By Elizabeth, an Ex-Christian Scientist Group contributor.

The phase of belief I’ve been moving around in for the last few years is a god-is-math mentality. So, very precisely, it’s not that everything happens for a nice inspiring reason, but that everything. happens. Every kaleidoscopic variation of experience occurs simultaneously, as a unified mathematical expression. Time is a construct of man’s consciousness, which is itself a creative interpretation of the geometry of the universe. Our concept of god, as well as our world outlook, is a flawed and limited interpretation of the part of this massive mathematical equation we are each able to perceive, infused with a drama of our own making—individually and then again societally/culturally.

There is no good or evil, but there is every variety of circumstance to move us to tears, set our souls on fire, stun us into apathy, break our noble spirits, confound our strongest convictions, awake the psychopaths within, transmute our failings into strengths, inspire a heroic and sacrificial effort; in short, everything required to make us hate the world and to make us love the world.

Inside this theory, free will is not the reality, although the nature of our conscious awareness does allow for a lot of flexibility in how we perceive our will, or lives, or destinies. This is why Christian Science can seem amazingly effective until it isn’t; until it bumps up against the underlying math, the facts of your life.