Waking from a sleeping dream one morning, I experienced momentary mental disorientation. Where was I? What time was it? What day? Who was I? I found I was searching for an identity.
Before I settled on the man I seemed to be, I caught a glimpse of what I really was—before I was so quick to don my human identity. I am spiritual, the creation of the one Mind, God. Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, writes in her book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, “Now I ask, Is there any more reality in the waking dream of mortal existence than in the sleeping dream?” (p. 250). This got me thinking: Is life only a human struggle where we bang about in a material universe full of physical and mental confusion? Or is it something different? As I was learning in my study of Christian Science, it was very different.
As the day progressed, I felt fine and settled into my normal activities. But I refused to let go of this sense of spiritual identity. In Psalms we read, “As for me, I will behold thy face in righteousness: I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with thy likeness” (17:15). I realized there was no need to burden thought with what I was not—instead of what I am, as God’s likeness. Eddy writes, “The substance, Life, intelligence, Truth, and Love, which constitute Deity, are reflected by His creation; and when we subordinate the false testimony of the corporeal senses to the facts of Science, we shall see this true likeness and reflection everywhere” (Science and Health, p. 516).
