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.
