If you ever feel stuck in a rut, making no progress with your prayers, insist on a breakthrough!
The sensation of making no progress in the face of lack or disease manifests a belief that matter controls mind. It’s an illusion that mind can’t do anything about the material circumstances but wait it out and suffer in the meantime.
But wait! Matter does not control mind. It’s the other way around. Mind makes its own decisions and carries them out. Matter never objects or balks at the demands of mind.
What are you deciding? That is what you are feeling.
If mind feels at the mercy of matter, that is a choice that mind made, not a decree it has to obey. And when the outcome of the decision is stagnation and continued suffering, it’s time to make a healthier decision.
Insist on a breakthrough!
Don’t settle for a sub-standard status quo.
You are an intelligent child of God who has spiritual dominion and authority to conquer all material beliefs with spiritual truth. You can think rightly and act rightly. Matter does not control your thinking. Divine Mind controls mortal mind and forces it to obey divine decree. Exercise that power fearlessly! Demand a change in consciousness, and stick to that demand until there is improvement.
In observing Jesus Christ’s approach to healing, Mary Baker Eddy wrote,
“He demanded a change of consciousness and evidence, and effected this change through the higher laws of God. The palsied hand moved, despite the boastful sense of physical law and order…He heeded not the taunt, ‘That withered hand looks very real and feels very real;’ but he cut off this vain boasting and destroyed human pride by taking away the material evidence” (Unity of Good, p. 11).
With the help of Christ, you can cut off the “vain boasting” and “human pride” of mortal mind, too. Mind rules, never matter.
Thank you Evan a very powerful thought just what I needed to put things into their proper order. To see things as they really are.
I love love love this post. I needed this wake up to remind me who runs the show.
This was so empowering to read, thank you!
Thank you! This is being forwarded to my son who is eager to feel strong after feeling very ill at college.
My prayer is that it empowers him.
thank you Evan for the powerful treatment.
warm regards
Thank you Evan for inspiring me to be persistent in my denial of matter being all powerful. It’s not easy to do this, else more positive demonstrations would be told. But like Mrs Eddy writes; “PERSISTENCE WINS THE PRIZE.”
Way to go!!!!!
when the veil is lifted we discover that the great oz is nothing but an illusion of our own making….”be not conformed to this world”……” I have met the enemy and he is us”…….
Thanks Evan. Very helpful.
Thank you, Evan!! Just read this and a few other recent blogs and am feeling better. I so appreciate you!!
This is the wake up call. Wishy washy is not an option. We have dominion, now use it! This is so inspiring, thank you, Evan.
How can an illusion be your explanation when you also assert that only God and his perfect idea exist?
Hi Phineas,
I’m not sure I understand your question. An illusion is something that appears real to the human mind, but is not real in spiritual fact. Once the spiritual fact is understood, the temporal illusion dissolves. And the allness of God is better understood and demonstrated.
You claim the allness of God.
You deny the reality of suffering, claiming that it’s only an illusion appearing to the human mind.
But you don’t account for how an illusion or an imperfect mind can exist or even be entertained in the perfect allness of God’s creation.
If God’s creation is perfect and all, the explanation that we just need to improve our understanding is incompatible with the creation.
Do you see the contradiction and does it bother you in the slightest?
Oh yes, I know what you’re talking about. The only way you can answer your question is through demonstration. It’s like when some people believed the earth was flat. It was always round, but people still believed it was flat. Eventually truth was seen and understood. The same happens with God. Many people believe in other powers than God, and those powers appear very real to them. But eventually truth will win the day and they will see that they entertained an illusion all along. This awakening happens in degrees.
I know from experience that when I choose to believe in evil, life gets much worse and problems are difficult to overcome. But when I know the unreality of evil and the reality of God, I can overcome it much quicker. Same rule for sickness. Belief in sickness compounds it and worsens its effect. Understanding it as illusion can make it go away.
Hope that helps.
Thanks for the response, but if you wouldn’t mind thinking this through with me a bit more:
How do demonstrations solve the contradiction of illusions seeming to exist in a perfect creation?
Demonstrations or healings do not provide an answer to this contradiction, they illustrate the problem more clearly.
Christian Science declares that an all-loving all-knowing all-creative all-present God created everything perfect; that pain, disease, disharmony, error, and death are merely illusions to a mortal understanding; that we can improve our spiritual understanding of God and Her perfect creation; and that material laws yield to spiritual laws, so healings can result from improved spiritual understandings.
But there are a few contradictions within the claims themselves: that perfect creations have room to improve their spiritual understanding, and that erring mortal sense seems to exist in a perfect creation.
If we are capable of improving our understanding, then we are not perfect. Wouldn’t an absolute perfect creation include perfect understanding?
Do we need to progress or are we perfect?
If we need to improve our spiritual understanding to recognize perfection, then we are not perfect.
Would a loving and perfect and logical God say “You are perfect, you just need to understand that you’re perfect to experience perfection”?
If we try to diminish the theological problem of evil by saying that error is only an illusion appearing to a false sense, then you still have to account for this false sense that’s been proposed. How did a false sense or an illusion or an error get in when an all-knowing God created everything perfect? Recursive attempts to evade the problem are always left with the same problem.
Before trying to prove a hypothesis with personal experiences, shouldn’t we make sure the hypothesis is coherent and free of contradiction?
Couldn’t we prove any theory to ourselves if we worked hard enough?
Thank you for the reminder, wake up call, you are always on the note of harmony.
Thank you Evan. I needed that encouragement especially your response to the question of
Contradiction. Bless your heart for your continued shepherding
to your readers.
Hi Phineas,
Yes, you answer your own question. You can prove the theory through experience. You will not be able to prove it though, trying to figure it out materially. It only makes sense to spiritual sense. Also, if evil were real, you could not overcome it. But you can conquer it, thus proving its claims are illusion. This can not be done by talking about it. It is proven in experience. You just have to do it, and then you’ll know what I mean. That’s the only way I can understand it, is through my experiences. When I pray and make a sickness go away, it is proved, to a degree, for me, that evil is not what it claims. Jesus made the ultimate proof, and that’s what gives me inspiration to keep working at it.
I do not pretend to understand the whole of it, but step by step, I do prove more of it everyday. It’s a lot better than the option of giving into evil and succumbing to it, I believe.
THANK YOU EVAN
Thank you Eban
Thank you so much, Evan, for your dialogue with Phineas. I too have entertained his questions through the years, but your last answer is so comforting and true! We must demonstrate Principle or rather watch, feel, hear Princple prove itself. I experienced an instantaneous moment of freedom from excrutiating pain after calling a CS Practitioner to pray for me. To this day, I cannont explain what happened. Mrs. Eddy has explained it, but really there are no words that can come close to the experience. It was divine. And you are absolutely right, it only makes sense to spiritual sense! Thank you so much for your wonderful arena for sharing spiritual insights. I am grateful for the image of breaking through a brick. Nice.
You are welcome! Thanks for sharing your thoughts. They are appreciated and read.
Evan, thank you for your openness to discussion.
The answer to my own question that I think you reference is:
“Couldn’t we prove any theory to ourselves if we worked hard enough?”
I don’t believe I answered my own question, because I am not satisfied with the rhetorical “yes” that follows that question.
That we can convince ourselves of ANY theory if we work hard enough is what is troubling.
What if our secret wishes and biases get in the way of our quest for truth? What if we were born and raised with a mistaken set of beliefs? Is our ability to convince ourselves really a good metric for the truth of a belief set? Isn’t there a better way to interrogate the universe?
In a sense I hear: “Even though the foundational claims of our beliefs don’t make sense, they’re not supposed to make sense yet, because if you’re confused that means you’re still reasoning with material sense, not spiritual sense (you’ll find out later how to distinguish between the two). You just need to start applying these truths to your life, step by step, and I’m sure you’ll demonstrate the truthiness to yourself.”
You are pleading for everyone to take it on faith and start trying to confirm the bias, which I agree could be a long and fruitful journey, just not one necessarily based on our best understanding of reality.
The small “s” sciences have devised clever ways to narrow the error bars and correct for many of our biases.
People convince themselves of many different kinds of belief, often quite different from CS and incompatible with CS, but with precisely the same amount and quality of evidence as found in CS demonstrations.
There are other journals of testimonials.
Testimonies from drastically different beliefs also claim healings of blindness, AIDS, cancer, near death experiences, and misplaced car keys. Their explanations are wildly different, but their evidence is strikingly similar.
They can’t all be right.
What is a demonstration? Isn’t it an improvement in condition after an improved understanding? How do we know to credit the improved condition to the improved understanding at all, let alone exclusively? How do we know to blame our ignorance or sin for declining health?
I believe “demonstrations” are more about reinforcing beliefs than searching for truth. We are taught to believe that any improved condition in the body or mind after spiritual work is a direct result of that spiritual work.
There is an assumption, that a causal connection exists, when in reality only an occasional correlation exists. We don’t consider that other factors may be at play.
We are taught to ignore other possibilities, ignorance to knowledge is the prescription for better understanding in CS.
We do not count the number of times prayer doesn’t work, or we find ways to blame our own character or understanding if we struggle.
We say that we’re all trying to understand it better, step by step, and that our demonstrations should be sufficient proof.
That nobody has demonstrated this theory fully, except Jesus.
Are the four discrepant non-contemporary anonymous Iron Age authors of the Gospel, later interpolated, our best guide for absolute truth?
Is a theory really useful if you need to disclose to adherents that nobody completely understood this theory except for one person who lived a couple millennia ago, born of a virgin?
We improved our knowledge with scientific revolutions in thinking that you mention, like our shift from flat-earth to spherical-earth to ellipsoid-earth, and from geocentrism to heliocentrism. Our intuitions revealed our conceits, we assumed the world was custom made just for us. But our observations and scientific method challenged these conceits.
The advances in understanding did not occur because some courageous spiritual thinker made claims from a spiritual sense. No mystic accurately shifted global consciousness on the motion or placement of the spheres by espousing proclamations from revelation.
No, these revolutions were made possible by better instruments and better reasons, better direct material observations that were repeatable, results that were verifiable around the world without a single counterexample, and claims that were falsifiable–the trademarks of science.
We’ve learned too many times that our wishes deceive us and that our intuitions do not comport with reality.
We’ve learned that we should not trust claims merely because their sources are inspiration, revelation, or authority or that the results appeal to our emotions.
Our knowledge has been hard-fought, but we’ve developed a scientific method, a process to account for our ability to deceive ourselves.
I don’t believe Christian Science has accounted for that ability.
I welcome any thoughts you have on these ideas.
Hi Phineas,
You are a very thoughtful person and full of many good questions. I can tell we could go on discoursing for a long time! I have only respect for you in your queries and quests. I just know what works for me and has worked so successfully over the decades, and my effort is to hopefully shed a little light on other people’s paths to bless them too. I don’t argue with others, I just strive to love them and trust their path to the guidance of wisdom. I will keep blogging, and perhaps more answers to your questions will appear in those posts. Lots of love to you.
I don’t think we even started discoursing.
Instead of addressing any of the foundational inconsistencies, you plead for us to accept the conclusions and strive to reinforce them more thoroughly.
Hasn’t the time for thinkers come?
Shouldn’t we be able to question the first principles of our belief systems?
Does it not seem suspicious that other belief systems have exactly the same quantity and quality of evidence as CS but reach drastically different and incompatible conclusions?
How do we rule out wish-thinking?
Your information is right on time as I have been struggling a bit, but you have cleared it up!
Thanks, Evan
I shall read and reread this post numerous times. I hopefully will get nearer to these Truths and be able to gain more understanding . I would love to be able to rely on Christian Science and get it. Thank you for your discussion with Phineaus . I think there are many of us out there who struggle to understand and demonstrate Science. Thank you Evan for your loving support and caring. These daily lessons are very helpful. I won’t stop trying.
Evan,
I love the idea of insisting on a breakthrough. Why do I seem to give so much power to error? Just because the world is holding it up to see? That’s not very reliable. I am going forward insisting on breakthroughs. Knowing that only what God knows is true. Thanks so much!
Sorry for the late post…I’m behind in my blog reading.
My heart goes out to Phineas. I am an engineer by nature, spent 4 years studying engineering in college to get my degree in Mechanical Engineering, and have worked as an engineer for 28 years since graduating from college. I recognize the thought patterns expressed by Phineas in my own thinking and in the thinking of my co-workers in the engineering profession…i.e. the desire to reason out the answer to a question until EVERY possible logical loophole is closed. These are the types of people you want designing your airplanes and writing your mission critical computer software!
So I too have spent many an hour trying to resolve to my satisfaction the questions Phineas has expressed so eloquently in his comments. Over the years I’ve resolved these questions somewhat to my own satisfaction by reasoning through many of the ideas Evan expressed so well in his responses. I am also VERY grateful to the Christian Science Sunday School teachers, practitioners, friends, etc., who took the time to patiently discuss these questions with me. Fortunately I also realized that discussing these questions ad infinitum served no purpose and that the best approach was to take the food for thought provided during these discussions and try to digest it on my own…little by little. [Whom will He teach knowledge? And whom will He make to understand the message?…For precept must be upon precept, precept upon precept, line upon line, line upon line, here a little, there a little (Isaiah 28:9-10).]
But even after all of these discussions, and reasoning on my own, I have still always felt that there remained a few loopholes in the logic that I didn’t feel had been completely closed to my satisfaction. Again, some of the ideas Phineas expressed.
For many years these unresolved loopholes caused me to question Christian Science, even to the point of drifting away from studying it for periods of time. But I always came back and I’ve finally come to peace with “not knowing” all the answers. As Evan points out, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s best to just demonstrate what you do understand. While this may seem illogical to some, it has given me peace and has been a fruitful approach in that I have been able to benefit from what I do know. I also learn more and more every day and continue to chip away at the unresolved questions I still have. And I take comfort in the conviction that one day I will resolve these questions to my satisfaction! But for now I’m just so grateful for what I do understand of Christian Science and the peace of mind this understanding brings me continually.
Thank you Brian. Very well put! I don’t know all the answers either, but I know from experience that what I have learned in Christian Science, brings deep and far reaching positive results, makes me a much happier person, helps me stay healthier, and gives me genuine spiritual peace within. Also, it gives me a way to help other people out of suffering too that brings much more than just physical recovery into their lives.