What is “mortal mind”?
The author of these ideas is Mary Baker Eddy, from Science and Health wKtS
“the author calls sick and sinful humanity mortal mind…“ 114/2
Mortal mind is what rules the beliefs of mortal man.
The three degrees of mortal mind.
The lowest aspects of mortal mind encompass
Depravity in the first degree:“Evil beliefs, passions and appetites, fear, depraved will, self-justification, pride, envy deceit, hatred, revenge, sin, sickness, disease”115/20
I would not put them in that order, I would rank them on continuums within each state of mind and also rank them from worst to the least horrible in that category. Some categories just aren’t depraved enough to go on this list.
Second degree: Evil beliefs disappearing. A lot of categories start diminishing in the second degree of mortal mind. Each on its own continuum. A lot of humanity has achieved higher levels of thinking on a lot of continuums in this category, but people do not cross into Understanding all at once.
Third degree: Understanding. This brings one into line with love, health, and wisdom and people almost at this level are the most likely to get flashes of understanding the true reality of Being, that underlies their mortal perceptions.
I would call the third level of understanding something that can and has been reached in flashes by people, through a number of means, throughout history. By the wayshowers but as long as mortal mind rules in the lowest common denominator it can’t move fully into a spiritual perception- There is a lot of work for the higher degrees of mortal mind to do to pull the lowest common denominator to a higher understanding. It is the job of mortal mind to evolve, and evolve it does.
Mary states the perfect catch 22 inherent in her theology
“Theories of mortal mind “lead to one of two things. “They either presuppose the self-evolution and self-government of matter, or else they assume that matter is the product of Spirit.” 119/4.
This statement needs to be discussed. She dismisses matter as a power in and of itself because it leaves the Creator out of the Creation. Or if God did create matter, He is responsible for creating the sin, dis-ease, and death, that arises out of matter, making Him the source of evil.
This is the crux of Mary Baker Eddy’s belief. This is the completion of her theology. The complete expansion of relieving God of Predestination, Hellfire and Damnation, to relieving Him of being anything but pure Spirit or Love.
If we did not self-create the illusion of living in matter and God did not create the living matter we experience being, then we are not explained by Mary Baker Eddy’s theology.
She seems clueless as to how we all came to share this strange experience and apparent long history of material existence and she can’t because one of those two proposition is wrong. It has to be wrong. We live in Mortal mind, and mortal mind has rules of logic available to it.There has to be an explanation -so what is it? No matter how many times she repeats we are not matter but reflections of God in everything she writes, she does not explain what is going on instead.
I am sorry, but Mary Baker Eddy has painted herself into a corner from which there is no escape. She gives mortal mind an active role in many examples of what it was doing or what change it was affecting throughout her book. It is the active agent Christian Science must overcome. It is still intermediary between the flesh and God. It controls the flesh, unless it can be overruled by Truth or any other synonym for God. Mortal mind wins unless the practitioner can invoke Love, or Mind strongly enough to banish the temporary illness of the senses.
She is saying, God is not material and we think we are. But, we are mortal mind which rules our material sense, except that mortal mind is nothing, it has no existence. That may be the ultimate theology, and the three degrees of matter give a pathway out -an evolution, if it weren’t for her denial and demand for radical reliance on Understanding before we are ready, maybe more people would have stuck around and raised kids in Christian Science.
A theory of mortal mind ?
For me, the three degrees of Mortal mind show clear evidence that MBE thought it evolves, whatever it isn’t. her failure in logic demands an explanation of mortal mind. How did it come into being? When? How internally consistent is it? What properties does it have? It is clear that mortal mind is not material, but what is it- this “thing” that must be overcome to restore balance to the (apparent) body? It is not as though MBE stands alone in using some aspect of this construct.
I do not think looking at how mortal mind works will enslave us to it any worse. It is actually useful in deciding how to pick your battles against it. So I have been working on lists, perhaps to become graphs someday outlining what mortal mind encompasses.
Many people are reading this blog backwards through time, so may have already seen that first list, which I hope to discuss in the next post.
Understanding Mortal Mind 