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?
Material law, defined by science, theology, and medicine, is all around us. It seems to be getting more pervasive and more complicated all the time. While new laws are still be considered, and then freshly installed into society (coughing into your elbow – oy), they are usually not in our thought much unless they are controversial. But once the law finds a place, then the people find the law. Beliefs, theories, opinions – these start to build on top of the law. Then the law eventually becomes part of our community and personal sense. We change our behavior to fit it and we get afraid, then angry when others don’t change their behavior.
Then there is spiritual law. It doesn’t change or grow more complicated. By comparison, it seems to become more simple. Love.
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.
This is the first day of Teaching Christian Science. The two ideas that struck me were Mary Baker Eddy’s tone and her clear guidance. Some places in the book, she is very forceful but in these two pages, I didn’t read that. I read compassion and guidance, as if she were speaking to me in a class.
Right off the bat, she says:
under ordinary circumstances a resort to faith in corporeal means tends to deter those, who make such a compromise, from entire confidence in omnipotent Mind as really possessing all power.
There are other places in the book where she says this differently but you get her general attitude here.
There are so many rules listed in these two pages, I was thinking about making a list but I wouldn’t want anyone to stray into the argument of the letter versus the spirit of the rule.
She does discusses the ethics of Christian Science and mentions mental assassins then defines the term:
mental assassins: someone who attempts to kill morally and physically
This is the wrap up of the trial. There are several lines that popped out at me:
any so-called law, which undertakes to punish aught but sin, is null and void
That’s a sweeping statement. I need to keep that one close by. It is said another way, in case you need a variation:
Man is adjudged innocent of transgressing physical laws, because there are no such laws.
There is alot her to consider and prayer about:
We should relieve our minds from the depressing thought that we have transgressed a material law and must of necessity pay the penalty. Let us reassure ourselves with the law of Love. 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. Through this action of thought and its results upon the body, the student will prove to himself, by small beginnings, the grand verities of Christian Science.
Yesterday was a really good day. I didn’t have a journal entry here but I did have a household where children behaved, parents didn’t fight. Usually on our busiest days, I’ve a short temper and rush. Yesterday was so full, even my husband lost track but we all got along and everything got done and we had fun. Yeah!
I’ve been thinking lately about the matter illusion. I can’t get around matter, regardless so today’s reading helped:
Matter is not self-sustaining. Its false supports fail one after another. Matter succeeds for a period only by falsely parading in the vestments of law.
The idea of law having a hold on me in right on. So I’m going to work on that idea of the falsity of material law. Or something along those lines.
And:
If pride, superstition, or any error prevents the honest recognition of benefits received, this will be a hindrance to the recovery of the sick and the success of the student.
I try to be grateful for each small (and big) thing (and non-thing) in my life. But I probably don’t see everything I should be grateful for so I’ll redouble my efforts on that.
