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Immediately following these tables is a
paragraph headed Spiritual universe." Universe means literally, turned into
one, uno and vertere, where everything is gathered back into what it actually
is in God. This paragraph reads: "In the third degree mortal mind disappears,
and man as God's image appears. Science so reverses the evidence before the
corporeal human senses, as to make this Scriptural testimony true in our
hearts, 'The last shall be first, and the first last,' so that God and His idea
may be to us what divinity really is and must of necessity be,
—all-inclusive."
Our starting point is God and God is
defined through divine synonyms as "divine Principle, Life, Truth, Love, Soul,
Spirit, Mind." At the beginning of this chapter in Science and Health we were
told that the discovery of Christian Science was the discovery of the "divine
laws of Life, Truth, and Love;" it was a "revelation of the absolute divine
Principle of scientific mental healing." This divine Principle of scientific
mental healing with laws of Life, Truth, and Love, is translating itself
through Soul, or spiritual sense, and so comes to thought as the spiritual
reality, as Spirit, and is manifested as the only Mind there is.
With this view of the divine synonyms we
can begin to see man as the working of these synonyms, the divine image: he is
"God's spiritual idea" of Himself, "individual," - indivisible from God,
"perfect," - not going to be, but is now, and therefore "eternal."
Then idea itself, as defined by Webster,
is first, "An image in Mind;" capital M, Mind! How often do we pause to remind
ourselves that really we, man, are an idea in the Mind of God? We are much more
inclined to think that we are sitting here outside on earth with separate minds
of our own, and somehow God has to come to us and do something, or that we are
dependent solely on ourselves. Then the definition of idea continues: "the
immediate object of understanding." Immediate, no medium, no intermediary, no
gap of time or space. The immediate object of God's own understanding. So this
image then is really divine reflection, the image in Mind.
From that premise of the translation of
immortal Mind, immediately a second — the translation of mortal mind
— starts to operate. You know how on a cliff railway the moment one car
starts to come down the other car starts to go up. They work absolutely as one
motion, because they are on the same cable. The same thing happens here; the
divine coming into consciousness, and human consciousness responding to the
divine, is all on the same cable!
| First Degree: Depravity. |
| PHYSICAL: |
Evil beliefs,
passions and appetites, fear, depraved will, self-justification, pride, envy,
deceit, hatred, revenge, sin, sickness, disease, death. |
Unreality |
The translation of immortal Mind coming
into consciousness has this immediate effect of showing us that what we call
the physical is not really physical. The terms given in this first degree are
negative thoughts or states rather than pertaining to the physical body. The
heading is "Depravity." This word is derived from de, completely, and pravus,
distorted, crooked. We have a bent or distorted view of reality. Isn't this
what "evil beliefs, passions and appetites, fear, depraved will,' etc. really
are?
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