Standing By Truth

"Illusion of Danger"
photo credit: Aaron Springston

Today I received an excited message from an old friend who is a newcomer to social media. He was forwarding to me a message about a prominent Chinese scientist informing us about the "truth" concerning the ongoing viral situation. I immediately did a search on this and found numerous sources telling me this had been circulated since April, 2020, and it was not true. I wrote him back, telling him what I had found and how he, too, could discover these facts, mentioning that it was our responsibility to not pass on things designed to divide us and create fear-based responses. He wrote back telling me others had informed him that his urgent post was, indeed, misinformation. He was downhearted and said he should know better and he was going to ignore these posts from now on. "NO", I said to him. It is our responsibility as capable, intelligent people to seek truth and pass it on, while quashing lies and doing our best to correct them. I assured him he was one of these capable, intelligent folks and he could play an important role in this maze of misinformation. I urge you, each and every one, to be bearers of truth and goodness, not caving in to lies, but finding the truth and standing by it, today and every day. And to do so with kindness whenever possible -- and it's always possible!

"You do not deny the mathematician's right to distinguish the correct from the incorrect among the examples on the blackboard, nor disbelieve the musician when he distinguishes concord from discord  ... Right and wrong, truth and error, will be at strife in the minds of students, until victory rests on the side of invincible truth." Mary Baker Eddy - Science & Health Page 452:32

Translating Things Into Thoughts

photo credit: Heather Peters

Many spiritual disciplines concentrate on getting things. As a student of divine metaphysics, I am learning to ”resolve things into thoughts”! Let's say we need a place to live. How do we think about this in order to manifest it in our existence? By understanding the substance of an idea! What are the spiritual qualities of this place to live, this house, this home? What does it represent? Some of the qualities of home could be warmth, comfort, peace, safety, beauty, love, and hospitality. Home is really a spiritual idea, and these qualities already exist in our individual consciousness, so we don't have to go out and find them because they're already a permanent part of our being. We can express all the qualities included in the concept of home no matter where we are, and by this expression we are cherishing our spiritual home. This translation of material things into spiritual ideas gets easier with practice, so don't be surprised if your needs are met before you even know you have them!

"Divine Science, rising above physical theories, excludes matter, resolves things into thoughts, and replaces the objects of material sense with spiritual ideas.” Mary Baker Eddy - Science & Health Page 123:12-15

A Great Secret

I ran across this jewel today. I share it with you because I'm going to start my days with it for the immediate future! 

It is called: Demonstration

"I have learned a great secret.

I have learned how to demonstrate, I have learned how to make Science a thing of life, not of words.

I am going to tell you what the secret is, and it is wonderful.

It is this: Not to see or hear or repeat any kind of imperfection.

It is seeing and hearing and repeating good only, at all times and under all circumstances, and in spite of everything that appears to the contrary.

I make this resolve every morning, when I first open my eyes, and I renew it every hour of the day.

I see perfection in myself, in my friends, in my so-called enemy, in my affairs and in world affairs.

I take my radical stand for the perfection of God and everything and for everything and everybody [It] has created. I look upon the world with God's eyes and see it just as [Love] sees it, and I refuse to see it in any other way.

I stop a dozen times a day, and renew the resolve, and make sure that I am not repeating error or giving way to criticism. I watch my thoughts about people, the lame, the old, the unloved to sense that I pass in the street, stray animals; I except nothing. I have taken my radical stand for perfection and I will not, absolutely will not, relax this perfect standard.

The result has been simply marvelous. Try it and you will find that you forget your glasses; they will become unnecessary.

You will be seeing with God's eyes, [Mind's] perfect sight, and you will behold a perfect universe, the outward condition of your inward thinking. To change the picture you must change the sight that produced the picture." 

By Mary Baker Eddy

Set Yourself Free

"Loveland Pass"
photo credit: Aaron Springston

Sometimes material-based life seems overwhelming. It's easy to feel bound by illnesses and injuries, financial burdens, grief, and world conditions. Our lives appear to have a beginning and an end. Physicists tell us of a perspective called quantum entanglement, in which particles separate yet remain connected, reacting to stimuli in the same way even though they no longer occupy the same space. In a book by Dan Cowan, Mind Underlies Spacetime, he explains, "...this direct connectedness occurs because each real entity is already everywhere." How perfectly this explains Oneness! This omnipresence is our perfect identity, without boundaries. We are free!!

“The admission to one's self that man is God's own likeness sets man free to master the infinite idea.” Mary Baker Eddy - Science & Health Page 90:24-25

Hate -- Inside or Out?

unknown photographer

"Clad in the panoply of Love, human hatred cannot reach you." This Mary Baker Eddy quote is one which I've always thought of as meaning that the human hatred others feel cannot reach me when I'm wearing the armor of divine Love. I now see that it also includes the hatred I may feel toward others. It's very easy for me to think that I don't hate anyone or anything. Actually, it's a word I have pruned from my vocabulary and simply do not use. BUT if I am irritated by another's actions or words, or if I replay a past situation in my mind which caused anger in the past, or if I allow criticism to gnaw at me and I think of retaliatory statements which could have been said -- isn't that human hatred? Wearing this cloak of Love calms these nagging feelings and thoughts. I know that if I'm wearing the protection of Love, hatred cannot enter from inside or out!

“As a drop of water is one with the ocean, a ray of light one with the sun, even so God and man, Father and son, are one in being.”  Mary Baker Eddy - Science & Health Page 361:16-18

Be Kind Whenever Possible

I know a young woman who is trying to move forward with her life, but her parents and sister seem to want her to stay in place. They tell her she is not capable of holding a job, that she is mentally ill and should be on disability, and imply that she is not worthy of love. She is working toward moving away from behavior which no longer serves her, and perhaps never did. I am proud of her and tell her so every chance I get. Today she texted asking for my advice on how to get along with her parents, who are very conservative and have different life values than hers. She has mentioned numerous times that she feels mentally ill, because her family keeps telling her she is. It's sort of a "which came first, the chicken or the egg" kind of situation, it seems to me. She has been told something all her life, which she has come to believe -- at least enough of a belief that when something doesn't go right in her life, she feels something is wrong with her. Schools and workplaces are not generally set up for anyone who doesn't fit into whatever sized box they want to put them in. In this time of change, I see people relaxing their beliefs on what is correct behavior. This is more than a live-and-let-live attitude; it is an embracing compassion for all things living. I could no more fault my dog for being black rather than white than I would ask my sweet cat to be more like my smart cat. Let's be kind to one another, and gentle with ourselves. Namaste... 

"The great difference between voluntary and involuntary mesmerism is that voluntary mesmerism is induced consciously and should and does cause the perpetrator to suffer, while self-mesmerism is induced unconsciously and by his mistake a man is often instructed. In the first instance it is understood that the difficulty is a mental illusion, while in the second it is believed that the misfortune is a material effect. The human mind is employed to remove the illusion in one case, but matter is appealed to in the other. In reality, both have their origin in the human mind, and can be healed only by the divine Mind." Mary Baker Eddy - Science & Health Page 403:2

Neowise and the International Space Station

"Overexposed Milky Way"
photo credit: Richard Quick

We were outside looking for the comet, Neowise, this evening. There were conflicting accounts of where to see it, with Accuweather saying close to the archer and milky way in the east-ish sky, and astronomy.com telling us we could see it below the big dipper in the other direction. I have the app, Sky View Lite on my phone, and so we had a fun time discovering various night lights which were not the comet! My favorite one was the International Space Station! At one point, I thought I was seeing an airplane, so I pointed my phone toward it to see how the app would identify a plane. What a surprise to find it was the space station! All this conflicting data reminded me of the stories we hear through various media. We may hear one thing from one place, and a conflicting version from another. Some folks are upset that the "big" news organizations -- Associated Press and Reuters -- are not reporting the things they are hearing in the sensational news. They take this to mean it's a conspiracy for the mainstream news sources to hide stories from the masses. The instance which was brought to my attention was a police-blotter-type story which has no reason to be reported on by the AP, but some sources are treating it as a #BLM killing. This type of sensationalized headline leaves out vital details; details which turn it into just another horrid happening at 3 a.m. in somewhere USA. But I digress. The point is: Go look at the sky, watch bugs crawl through the grass, breathe the cool night air. Generate joy, and let your intuition lead you in paths of righteousness. 

"So we have goodness and beauty to gladden the heart, but man, left to the hypotheses of material sense unexplained by Science, is as the wandering comet or the desolate star -- 'a weary searcher for a viewless home.'" Mary Baker Eddy - Science & Health Page 121:12