the extent we seek after these divine ideas for their own sake, however, their appropriate human expression will surely appear. As Jesus said, “Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you” (Matthew 6:33).
While praying that day in my college dorm room, I also declared that consciousness and evidence are simultaneous—without a second of delay—because there is no space-time in which divine Mind needs to evidence itself. My motive was not to pray up to Mind in order to then bring about a good result down on earth at a particular place and moment. There is no divide between consciousness and evidence because the nature of reality is oneness, not twoness—one in the eternal now of divine Mind.
Finally, I declared that I was not brokenhearted over seemingly ineffective prayers in a dreamed past. Discouragement and doubt based on past failures are an impossibility in a timeless universe. What we believe to be past failures, I reasoned, are not real events that actually happened some time ago, but instead just hypnotic suggestions telling me “they happened.” I live now, and in this “nowness” there has literally never been a single ineffectual prayer.
After declaring these truths, I heard the sliding door in the dorm room beneath me slam open. A friend stepped through it and—seeing my window open—told me I should go to the college’s career center to see a posting for a legal assistant position. The listing turned out to be a job working with an attorney who had worked closely with the President of the United States. Before long I was offered the job, and my experience with this attorney led me years later to a position as an attorney on a committee in Congress. The power of that one treatment transformed the course of my professional life.
The second experience unfolded after I left Congress. I found myself without a steady income. Eventually I landed a job with a federal agency, but I later received a call informing me that there was a problem with my drug test, and the agency’s federal policy did not allow for a second test. I knew I had not taken drugs, but I was told I would lose the job unless I could prove that a diseased condition had caused my abnormal test result.
Instead of approaching the situation from within the parameters of the human dream by tinkering with its characters, I resolved not to get up from my seat until I saw the unreality of the telephone call’s story about a test tube “out there” with a set of agency rules causing me harm. I remembered Mrs. Eddy’s question, “Is there any more reality in the waking dream of mortal existence than in the sleeping dream?” She answers, “There cannot be, since whatever appears to be a mortal man is a mortal dream” (Science and Health, p. 250).
I declared, “As the idea of divine Mind, I am not capable of dreaming harmful events, which are nothing but a theater of thought that has no power over me. I am safe in God’s universe of harmonious, divine ideas.”
By that evening I felt at peace and drove to a restaurant. When I was driving away from it, however, another car ran a red light at high speed and totaled my car. When I got out, one leg was difficult to walk on and my upper torso was in pain. Witnesses and a policeman urged me to go to an emergency room, but I declined and called a Christian Science practitioner. My thought had been so immersed in prayer all day that the car collision seemed like a dream. I held to the status of man’s Life as “entirely separate from the belief and dream of material living” and to the fact of “man’s dominion over the whole earth” (Science and Health, p. 14). By the next morning my leg was healed, and several weeks later my whole body was.
I decided to provide the agency with a second drug test from a private company that showed I was healthy and free of drugs, along with a letter from the company’s doctor, who had determined that I had unwittingly drunk too much water before the agency’s test. But the agency did not budge, and I learned that the federal agencies’ “one and done” drug policy had been upheld in courts for years.
Ready to give up, I called the Christian Science practitioner who had been praying with me. He strongly rebuked my doubt, and a short time later the agency not only offered me the job again, but said they had decided to rewrite their policy on drug testing to allow for a second test.
One night nine months later, I was inspired to write a record of this healing. It took me most of the night, and when I arrived at work a few hours later, my boss handed me a letter sent to agency employees nationwide announcing the agency’s new drug policy. The letter stated it was effective that day!
As I pondered the odds of this new policy becoming effective the very day I had rejoiced in the completeness of the healing, I glimpsed more clearly than before the almighty power of God to instantaneously transform our universe of experience, through Christian Science treatment, so as to portray divine reality in its highest humanly appreciable illustration.
The nature of reality is oneness, not twoness—one in the eternal now of divine Mind.
Our purpose in praying is not to improve human circumstances. That would be like a person hypnotized to believe he is a stick figure on the page of a book trying to use prayers about three-dimensional life in order to overcome two-dimensional problems in a real “Flatland.” It is equally unscientific to use spiritual ideas to improve a real, three-dimensional human experience in a material, planetary universe. Instead, we can awaken from the dream of any limited personhood to discover our true identity as a spiritual idea residing in the illimitable “fourth dimension” of Spirit’s universe (Miscellaneous Writings, p. 22).
Perhaps this is summarized best by something the Christian Science practitioner told me: “In Christian Science, we’re not improving a real world of human imperfection; rather, we’re disproving the lie that a world of human imperfection is real.” When we clearly understand this, what appears to be a universe of human experience transforms to more accurately reflect the universe of God’s perfect thoughts—instantaneously.
