The Educational Systems of the Pharaohs

This is something Mrs. Eddy refers to in Science and Health, only once (on page 226). She doesn’t go on to elaborate about it; the crux of her sentence is her desire to save people:

“The lame, the deaf, the dumb, the blind, the sick, the sensual, the sinner, I wished to save from the slavery of their own beliefs and from the educational systems of the Pharaohs, who to-day, as of yore, hold the children of Israel in bondage.”

People in my part of the world (and of the internet) would be quick to jump on what the sentence implies, that there are modern Pharaohs holding us in bondage. The illuminati, the 1%, the Oligarchy. I think it’s interesting that Mrs. Eddy doesn’t dwell there, doesn’t call out the Pharaohs or call for a rally to overthrow them. I don’t find it surprising; to call them out would be using the tools they would use, and falling into the same bondage. Mrs. Eddy makes clear that all evil is a lie, and the need is to drop it — to refuse to engage with it on its terms or any terms, since divine Truth obliterates any lie, and is the only place for us to dwell.

But she also points out the need to understand how evil works in order to avoid getting taken in by the lie. And as I started to understand the unconditional nature of good, I also started to see its opposite, and how it seems to be held in place throughout our educational systems and all of our society. Its shape is a pyramid, so it is aptly named the educational systems of the Pharaohs.

The pyramid shape has one or a few people at the top and many at the bottom. It illustrates the concept of relative good, graded good.  And its function is to hide the power of good from us, and its accessibility. I remember a ditty from childhood: 

Good, better, best

never let it rest 

till your good is better

and your better best. 

It’s interesting that the word good, in the romance and germanic languages, doesn’t have a comparative or superlative form. The comparative and superlative words are taken from a completely different root. I think that’s telling. Good, as a word for the unmistakeable God quality, is not qualified. But we lose sight of that when we make good relative, arrange it on a pyramid. Instead of being the key essence of what we desire in life, the engine of all our growth and movement, good becomes something in between “excellent” and “poor.” What does in mean, in that context, to say “God is good”? 

That’s it. That’s the whole educational system of the Pharaohs in one little lie about how life is put together. It is a way of hiding good in plain sight. And it’s so pervasive that we can go for years, and many iterations of growth and progress, without breaking free of it.

In school and in society, we are taught that there are only a few people who are really excellent at any given thing, and everyone else is either trying to get there or has given up on it because they can’t be the best.  Similarly, we are taught (a little under the surface) that some people are more worthy than others, more deserving of good things in their lives. It is intimated that those at the top of the pyramid are most deserving, and those at the bottom not deserving at all. 

So the game of life, we are taught, is to work our way up the pyramid, and to try not to fall down. A great deal of our time as mortals is spent making open or clandestine assessments of where we stand in relation to others.

Yet it’s not a secret that friendships thrive in a field of equals, that we can most successfully be friends with people when we consider ourselves equal to them and they to us. In a good friendship, the corrosive comparison to each other can be put aside, so we can rejoice in each other’s good. But along the pyramid on which we’re arranged (according to the Pharaohs’ system) it’s hard to carve out little pools of equality to share friendships in, and it’s easy for some event or misunderstanding to tip the pool into inequality, spilling the friendship out. 

And it’s not a secret that a key to happiness is having a solid sense of self worth, and a generous sense of the worth of others. The belief that worth is graded tends to keep us from being content. We even feel that it is virtuous to always be striving for more. But in always striving for more, there’s little room to realize that we already have enough, are enough, and that God’s unconditional love for us is always here, without us needing to do anything to be worthy of it. And if we can stop our striving and assessing, we can use the slack we gain from that to really appreciate ourselves and others. We might, also, begin to grasp the vast and amazing meaning of the sentence “God is good.”

Poem: Deliverance Prayer:

http://www.wendymulhern.com/2012/02/04/deliverance-prayer/

From my part of the internet: The pyramid and the pool:

The Pyramid and the Pool

A Compound Idea in Mind

It was clear to me that a healing of grief would have to include our whole family, and particularly my husband, who was having a very hard time of it. I prayed daily that divine Life, Mind, God, would make itself known to him, would tell him what he needed to know — that he, too, might experience The Allness.

Heather and I had talked about the significance of “daughter” in the Bible —“shake thyself from the dust, o daughter of Zion”; Jesus’ blessing at the healing of a woman: “daughter, go in peace, thy faith hath made thee whole; “thy daughters shall be as corner stones” … She had even started to prepare readings on the subject.

One night, as I was praying for my husband some months after Heather’s passing, I had an image of what an important thing a daughter is to a dad’s concept of himself — that it represented his ability to protect and nurture something precious and beautiful, that it was, indeed, a very cornerstone to his sense of himself. I felt how much, to human sense, the loss of a daughter was shattering to his sense of identity and self worth. I also perceived that this sense of daughter was something that couldn’t be taken away from him. A verse in Psalms reads, “the king’s daughter is all glorious within”. For the first time, I saw an additional meaning to the verse — not only is the king’s daughter glorious within herself, but she is glorious within the king. His internal daughter is intact, glorious, safe.

I was telling this to a new and dear friend, with whom I was staying for my Christian Science Students’ Association, and I said I’ve been praying to see that he can know this wholeness of his daughter within. She said, “he does know it, because he is a compound idea in Mind.” These words struck me as deeply true. Further insights at the Association meeting brought out the idea that human personality has nothing to do with what we are. If God is All, and we are the reflection of God, then God, Mind, is the only Mind we can have, the only source of thought, the only holder of conclusions. I saw that there is no small “m” mind that can hold a false view of its identity, that can feel that some part of its being is shattered.

This has become an important focus for my prayers: no human personality, no small “m” mind. No repository for wrong ideas about being. Instead, I am here to bear witness to man as a compound idea in Mind, including all right ideas, as Science and Health points out (see page 475). So in my prayers I am affirming that man (and that includes me and my husband) includes the full and whole idea of daughter, and of son, and of father and mother, and also many other right ideas such as home, livelihood, joy, friendship, companionship, fulfilling activity, brilliance, skill…

I told my friend what I was beginning to see: Heather showed us daughter, but she was never our daughter. She always has been, and always will be, God’s daughter. We can love her and be so grateful for what she showed us, both of her own wonderful identity and the wonderful daughter within that is part of each of us, which can support us like a cornerstone and insure that we protect and bring forth beauty in our lives. And we can expect to learn new things from her, and share new things with her, as we grow in our perception of Spirit.

I won’t say that this healing is complete at this point, but I do see continuing progress in my witnessing of man as the compound idea of God.

Click here for poem: Windows of Heaven

Spiritual Sense vs. Material Sense

As I became more aware of Love’s Paradigm, through my intense reading of Science and Health and also through my daily life, walking around and looking at everything with new eyes, I started to understand something about the senses with which I was perceiving.

 

I had given some thought, before, to the question of spiritual sense vs. material sense. Mrs. Eddy tells us that the material senses always lie, and that, if we want to see the truth, we must perceive things through spiritual sense. (See, for example, Science and Health p. 318). I had struggled with the meaning of this, to some satisfaction, in various earlier iterations. I knew that she wasn’t saying that everything we see with our eyes or hear with our ears, or touch, is material. After all, in another place, she says, “Sight, hearing, all the spiritual senses of man, are eternal. They cannot be lost.” (Science and Health p. 486.) I had come to recognize that spiritual sense is seeing good, where material sense is seeing phenomena either as bad or without a sense of being good or bad. I recognized that we humans are not strangers to spiritual sense, since we certainly do see good in our lives, being hardwired, as it were, to seek it.

An analogy that helped me, then, was to consider a fountain — in particular one of those ones that shoots water straight up so it cascades in beautiful, ever-moving whiteness as it falls down. Was I seeing water? Yes, but I was also seeing the forces that propelled the water — the pressure sending it up, the gravity pulling it down. If I wanted to change the fountain, I couldn’t do it by trying to push at the water. And I couldn’t take a tub of water and form it into the shape of the fountain.

Similarly, if I look at a person, I may see arms and hands, a face, etc. But I can also see joy, grace, purpose. Just as the fountain is a reflection of the forces that make it, we are a reflection of the Spirit that motivates us. Spiritual sense is our ability to see that.

In this recent time, my understanding of spiritual sense took another leap. When I recognized that good is impartial, unconditional, I noticed how different this was from my usual way of seeing. I recognized that my default position had been to assume that things were good if conditions were right, and not so good if they weren’t. As I looked out from my eyes, I would assess the relative goodness of things. If they were good, well, great. Otherwise, I would be asking myself what needed to be done to make things better. 

If good is unconditional, this way of looking at things becomes obsolete.

I need to say that again. If good is unconditional, this way of looking at things becomes obsolete.

This is huge.

This means a whole different way of looking at the world. 

Not looking to assess relative goodness or harm. Not looking to make things better. 

Celebrating the full goodness of everything, its unconditional blessing!

No need to try to fix anything, to make anything better.

I realized that I could consider material sense and spiritual sense as two different query systems — flow charts of questions and answers. And just as a query system can only return the results of the questions it asks, spiritual sense and material sense return very different results.

Material sense assumes that goodness results from the meeting of specific conditions. If the conditions are met, there is goodness; otherwise, there is not. Material sense looks out from the place of fear that the conditions for goodness might not be met. If I’m viewing things with material sense, I will feel vulnerable to harm. This will lead me to be critical, disappointed, angry, sad. 

The corollary is that, if I am feeling critical, disappointed, angry, or sad, I have been using the query system of material sense. Somewhere in thought I have taken in its premise that goodness is conditional. If I want to see things good, see things as they are, I have to drop, completely, the material sense approach. I can’t be looking to fix things, on any plane. I can’t be starting from a critical sense and praying to make things get better. I need to turn to spiritual sense to make any true sense of things, and to bring about any healing.

Since spiritual sense is given to us from God, it always tells us about God, and goodness. It expects good everywhere, and always seeks to behold the particular exquisite unfolding of each expression of goodness. When I am seeing things with spiritual sense, I see God’s creation everywhere, and so feel very close to God. This is where I am striving to dwell, as much as ever I can.

Click here for poem: Message from Heather

Love’s Paradigm

While I was in Boston with Heather, this concept of Love’s Paradigm emerged as a key point of growth. I felt like I made a huge paradigm shift in my thought, a shift away from the notion of struggling towards healing to a notion of Heather and I being the perfect ideas of our Creator, infinitely loved right where we were. I was astounded at how different this was from the way I usually saw all aspects of myself and my day. Very often, as Heather and I confronted some way of thinking about something, we would say oh, but that’s from the viewpoint of the partiality of good. What does Love see? 

I can’t speak for sure of how Heather felt on the inside. For me, it was a completely different atmosphere inside my thought. I hadn’t reached yet the vast canyon of light I call The Allness, but I was approaching it. I felt much lighter inside, and much encouraged that continuing in this line would bring us the desired healing. 

This revelation came in the midst of my very deep study of Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, by Mary Baker Eddy, the textbook of Christian Science. I found all the sentences illuminated as I held in thought the distinction between the partiality of good and good’s allness. I found the call to this paradigm shift permeating the book, and as I held to Love’s paradigm, everything I read made more sense than it ever had.

Heather encouraged me to write an article about it for the Christian Science periodicals. I am trying, but haven’t found the right tone yet. Meanwhile, here is an attempt to describe some key concepts that got fundamentally changed as I made the shift:

Good

In the paradigm of the partiality of good, good is a thing that sometimes appears when material conditions are favorable. My goal, in this paradigm, is to assess how favorable or harmful the current conditions are, and then try to manipulate the conditions so they will bring me more good. So whether I’m thinking about my body, my character, my home and work conditions, or my larger environment, I feel subject to the material conditions which I believe determine the present amount of goodness or potential harm.

In Love’s paradigm, good is the ever present law. I start learning (as pointed out in Science & Health p. 206) that what blesses one blesses all. My goal, instead of assessing material conditions and trying to improve them, is to see good in every place, to behold the perfect man and the harmony of being, and to celebrate the unfolding of good.

Worth

In the paradigm of the partiality of good, I think of my worth as relative, arranged along a slope where there are always people better than me and (I hope) people worse; where I am always struggling to improve my worth. In this paradigm, I don’t think I ever feel good enough, and my constant struggle for self-worth doesn’t seem to get better as I fight my way up the slope. My job of assessing my relative position is fraught by turns with envy and an uncharitable feeling of superiority. On this slippery slope, it is hard to love myself or anyone else.

In Love’s paradigm, every idea of God has infinite absolute worth. I can rejoice daily in the certainty that I am well beloved of God, that I am enough, that my individual being naturally brings forth the glorious qualities of God. From this place of comfort, I automatically feel love for my fellow expressions of God’s glory. My goal is to participate in the grand harmony of Love’s ideas making great music together.

Gratitude and love

In Love’s paradigm, gratitude and love are the normal, natural state of being. In the partiality of good, love is rare and unexplained, a tippy and perilous brightness, which I’m always desiring but seldom find. I save my gratitude to be given only when material conditions are optimal. I also may think of gratitude as a negotiating chip, a measure of obligation to others that has both positive and negative consequences in my struggle for greater self-worth. It’s hard to understand the exhilarating  nature of gratitude from the partiality of good, but in Love’s paradigm, I soar with it.

All these concepts — goodness, worth, gratitude, love — have representations in both paradigms. I realize that, if I want to view things from Love’s paradigm, I have to give up my old-paradigm notions about these fundamental points of value. I can’t reach Love’s paradigm by continually pushing up along the slope of partial goodness, relative self-worth, elusive love, and negotiating-chip gratitude. But I can get there by letting go of that painful effort and allowing the Christ to lift me to the unchanging truth that has always been present. I can stop trying to be good and recognize that I can’t be anything else, since God, good, made me. So I stop comparing myself to others to determine my relative worth, and can instead recognize the absolute and infinite worth of myself and everyone else.  This opens out my ability to love my neighbor as myself, and to understand the vastness of the love of God. Thus I am received into the heavenly kingdom, thus I can’t help but fulfill the two great commandments. Thus I am lifted into the ever-joyous domain of Love’s paradigm.

Click here for poem: Amnesty

Click here for poem: Spring Clean

Navigating Grief

I mentioned that my experience of The Allness sustained me through grief, and that I didn’t experience Heather’s passing as a failure. This is not to say that I thought her passing was “for the best” or “what was supposed to happen.” Certainly there has been much soul-searching, much asking what we needed to know or do to have occasioned a different outcome. There have been different answers to that, and places of no answer. And there have been massive floods of tears. As people who have been there have attested, there can be a sense of being in a world where things are almost normal, where we can even laugh, and then we can fall, as if through a thin partition, into the place of drowning. 

We are taught in Christian Science that death is unreal, that grief at death is without cause. But it was clear to me that I needed to be honest with what I was experiencing, and not to try to stifle or bring to quick closure whatever was happening as the tears stormed through. Sometimes I was completely under the waves; sometimes it seemed I could observe the weather system and notice things about it. And one thing I started noticing was how my identity seemed to separate out — the one that cried being a different person from the one who found peace in The Allness. 

The one that cried was the one that is referred to in Christian Science as “personal sense.” But, if you’ve been studying Christian Science, try this: say “personal sense” with utmost compassion. This is the one who believes she is a separate entity, and that whether she knows God or not is her choice, and that she can make wrong choices, and will be punished for them. What she most deeply wants is the comfort of The Allness, just as we all do, and what she is starting to learn is that she can find it by simply abandoning the sense of herself as the entity she has thought she was.

In the presence of The Allness, there are no tears. And there’s no sense of being a person who can fail. In The Allness the sense of identity is as the beloved of the One, not separate from anyone or anything.

Let me try a different approach to explain this. After Heather went through the first iteration of her ordeal, in 2015, I started to recognize something about myself. It was that I viewed life as a process of attaining what I found myself calling “the plums of life” — the things that were supposed to bring happiness. Things like marriage, a good job, a good place to live, children, achievements, skills, experiences. And what I most wanted for my children was for them to attain “the plums of life.” So when I would meet new people, or reconnect with ones I hadn’t seen in a while, I would bring out my “plums”, and those of my children, to share. They were what made me, in my eyes, a worthwhile person to be around. Oh yes, I would say, Heather is learning to play the fiddle, and has a black belt in Tae kwon do. 

So when Heather faced the next portion of her life with some big challenges, I realized that I couldn’t take for granted her eventual achievement of the “plums” that I hoped for her. More importantly, I realized that none of the “plums” that I or anyone could name could guarantee happiness for those who achieved them. Any one you named — marriage, job, children, home, skills, experiences — could as easily be empty, or full of heartache. 

So I started to have a different view of what would get me, and my children, happiness and fulfillment. And it started to become clear that everything worth having in life is spiritual. Which doesn’t mean it’s ethereal. Actually, it means, instead of thinking, for example, that in order to have love one needs a relationship, I could see that love, the spiritual quality, is what we each have by nature of our identity as Love’s ideas. So we could have, as it were, the juice without the plums. It became clear to me that it was the juice that we really wanted — the sense of spiritual connection to goodness, of loving and being beloved. The plums might or might not deliver the juice; going directly for the juice was a much surer way to get my needs met.

This understanding helped me in my spiritual growth since that time, and helped me to have a better, and growing, relationship with Heather. It helped me to be fully in support of her doing what she most wanted to do, as we worked toward healing.

So here’s the thing: when I would be overwhelmed with tears, it was often set off by something relating to “the plums” — Heather was saving her doll treehouse for the kids she hoped to have … And when I noticed that dynamic, I often felt the tears and sorrow simply fall away. I could then, with a little contemplation, find my way back to The Allness.

In my experience, I found that if I was crying, it was good to let myself cry. At the bottom of all the tears is The Allness. And if my husband, Heather’s dad, was crying, it was good for me to cry with him. All tears are eventually cleansing. 

Lately, I haven’t been overwhelmed as often, and I often feel a sweet sense of Heather’s presence. But just when I think they’re all done, more tears will come, and that’s OK. I have all of my life to learn spiritual being, and no sense of having any other purpose.

Click here for poem: Transparent

Restarting my Spirit blog

I haven’t written in this blog in over five years. In early 2011, I started a poetry blog, which I have been very faithful with and which has fulfilled, for the most part, my creative need. (see http://www.wendymulhern.com/category/poems/) During this time, I’ve published nine books of poetry that are collections from my entries in that blog. 

This year, events in my life led me to some astounding revelations. In some ways, they are all one thing; I sometimes find myself calling it The Big Idea. And I feel the need to communicate what I’m seeing. An obvious place to communicate it would be in the Christian Science periodicals. I love the periodicals, and I am trying to write an article for them (I have three drafts in for consideration.) But I guess I haven’t yet figured out how to separate insights from context, and ideas from each other, to meet the required format. I still feel the need to communicate the ideas — hence the resurrection of this blog. I hope I will find readers, and I hope you, my readers, will share comments. 

Background 

In April of this year, we lost our beautiful daughter, Heather. 

The challenge she was facing began in 2015, and launched both her and me on a deep spiritual journey. Speaking for myself, I will say that the effort to find healing led to a tremendous amount of spiritual growth. During the last five weeks of her time with us, I was with her, helping her with physical needs and praying constantly to understand the spiritual truth that would bring about her healing. Of course, we were both expecting her to recover. But here is a secret that it’s hard for me to find words to articulate: I didn’t experience her passing on as a failure. I felt her alive and present in the room, felt that she was experiencing the knowledge of her perfection, and felt myself delivered into a place I only experienced once before: I call it The Allness. 

Even as tears flooded through me like sheets of rain, I was aware of the place, and whenever the tears subsided the presence of The Allness was there, like rays of sunshine, no, like a huge canyon of light with a clean wind blowing. And it was absolutely clear to me that this was what is real; that Love is present and everything; that there is no falling out of it, no dying out of it, no failing out of it. That everything I always thought about life was like living in a small bubble, and that this death experience — the very suffering of it, had ripped away the illusion of limitation, of living in a small field of goodness bounded by fear — the fear of falling out of it. That the only purpose of suffering was to rip away the limitations on our concept of good, to show us the allness of it. 

http://www.wendymulhern.com/2018/04/17/going-through-it/

This experience is what has sustained me through the journey of grief, and changed my whole sense of what comprises my life. It’s given me a way to go forward after the unthinkable experience of the loss of a child. And as I’ve explored this realm of The Allness, I have started to see the delineation of what I think of as The Big Idea. Which is what I intend to explore in this blog. I hope you’ll join me.

Forgive us our debts

In my studies this week I glimpsed the way prayer can be a means of sustenance. Rather than something I need to schedule among the other things vying for my waking hours, it can be the thing that gives me strength and regeneration. For prayer is not about asking God to help with my life. Prayer is about God being my life — that is to say, that elemental goodness is the Principle on which I am formed, the Principle of how I’m put together — my movement, my interaction, my growth, my purpose, my fulfillment.

So in church today, I opened my heart up to that sustenance, that sense of having my whole being created, in that moment, by the ever-present Love that was embracing me. And I embraced the rest of the congregation, as best I could, in that perception. That was during the silent prayer. Then we began to say the Lord’s Prayer, “Our father, which art in heaven; Our Father Mother God, all harmonious . . . “ It was a great affirmation of where I had been flying in silent prayer.

When we got to the part, “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors; and Love is reflected in love,” I had an interesting insight. In order to be forgiving a debt, I first had to give a loan. Had to enter into relationship with someone, had to trust them and act on that trust. So in order to be forgiven for all that I don’t understand about who I am, I need to enter into a relationship of trust with others, and forgive them for all they don’t understand about who I am, or about who they are. A lovely practice that involves no passing of judgment, no miserly withholding, no cautious prudence. I agree to trust others to be the divine children that Life, Love, creates them to be. And then forgive them, and me, when I see something different. That’s how I am forgiven for seeing something different, and that’s how I rise to a truer perception of both them and myself. Thus, my relationship to God requires an active relationship with others. A thing I have been doing and loving to do, and was glad to see is part of the prescription for being Christian.