Understanding Mary Baker Eddy’s “Mortal Mind”: the thumbnail version

Section 1 Mary Baker’s Eddy’s life and teachings, explained.

Mary Baker Eddy’s  life history: the thumbnail version.

A repressed and sickly child grew up into a repressed and sickly adult who blamed her father for the loss of her son to permanent foster care. A follower of quack medicine, she was drawn to the mind over matter theories and wrote a book, then started a church, based on them. She restricted herself to only teaching her method and was very exacting in the way it was used. She excommunicated a series of followers; whom she then believed were actively out to harm her every day for the rest of her life. She believed her kidney stones were due to the evil thoughts directed at her by former followers, and engaged around the clock prayers to fend off those evil thoughts, while she fended off the pain with opiates.  She had beliefs that she was an exalted figure in Christianity and interpreted her life and scripture to prove it. She gave up the belief in matter, rose above it teaching that medicine was bad and radical reliance on God was good and produced healings of the body and of mortal mind.

Mary Baker Eddy’s teachings; thumbnail version.

She taught the Allness and complete spirituality of God, and that man is his image and therefore spiritual too. Neither God nor his creation could produce evil, and there was nothing else created, so the occurrence of mortal mind in one’s life is an illusion. The body, with its suggestions of sin, sickness and death, is a lie. It is the offshoot of mortal mind, so it is an illusion as well, with only a belief that a body got sick. Therefore man is not ailing, he is really complete and whole, reflecting God and only afflicted with the delusion of a belief in matter that is pretending to be sick, so change your mind, get rid of the error in thinking that you have a mortal body and accept your healing.

A summary of mortal mind as illusion; taken from Science and Health by Mary Baker Eddy.

Mortal mind is the uncreated illusion that fools man into thinking he has a material body that can sin, get sick, and die. Mortal mind creates the illusions of illness and accidents; it makes us think we really do have a body and live in a material creation, where bad things happen. Its active agent, malicious animal magnetism, causes harm to the victims of its mental machinations.

Logic of mortal mind; taken from Science and Health by Mary Baker Eddy.

Mortal mind is blind, has no intelligence and can’t see its own creation. It is unconscious, mindless, made up of human opinions, which rule by majority. When a majority of mortal mind thinks a poison is not a poison anymore, then it won’t be. Mortal mind causes bad weather, and fights every claim that man is complete, well and perfect. Mortal mind created DNA and makes us think it encodes our material past. All of our false perceptions of the world as material are lies of belief, and the universe as matter plus non-matter like waves of energy, are also nothing but beliefs of mortal mind.

Section 2. Understanding mortal mind in the 21st century.

In this section, I try to cut mortal mind down to size. (If you can cut “nothing” down to size.) Mary gave almost all powers of creation to mortal mind as being a false creation, but over the past century, a lot of her beliefs have not panned out. There are areas of reality over which mortal mind has no control. That includes all creation except man.

Man has developed a body of wisdom or human opinion, which is a database, a human convention. A lot of it is encoded in DNA as part of the body and thus, subconscious. Mortal mind is split up and divided in many ways in history and culture, but it can be a useful metaphor for what people can change in their lives. Although MBE may be correct and reality is ultimately an illusion, (unlikely, IMO) she still drew a picture of mortal mind that gave it too much power. No amount of Christian Science practice will change eye color or other physical qualities that are determined by DNA. Or reverse the loss of teeth or the optic nerve. However some genes do have alleles that can flip on or off, depending on conditions.  An example might be a gene with a couple of alleles, one of which is for a diseased version of the gene. It may be a predisposition, but given the correct circumstances it will not flip on (or off) thus never producing the disease. A combination of positive thinking and correct actions for the effect one wants, can sidestep a lot of predispositions.

Mortal mind gives up when physical science produces evidence based cures.

Mortal mind has also surrendered to the proper use of some medicines, so it has become pointless to try to pray infections or diabetes away. Mortal mind never did control the weather and never will; it is subject to universal laws that no man can change, yet. Mortal mind tends to be conservative and fearful, and thus can aggravate human fears and lower immune system response thresholds so that  diseases can invade.

Mortal mind is Fear itself.

The only useful concept I can see of mortal mind is that it is nothing but fear. Most illnesses have stress as their underlying cause, (though some are genetic in origin). Maybe all illness does. And people generally have strong immune systems that ward off disease.  Their immune systems are by nature adequate to keep an infection from developing.  That is why some people never get colds and why others don’t get them often. Their immune responses are healthy and can fend off over-growths of germs or viruses. The immune response can be lowered by ongoing states of fear and stress and that is when the stress starts getting into the body, literally, the muscles, stomach, heart and so on, any system can get weaker with enough stress and stronger with less stress.

So, if mortal mind is thought of as stress and disease as a result of stress, It becomes clear where correct thinking will restore the immune system, hopefully before structural damage is done, but any time is better than being in a stated of fear. So mortal mind’s bad effects are mostly due to fear. Fear is often justified, but it should be overcome as quickly as possible. Fear undermines the mind and body, allowing its most vulnerable systems to be susceptible to dis-ease.

The best use of Christian Science prayer.

So in my eyes, removing excess fear/stress is the single best intervention any Christian Science practitioner can perform. If the total removal is not possible due to politics or something, then people need to keep working to remove or reduce its effects on the life and to keep the big picture in mind. Fear/stress is not a natural state and most men would want to reduce it, if they knew its bad effects.

If we shrink mortal mind down to being states of fear which lower immune responses, it is still plenty troublesome. Fear needs to be faced as fear and not given all the powers in creation.

Observations on Mary Baker Eddy’s concept of “mortal mind”

ust what is “mortal mind” in Christian Science?

Right off the top, I think “mortal mind” is an interesting metaphor and an interesting way to look at the weight of public opinion, or the beliefs of the lowest common denominator. It is much more interactive with mankind than is the “collective unconscious” (ucs) of Jung. For him the collective unconscious is the deep body of shared archetypes and information, no matter what culture. Jung always related to highest expressions of the collective ucs, the archetypes, the universal blueprints from which all reality is cast or observed. He called the lowest common denominator our “dark side”. The side not facing the light of consciousness (cs) Jung made his system too neat and tidy to contain an idea like mortal mind, but it is talking about the same thing. The lowest common denominator.

Archetypes are always non-material, they reflect the deepest ideas upon which mortal mind derives its local expression. The creation is the source of the archetypes, and archetypes are but blueprints for mortal mind to use in its own earthly creations. Maybe archetypes are the spiritual creations, upon which man improvises to build a society. Maybe someone  by seeing  or feeling, for even a flash in time, the experience of “becoming” the perfect reflection of the archetype would be a way to achieve healing. That experience is illusive and impossible for most people at our present state of understanding mortal mind. It would take special talent to discover the way to a new understanding.

So, mortal mind, being the problem, or expressing an Error in thinking, seems to be what Christian Science (CS) aims to heal. I am curious why Mary Baker Eddy did not actually make a complete model of mortal mind.  She did call it by various names, but it seemed to be entirely unknown to her as a complex, ever-moving entity that could be described. She scared herself when she came up with that idea and avoided describing how it works or how to change it.

Unlike God, universal and eternal, and our collective mortal mind, mortal mind is always local and temporal. Every culture develops its own version of mortal mind and how the universe works. These are always subject to change, but when people find a level that works for them and they can prosper, they tend to not want to make any changes in their thinking about it. That is conservatism at its most primal.

To me understanding the parameters of mortal mind and knowing that is what is expressing itself to our senses, chops it down to size.  One can look at the culture of New England in Mary’s time and describe what beliefs mortal mind was expressing. That is why I am including the fact that mortal mind was under the sway of Puritan ideals in much of New England in Mary’s upbringing. There was also a passion for having something concrete to believe in. It was at this time that the Bible was seen by more and more people as the infallible word of God and put up against science and the Enlightenment.

Of course, in taking that stance the local mortal mind would have to deny that a bunch of Catholic priests got together and decided to put a book together that expressed their own ideas as the Power Group of the day. What got in the Bible and what stayed out was fraught with politics and personal agendas. And to this day the Bible reflects their unbalanced view of the universe and especially, Christianity.

Perhaps a lot of the religious foment of the early 19th century in that time and place was a reaction to the Deist Enlightenment that was so strong among the elite who were our founding fathers. But that is another topic. I know a lot of the Revivalist human opinion, like the whole Baptist thing, became a desire to enfold oneself into something strong and permanent and concrete in their faith. The mortal mind that rules them has a lot of defenses against science and its revelations of the 20^th century and spends a lot of time fighting them, so most of their sheeple acquiesce to the common ucs, or mortal mind of their group. Nevertheless, they enjoy the latest toys science has developed and they use the materia medica of the time, even though it was developed by science, too. This is a lot of denial. When a small section of mortal mind, like the fundamentalist Christians, try to hold to its own unchanging subculture, it is very vulnerable to being understood by certain members who then leave and free themselves of that tiring aspect of mortal mind.

So, there are local differing opinions in mortal mind. Therefore local and temporal mortal mind argues with itself, it splits and schisms within itself. It is attacked by other versions of local common opinions and it is not above deceit of its true believers, the sheeple.  Since mortal mind tries to preserve itself, it often becomes a liar.

It is easy to see various collectives of mortal mind’s differing opinions in politics and the party system. It is very easy to see it between the differing Christian sects. And it is easy to see that different classes of people have different collective consciousnesses from each other. It is easy to see that mortal mind can evolve through education, and allow people to make their own choices, if they have the thinking to do so.

Mortal mind can be divided any which way, by differing opinions on anything, to different levels of education, the highest of which allow people to shed a lot of the earlier ruling opinions. Or class systems.  Thus mortal mind evolves with public opinion. Mortal mind is public opinion. Or rather the reverse, public opinion is always mortal mind. Yet any portion of mortal mind can break off with one opinion and take another. If more and more people adopt the new opinion, mortal mind has changed for some. Sometimes a new finding becomes the majority position of the world’s entire first world nations’ mortal mind. Try to overcome the weight of that belief, such as in penicillin, with the prayer of a practitioner who denies there is a simple remedy for infections and prayer is needed in this case instead of the weight of mortal opinion.

However science has far less of a hold on mortal mind than religion or common opinion. Science tries to discover the secrets of the universe and reveal them to mankind, whether in astronomy or medicine. Just like mortals must accept that they must eat and eliminate, and breathe, I think we must accept that which has not been touched by mankind’s hand reflects God’s creation pretty well, better than any other system so far. So let science pursue that view and all of mortal mind is uplifted.

One thing about mortal mind. It seems to be democratic. It doesn’t care what a group believes, it just gets more powerful or less powerful -in that belief- as fewer or more people hold that opinion. And each and every belief is subject to change. Modern social sciences have discovered what mental programming is and how common it is. It governs a lot of what all normal people think every day. And by the new specialty of deprogramming religious beliefs, there are effective ways to change opinions. Deprogrammers have a good understanding of how to do it. Good deprogrammers never use force, torture or confrontation. The best programmers know how to match the clients thoughts, pace them by demonstrating understanding, then lead by trying to influence minor beliefs or inconsistencies.

All advertising is an attempt to influence mortal mind and advertising knows every propaganda trick in the book and use all to sell everything from personal care products to cars. The best remedy for advertising is critical thinking. It is also the best remedy for deciding if mortal mind is correct on any other matter. Or if that political ad is honest.

My last observation in my brand new study of mortal mind is that it can be educated to new thoughts and ways. Also that when something gets outdated in mortal mind, Christian Science practice will no longer be effective  for that outmoded belief – ie. in diabetes or acute infections, now that it has conquered that problem through the educated efforts of people who could prove to mortal mind that antibiotics are better than placebo for infections and insulin for diabetes.

This may be a good model to bring Christian Science practice into the 21^st century. Let educated mortal mind deal with the facts of the illness and medicine, if it has the cure, and let Christian Science work on removing the fear from the illness and its treatment and also errors in execution of the correct steps to affect the cure. After all mortal mind still makes mistakes. And above all quit using the “Error in thinking” concept of healing. Of course it is, but the practitioners knows better how to reassure and teach a child, than the child can do for itself. Also it is better to teach the specific corrected thought of mortal mind than point out the error in thinking. This alone has cost the church the vast majority of its congregation.

That and letting children die from adherence to the radical macho CS model  of 100% reliance on God.

I wrote this spontaneously as I have all my other posts so far, but I think the ideas I expressed in this one will lend themselves to further examination. They have bubbled under the surface for many years as I slowly digested what I think is at work in CS healings, but more importantly, in its failures. When I found quantum mechanics, I thought I saw a metaphor for the CS pov, but also a literalness about how everything in the universe is connected together. that connectedness is the root of the word religion. Mortal mind has destroyed the original meaning in its dissections but that interconnectedness is a door past mortal mind’s view. perhaps a gateway to healing. Whatever healing is needed after all eliminations and misdirected discharges are accomplished.

I think a useful theory of mortal mind can be developed, it could be tested against previous observations such as Jung and other literature. I think there are many testable observations. A body of science applicable to mortal mind can be reframed from many other fields of science. For every time a practitioner prays, it is to correct mortal mind, but if the local and current mortal mind already knows better,  the prayer against Error is ineffective.