You Can't Lose Your Mind
While I was talking with a relative recently, he couldn't remember something. He complained that one of the problems of growing older is that your memory begins to fail.
An idea came to me at the time with such conviction: God is Mind, and there can be no gaps in divine Mind. God is the infinite intelligence that fills all space. There can't be a gap in the ever-present, all-knowing Mind.
God made us each to reflect His unchanging intelligence. As St. Paul said to the Athenians, "In him [God] we live, and move, and have our being" (Acts 17:28). We live in infinite Mind. To understand this is to find ourselves expressing greater intelligence with fewer lapses.
These ideas have helped me many times. Say a word or name has escaped me. I've turned my attention to pondering the all-knowing Mind as the source of all needed and right ideas. I've prayed to understand the fact that as God's reflection I have access to those ideas. Then I've found that whatever I really needed to know has usually popped into thought immediately, or has come to my attention in some interesting or unexpected way.
Other times, helpful ideas come without effort on my part - ideas about how to handle work projects more efficiently or juggle multiple activities. Remembering that Mind has no gaps has helped me triumph over some of the limitations in my life. The Christian Exemplar, Christ Jesus, said, "I can of mine own self do nothing: as I hear, I judge" (John 5:30). Doesn't this imply that we can't really do anything of ourselves either? As I listen for God's message, I need to judge whether ideas coming to me are of God, who is Truth, or if I'm believing that I have my own intelligence separate from Mind. Ideas from God are helpful, hopeful, and healing. They're reliable under all circumstances.
Once, a co-worker called me to say his wife of many years was in the hospital and had been in a coma for three days. On a previous occasion she had been unconscious for a couple of weeks, he told me - and at that time her doctor had said that if it happened again, she wouldn't come out of it.
Now, I knew that my friend had a firm belief in God and that he had worked in his church for many years. We had talked before about God's goodness and the power of prayer. So I felt quite free to share some ideas gained through the practice of my own faith, which is Christian Science. I explained that Mind is synonymous with God, and that I accept literally the biblical statement that man (male and female) is made in the image and likeness of God (see Gen. 1:26, 27). We agreed that God, as Mind, must be eternally expressing intelligence throughout His creation, and thus could never be unconscious. Therefore, it followed that no one made in the divine image, reflecting Mind, could be unconscious either.
After this, I heard nothing from my friend on the subject, until a couple of weeks later, when I learned that his wife was back at work, and had been since shortly after our conversation.
It was through consecrated study of the Bible that Mary Baker Eddy discovered the Science of Christianity, which includes the fundamental fact that God is infinite Mind. In "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," which is the textbook of Christian Science, she wrote: "Every concept which seems to begin with the brain begins falsely. Divine Mind is the only cause or Principle of existence" (Pg. 262).
I think my friend accepted this premise. I feel he caught a glimpse of something Science and Health elaborates on: "The relations of God and man, divine Principle and idea, are indestructible in Science; and Science knows no lapse from nor return to harmony, but holds the divine order or spiritual law, in which God and all that He creates are perfect and eternal, to have remained unchanged in its eternal history" (Pgs. 470-471).
In the ever-presence of infinite Mind, there's no basis for forgetfulness, unconsciousness, or the loss of any God-bestowed, God-reflected faculty.
You can read other articles like this one in the Christian Science Sentinel, a weekly magazine.
