All the men of my family were avid domino players and never shied away from an opportunity to put their expertise on display. Of particular interest to me was the fact that only a few moves into each round, they all seemed to know what pieces every other player had. At the end of the round, someone from the losing side would inevitably slam down a domino piece on the table and yell at his partner for not making this or that move when he had the chance. They might then argue back and forth on the strategy they should have followed, but they rarely made mistakes in their assessment of the still uncovered pieces.
To me, that seemed like magic. It was a way of life that I loved, and one that I even formed my own childhood superstitions around.
Of course, what looked like magic to me as a novice was simply a very specific set of knowledge and skills practiced over a lifetime. This knowledge was fascinating and inherently undetectable to my sight, but no actual sorcery was involved. We could say that there was a learned and demonstrated Domino Science on display.
Now, the term Science may be a bit unconventional here, but it is clear that beyond my personal experience with this culture lay a practical knowledge for anyone to learn and practice.
A similar sense of superstition, wonder, and misconception has generally accompanied the history of anything that is counterintuitive to human experience. For example, the laws of aerodynamics remained largely undiscovered until the early 1900s when the Wright Brothers piloted their first flights. Millions of years of grounded human experience had made human flight counterintuitive, relegating its pursuit to fantasy, mysticism, and poetry. Then, those first 59 seconds of airborne magic not only proved human flight possible, they changed our way of life forever. What developed was a very specific set of knowledge and skills to be practiced over lifetimes, demonstrating and developing the previously undetectable laws. A Flight Science had been discovered.
Twenty-one centuries ago, a Galilean man named Jesus is said to have performed feats that were counterintuitive to not just one aspect of human experience, like domino games or flight, but to all of it. He is said to have systematically overcome all previously held notions about human limitation—including physical laws and obstacles, disease, poverty, accidents, death.
To many, this was the Christ or Messiah: the promised deliverer from human misery, and the final revelator of God's truth. To others, he was a trickster and blasphemer. Yet to all, the feats he performed seemed like magic, and centuries of superstition, wonder, and misconception followed.
Then, in the late 1800s, a New England woman named Mary Baker Eddy claimed to have discovered the universal and practical laws underlying Jesus' work. She called this discovery Christian Science, because of her belief in the provable and duplicable nature of the Messianic work. She established an organization which, in her words, "... should reinstate primitive Christianity and its lost element of healing."*
To many, this was a new mode of worship based on proof and understanding rather than blind faith. To others, it was neither Christian nor scientific, and the ideas it contained were viewed as dangerous and blasphemous in both arenas.
When I came across Christian Science during my first year of college, I had never heard of such a religion or science. So I approached it with few preconceptions, positive or negative.
One of the biggest mysteries I had tried to understand since childhood was the workings and purpose of consciousness. It seemed very strange to me, as I think it does to many people at some point in their lives, that I had consciousness at all. I was both fascinated and troubled by the concept that each person has a separate conscious mind, given how all-encompassing my own thought felt.
I was also perplexed by the fact that I did not feel the passage of time while sleeping, and I was concerned with understanding how and when I became unconscious in falling asleep. Of course, this last anxiety kept me up at night for hours, trying to somehow consciously become unconscious.
I developed a fierce interest in all the sciences. And I developed a deep appreciation for all the religions. To me they both approached the fundamental issues of consciousness and existence in very different, often valid, but usually incomplete ways. Now, here was an ontology, a view of existence, called Christian Science, which to my understanding was equating existence itself with consciousness. And it was claiming that this view was based on the ministry of the Galilean prophet named Jesus.
This notion was intriguing to say the least. It felt fresh, maybe even promising. Was there a practical knowledge here to be learned and practiced?
Of utmost importance to me in assessing the worth of this view were the following BIG questions:
- Did this ontology offer a meaningful and complete explanation of consciousness?
- If so, what is consciousness, and how, specifically, does it relate to human experience?
- What originated consciousness?
- Does consciousness survive death?
The following chapters are not meant to define the views of other Christian Scientists or of the Church of Christ, Scientist. Instead, they are my attempt to answer the above questions for you by illustrating the Christian Science ontology, its explanation of existence, from my own perspective, in ways that are partial but, I hope, useful.
The chapter entitled Proof and Theology explores why the discoverer of Christian Science and those who follow her teachings today consider her approach to Christianity to be a science. The chapter on General Belief and Individual Faith lays out the specific mechanics of how mental activity can result in the human condition. The Consentaneous Projections chapter suggests how consciousness can precede the discoverable material past rather than evolving from it. Finally, the chapter entitled Death and the Ascension will address the end of consciousness as we know it.
There are also a few smaller chapters in between exploring the implications of these ideas. But first, let us begin with a couple of thought exercises and definitions, which will clear the way for discussing the bigger questions mentioned above.
