Tag: metaphysics

What is your identity?

Published on by lindseybiggs1 Comment
Some might say these are unlikely friends.

Recently, a friend shared how she was praised at church while serving in a particular capacity. The praise was given by a fellow church member. Knowing both of these individuals, I admired their ongoing friendship and the way they appreciate the God-given qualities in one another such as integrity, dependability, honesty, forthrightness, compassion, and care. These individuals have served in church together for many years.

If I look at just the material surface of things, I might wonder how these individuals could be friends since they are so different: you could say one is a conservative, upper-class man while the other a liberal, middle-class lesbian.

How can these two different individuals serve together for decades in church and share a friendship that dives so much deeper than a material sense of things? By truly appreciating one another as God’s child – as brothers and sisters of the one Father-Mother God.

“…man is not material; he is spiritual”, wrote Mary Baker Eddy (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 468). If our identity is spiritual, that means it isn’t made of anything temporal (or temporary). We are made of God’s thoughts, ideas and qualities. This certainly makes me want to get to know who and what God is, so that I can know who and what we are – what we are made of.

“God’s being is infinity, freedom, harmony, and boundless bliss.” (Ibid, 481)

“God is incorporeal, divine, supreme, infinite Mind, Spirit, Soul, Principle, Life, Truth, Love.” (Ibid, 465)

Meditating on each these synonyms and attributes for God gives us a greater understanding of who God is; and it tells us about what we are made of since we are made in God’s image and likeness. It also reveals how our human relationships can transcend material confines and be harmonious, united and long-lasting.

Reblog: Reader Responses to ‘The Present Heaven’

Published on by lindseybiggsLeave a comment

In this blog post, beautiful experiences are shared of becoming conscious of our spiritual being here and now (and at a time when it was needed most).

Reader Responses to ‘The Present Heaven’

Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave”

Published on by lindseybiggs1 Comment
The following excerpts by Christie Hanzlik, C.S.  are from Let Your Light Shine on UNREALITY to Reveal Reality! (a Christian Science Bible Lesson study guide) 

Plato, a Greek philosopher, created his “Allegory of the Cave” roughly 400 years before Jesus’s ministry, but, in many ways, we can see it as an early glimpse of Christ’s promise to all mankind that we can be free from material bondage.   In fact, we can use the allegory to understand Jesus’s necessary role in revealing and demonstrating reality to mankind.
 
Whereas Plato may have left the story with the prisoners unable to understand the true nature of reality, Jesus proved that people could understand it.  Without Christ Jesus’s amazing demonstration of spiritual vision and communication, the “world outside the cave” would remain a garbled confusion to those feeling imprisoned by matter.   Christ Jesus was necessary to bring the Divine revelation to humanity.
 
Jesus understood God’s love for us so well that he could, unlike the freed prisoner in Plato’s allegory, communicate and demonstrate the truth about the “world outside the cave.”  His role was to show us the way out of the cave so we could see and prove for ourselves that we are not prisoners. He was the way shower.  And true Christianity, as Jesus taught it, is the movement and spread of the absolute truth that we are not prisoners chained in a cave of matter.
 
Jesus saw clearly that the “shadow wall”-matter-is not the true picture of reality even if it may seem to present mesmerizing sights and sounds and smells. He understood the “world outside the cave”-spiritual reality-and his purpose was to reveal this truth to all mankind.  Jesus asked us to let our light shine and to continue sharing his message of salvation-freedom from the chains of matter. Once we know about the “world outside the cave,” we cannot go back to not knowing it; and it’s natural for us to want to share it with others.