Day 244: Today’s Question

484:28-487:12

Is materiality the concomitant of spirituality, and is material sense a necessary preliminary to the understanding and expression of Spirit?

Emerge gently from matter into Spirit. Think not to thwart the spiritual ultimate of all things, but come naturally into Spirit through better health and morals and as the result of spiritual growth.

If thought yields its dominion to other powers, it cannot outline on the body its own beautiful images, but it effaces them and delineates foreign agents, called disease and sin.

In reality man never dies. The belief that he dies will not establish his scientific harmony. Death is not the result of Truth but of error, and one error will not correct another.

Sight, hearing, all the spiritual senses of man, are eternal. They cannot be lost. Their reality and immortality are in Spirit and understanding, not in matter,--hence their permanence.

2010

Day 242: Today’s Question

479:27-482:12

Does brain think, and do nerves feel, and is there intelligence in matter? (answer cont’d from yesterday)

Consciousness, as well as action, is governed by Mind,--is in God, the origin and governor of all that Science reveals.

The forbidden fruit of knowledge, against which wisdom warns man, is the testimony of error, declaring existence to be at the mercy of death, and good and evil to be capable of commingling. This is the significance of the Scripture concerning this "tree of the knowledge of good and evil,"--this growth of material belief, of which it is said: "In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." Human hypotheses first assume the reality of sickness, sin, and death, and then assume the necessity of these evils because of their admitted actuality. These human verdicts are the procurers of all discord.

When reading the Scriptures, the substitution of the word sense for soul gives the exact meaning in a majority of cases.

As used in Christian Science, Soul is properly the synonym of Spirit, or God; but out of Science, soul is identical with sense, with material sensation.

2010

Day 241: Today’s Questions

477:19-479:26

What are body and Soul? answer

Soul is the substance, Life, and intelligence of man, which is individualized, but not in matter.

Does brain think, and do nerves feel, and is there intelligence in matter? answer (answer cont’d tomorrow)

Matter cannot see, feel, hear, taste, nor smell. It is not self-cognizant,--cannot feel itself, see itself, nor understand itself. Take away so-called mortal mind, which constitutes matter's supposed selfhood, and matter can take no cognizance of matter.

2010

Day 233: Anatomy is mental Self-knowledge

461:1-463:4

Anatomy, when conceived of spiritually, is mental self-knowledge, and consists in the dissection of thoughts to discover their quality, quantity, and origin. Are thoughts divine or human? That is the important question. This branch of study is indispensable to the excision of error. The anatomy of Christian Science teaches when and how to probe the self-inflicted wounds of selfishness, malice, envy, and hate. It teaches the control of mad ambition. It unfolds the hallowed influences of unselfishness, philanthropy, spiritual love. It urges the government of the body both in health and in sickness. The Christian Scientist, through understanding mental anatomy, discerns and deals with the real cause of disease.

2010

Day 211: Identity & Illusion in Healing

416:16-418:11

The whole reading today grabbed me. My thoughts have been racing toward this all week.

The material body, which you call me, is mortal mind, and this mind is material in sensation, even as the body, which has originated from this material sense and been developed according to it, is material. This materialism of parent and child is only in mortal mind, as the dead body proves; for when the mortal has resigned his body to dust, the body is no longer the parent, even in appearance.

To the Christian Science healer, sickness is a dream from which the patient needs to be awakened. Disease should not appear real to the physician, since it is demonstrable that the way to cure the patient is to make disease unreal to him. To do this, the physician must understand the unreality of disease in Science.

2010

Day 194: Clean body & Clean mind

383:3-385:14

the Christian Scientist takes the best care of his body when he leaves it most out of his thought

God never punishes man for doing right, for honest labor, or for deeds of kindness, though they expose him to fatigue, cold, heat, contagion. If man seems to incur the penalty through matter, this is but a belief of mortal mind, not an enactment of wisdom, and man has only to enter his protest against this belief in order to annul it.

Let us remember that the eternal law of right, though it can never annul the law which makes sin its own executioner, exempts man from all penalties but those due for wrong-doing.

2010

Day 114: Mind & the Body

221:1-223:6

He learned that suffering and disease were the self-imposed beliefs of mortals, and not the facts of being; that God never decreed disease, –never ordained a law that fasting should be a means of health.

This new-born understanding, that neither food nor the stomach, without the consent of mortal mind, can make one suffer, brings with it another lesson, –that gluttony is a sensual illusion, and that this phantasm of mortal mind disappears as we better apprehend our spiritual existence and ascend the ladder of life.

2010

Day 113: Harmonious Body

219:6-220:32

…we shall never affirm concerning the body what we do not wish to have manifested.

Science includes no rule of discord, but governs harmoniously.

Mortal mind forms all conditions of the mortal body, and controls the stomach, bones, lungs, heart, blood, etc., as directly as the volition or will moves the hand.

2010

Day 112: Treatment of Sickness

217:6-219:5

What renders both sin and sickness difficult of cure is, that the human mind is the sinner, disinclined to self-correction, and believing that the body can be sick independently of mortal mind and that the divine Mind has no jurisdiction over the body.

Treat a belief in sickness as you would sin, with sudden dismissal. Resist the temptation to believe in matter as intelligent, as having sensation or power.

2010

Day 111: The Body

215:11-217:5

If man is governed by the law of divine Mind, his body is in submission to everlasting Life and Truth and Love.

2010

Day 103: Influence on the Body

198:23-200:29

Mortals develop their own bodies or make them sick, according as they influence them through mortal mind. To know whether this development is produced consciously or unconsciously, is of less importance than a knowledge of the fact.

2010

Day 92:

176:21-178:27

Mortal mind and body are one. Neither exists without the other, and both must be destroyed by immortal Mind.

2010

Day 66: Belief

124:3-126:7

Physical science (so-called) is human knowledge,--a law of mortal mind, a blind belief, a Samson shorn of his strength.

In a word, human belief is a blind conclusion from material reasoning. This is a mortal, finite sense of things, which immortal Spirit silences forever.

The elements and functions of the physical body and of the physical world will change as mortal mind changes its beliefs.

Thus matter will finally be proved nothing more than a mortal belief, wholly inadequate to affect a man through its supposed organic action or supposed existence.

…mortality will cease when man beholds himself God's reflection, even as man sees his reflection in a glass.

2010

Day 298: Rheumatism Healed

600-601:23

Fruitage is always such a wonderful read.

In this healing, the testifier is relating a healing of rheumatism. The person mentioned that he or she understood a mental condition needed to be corrected. When I looked up ossification, one of the definitions agreed: “the process of becoming rigidly fixed in a conventional pattern of thought or behavior.”

Vocab:

• Rheumatism
• Ossification

Day 241: Identity & Belief

477:19-479:26

After today’s reading, I’m considering the chapter nickname of belief.

Mary Baker Eddy starts of the answer to What is body and Soul? with the concept of identity. Plenty of people would identity as either the body or Soul in body, so I understand why she starts there.

This is one of those question/answers that, regardless of Christian Science, I totally get. That’s to say that outside of the nature/nurture argument, I know my body is not me and that there is no other identity (such as Soul) in my body. There are some things that you have to know for yourself, spiritually speaking. This is one I know.

So when I got to this line:

What basis is there for the theory of indwelling spirit, except the claim of mortal belief? 

I broadened it so I could apply it to other issues:

What basis is there for the theory of [insert challenge here], except the claim of mortal belief? 

Still praying about son.