A Christian, trained in traditional and literal interpretations of the Bible, was taking me to task about the teachings of Christian Science, especially the affirmation that matter is not real.
He put his finger into the first chapter of Genesis and said, “See, here it says that God made material cattle, herbs and trees.” And I replied, “Yes, God made the animals, herbs and trees, but nowhere in that chapter does it say they were material.”
And this revelation highlights the genius of Christian Science. It teaches what Jesus Christ saw and understood: that we do not live in a universe of matter, but of divine Mind where things are thoughts and ideas are substance.
Mortal mind looks out into God’s fabulous universe of Mind and sees material things and temporal objects. But the divinely inspired mind looks out from God’s universe and sees spiritual ideas and immortal beings.
The universe is not material. If so, it would end, and what’s the point?
The universe of God’s creating is spiritual, and a joy to live in. But it requires spiritual sense to see and experience its blessings. Divine Science reveals those blessings.
“In divine Science, the universe, including man, is spiritual, harmonious, and eternal” Mary Baker Eddy (S&H 114:27).
The time has indeed come for mankind to at least begin to accept the profound fact of the non-materiality of God’s creation. (If it was not time Evan’s words would not have been sent out into the ethernet, would they!)
Mary Baker Eddy was truly a thought-pioneer: she went where no one went before, other than Christ Jesus. And her experience, and writings about it, happened
when mankind was ready to receive it this good news.
LMay we really receive it, and rejoice in its implications!
There is nothing to fear, nothing to lose.
The divine Mind has ALL good for His idea, man!
That’s US!!
Evan I LOVE your posts. They’re sort of Lifts in written form. I love that they are open to different sources from S&H.
One question on “Creation is spiritual”: you illustrate your post with a photo of very solide, real looking cows and mountains. So I ask, how did these material forms originate? And how can a camera capture a non material form?
How do you pray for someone you love who doesn’t appear to be aware of spiritual sense and doesn’t want it or hear about it and is suffering?
To above about cows and mountains…you call them material forms, but in the Mind of God, the cows and mountains of God’s creating are spiritual ideas. This is the whole point, that material sense misinterprets God’s universe calling spiritual ideas material things. Material sense is wrong. It’s concepts die and disappear. God’s ideas live forever.
To anon above about others…prayer is always about changing our view, getting the right view of God’s creation. So if you’re perceiving someone else to be not spiritually minded, that’s an error you are entertaining in your mind, and that’s where the correction needs to take place.
Oh, Evan, you’re just too intelligent for me! I still can’t wrap my mind around the fact that a spiritual, immaterial idea can take shape, and show up in a photograph. I guess I’m still in CS 101….
You can see the cows because they have substance. No one is trying to say that the cows are not there.
Material thinking is a viewpoint that says everything is subject to laws of destruction.
CS is a viewpoint that says God is in control. We get to chose.
CS is not trying to make creation go away. CS 101 is a matter of viewpoint and of government. Spirit manifests substance. CS is seeing everything under the government of God who made everything, liberated from the collective consciousness of 7 billion people.
The issue is viewpoint. The issue is not whether the cows exist or not.
Creation doesn’t come from matter. Creation comes from God.
Material thinking is the belief that substance is self-existent, and that everything is subject to the laws we hold to be inescapable. Material thinking is putting limits on what God manifests.
I fell off a cliff once and had many broken bones in my leg. I prayed. I saw heaven. I saw everything as God sees it. In that split second God healed my bones instantly, completely and perfectly as quickly as you could change the TV channel using a remote control button.
God did not remove my leg. My leg did not become invisible. You could take a picture of my leg. God proved that nothing is destructible in His care.
Spirituality is putting everything in the care of the God who made everything. CS helps me see things through God’s eyes. Spirituality doesn’t make creation disappear. Rather, everything becomes a billion times more beautiful and substantial.
If I had said, “My leg is badly damaged and I need surgery and months to heal, then that would have guided my experience. That is the usual material view of things. But I declared God to be the Source of all, to be sovereign and everything about me to be 100% under God’s care. That is the spiritual view.
I prayed for someone just before brain surgery to remove a tumor. The doctors took the final X-ray and the tumor was gone. Their jaws hit the floor! They had no explanation.
Spirit, God, trumps what we call “matter”. I know it’s hard to understand, but it is an illusion in believing that we have to suffer. There is more!
Evan,
You worded that so helpfully for me. I enjoyed it very much. I’m going to save it. You emphasize MBE’s point that it’s all about what we see and how we see things.
Yes, God’s creation is real, the hills and the cows are real. But our human senses only report to us a very limited view of all that really is. Spiritual sense illumines creation; it does not erase it. It only erases limitations.
Spirit manifests itself in substance. Good religion, whether it be CS, mystical Judaism or Native American helps us to see that everything comes from Spirit, God, is sustained by Spirit, and finds it’s substance in Spirit. Everything in creation speaks of it’s Source in which it exists.
I have empathy that honest visitors to the site are confused when MBE calls matter “unreal”. But if I read enough I find that MBE describes matter as the results of a limited perception of things. Matter is a concept of reality.
Material thinking is a viewpoint. A material view believes that substance as we see it with human eyes is self-originating. It says that we can trust our eyes and our brains to report the full reality to us. You might say limited human thinking is like looking at a beautiful landscape through a dirty lens. Or that collective human consciousness is running interference with a much bigger and more beautiful reality that is waiting to be discovered.
CS is not the only tradition which stretches us to see “what the eyes alone do not see”. Great poets and writers all through the ages have sensed it and told of it.
Jesus defied the laws of collective consciousness that have us brainwashed and make us feel imprisoned in suffering and limitation. Jesus blew-off all those shackles and chains, and made people healed, whole and well. He walked on water and appeared suddenly in a different place. Things are not what they appear to be.
Eventually mankind must evolve to see that God is the power behind everything, and how great that Power is. MBE explains to us that Spirit is the Source and Cause, and only ignorant thinking blocks us from experiencing all we were meant to experience.
Jesus came to proclaim that the kingdom of heaven is within reach, is all around us, already appearing and within us. It’s not, “lo here, or lo there”. Heaven is HERE! NOW! One God. One creation. Not two. The seeming fracture is only in our consciousness.
Inspired leaders come to help us learn to use our spiritual eyes! To awake! There is more. Thanks Evan.