Intelligence emanating from God

WE'VE probably all faced the pressure of producing a quality product in a timely fashion. News copy, term paper or dissertation prospectus, books balanced for a year-end audit, family and belongings prepared for a long-distance move. As the deadline for any such task approaches, the pressure may build and our confidence in an effectual and timely completion of the project diminish. When we are called upon to complete a project demanding intelligence, insight, good judgment, originality, flexibility, incisiveness, we're actually being called upon to express God's divine nature, because these are God-derived qualities.

But occasionally something may seem to stand in the way of our expressing such qualities. That something may be a form of egotism--an egotism that suggests these Godlike attributes are products of a personal mind compacted within a material brain. If we believe that, we've accepted the prevalent conviction that there's a multiplicity of minds with varying abilities to express these qualities. And we've accepted the belief that intelligence, insight, and so forth, are subject to the vagaries of matter with its inherent limitations.

Yet genuine consciousness is neither multiple nor material. God is Mind, because God is the one infinite source of intelligence. ``His understanding is infinite,''1 the Bible says of God. Paul instructed, ``Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus.''2

Mind's infinitude precludes the possibility--or the need--of any other mind or source of intelligence. Furthermore, because God is Spirit, as we can learn from the Bible, Mind is Spirit and therefore not subject to the limitations of matter.

God hasn't created man and then separated him from his divine source, leaving him to draw on a limited, depletable store of intelligence and wisdom. Mind's intelligence is inexhaustibly present. Part of the definition of Mind found in the Christian Science textbook, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy,3 is ``the one God; not that which is in man, but the divine Principle, or God, of whom man is the full and perfect expression.''4

Nothing can impede Mind's effluence. The only impediment there could seem to be comes from the resistance of materialistic thinking to the acknowledgment and expression of divine Mind--from the egotism that persists in clinging to a personal mind, capable or incapable.

Egotism may surface as pride or fear: pride of seeing oneself, with a mind separate from God, as the source of creative solutions; or fear of personal failure to express successfully the one true creative source.

But humility is an effective antidote to this error. Humility requires recognition of the oneness and infinitude of divine Mind and the consequent refutation of any other mind. (Why would we want any other mind with this infinite source at hand!) Humility also brings a reassurance that Mind never fails to impart its qualities and that man, God's spiritual offspring, cannot fail to express them.

A greater realization of divine Mind's infinitude and spiritual substantiality provides us with a clearer comprehension of our own distinct, spiritual identity. We read in the Christian Science textbook, ``This scientific sense of being, forsaking matter for Spirit, by no means suggests man's absorption into Deity and the loss of his identity, but confers upon man enlarged individuality, a wider sphere of thought and action, a more expansive love, a higher and more permanent peace.''5

Acknowledging one Mind and man as its manifestation, we open thought wide to the fluidity of divine Mind's expression. Calm assurance replaces pressure, and we rejoice in the provision and recognition of just what is needed to accomplish satisfactorily the task at hand.

1Psalms 147:5. 2Philippians 2:5. 3The Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science. 4Science and Health, p. 591. 5Ibid., p. 265. You can find more articles like this one in the Christian Science Sentinel, a weekly magazine. DAILY BIBLE VERSE: O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out!

Romans 11:33