"Your life is an occasion. Rise to it!" - Mr. Magorium

Thursday, May 7, 2009

There's Only One Mind?

Christian Science teaches that God is Love. I really like the idea that we were made and are constantly cared for by infinite Love... and that infinite Love is always right here with us and all around us.

But one of the things that always bugged me about Christian Science was that it teaches we all have "one Mind", and that our Mind is God. I'm allowed my own consciousness, but my Mind has to be God, and I gotta share with all of you. How does that work? It took me a long time to get used to this idea. This is how I finally came to grips with it...

Many people say that God is controlling everything. Whatever happens in our lives is because God made it happen. From that perspective this includes evil things as well as good. Man, that gets confusing. It doesn't sound like God loves us unconditionally.

Instead, think of yourself as a radio controlled car. You can be any kind of car you want. Think up a character for yourself that would fit nicely into the Pixar movie Cars. Because you're radio controlled, you're steered by a guiding signal. Next, imagine that everyone else is also a radio controlled car too, that each of us receives our own unique guiding signal, and everyone's guiding signal comes from God... the one infinite Mind. God keeps us all on the right side of the road. He stops us at all the red lights. Under his controlling signal we all move along on our individual paths in perfect harmony.

Now, what if your receiver broke? Might you miss a stop sign. Might you stray across the double yellow line? If so, might there be undesirable results? Oh, yeah!

Thankfully, our receiver can never be broken! However some of us ignore our receivers. Some of us may not even know we have one. Some of us are dang sure we don't need any fool receiver to tell us what to do; we know exactly where we're going... and everyone else just better stay out of the way. And some of us even know exactly what some other people's receivers are supposed to be telling them... and are bound and determined to make them understand and comply. This is how evil occurs without it being created by God.

Our receiver is called "the Christ". It is "that mind that was in Christ Jesus".

"Let this mind be in you that was also in Christ Jesus:" (Phil 2:5)

Now does that make each of us less individual? Not according to Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy:

This scientific sense of being, forsaking matter for Spirit, by no means suggests man's absorption into Deity and the loss of his identity, but confers upon man enlarged individuality, a wider sphere of thought and action, a more expansive love, a higher and more permanent peace." (S&H 265:10)

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