Thought Objectified

Photo credit: Mark McGee

Sometimes events seem too much to bear. A friend’s son was violently killed during a vacation to a warm, beautiful part of our world. In reaching out to her, I’ve learned that the embassy is doing an efficient and caring job taking care of what must be done. I’m having a tough time separating myself from her grief, from imagining it as my own. Which brings a question to my mind: if we are One, why don’t all of our thoughts simply bounce around and become stuck to others. I am learning it is because the only reality is that which is from God, good. Anything else is erroneous thinking and illusion masquerading as truth. When I first heard these concepts, my learned beliefs rebelled against their veracity. It sounded heartless. But I know it is the ultimate expression of Love to embrace our world in spiritual reality. What else truly changes a situation other than seeing it differently? Every time my friends’ grief comes to mind, I shall embrace them in divine Love — even as my tears of sympathy fall. These things are not mutually exclusive.

“The artist is not in his painting. The picture is the artist’s thought objectified. The human belief fancies that it delineates thought on matter, but what is matter? Did it exist prior to thought? Matter is made up of supposititious mortal mind-force; but all might is divine Mind. Thought will finally be understood and seen in all form, substance, and color, but without material accompaniments. The potter is not in the clay; else the clay would have power over the potter. God is His own infinite Mind, and expresses all.”
Mary Baker Eddy - Science & Health Page 310:1-10

“Death is the central dream from which all illusions stem. Is it not madness to think of life as being born, aging, losing vitality, and dying in the end? We have asked this question before, but now we need to consider it more carefully. It is the one fixed, unchangeable belief of the world that all things in it are born only to die. This is regarded as ‘the way of nature,’ not to be raised to question, but to be accepted as the ‘natural’ law of life. The cyclical, the changing and unsure; the undependable and the unsteady, waxing and waning in a certain way upon a certain path,—all this is taken as the Will of God. And no one asks if a benign Creator could will this.

‘In this perception of the universe as God created it, it would be impossible to think of Him as loving. For who has decreed that all things pass away, ending in dust and disappointment and despair, can but be feared. He holds your little life in his hand but by a thread, ready to break it off without regret or care, perhaps today. Or if he waits, yet is the ending certain. Who loves such a god knows not of love, because he has denied that life is real. Death has become life’s symbol. His world is now a battleground, where contradiction reigns and opposites make endless war. Where there is death is peace impossible.”
A Course in Miracles M-27.1:1–2:8