What is Real?

The fact that when you look down railroad tracks and they seem as though they converge into one, causes us to question what the eyes are telling us. And how long did people think that the earth was flat and that you could fall of the edge? Through the human desire to know and understand more, we have discovered, thankfully, that the earth is not flat and is in fact a sphere. But what if we didn’t question, research, explore and search for answers? Well then we would pretty much be left thinking we would fall of the edge of the earth or no one would take trains to travel anywhere!

So it seems that reason and understanding surpass what the material senses tell us. Imagine, the law of physics that enables airplanes to fly existed 4,000 years ago but no one had discovered it! Just think of all of the things that are part of humanities future in thousands of years which we have not discovered yet – which our thought has not been evolved enough to know, see or understand. Really it seems as though what we see is a result of our understanding. We see planes fly because we have understood, as humanity, that that is possible.

Is it really realistic for us to base our understanding of what’s possible on the material senses? Why do we think that what we see, taste, smell, touch, and hear is reality or that determines our possibilities?

The Bible is full of accounts of the “impossible” being possible through people who were close to God. In the Old Testament, II Kings, the company of the prophet Elisha want to move to Jordan where they have more space to live. They go to do this and as they are cutting down some wood, one man’s axe falls into the water. He panics because he had borrowed the axe and tells Elisha. The Bible says, “Elisha cut a stick and threw it there, and made the iron float. ‘Lift it out,’ he said. Then the man reached out his hand and took it.” (II Kings 6:6 NIV) Now is this possible to human senses? Even to human reasoning and understanding this is deemed as impossible. But what did Elisha know that made this possible? Did he possibly know there is a higher law, a divine or spiritual law that is governing all things? And from this story it appears that if you don’t know about this law than you wouldn’t appeal to it. Were it otherwise, the man who had borrowed the axe would have known how to retrieve it himself.

What laws are governing our existence that we don’t know about? Can discovering them create a better human experience for everyone? Could these laws have something to do with business, supply, health, and how we treat one another?

The following passages from Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures illustrate reversing what we determine is real and possible through spiritual understanding or spiritual sense.

"How true it is that whatever is learned through material sense must be lost because such so-called knowledge is reversed by the spiritual facts of being in Science. That which material sense calls intangible, is found to be substance. What to material sense seems substance, becomes nothingness, as the sense-dream vanishes and reality appears." (p. 312:1)

"Natural history presents vegetables and animals as preserving their original species,--like reproducing like. A mineral is not produced by a vegetable nor the man by the brute. In reproduction, the order of genus and species is preserved throughout the entire round of nature. This points to the spiritual truth and Science of being. Error relies upon a reversal of this order, asserts that Spirit produces matter and matter produces all the ills of flesh, and therefore that good is the origin of evil. These suppositions contradict even the order of material so-called science." (p. 277:13)

Just some things to think about!

Can these ideas make this human experience better for everyone?