Description
A collection of seven talks including: Beginning Rightly, Our Original Identity, Practical Wisdom, Challenging Heredity, Spiritual Radicalism, Daily Identification, “Earth’s Preparatory School.”
Mr. Jensen was a life-long Christian Scientist. He practiced law in Fresno, California before entering the full-time practice in 1964. He became a teacher in 1970. He served as Field Representative for The Mother Church in northern California. These talks by Mr. Jensen are like a good heart-to-heart talk with a teacher whose many years of experience enable him to relate the deeper metaphysics of Christian Science to our everyday challenges. As a Field Representative for The Mother Church for many years, Mr. Jensen was often invited to speak to experienced Scientists, and in his talks, he has a way of pinpointing hidden forms of animal magnetism that claim to be handling us and then explains how to handle them.
“Beginning Rightly” is based on Mrs. Eddy’s statement, “To begin rightly is to end rightly.” Mr. Jensen explains what it means to begin rightly. He says that too often we begin wrongly by wanting to heal a material body or discordant situation through spiritual means. To begin rightly, we need to see that all discord and disease are illusions, myths. “In spite of the vividness of the sense-testimony and its claim to reality,” he tells us, “there is a choice to be made . . . . So how will you view the problem? Which premise will you accept? One — that matter, the body, is real; that it has substance, life, and sensation, yet it is destructible in nature; that it must be repaired or restored, one way or another, physically or metaphysically? It’s the body that you find yourself looking at. And when it hurts, it makes it more real to you. Or two — the premise that Spirit is real and that man is totally spiritual, eternal, perfect, and indestructible; that therefore this so-called matter is but a mental picture that is actually unreal and illusory. Which premise is to be accepted at the outset of your work?”
In choosing the correct premise, we need to “resolve things into thoughts,” as Mrs. Eddy tells us. He writes, “Why is this resolution of things into thoughts so important? Well, in the first place, when you are dealing with thoughts, you are dealing with something that can be changed, replaced, corrected, for who ever heard of an unchangeable thought? Do you see what this does to the claim of incurability? Who ever heard of an incurable thought? There’s never been such a thing. This resolution of things into thoughts allows us to see things as simply illusions, mental mistakes or errors, rather than as realities or frightful material conditions. . . . The challenge, therefore, is to look through the false testimony of the senses, the mental picture presented, and recognize it to be only a mental error.
“How do we do this? You know the answer so well. Dwell on the fact, the spiritual fact, as taught in divine Science. Dwell on it so single-mindedly and resolutely that only this truth has reality to you. The illusion will become self-evident. This is destroying the illusion through divine metaphysics, and not through an act of will-power. It is the power of Truth that heals.”
Mr. Jensen has much to say about handling disease and age. In “Our Original Identity,” he says, “Age is never a ‘condition’ with which we have to deal. There is never a matter body to be reconstituted. I want to repeat — Age is not a physical condition, but only a mental suggestion that has been accepted, and thereby has become a ‘belief.’ It is all in thought! . . .
“The false education of mortal mind’s suggestions that we have carelessly accepted, has taught us wrongly, and so man has appeared to himself to age and die, in obedience to his mental acceptance of these suggestions of age — but certainly not because of a physical ‘condition.’” But he explains that in Christian Science “we come to see that identifying ourselves with the image and likeness of God establishes not only our perfection, harmony, joy, intelligence, divine purpose, strength and freedom — but it established our immortality, and all that it includes. We see ourselves as birthless, therefore as ageless, deathless, diseaseless, and indestructible, as ‘never born and never dying.’”