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God is All, and God is Spirit. Matter appears to be the opposite of Spirit, but Spirit, God, being all, can have no opposite. The presence of God’s opposite must mean the absence of God, who is ever-present. Matter only seems real to thought that believes it is something besides God, — that believes God is not All-in-all. There is nothing in Spirit from which its opposite, matter, could be made. Since God, Spirit, is the one infinite Cause, and cannot produce anything unlike Himself, matter has no cause, and is therefore not an effect. Matter is the opposite of Mind or intelligence, therefore it cannot know or be known because God, Spirit, is the one infinite Mind which knows all there is to know. Neither can matter have identity nor be identified, because God, Soul, constitutes and includes all individuality or identity, which is purely spiritual, not material. Matter cannot be the expression or manifestation of life, because God is Life, and Life therefore must be spiritual, eternal, and self-existent. The notion that life can exist in matter is too absurd for consideration. Matter’s most basic claim to existence is that we can see, hear, feel, taste, and smell it through the five physical senses. However, it is commonly taught in high school science textbooks that we see only reflected images of light; that what we feel, taste, smell and so forth are electrical impulses transmitted by the nervous system to centers in the brain. We are taught to interpret these impulses as material phenomena in a physical environment outside of our consciousness, over which we have no control and for which we have no responsibility. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Dreams and hypnotism both illustrate the unreliability of sensory evidence. Moreover, this interpretation of sensory perception represents existence as exclusively material, and leaves God, Spirit, completely out of His own creation. The fact is that in reality there is no such thing as matter, and there has never been a mind capable of believing that it sees, hears, feels, tastes and smells matter. God is the one infinite, all-knowing Mind, and God knows only His own countless spiritual ideas. Since matter cannot be a reality, and since there is no mind apart from God, these two non-entities could never have combined to form a mortal man. Therefore, the mortal concept of man as a “living soul”, a physical body animated by an indwelling mind or spirit, is a completely false conception of man. This intentional deception concerning the nature of man has been perpetrated as an imposition on our thinking by the serpent (the human ego), whose objective is always to present the exact opposite of truth as though it was in fact the truth itself. This is the only conceivable way it could succeed at deceiving the whole world. Since there really is no such thing as a mortal man, what we call the carnal mind, or serpent, has no channel through which it can work its deceptions, nor any victim upon whom evidence of its false hypnotic suggestions can be manifested. Man is the image and likeness of God, entirely spiritual and immortal. There is no other man, in spite of the carnal mind’s efforts to argue otherwise, and in spite of what may appear to the physical senses as outward evidence to the contrary. Beginning from the premise that God is All-in-all, that He creates and constitutes all that is, and that He cannot create anything outside of or unlike Himself, we must logically conclude that neither matter, the carnal mind, nor mortal man exist as realities, but are false concepts that only appear real to a supposititious mind, to a false sense of consciousness which assumes existence outside of God’s Allness, — a moral, logical, and spiritual impossibility. When you have reached this point in your prayer, address your thought to those specific problems you wish to heal, and treat them from the standpoint of these revelations. Realize that they are simply the malicious and aggressive mental arguments of this false hypnotic sense, — characteristics of a destructive material point of view which has no basis in reality. The truth is, (Col. 3:3), “Your life is hid with Christ in God.” That’s why Jesus said, “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. Course Steps Home Step Five |