Day 107: Turning a corner

207:8-209:4

In my opinion, the book has turned a corner from introductory material to the meat of the theology. If you have made it this far, put your thinking cap on and pay close attention to what Mary Baker Eddy says. She has some real gems hidden in the text.

I pulled some ideas from the reading.

We must learn that evil is the awful deception and unreality of existence.

The original wording for this next one is:

The spiritual reality is the scientific fact in all things.

But I rewrote it. Does it make it clearer or change its meaning?

The scientific fact is the spiritual reality in all things.

Grabbed the core idea and removed the other words:

Error of belief = embracing sin, sickness, and death

I don’t really think most people embrace sin, sickness, and death but they embrace the road that took them there.

It is the mortal belief which makes the body discordant and diseased in proportion as ignorance, fear, or human will governs mortals.

Of those three, ignorance, fear, and human will, the last is most often the culprit.

2010

Day 106: Specific Guidance

205:7-207:7

Day 95’s reading is about treatment (or thought that make up a healing treatment). Today’s reading is about specific guidance for our own actions, thoughts, and lives.

I’ve copied the text of these two pages and keep them on my mobile phone with me at all times.

I would love to know what pages have you marked as ***important and why?

2010

Day 100: Human will and opinion

192:4-194:5

This chapter’s title is Physiology, but I always just think of it as the body. The chapter flows from the body –> materiality –> human thought –> human will\opinion.

In Science, you can have no power opposed to God, and the physical senses must give up their false testimony.

Whatever holds human thought in line with unselfed love, receives directly the divine power.

 2010

Day 96: False Belief

184:16-186:10

Controlled by the divine intelligence, man is harmonious and eternal. Whatever is governed by a false belief is discordant and mortal. We say man suffers from the effects of cold, heat, fatigue. This is human belief, not the truth of being, for matter cannot suffer. Mortal mind alone suffers,--not because a law of matter has been transgressed, but because a law of this so-called mind has been disobeyed. I have demonstrated this as a rule of divine Science by destroying the delusion of suffering from what is termed a fatally broken physical law.

2010

Day 79: Free Moral Agency

150:4 - 152:9

Mary Baker Eddy uses the term free moral agency in this section.

Don’t confuse this with free will. People usually use free will to say they have a choice about something as opposed to man imposing on other men. At some point human will moves from an individual right to a personal corruption where we no longer have to listen or be advised. We can just do because we have free will.

That has nothing to do with free moral agency. If you are listening to God, your moral compass is properly attuned and you act accordingly. Human will or free will lets you be your own God.

2010

Day 8: Space for Prayer

9:5-11:4

Mary Baker Eddy explains that asking isn’t enough. Prayer needs to also include the work of sinning no more. She lists two things that are not a part of prayer:

• material sense
• human will

If I eliminate these entirely from my mental landscape, I wonder if the nature of my prayers would change. I’m not asking to be rich and famous but I have spiritual goals. Perhaps I’m focusing too much on the goal and not the immediate steps in front of me that confirm my progress.
2010

Day 302: Impersonal Healing

607:6-609:13

This reading has something special to offer. At the end of the second testimony, the person writes:

so it is absolutely certain that the healing was entirely impersonal, as was also the teaching, which enabled me to begin at once demonstrating the power of Truth to destroy all forms of error.

The person healed was going to read the book but wait to be healed by a Christian Scientist, meaning someone better informed. But after reading the book, that wasn’t necessary. Nor was it necessary to be class-taught.

The thing about this is, there are many times where I plan how things will happen in my life, whether it’s a healing or a family event or employment, then I will do anything and everything to obstinately see that is what happens. Blinded by my own concept. But here is a person who could put that all aside. And just do it.

Mary Baker Eddy was aware of this type of stubbornness. The opposite of obstinate is here. And here is a post from this blog about Human Will. Things I need to work on.

Day 246: New Connections

489:24-491:16

A few of things I would like to note about this reading. First, I think there might be several points that are new in recapitulation, to me anyway. I know this is probably error on my part. So the second thing is that I’m considering reading this journal again next year instead of moving on to misc writings. If I missed some key points and didn’t figure it out until around page 500, I wonder what else I missed. Third, if other people were blogging about their experience reading the book, and I could find/read those blogs, perhaps I wouldn’t have missed what I now consider very important points. Drat! Double Drat!

[Just spent 20 minutes trying to find an online link to the Journal for Misc Writings. Argh! I’ll post here and on the About Me page when I find it. Anyone know if it is officially out of print?]

First point:

The corporeal senses are the only source of evil or error. Christian Science shows them to be false, because matter has no sensation, and no organic construction can give it hearing and sight nor make it the medium of Mind. Outside the material sense of things, all is harmony.

This is the best definition of evil/error so far in the book – the first one that was applicable to my life and experience.

Will-power is but a product of belief, and this belief commits depredations on harmony. Human will is an animal propensity, not a faculty of Soul.

Will--blind, stubborn, and headlong--cooperates with appetite and passion. From this cooperation arises its evil. From this also comes its powerlessness, since all power belongs to God, good.

This is the first connection I’ve seen between human will and belief (or was it there in the trial somewhere?). Also another good tie into to evil.

Human belief--or knowledge gained from the so-called material senses--would, by fair logic, annihilate man along with the dissolving elements of clay.

Now a tie between belief and the material senses. The following formula isn’t exactly write but close to what I’m getting from this reading:

Material Senses = Belief = Will = Error/Evil

Thoughts?

And then the last little bit about sleep which I thought was a great example of what Mary Baker Eddy is trying to say:

Sleep and mesmerism explain the mythical nature of material sense. Sleep shows material sense as either oblivion, nothingness, or an illusion or dream. Under the mesmeric illusion of belief, a man will think that he is freezing when he is warm, and that he is swimming when he is on dry land. Needle-thrusts will not hurt him. A delicious perfume will seem intolerable. Animal magnetism thus uncovers material sense, and shows it to be a belief without actual foundation or validity. Change the belief, and the sensation changes. Destroy the belief, and the sensation disappears.

Day 228: Human Will & Mental Malpractice

451:8-453:5

These two ideas are easy to understand and diffuse on their own but in this reading, somewhere, MBE, ties them together. At least that’s the thought that I came away with.

Every Christian Scientist, every conscientious teacher of the Science of Mind-healing, knows that human will is not Christian Science, and he must recognize this in order to defend himself from the influence of human will. He feels morally obligated to open the eyes of his students that they may perceive the nature and methods of error of every sort, especially any subtle degree of evil, deceived and deceiving. All mental malpractice arises from ignorance or malice aforethought. It is the injurious action of one mortal mind controlling another from wrong motives, and it is practised either with a mistaken or a wicked purpose.

Day 225: Human Will

445:19-447:11

Since most of this reading is about human will (or it was to me), I thought I would link up other days I thought included that topic.

Thoughts MBE has about Human Will:

Christian Science silences human will, quiets fear with Truth and Love, and illustrates the unlabored motion of the divine energy in healing the sick.

The human will which maketh and worketh a lie, hiding the divine Principle of harmony, is destructive to health, and is the cause of disease rather than its cure.

The exercise of will brings on a hypnotic state, detrimental to health and integrity of thought. This must therefore be watched and guarded against.

The heavenly law is broken by trespassing upon man’s individual right to self-government.

Day 115: Spirit and Truth

223:7-225:4

The first sentence in the section totally grabbed me:

Matter does not express Spirit.

It is definitely a quote for the Beginning/Only Christian Science. The next bit that caught my attention was:

Spiritual rationality and free thought accompany approaching Science, and cannot be put down. They will emancipate humanity, and supplant unscientific means of so-called laws. 

Free thought is different from free/human will to me but how are free thought and free will different? Free thought, to me, implies changed thought -- allowing a person's thinking to mature or develop through change.  Free will to me implies a human will or stubbornness to changing thought. So I could reword this to say something like

Changing thought will free humanity. 

The last thing I underlined was:

No power can withstand divine Love.  

That goes back to the Beginning/Only idea. Another way to express it would be:

No power can withstand divine Love because Love is all. 

 I'm going to spend today working with that.

Day 106: Loving our neighbor

205:7-207:7

When we realize that there is one Mind, the divine law of loving our neighbor as ourselves is unfolded. 

Mary Baker Eddy goes on to speak of selfishness as a beam towards the side of error. When I feel the need to retract emotionally, I do act like I'm the only person on the planet and I don't care about my neighbor. I know it's wrong. This quote is just another indication to me that to grow spiritually, I won't be on the journey alone -- even it that is what I wanted. I'm an introvert by nature so including others isn't easy.

She also goes on to mention will-power and human will as subordinate to God's will and that will-power is capable of all evil. I already knew that but the subordinate to God part is tricky.

She also says the prayer of the righteous heals the sick, the prayer is: hope, faith, love. She sort of sneaks that in instead of making that the main point of the paragraph but I'm going to hold on to that one and think about it.

The last thing I marked was "whatever blesses one blesses all." I'm a Star Trek fan and the prime directive is ingrained in me. These two, MBE's whatever blesses one blesses all and the prime directive are in direct conflict with each other. But it gives me some real (t.v. real anyway) ideas on what blessing one is. It's unselfish and damn-the-consequences.

So I think I'll call that C.S. quote the C.S. Prime Directive. What do you think? Might be easier to remember that way.

Day 102: The Elasticity of mortal thought and the fear farmer

196:11-198:22

The Elasticity of mortal thought is a great function. We can bounce around from fear to love to anguish quickly. I do this all the time when I watch a movie. It's a little harder when the situation seems real. I've been thinking a lot about human will lately. Another term for this is free will. People often use this as some sort of great thing. We have free will! Isn't that wonderful. You can choose. I've always ignored the argument because it seems contrived but now I want to take a side.Free will versus God's will.

I've been examining my thoughts closely while reading this book. It's easy to tell myself I can change my mind, ignore error, do the right thing. But free will can swing both ways. I can listen to fear and anger and wear it as though it were clothes.

Mary Baker Eddy said:

We should master fear, instead of cultivating it. 

I know a lot of productive fear farmers. I'm not going to worry about them though. Just me. Am I a fear farmer? Do I bring my crop home? More than I care to admit.

But the elasticity of mortal thought needs to be applied. I will change my crop. I've been watching my actions for human will or willfulness. That's a good step but now I want to actively apply love to my actions. That's easy on the surface. I take care of my obligations, my family, and my house. But what about my thoughts? What am I thinking as I sweep the floor for what feels like the millionth time this week? Am I grateful to even have the floor? And what about when something I want doesn't work out? I say "no big deal" but I stew inside. That needs to change. 

A technical note: I'm going to be making some changes to the previous posts: adding labels/tags, adding a link to the pages, etc. This is clean up. At the end of the year, I plan to export off of Blogger to a Wordpress site. In order to make that export easier, with less cleanup, I'll start now.

Day 100: Spirit does not share with Human Will

192:4-194:5

I've started reading each day's section two or three times. I know it sort of defeats the purpose of the quick read but I'm either having problems grasping the material the first time through or wondering why these two pages were picked -- meaning why start here and end there.

The first sentence of the second paragraph starts with erring power. I always think of that as something that isn't me so but I could tell by the rest of the paragraph I was misreading. Then I looked at the paragraph title in the white space: Human power a blind force. Ok then. It is talking about me. Still not entirely clear on what is going on, I finish the section to find this:

It has been demonstrated to me that Life is God and that the might of omnipotent Spirit shares not its strength with matter or with human will.

Oh, I get it now: human will power. I've got loads of that -- coming out my ears. Probably why I have a difficult time hearing God.

One more thing that I saw which, this time, made total sense right off:

Human opinions are not spiritual.

So few people express happy, positive, loving opinions -- myself included. There are a couple of people around me that if they express any opinion, I know it will be a big glob of negative, hate-filled goo.

So today's goal (yes, I do have one) is to not fill up on my own will or opinions but leave the mental tank empty and see what God puts in.

On a different note, today is day 100 for me. I'm a couple of days behind in the general journal calendar. Sorry about that. While I may be a neanderthal spiritually, I'll keep working on it. I'm sort of proud of having come this far.