THE INFINITE WAY MEDITATION and TAPE GROUP   -   CHICAGO, IL 

The teaching of modern mystic Joel S. Goldsmith

 Place: United Church of Hyde Park,  Rittenhouse Chapel,   1448 E. 53^rd Street, Chicago   (Enter at glass doors)

Time: Saturdays, 10:30 am      Starting April 3, 2010.      

Contact: Barbara Holt,  773-991-6887   holt-barbara@comcast.net

REMINDER OF SUNDAY MEDITAITON  -  2:00pm EST

Please join for meditation at 2:00 your time and for an hour of study of March’s work…

                 1960 LAUSANNE CLASS

                Tape 345 Side 2                 

 The Nature of Prayer – Power

               By Joel Goldsmith

1960 LAUSANNE CLASS

TAPE 345 SIDE TWO

THE NATURE OF PRAYER – POWER

 By Joel Goldsmith

           Good afternoon. I think that we can complete this subject of prayer today. But it will mean a very long and probably hard period for you because it will still remain with you to prove this, to demonstrate it, to manifest it. Knowing it will only be a step but bringing it through into expression is going to be quite a different matter. That is going to entail practice—much practice, patience. Prayer as you know is our means of contact with God or bringing God into visible expression, visible manifestation.

          If we were completely consciously one with God, prayer would be an entirely different subject then it is now because prayer then would be only a communion. It would be only a communion. It will be an experience of love. There would be a continuous feeling going back and forth within us from the exterior to the interior from the interior to the exterior—in other words, from our inner spiritual self to our outer expression. But this would really be something taking place within ourselves and going no further than the boundary of our own individual completeness, and it would have no other object than communion. No other object than realization of this oneness. It is only because of the sense of separation that exists within us—a sense of being separated from God that prayer has a different connotation, a different meaning and has more the meaning of re-establishing ourselves in a relationship that already exists. In other words it is re-established; no it is establishing ourselves in a conscious relationship. The relationship already exists, but we are not conscious of it and so prayer becomes an establishment of conscious relationship or conscious oneness or conscious union. Again, because this sense of separation sets up for us a series of false appearances prayer becomes a means whereby the false appearances are dissolved and we again see him as he is. We are told that when we see him as he is we will be satisfied. We will be pleased. When we awaken in his likeness then the function of prayer in our present experience is really to see him as he is, to see ourselves, to see conditions, to see the world as it is in spiritual reality, for the purpose of prayer is to awaken ourselves in his image and likeness, awaken ourselves to behold him as Christ, to behold ourselves as spiritual sonship.

          Now God is spirit and must be worshipped in spirit and in truth and I give this to you as a starter that you are not praying when you are speaking or thinking thoughts. No matter how holy you believe your prayers are if they have in them speech or thought you are not praying. You may be setting the stage for prayer. You may be going through a preliminary stage leading to prayer. We do that in what we call contemplative meditation which is contemplative prayer when we close our eyes and silently realize God is closer to me than breathing nearer than hands and feet, where I am God is. All that the Father hath is mine. I can never live or move or have my being outside of God for I am in God and God is in me for we are one. This is not prayer. This is a contemplative form of prayer or meditation in which we contemplate truth for the purpose of quieting our inner thoughts and fears and doubts. In other words we are faced with an appearance of the world coming to the end and we get frightened and we want to get calm. And in order to do that we close our eyes to the appearance and realize God, “thou art closer to me than breathing, thou art closer to me than the end of the world, and if I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil for thou art with me. And if the world does end and if a bomb blows it up I will fear no evil for thou art with me and if I am where thou art I cannot be separated from life, Consciousness, love. So whether it’s in this world or the next world I will fear no evil.” And by this time our inner fears have been stilled and now we can enter prayer which is a state of union with God that has neither words nor thoughts but is merely an opportunity for the free flow of the spirit of God within us.

          In the same way someone comes to us in pain, or lack, or distress and we would give them help, and the appearance itself as it has been presented to us disturbs us. It is not only disturbing the patient but they have made it so real that it’s now going to disturb us. And so before we can enter prayer for them we have to overcome this fear, this doubt, this reaction to appearances and so we enter a state of contemplation.

          “Judge not after appearances, Joel. Judge not after appearances. The Master has taught you. Judge not after appearances. Judge righteous judgment. What do you believe about God, Joel? Do you really believe that God is infinite? Could you believe then that there is infinite good and somebody else or something else? Do you really believe there is some other power besides God or some other substance or law. No, no Joel you know better. You have been instructed. You have been taught that God is infinite Spirit. That God is the only law unto his universe and the substance of all form. You know that the body is the temple of the living God. Therefore be still. Fear not. It is I. There is not I and somebody else. There is not I and something else. Be still. Be not afraid. It is I. I will never leave thee nor forsake thee. I will be with thee to the end of the world, and with everybody else, so be still. Be still and know that I am God. You have nothing to fear. I am God, and I am ever with thee. Wither so ever thou goest, I will go. And if you make your bed in hell I will be there with you. Be not afraid. It is I.”

          And this contemplative prayer; this contemplative meditation now brings me to an inner state of peace where I am not reacting to the outward appearance. And now I can say, “Speak Lord thy servant heareth.” Now I can rest without words and without thoughts and permit this inner flow to take place and it is in this stillness, in this quietness, in this confidence that the appearances of sense are dissolved and the spiritually real comes into expression. Now it is at this point that those who pray must be careful. If you are praying with any idea that you are going to make sick matter into well matter or a little matter into a lot of matter, you are praying amiss.

          Here is where the world has gone wrong. It has prayed to a God of Spirit to do something to materiality and a materiality which has no existence. It is like praying to God to change the mirage on the desert. Supposing there is a mirage on the desert, supposing there is a turbulent ocean out there. Can you pray to God to still that ocean when you know all of the time it isn’t there? It is only an image in you mind? How can God do something to non-existence? Supposing that out on this desert there is a great big wall that won’t let you pass or a whole big city and you pray to God to open a way for you to go through. Can God answer such nonsensical prayers when there is no wall there, there is no city there? This wall and this city is only a mental image in your thought and it has no externalized existence and your sitting here waiting for God to do something to something that doesn’t exist.

          Do you see that? You might as well sit here and decide you want to cross this mountain and pray first that God opens a path through that horizon. Well you could sit here forever because God can’t answer that prayer. There is no sky blocking your way. If you can climb a mountain go and climb. When you get to the top you will find that the way is free to go beyond.

          So it is, if you make the mistake that this world is making, praying to God to do something to an illusory something that has no existence—and that’s what it’s doing when it prays to heal disease or when it prays for supply or for bread or home or companionship—it is a waste of time. You must be careful that when you pray the object of your prayer is to behold God, to behold true being, spiritual being, not to change a condition of matter. Not to increase matter or decrease it. Prayer must be for one purpose only on this mystical path and that is—God reveal thyself. Let me behold thee as thou art or thy universe, thy law. Reveal to me thy spiritual law. Reveal to me thy spiritual self. Reveal to me divine being. Reveal to me eternality, immortality, infinity.

          Only be careful that you’re not hitching it up to and incidentally move the sky off the mountain. Or siphon the water off the desert. Be careful that you are not applying your prayer because the world is doing that and getting no answer. The world is doing that. It is praying. You have only one object in prayer and that is to behold God in action, behold the law of God in action, the life of God in action, the self of God in action, the being of God in action. You have to start with a complete humility, let’s use that word, humility. A state of being in which you say, “I do not know what God is. I do not know what spiritual man is. I do not know what spiritual law is.  Now Father, reveal thyself”. In that state of humility in which the Master says, “I can of my own self do nothing” or, “if I speak of myself I bear witness to a lie” or, “this message is not mine, his that sent me”. That wiping of the self out, the Jesus self, the John self, the Joel self, the Mary self—“I do not know how to pray”, one disciple says. “I do not know how to come in or how to go out or what to pray for”. That is really humility.

          Because actually you don’t. What you really want is the experience of God in your life, but humanly you have no way of knowing what that is and the strange thing is you never will. You never will until you have transcended the knowledge of the human mind. There is no way to grasp the things of God through the human mind. The things of God, Spirit, Infinity are foolishness to finite mind. In fact the finite mind cannot encompass God or spiritual truth. It would be impossible to get even the tiniest grain of spiritual wisdom into the human mentality—the things of God. And so you only come into God’s grace when you have come to such a place of inner stillness, quietness and peace that you are not thinking or trying to outline or bring through your idea of what harmony is or what good is. Only when you are in that complete stillness and since no one can stop the action of the human mind that’s why so much of the Oriental meditations fail. That’s why they too are not bringing through God in spite of all their meditations. They make too much effort to stop the action of the human mind. If you succeed in doing it, you just leave yourself a blank. You still haven’t brought the spiritual faculty into awakened state. But if you use this method of silent, contemplative meditation—we have many, many tapes, many, many classes that include contemplative meditation—and if you practice this contemplative meditation in which you silently, peacefully declare every truth you can about God and your oneness with God and the nature of God’s creation and so forth and then relax in quietness and confidence so that something can come through from the beyond.

          Now the only way I can explain it to you is this. Supposing right now you were asked to compose a piece of music but it must not be any piece of music that has ever been composed before or heard by the ear of man. Therefore, you mustn’t let your mind wander around to the field of music. Since you can’t get this piece of music out of your mind, out of your memory it has to come through from an unknown source and it has to be a combination of notes, remember, that have never been heard before so you can’t even use your imagination to think what it will be like when it comes through. Now if you can realize that and then wait for this piece of music to come through, when it comes through you find out how entirely different music is then what you thought music was. Other words, you’ll understand the old wise composers who said that his composition never sounds on the instrument like they did in his mind. He can’t recognize them when he hears them.

          And that’s the truth about spiritual truth. There isn’t anything that’s written down of spiritual truth that once it’s written down is anything like it was when it was received in Consciousness. And none of us seem to have the ability to write it down, and that’s what’s so frustrating. We get a most beautiful vision and we write it down and then look at and that isn’t it and that isn’t what came through and it’s frustrating. Now just imagine that you don’t know what your demonstration is to be. You don’t know the meaning of health. All that you’ve been taught is that it means a heart that beats so much or a digestive organ that does this or an eliminative organ that does that and you believe it. But you don’t know what health is. You don’t know what the health of man is—man who is immortal. You don’t know what his being is. You don’t know what his body is. Therefore, you have to be like the composer. You want something to come through that never has been known before in the mind of man. And that’s the secret of your life, your mind, your being, your body, your health, your supply. And it’s because you can’t use your imagination, you must attain an inner stillness and peace and then wait for the revelation to come through.

          Now I will show you a few practical examples of how this works. Now you all have gardens or trees or pets, cats, dogs, birds. And so you will have to make your initial experiment with these. No matter how beautiful we think this is believe me it isn’t a least bit beautiful in comparison to what it really is. If we could see this as it is we would all be shocked by what we would see. It is so far different with what we are seeing with finite eyes. Now, this is true about your cat or your dog or your bird. You have no idea what they look like and you have no idea what they act like because their present actions are not divine. They are the expression of the universal human mind that surrounds them.

          In other words your cat or your dog or your bird is just the reflection of the human belief in good and evil. And so they’re sometimes good and sometimes evil, sometimes well and sometimes not well. Manifesting human—the surrounding human Consciousness. Now you can take your cat and your dog and your bird out of that and you can put them into Divine Consciousness where they will never be good or bad, sick or well. They will always be God in expression. They’ll always be their spiritual identity. Now the way that you do that is you have a period in which you are going to meditate for your dog, cat, bird or plant or garden or tree. You sit down and then you dismiss them from your thought entirely. And now you turn only to God. You have your brief period of contemplative prayer or meditation until you feel yourself becoming still and then you sit still as if you were waiting to hear the still small voice. And you may hear it or you may not. You may just eventually get a deep breath within you. Sometimes you breath so deeply that it touches way down into your stomach, way down into the solar plexus or you may just get a feeling of release as if a weight were taken off your shoulder, a feeling of peace, and that’s the end of it.

                                                                                                                                   Now as you do this day after day for just a few minute specifically for your pets or your plants, you will begin to notice a change in them. You will notice a change in the relationships of your pets to yourself. There’ll be a closer bond and it’ll be of an entirely different nature. It won’t be entirely human. You’ll see in it that there’s something in that relationship of a divine nature or you’ll see in it a communion with that animal or bird or plant. There’s no use trying to describe it. You have to experience it. Now this is what is the mystery—this Consciousness that has come through from somewhere out in the beyond which is really the depths of your own withinness—this that has escaped up into you is the God Consciousness and it becomes the substance of this relationship and of this body.

          Let me give it to you in another form. This is easy for you to realize because many of you have had the experience. Let us suppose there is a child, a baby, a youngster, and it is feverish. Now you sit down beside it—don’t give it a treatment, give yourself this contemplative meditation first until you feel an inner peace. And wait there for just a moment or two until this deep breath takes place or this inner peace, and then watch how that child settles down into a sleep and then awakens without the fever. And you will find that it is this that has escaped from you that has now become the substance of their Consciousness, of their life, of their mind, of their body. You haven’t done anything to disease or sickness. You have dissolved material sense and brought to light a state of Divine Consciousness. Because of our eyesight it still looks to us as if we just had a healthy body now in front of us. But it isn’t so—it’s a state of divine health that has come into expression. It is as if this Consciousness which escapes through me becomes your Consciousness and becomes the law unto your being and your body. And so as it escapes from you, it becomes the law unto your animal or plant or patient or student. It’s really your Consciousness that is now their Consciousness—not your human consciousness. In this work there is no such thing as transference of thought from one individual to another. There is no such thing as the transference of good or evil thought. That is why if you are faithful in this work nobody is ever going to be harmed by any erroneous thought that may momentarily or temporarily take place in you, and there is nobody on the human plane who once in a while doesn’t have a fear thought or a sensual thought or a doubtful thought or an erroneous thought or a temporal thought or a temperament thought. There isn’t anybody who has attained purity on earth.

          And therefore, it is definite that at some time or other we all have a negative or erroneous thought, but this will never transfer itself to our patients or our students if we are remembering never to project our thought into their mind. Never project your thought into anyone’s mind either to give them a thought or to receive a thought from them because you don’t want anything they’ve got. And they surely want nothing that you’ve got humanly. And so to be sure that there is no transference of thought, be sure that your contact is with Spirit alone, with the Consciousness within you. And then as it escapes from you in this deep breath, or this release, it in all of its purity becomes the law and the life unto them. You watch it in your plants. Watch how they respond to you. Watch it in your pets how they respond to you as long as you have no human thoughts, as long as you are not addressing them humanly, as long as you are not telling them anything or asking anything of them. When you are completely pure—and that doesn’t mean that you have to be concerned if erroneous thought goes through your mind—that isn’t going to get outside of your mind, you are directing yourself to the Father within you. You are making way for the imprisoned splendor to escape, that’s the spirit of God in you, and the very moment that you are still, that you take no thought the bridegroom cometh, the Christ, the Christ, the Spirit of God comes through into expression and that is why—and you may have noticed this because many classes have—when we meditate here as a group if you respond at all and are lifted up, if you feel my meditation, what is it do you think that happened? It is no thought projected out at you. I’m not sending thoughts out here—sometimes 200 people sitting in the room, 300, 400, a thousand in February—it is I am staying in here consciously one and wait until that takes place. And when that comes out, that’s pure essence, pure God, pure Spirit of God and it lifts you up. I if I be lifted up draw all men up to that same level of Consciousness.

          Now in that uplifted Consciousness healings take place. Illumination takes place. Supply takes place. Wonderful things take place to students out here. It would be wonderful if only it could happen to every student in every class but it doesn’t, because it only happens to those who are ready at that particular time. Some students come into our classes for the first time and receive illumination and some don’t even receive it the last time. It has to do with me only to the extent that I’m the instrument through which it happens and I if I’m lifted up make it possible for you, but only for the ‘you’ who is at that moment ready.

          In other words if it were my human will then every one would be lifted up and given their illumination. That would be my human will, but I have no control over that. Therefore, when I do meditate with students and many times we have witnessed that on the very first meditation they have received their illumination—others second or third or twelfth.

          Now all that happens is it is no act of human will. It is an act of conscious union with God letting this invisible Consciousness come forth and then it performs its work. And the surprising thing is that one person has spiritual illumination another person has a fever disappear. Another one has a lump disappear. Another one has unemployment disappear. Somebody else has poverty go out the window. It is the strangest thing but the answer is that Consciousness is the substance of all form. And Consciousness is God. And therefore as we enter this meditation if we have a plant in front of us and this Divine Consciousness escapes, that plant begins to express the harmony of God rather than just the harmony of nature. It responds more, to more than just the fertilization that it got or the rain that it got or the sunshine that it got. There’s a something extra that it received that comes forth through it. That is why it is possible for those who pray to have far better crops, far better gardens than even those with the best of fertilizers, and sunshine and rain. It is possible for those who pray to bring forth more milk from their cows than others do. In other words, we live not by bread alone, not by food alone, not by fertilizer alone, not by rain or sun alone but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. And therefore, the human body does respond in a measure to food. You can always tell that in the experience of people who give up most of the foods in ordinary markets and begin to use the foods in health food stores, the pure grain foods and so forth and so on. You can soon see the change in their bodies the change in their health because the body does respond to pure food in the same way that a plant will respond to its rightful fertilizer or its rightful amount of rain or its rightful amount of sunshine. So it is food in some measure respond to, I mean the body, respond and the health to the right foods. But there are many people who become faddists and believe they’re going to find their health or their eternality in pure foods and they get left. They lose out, because you can only go so far with food for we do not live by bread alone, we live by every word.

          But give a person pure foods, the right foods, and to that the life of prayer, then you’ll begin to see the whole man, the spiritual man. It’s more difficult to try to give’m prayer and a lot of wrong foods too unless the prayer helps him to get rid of his wrong foods and turn his appetite in the right direction, which usually happens. So it is then, don’t expect that your prayer is going to eliminate the need for sunshine and rain on your plants. Don’t think that your prayer is going to eliminate the need for food for your animals and good food.

          Don’t be like the man who discovered one day that he forgot to feed his horse and the horse worked just as hard the next day. So he decided each day he would limit a cupful of grain from his horse’s food, and the horse seemed to go on just the same. But you know what eventually happened. You can’t keep taking a cupful away each day and then in the end not have your horse collapse. So it is, man shall not live by bread alone, but let’s be sure that while we have the ability to eat and drink properly that we do it.

          On the other hand we have the experience of truth not only that Daniel when in prison was fed for, what was it, 40 days on nothing but toast and whereas all the other prisons who were fed that way had weakened and become thin and depressed, Daniel was his normal natural self and had no occasion to change him. And so we have the experience likewise on the war of many people who were prisoners of the Japanese who were either ill fed or not fed and countless numbers did not survive. Countless numbers came out weak and in bad physical shape and yet some managed to come out harmoniously, and when you talk to them you will usually find they were living in prayer in spite of their surroundings. Therefore, we need not feel that we cannot survive long periods even of not eating or even of incorrect eating, but as long as we’re thinking in terms of normal living let us remember this that we do not live by bread alone. We live by this conscious activity of Consciousness. Now watch it. Watch it with your garden, your trees, your animals. Watch it with every opportunity you have with children for they’re the most receptive and responsive.

          And you will see that as you attain this release, this deep breath, their fevers will disappear, their little ills will disappear, their sores will quickly heal and you will see that this Consciousness which escaped from you became the substance of their renewal, resurrection, rebirth. Then, you are not seeking with prayer or God to change something or somebody out here. You are seeking to bring out into expression this released, this inner ‘That’ which we call Spirit of God, and then you witness It in manifestation and it will appear to you as a healed person or an improved animal or plant. Only be sure that you are not trying to connect up this experience with a fever out here or a bad animal out here or something of that nature.

          Watch out that what you are trying to bring forth is this hidden splendor, bringing it into manifestation and let it appear as spiritual identity. Then it will appear to you. To your eyesight it will just be a healing. But inwardly you will know that it wasn’t a healing at all. You have now seen the spiritual life in expression: spiritual being, spiritual harmony—the only reason that after these healings that people succumb to other ills is that they do not maintain the Consciousness in which you have established them. They go back. The Master says, “Go and sin no more lest a worse thing come upon you.” We do bring spiritual healings to people and they go right back to the very state of material thought or consciousness or living that brought it on in the first place. And all they do is in clearing out one evil make room for seven more to come in.

          In other words our life should be devoted not purely to healing ourselves or others but to bringing forth the divine nature of our being. And that means being renewed by the transforming of the mind, transformed by the renewing of the mind. In other words it means developing a whole state of Consciousness in which we do not put reality, power, law into the world of effect but realize that all reality, all power, all law is always invisible. You can never see law. You can see an apple formed on a tree as a bud or a blossom and then turn it into the apple, but you can never see the law that did it. You can only witness the outer expression, but never the law. You can witness, you can sit and watch sometimes as disease is disappearing out of a body and health is being, but you can’t see the law that’s performing it. Spiritual law is invisible. Spiritual law is the only law. You can’t see spiritual life. You can see the body, but you can’t see the life of the body. The life is invisible. Life is invisible. Law is invisible. Being is invisible. I am invisible. You can’t see me. I am invisible. And the reason is I am so big that I wouldn’t fit in any room. I wouldn’t fit in any arena because I fill all space. I am infinite. I am one with God. I can’t even fit into this here because I am from everlasting to everlasting. I can’t fit into this space of a century because I am before Abraham was. I am one with God in nature, in being, in life, in eternality, in infinity, in quantity and in quality. Therefore, I cannot be seen.

          I was before my body was visible. And I will continue to be when my body is no longer visible and I will be where I am now. I will not go any place. I will not depart for I did not come. I was always here—invisible just as before a few years ago I was unknown and invisible to you, but that didn’t mean that I didn’t exist. I just did not exist to you, but I existed. And so it was that I existed before my mother knew me.

          One man had the vision to say before God was I am, before ever there was a concept of God before ever there was anybody to have a thought of God, I am. So as you ponder this, you will find that the I that you really are, you really are life eternal, and you become the life of your pet, the life of your child, the life of your tree, the life of your body. You become the life of your own body the moment you realize the spiritual nature of your identity. And then since you can’t bring this out through thought—you can only bring it out through silence, you engage in a contemplative meditation until you feel an inner stillness and an inner peace and then you take the listening attitude as if, “Speak Lord thy Servant heareth,” and then wait until that Spirit fills you. When it fills you, it is removing all of the sins and diseases and deaths and lacks out here. Wherever there is receptivity there is responsiveness to it. We may not be receptive one day but we may be receptive tomorrow. We may not be receptive this year, but we’ll be receptive next year.      None of us is responsible for our receptivity humanly because it is something that is taking place within us and you may say often in spite of us. It is like this. I told you the other day we are not yet living in an age of civilization. Civilization has not yet reached this earth. We are still living in a state of pre-civilization. Mostly men are animals living by the law of self-preservation. Self-preservation is the first law of nature says man, and then he proves it by killing everybody else to save his own life, by plundering everybody else to save his own fortune. And that is the universal state of human consciousness and yet watch how it is evolving in spite of mankind.

          Within the human span of a few of us in this room we have evolved in society to where one group of nations protects another group of smaller nations. Something that never before happened, never before this century. We find great corporations protecting their employees, providing hospitals, providing retirements funds, providing all kinds of vacation schemes—something that never happened before this century. We find a greater sense of man’s responsibility to man, man’s brotherhood to man, but we find it coming into this century a little here and a little there, a little here and a little there. We do not find it worldwide. We do not find it encompassing even one-third of the world. We do not find these things taking place in China, only beginning in Japan, hardly at all in India or Russia or wherever the big populations are. But you find them coming up here and there in the United States, in England, in France, in Switzerland, here and there in the world so that you can perceive that civilization is dawning. It’s coming into human consciousness. You know there are things taking place today that if they had taken place 30 years ago this world would be at war. This world would be at war if these things that are happening on earth today took place 30 years ago. No country would stand for it. They’d shoot their armies across the border immediately. Yet they’re holding them in check—not entirely for fear of the atomic bomb—not entirely, but partly because there is that in man which is not quite so ready to spring on his neighbor and murder her. In other words you can perceive the dawning of civilization.

          Now it is only a question of time when we will go beyond civilization to spiritual realization in which my self will be your self and your self will be my self and I will understand why it is that if you do it unto the least of these my brethren you are doing it on to me because I am the least of these, and they are me for we are one. I am in you and you are in me and we are in God and therefore what I do to you I do unto myself. And if I do good unto you it is like casting bread on the water and it’s coming back to me. And if I do evil to you it is casting that kind of bread on the water and it is coming back to me. Regardless of what temporary loss you suffer from the evil of another you can be assured of this it isn’t even a marker to what they are going to suffer because as you sow so shall ye reap. And if you sow unto the flesh, you reap corruption. And if you sow to the Spirit, you reap life everlasting. And so if you sow to self-preservation, if you sow to self-gain, if you sow to selfishness, this is the flesh. When you sow to loving your neighbor, you are reaping love or life eternal.

          That is why all of the Master’s teaching was “ye”. Everything had to do with “ye.” “Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free”. “As ye sow, so shall ye reap”. As you do to another so it will be done unto you. “Do unto others as you want them done unto you”. Always you, his whole teaching is you, not God, You, for you can’t change God and you can’t bring God into mortality. So it is only as you change yourself into the immortal and spiritual can you come into God. Therefore, when you pray, if you’re praying for God to do something to matter, you’re out of order, for matter is only a part of the illusion.

End Tape 345 Side Two    

1960 LAUSANNE CLASS

TAPE 345 SIDE 1

 THE NATURE OF GOD – POWER

 By Joel Goldsmith

           Good afternoon. One of the greatest mysteries in all of the world throughout all time has been the mystery of God Power. From the very earliest days men have sought God Power They have sought to bring God Power into this world. They have tried to bring God Power into their personal affairs and in experiences such as we have had in this present century, men have tried to bring God Power into world affairs. They have prayed individually and collectively for world peace—which means they have tried to bring the power of God down into men’s wars. They have prayed for prosperity where there was none. They have prayed individually and collectively to overcome the evils—the major evils—of this world such as we see evidenced in the poverty of whole nations and the diseases of whole nations, in the slavery of whole nations, in the ignorance, superstition.

          Every bit of this praying has had for its purpose the bringing of God power down to earth, the bringing of God Power into the affairs of men. And on the whole, these attempts have been failures throughout all time—from the earliest recorded time to the present. And it makes no difference whether men and women have prayed in or through this church or that church or no church, the results are uniformly the same.

          I do not have to point out to you that for this past 30 years at least, perhaps 40 years, there have been groups, some separate groups and some united groups all around the world that have prayed for the ending of World War I and then the ending of World War II and then the end of the Korean War, and in between they have prayed to establish peace. And you know the results of all of this—a complete failure. Then of course we have an experience such as takes place annually in this trek to Lourdes in which usually 100,000 people all go to one place to pray for health. And out of 100,000 people each year that go there fifteen people come away healed. That isn’t a very great testimonial to the power of bringing God down into the diseases of mankind. And this is only one instance of many because in every religion and in every denomination, ministers, priests, rabbis are praying for the health of their followers. Usually if it weren’t for the intervention of materia medica there would be no help. It isn’t the prayers that save these people; it is the power of materia medica that saves them except again in isolated cases.

          Letters come to our desk—well there isn’t a week that this doesn’t happen—telling of great tragedies in families and then saying why do these things continue to happen. Does God permit them? Is God responsible for them? Or how can we bring God into the experience to prevent such things or to heal the consequences of such things? Indicating again that individually as well as collectively no way has been discovered of bringing the power of God into human affairs on any scale that could be called successful. Again, do not misunderstand me: throughout all ages there have been individuals who have been successful in understanding the nature of God and prayer and bringing the power of God into their individual experience or the individual experience of some of their followers.

          It was thought for many years that the New Thought teachings had found a way to bring God into human affairs. I think that most people will agree today that all that they discovered was how to bring mental power into their prayers—not the power of God but the power of the human mind. Only if you investigate impartially and objectively only occasionally will you find where it is actually the Spirit of God or the power of God that has been brought into these experiences. On the whole, most of the healing work and most of the great benefits that have come into the world through the study and practice of metaphysics has come really through a greater knowledge of the activity of the mind and a greater use of the power of the mind which has no relationship at all to God Power. It is true that it is often referred to as God Power. It is true that many in these New Thought teachings actually believe that they are working with God, with the presence of God and with the power of God.    

          Someday these people must awaken to the fact that they have merely widened their horizons and discovered more about the power of mind—the power of the mind of man, not that mind which was also in Christ Jesus, not that mind which was referred to as God. The question now, as the question always is, not whether or not there is a God, not whether or not there is God power, that is beyond question, but is it possible to bring the presence and power of God into human experience individually and collectively so that the reign of God could take place on earth as it is in heaven.

          Just remember you cannot declare that the kingdom of God is on earth while you are bearing witness to these sins and diseases and crimes on a world-wide scale. You can testify to the reign of God in the experience of those individuals who have solved the riddle of the mystery but the world as a whole is still as it was when Paul announced that, “man is not under the law of God, neither indeed can be”. And it is only as the Spirit of God dwells in you that you become the children of God meaning that you come under the law of God. Paul recognized when he said “I live yet not I. Christ liveth my life.” He recognized that this was only true of himself at that period of which he spoke, that is, after his illumination. He would hardly have declared that I live not yet I, Christ liveth in me when he was still Saul of Tarsus. He could never have said then I can do all things through Christ for there was no Christ alive in him until on the road to Damascus came the experience of illumination. So he was trying to tell us that there is no Christ in our experience. That is there is no spiritual power.

          There is no living by grace in our experience while we are still in our human identity. There is no God watching over us. We are not living under a law of God, a law of protection, a law of purity, a law of living without blood, sweat and tears. There is no such thing until that moment of illumination which brings about the experience of the indwelling God, the God that dwelleth in you or the Christ that dwelleth in you or the Spirit of God that dwelleth in you. Call it by whatever name you will.

          It is an actual moment, an actual moment of transition when something takes place within your Consciousness that sets you apart from what you were when you were Saul of Tarsus—when you were man whose breath is in his nostril, when you were the man of earth. Paul also separates the two in that way. One is the man of earth. The other is that man who has his being in Christ.  

          And so it is pointed out to us that when we are man whose breath is in his nostril, when we are the Son of Man, when we are the Saul man, when we are not living in the secret place of the most high, when we are not abiding in the word and letting the word abide in us, then we are the man of earth. And life is an accidental one. We can have riches today and poverty tomorrow. Then we can have double riches the day after. We can have sin today and purity tomorrow. But on the other hand there are those who will have purity today and sin tomorrow. Why? Because they are subject to circumstances of every day living. They are victims of what happens to their nation or to their race, or to their religion, or to their particular country at a particular moment—sometimes even subject to economic cycles, business cycles that moves them up one day and down the next day.

          And this could never be if the Spirit of God dwelt in them, if they were children of God because we learn this in the same Scripture that if you are living in the secret place of the most high, if you are the child of God, none of these evils can come nigh thy dwelling place. So you see that first of all it must be recognized that there are two stages of life. That one in which we are human beings the way we are born. That one in which we are in ignorance of God. That one in which we are living our lives separate and apart from God. And then that other life which begins in us when the name Saul is taken from us and we are renamed Paul, or when we have died to being man whose breath is in his nostrils and have been reborn as children of God. When we have died to our mortal selfhood and been reborn of the Spirit.

          Now since there is a God the first question that should come up in the mind of a searcher and a seeker is why then are we born into this experience of mortality? And the answer is because of the universal acceptance of two powers. It doesn’t make any difference how it came about or what date it came about. The fact is that it came about that universally there was an acceptance of two powers: good and evil. In Scripture that is referred to as the experience of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden when they are pure and after the Garden of Eden when seemingly they are impure. And of what does the impurity consist? They ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. In other words they accepted, they assimilated this belief of two powers good and evil and thereby they lost their divine sonship and became mortals. They became man whose breath is in his nostril. And it only means that he accepted two powers.

          Now since no religion on the face of the globe has discovered this, since no religion that is now known on earth or of which there are any records—no religion has discovered the origin of evil. They have not been able to teach it. And therefore they have not been able to take their people out of mortality. They have not been able to help them die to their mortality and be reborn of the Spirit because there is only one way to die out of mortality and to be reborn of the Spirit and that is to consciously recognize that mortality consists of a belief in two powers and to renounce it. And gradually accept in your Consciousness the great truth of Omnipotence. That is there is but one power. Now of course this is going to bring about a struggle, a strife within you. This is going to set up within you a warfare which is called the warfare between the flesh and the Spirit. Heretofore you have believed that the warfare between the flesh and the Spirit merely meant overcoming a sex desire and that is utter nonsense. It is complete mythology. The warfare between the flesh and the Spirit is the warfare between your five senses which testifies to two powers and your spiritual intuitive faculty which tells you that Omnipotence is the basic truth of being. If there is any thinker in the world who does not inwardly agree that omnipotence is and must be the only truth—that is that there is but one power, an all-power, an almighty power an omnipresent all-power—if there is any one of any spiritual vision they must see this—that Omnipotence must be the truth because it is evident in every phase of life in which we can behold God at work. It is only absent when we witness man’s work. In other words, man’s ability to misuse his way of life.

          Now when once you perceive that there is a truth, and that the truth is infinite, and omnipresent, and omnipotent, and that beside this truth there is no other power, from that moment on, a warfare begins in you because you open your eyes and all around you, you see sin and you see disease. You see wealth and you see poverty. You see goodness and you see evil. You see justice and you see injustice and there is a warfare immediately that tries to prevent you accepting omnipotence as the real and only law and state of being. Now this warfare within you has been given a very good name in Scripture. It is called antichrist. Antichrist means that which is against truth and that your five physical senses that help this activity of antichrist. Because it tries to make us accept what we see, hear, taste, touch and smell instead of judging righteous judgment. We naturally tend to trust our eyes and so it is that until we know better we believe that there is a horizon where the sky is sitting on the mountains. We are apt to believe that railroad tracks come together in the distance. We believe all sorts and manners of appearances, and only as we become enlightened, do we begin to perceive that there is no horizon up there. There is no sky sitting on a mountain. If we get up to that mountain we will find that the sky has moved back, but it hasn’t moved back. It is where it always was.

          So it is we learn as we walk along the tracks they don’t really come together a few hundred yards away, because when we get that few hundred yards they still come together but now it’s a hundred, a few hundred yards more. And so you could walk to the end of the car track and still find no place where they came together, you were merely deceived by appearances. So it is the Master says, “Judge not after appearances. Judge righteous judgments”. And to apply this spiritually it really means don’t believe what you see, hear, taste, touch and smell because you are perceiving through limited senses. But close your eyes to the appearance and ask yourself, what is the nature of God? And then you will know, whatever the nature of God is, that is the nature of creation because creation is the image and likeness of God.

          All right then, what is power? Well if the nature of God is Spirit, then power is spiritual. What is the nature of law? If God is law, or if God is the lawgiver, the nature of law must be spiritual. What is the substance of the universe? If the nature of God is Spirit, the substance of the universe must be spiritual. What is the nature of your life or my life? If God is life and God is spirit, your life is spiritual. How old is God? If God is eternal and immortal, if the nature of God is eternality and immortality, your life is endless.

          In other words, if you would judge righteous judgment you can only do so by first knowing the nature of God and then realizing that the nature of God must be the nature of all creation for all creation is the image and likeness, the offspring, the outpicturing, the manifestation of God. Then all that God is, creation must be. But if you look at this world and try to perceive its nature you will be fooled by your eyesight or the hearing of your ears. But if you close your eyes to the appearance and go back and seek within yourself for the secret of the nature of God, you will know the nature of your individual life and mine—and his and hers, the human, the animal, the vegetable, the mineral. You will know that God is its being, its life, its law, its presence, its power, its substance, its cause and its effect, and all that God is then, man is and creation is.

          Now once you begin to perceive this, another conflict will be set up in you because questions will arise. Since this is true what are we to do about these appearances. And the old answer always was, let’s go to God and have God change them. Let’s go to God and get God power to do something about it. And so of old they went to Jerusalem, and later they went to Rome. Somebody else went to Mecca. Somebody else went to Boston. But the idea was always the same: let’s go someplace where God is and have God do something about it with God power. Of course the fact that Jesus the Christ said to us do not go to holy temples and do not go to holy mountains for the kingdom of God is neither lo here nor lo there. The kingdom of God is within you—this has been forgotten. But it must be revived again, and it must be revived again within you, for it is you who must avail yourself of the truth since you are the seeker.

          Now, when you begin to perceive the nature of God and you’ll notice then that the works of God are always forever. There’s no changing in the works of God. There is no exception to prove the rule. Nobody has ever discovered a fish sailing through the air. And nobody has ever discovered a bird swimming in the water. Nobody has ever found any exception to two parts of hydrogen and one part of oxygen being water. Nobody has ever found exception to a law of God. Therefore, omnipotence must be the nature of God. Omnipotence must be the very characteristic of God in his government of this world.

          Now, with your perception of this the battle within you begins to subside. Because instead of looking for a God now or a God power to do something to the evils of the world, you begin to perceive their unreal nature. And then you begin to work like Jesus Christ did. When he comes to a crippled man he doesn’t pray to God to heal him he just says, “What did hinder you? Pick up your bed and walk.”

          You begin to understand that why he could stand at the tomb of Lazarus and say I don’t have to pray. Lazarus, come forth. In other words, we don’t need any God power here. God already is Omnipotence.  There’s no other power for God to fight or overcome. There are not two powers in the world. There are no forces contending against God not if God is Omnipotence and God couldn’t be God unless God were Omnipotence because only that which is infinite, omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient could be deity, nothing else; anything less than that would be man.

          Now, the failure to bring God into this world and to solve its problems has its basis in the acceptance of two powers. The belief that there is a God power which is being fought or contended against by some other power—and that we are going to God and have God do something to this other power called sin, disease, false appetite, hate, envy, jealousy, malice, and so forth.

          The very moment you accept these two powers you are outside the Garden of Eden. You are not the Son of God. You are not under the law of God neither indeed can be. The only way that you can bring yourself under the law of God is to stop praying to God for God power and begin to pray within yourself the prayer of gratitude that you have been awakened to the realization of God as Omnipotence, spiritual Omnipotence. The one substance, the only substance, the only law, the only cause, the only effect, and thereby you recognize that all sense testimony whether you see it, hear it, taste it, touch it or smell it is as illusory as the sky sitting on the mountain. And then instead of wasting effort to get God to lift the sky off the mountain, let God alone. And sit back here and rejoice that you have discovered the sky is not sitting on the mountain. And rejoice that you have discovered that what you see, hear, taste, touch and smell with the five physical senses is not taking place, as it appears to be. Something is there just like there is a sky on the mountain there, but they are not what they appear to be in relationship to each other. There is a “you” out here and each one of you has a body, but it is not the way my eyes are seeing it. My eyes are deluded by their finiteness. They are deluded by what I have come to accept as normalcy. I have said this to our students and it is no joking matter that our ideas of beauty differ. There isn’t any one of you who would appear beautiful in the eyes of our Hawaiian friends. You just haven’t become heavy enough.

          And I was reading today in the little book about the Incas, you wouldn’t have been beautiful to the men then either. You haven’t got rings in your noses and holes in your ears. So you see then that we all have different ideas as to what constitutes beauty and what I am looking at when I look out at you isn’t what you or how you are. I am beholding my concept based on my education or my belief or so forth and so on.

          And so it is what you are seeing with your eyes is not what is up here. Of that you may be assured. It is nothing like what you are seeing. What you are seeing is based on the prejudices, and biases, and bigotries and beliefs that have accumulated for centuries and so you are seeing your own image and likeness reflected. But be assured of this that just as out there, there is a sky and a mountain and each in their rightful place so right in here each one of us is in our rightfully place showing forth God’s grace, God’s beauty, God’s immortality, God’s life. And if you wanted to prove it, close your eyes to the appearances.

          And then see how rapidly God will fill in for you and say this is my beloved child in whom I am well pleased. Then you’ll know that you’re not seeing each other as we really are. When we awaken we will see him as he is; when we awaken from this dream of five material senses—not after we die. When we awaken here and now, when we have our Paul experience on the road to Damascus, that is when we are awakened and we see now through spiritual eyes and we see each other as we really are and that begins to make a whole new world.

          Now to bring God power into your experience into the experience of your life and into your affairs, don’t do it by trying to get God to come into your life. Don’t do it by praying to God to do something. Do it by being still. Being very still in the face of any discord, and begin to realize this:

          Be not afraid it is I. Look any storm in the face, any distress, any discord with closed eyes: Be not afraid, it is I. In other words you’re closing your eyes to the appearances. And instead of seeing bad appearances and then trying to get a God power to do something about it, you are closing your eyes to that and acknowledging Omnipotence and Omnipresence. This is I, God. Then you will soon find that when you open your eyes the storm will be still. The conditions will start to change. Why—because you have brought the only God power there is to bear, your spiritual recognition of God as constituting all creation, all being, all power, all life, all substance. The moment you surrender the desire to get a God power to do something, you are in God power. The very moment you surrender the desire to have God do something for you or to have God do something to something, you are in God power. The moment you can rest back, be not afraid it is I. Omnipotence is the only law. Spiritual law is the only law. Spiritual power is the only law.

          What power is there then in man whose breath is in his nostril? What power is there then in temporal power? Only that which appearance—the five senses give it. The very moment an individual has been touched by the Christ—that is by the realization of truth—they begin to perceive, thou couldest have no power over me unless it were given thee of God. What did hinder thee? Pick up thy bed and walk. Neither do I condemn thee. Thy sins be forgiven thee. Why? I am not acknowledging a power in you, but in God. I am not acknowledging a power in acts or deeds but in the substance of all form which is God.

          In other words the moment that you can stand ye still and see the salvation of the Lord, in that moment God power is operating. The moment you are trying to get God to do something to something to somebody for somebody you are outside the kingdom of God. You are only inside the kingdom of God; you are only inside the Garden of Eden when you acknowledge God is the substance of all from. God is the only law unto all being. God is the only life. God is the animating principle of all existence. God permeates the life, and being, and body of all that is. And God is Omnipotence, God is Omnipresence. God is Omniscience. I need not tell God, advise God, implore God, instruct God. I need not seek God. I need only acknowledge ‘be still and know, I am God.’ Be still and know, I am God. Be not afraid. It is I. I in the midst of thee am mighty. I in the midst of thee am life. I in the midst of thee am wisdom. I in the midst of thee am love. I am all in all. And where thou art I am, where I am thou art, for we are one, and not two.

           Do not seek God as if God were far off. Do not seek to bring God to you. Acknowledge I and the Father are one. Here where I am God is. All that God is I am, for God is indivisible, indestructible, one.

          We need not fear material laws, mental laws, legal laws, as we recognize the omnipotence of God as spiritual law. We need not fear what man can do to us if we recognize God as constituting man. So you will discover there is no way to get God power to remove the sky from the mountain. There is no way to get God to separate the railroad tracks. There is no way to get God to do something. God already is. God already is closer than breathing and nearer than hands and feet.  God already is omnipotence. God already is the eternality and immortality of your being. Only judge not after appearances or you too will go out looking for a God power and lose it.

      Be still. Be still and know, I am God. And I am closer than breathing and nearer than hands and feet. Where thou art I am for we are one.

      So you see then, the world has lost its way by accepting the belief of two powers. By accepting the belief of two powers it has to go around looking for a God to do something to that evil power. But the world finds its way back to the Garden of Eden once it realizes God is infinite. God is omnipotent. God is omnipresent. God is all-wisdom, omniscient. Besides God there is nothing else. Therefore we do not need a God power, we need the recognition of God as all and only. That’s why he could say to the storm or to the disciples, who were afraid in the storm, be not afraid it is I. Be not afraid. It is I. There is no other. Isaiah says, is there any other beside him? Besides me, beside the I. I know not any. There is but one and I am He. I am He. I in the midst of you am He. The very I that you declare is He. I am He. I am that I am. I am that I am. That I am that you have been talking about I am. I in the midst of you is that I am.

          The only I am that’s closer to you than breathing is the I that you declare. And as you know that and realize that in that I is embodied all of the God power that ever will be, you will know why you can travel anywhere on the face of the globe. You can live through as many decades as you wish and be free, be joyous, be harmonious just by realizing that this I is God. This I isn’t that limited being you thought it was. This I isn’t a sinner and never was. Paul also tells us he’s too far advanced to be a sinner yet he feels a sense of sin in him. And so with us—we have thought we have sinned. It wasn’t we sinning. WE have never sinned, but we have been aware of a sense of sin in us and we have falsely identified it with ourselves. The moment you recognize that you have impersonalized it, and when you’ve impersonalized it, you’ve given it no person in whom, on whom, through whom to operate. The very moment you recognize this sin is not me, this false desire is not me, this false appetite is not me, this fear is not me, this disease is not me or mine—this is a false sense of the world that I have been entertaining and giving it the label of I, me or mine. And by claiming it we have made it apparently ours, but by realizing this is not I for I is God, therefore this is but a false sense of me, entertained by the five physical senses but because it’s universal and impersonal and not of me, it must die. It must dissolve. It must disappear.

          “Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free”. And the truth is of course omnipotence, and omnipresence, and omniscience. The truth is that God is closer to me than breathing nearer than hands and feet for it is really my identity, the I of my being. God is that which constitutes my life, my soul, my spirit, my mind. God is even that which constitutes my body for it is said that the body is the temple of the living God. And once we know that God constitutes our being we know why in our true being we are pure. We are immortal. We are eternal for we are the very manifestation of God’s own being, the very showing forth of Gods own life.

          That is why we never show forth any glory of our own. We are always showing forth God’s glory. God’s glory shines through our eyes. God’s glory shines through our bodies. God’s glory shines in our purse. There is no personal possession. The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, and all that you have in your purse belongs to God. The very moment you know that there’s no limit to your possessions because all that God is and all that God has is yours. “Son thou art ever with me and all that I have is thine”. Once you know that I, Is God there are no more limitation. Limitation dissolves and disappears.

          Do not then seek God power. Do not seek how to bring God into this destructive world. But rather begin to understand God as the very nature of this world and then this universal belief that there are men who control the destiny of the world—you nullify that. This belief that weather can control parts of the world—you nullify that. This belief that conditions govern the world—you nullify that because no longer do you accept appearances but you understand God as the nature, the substance, the activity and the law unto this entire world.

          Now do you see that in knowing the nature of God, in knowing the nature of God power you also know the nature of prayer because now you know the nature of knowing the truth. And it is in knowing the truth that you are set free. When you know the truth about the nature of God, when, and not the nature of God as it is taught out in the religions of the world, but the nature of God as you have now begun to perceive God, as you begin to understand the nature of God power you’ll begin to understand the nature of how to know the truth that makes you free.

          So it is that even though we haven’t spoken of specific prayer or treatment in this hour yet as you listen to this class again and again you will perceive that all that we have been doing is praying and knowing the truth for an hour.

          Thank you.  

End Tape 345 Side One

1960 LAUSANNE CLASS

TAPE 344 SIDE 2

 PRAYER—THE UPWARD DIMENSION: EARTHBOUND – LANDLOCKED

By Joel Goldsmith

           Good afternoon. We’ll start a few minutes early and have a few extra minutes for our little work. And let us start with a couple of questions. And the first one is on the subject of prayer:

          The question arises because I said the other day that in our world prayer we pray that thy will be done and not the will of man and we open our Consciousness so that the Spirit of God may escape from within us out into the world and perform its work. And the question is asked, “Is this the only form of world prayer?” No. No, God is infinite so there must be an infinite number of ways to pray. There must be at least a million, millon, million ways to pray. As a matter of fact, there can be no such thing as any right way to pray. There can only be suggestions how to enter prayer. But there can be no such thing as a right way or a wrong way except of course that begging God and asking God is just a waste of time, but it can’t be said to be a wrong way because it may lead to something better.

          But actually there is no right way to pray, and the reason is this: Prayer is an individual’s communion with God. That’s what prayer is, an individual’s communion with God. Now there can’t be a right way or a wrong way because any way would be relative in the sense that what might suit you today would never suit you a year from now if you are progressing spiritually, and what might seem right to you today would be kind of laughable five years from now.

          Just think of this, within you is the kingdom of God. Within you, right where you are, the place whereon you stand is holy ground. “The kingdom of God is neither lo here nor lo there”, it is within you. Now prayer is the means of contacting the kingdom of God within you. It is the means of communing with that kingdom of God. It is the means of becoming consciously at one with it. And again prayer is the means whereby we hear the still small voice, where we receive impartations from God. So you see there must be a million, billion ways of that. Each day of the week should be different than the day before. A prayer in the morning should be different than a prayer at night. Why? Because we are going within to the kingdom of God within us to receive some assurance of God’s presence—that is the purpose of prayer—going within to receive some assurance of God’s presence.

          Now, we know theoretically and we know intellectually that God is Omnipresent, but this does not give us any power of God in our life just to know that God is Omnipresent intellectually. There must be an experience with God; an actual touching, an actual at-one-ment, or oneness. There must be an actual impartation from God to you—not from you to God. You must remember the nature of God. God is already infinite wisdom. Therefore, there is nothing at all that you can tell God. Take no thought what you shall eat. Why? Your heavenly Father knoweth what things you have need of. Therefore there is never any reason to go to God and tell God anything.

          Now it is God’s good pleasure to give you the whole kingdom, so therefore you never have to ask God. Now just remember this in your prayer that prayer means that you are not going to ask God for anything and you are not going to tell God what you need, and that really wipes out the old-fashioned idea of prayer. And it gives you something new to work with, and yet no formula—because nobody can tell you how to pray. They can only tell you the nature of prayer and then the rest must be spontaneous. The rest must be an inner joy between you and God. But the joy must come from God to you.

          So it is that since you do not have to tell God anything, and since you do not have to ask God for anything, you are now faced with prayer of a different nature than the world knows about. And so just imagine what happens when you close your eyes and say within yourself:

          Now there’s no need of my telling God anything because God is the infinite wisdom that made this world. God is the infinite wisdom that maintains this world. A God that could keep the sun, moon and stars in their orbits, a God that could keep roses coming from rose bushes and peaches from peach trees, a God that could keep fish in the water and birds in the air, certainly needs to be told nothing by little me. A God of such wisdom as we behold in this world needs no advice from me. And so I notice too that God does not withhold crops from the ground. God does not withhold fish, cattle, birds. God is not withholding any population from the earth. God is not withholding rain or snow. Therefore what right have I to believe that God is withholding anything from me? And actually why should God withhold anything from His own child any more than I as a human parent would withhold anything from my child? It is unthinkable that I have more love for my child than God has for me, or for all mankind. So therefore, knowing that God is the infinite wisdom of this world, and needs no help from me, knowing that God is the divine love of this world and is withholding nothing, how shall I pray?

           And an answer comes back to me immediately: “Let the meditations of my heart be acceptable in thy sight oh, Lord. Let my silence be thy resting place. Let my feeling of assurance of thy presence be my prayer. Let my mind be still and know that thou art God. Let my ears be opened that I may hear the still small voice. Let my eyes be opened that I may seek God’s kingdom, God’s grace, God’s beauty. Let me abide in thee. Let me rest. I know that thou art infinite wisdom. I know thou art divine love. Let me feel thy presence.”

          And this is enough. And you see this would be one form of prayer, but actually it would only be one form out of millions of forms because I could conceive of another prayer along this line:

          Father I seek nothing for myself for if I had everything and the rest of the world were in trouble I could not be happy. And so now I come to thee not for myself but for some wisdom for this world. How shall the eyes of man be opened? How shall the mind of man be opened? How shall I pray so as to bless my enemies as well as my friends?

          And here comes the answer: “Relax. Relax. Where the Spirit of the Lord is there is freedom, freedom from problems, freedom from sin, freedom from disease, freedom from lack. Where the Spirit of the Lord is harmony is. Abide in this word. Let this word abide in you. Harmony will come through. Recognize Me in the midst of the problems of the world. Recognize God as the intelligence of man. Recognize God as the Spirit of man. Even though appearances contradict this, realize there is a Spirit in man. There is. There is a Spirit in man. The world will be drawn to realize God.”

          And so this would be another form of prayer. Well as we read the newspapers today, and we read of this great new problem in the world, and the words, the thought that came to me was—in reading about this latest affair with Russia—that here is an irresistible force meeting with an immovable object. And now what can happen? And you know it just looks as if two powers must destroy the world and now you want to pray. I know I did. And then comes this:

          “In the human world force is power. In the human world the more force you have the more power there is. But here we have come to an irresistible force and an immovable power. Here we come to the absolute extremes of power and now what must happen.”

           And the answer comes back: “Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit. Fear not the armies of the aliens. Fear not temporal power. Fear not the weapons of this world for I say to you that life is not lived by might or by power but by my Spirit.”

          And with an assurance like that you rest. You rest. You must rest because if it isn’t true, nothing is going to help you. If it is true, you’re going to see a whole new dimension in life. But only those can usher in this dimension who have come to the place of recognition that life is not lived by might or by power but by my Spirit, and then stand aside and see the salvation of the Lord. Stand aside without fear, without anxiety, and believe only that life can be solved by the Spirit of the Lord and see what happens.

          This is very easy after it has happened in your own individual life; after you have individually found some disease, some lack, some sin, some false appetite disappear because you withdrew might or power because you stopped the medicine or because you did not rely on the human means, and then saw that the Spirit of God did take over. When you prove that in your individual life, it is easy to trust someone else’s life to this principle and then as you watch this year in and year out eventually you come to where your prayer enables you to trust this entire world to the Spirit of God.

          Now in this connection as I awakened this morning, well I’ll go back—as I awakened yesterday morning, and thinking as I suppose it is natural too with all of us when we waken in the morning—how can we help thinking of what is going on in this world whether it is in Russia, whether it is the election in the United States, whether it is the condition in the Belgian Congo, whether it is the condition that is facing South Africa that is probably more serious then any one of these problems that are in the newspaper—they’re just kept hidden a little bit—for the time being—but I don’t know how anyone can help thinking of these things, and as I awakened yesterday I did and a question framed itself in my mind, “what is the answer?”

           And you know it was almost as if somebody were sitting here in my chest waiting for me to ask that question, and answer it. And the answer came, “There is no awareness of God”. As simple as that? And the voice came back and said, “It is as simple as that. There is no awareness of God.” Where there is an awareness of God that is the Spirit of God. These troubles disappear. I never weary of saying to our classes, look at the peace there is in this room. Look at the peace there is between us, whether we are sitting here in this little group or last week in Holland or the week before in England and the week before in Washington, DC and the week before in Chicago, it was always the same. The room is full of peace and love and harmony, giving, sharing, cooperating. Why? And the answer is, there is an awareness of God. And the moment we have an awareness of God, we’re not fighting each other for anything because there isn’t anything that we want.

          That brought a smile a couple of Sundays ago. I was down in Dartmouth prison in England which is the prison for their very, very bad men and I had the opportunity of speaking at a Church of England service and the first thing I said to the men was I hope that you find something in what I have to say today but you won’t unless you can believe that you haven’t got anything that I want, and they just laughed. They just laughed. They were all there from 5 – 50 years and they just knew they had nothing in there that I wanted. But you see that this is the truth in any group, class, audience, once there is an awareness of God, no one has anything that you want. Oh, you enjoy their gifts, and they’ll enjoy what you have to give them but it has to be out of a joyous heart, not obligation, not duty, not desire, because where there is an awareness of God there is liberty. There is freedom, justice, equity, equality, harmony, peace. There is God’s government and so the whole answer really is to any problem, individual, collective, national, international, an awareness of God. And so this morning when I awakened two words came right into my thought and they made me sit upright to think.

          The first thing that came into my thought was, “earthbound.” You have heard that term. Earthbound-people who live in such a state of mind that nothing but the earth is real to them, nothing but what you can see or hear or taste or touch or smell is real, they, they have no, no Consciousness for beauty, for poetry, for art, for music, for the mystical because all of those are too abstract for them. They, they must have something that you can eat or drink or wear, something that glitters or shines. These are the earthbound. And then along with it came the word, “landlocked.” Landlocked. And immediately I thought of a country in the midst of a lot of other countries and then instantly it took me right here to Switzerland. And I thought, “Yes.” Here, here is an example of what I mean, landlocked. Here is a country situated right in the middle surrounded by a lot of other countries with no outside access. No access to the sea. No access to other nations, just locked up inside of all of these countries, landlocked, locked in. And then I saw the day of the railroad how that broke a little bit this landlocked condition and enabled this land to flow out into the neighboring lands through railroads.

          And then I saw how through the railroads the sea ports were reached, and then by access to ships of other nations that there was less landlocked. Now the landlocked only existed to the extent of being dependent on other people’s ships or other people’s shipping. But at least there was now a wider aspect, an outer pouring, not quite so much landlocked because there was now an access to the outer world and yet the country was landlocked. And then my mind went one step further forward and I saw the air age in which we are now, and all of a sudden Switzerland is no longer landlocked. Its ships shoot right up in the air and they have the whole free air all over the world. They have access to every place that the seaport countries have access to, and they have even more quickly with the air than with the ships.

          All of a sudden Switzerland is no longer landlocked. It’s no longer confined in space. Now in two minutes it shoots up and it has the whole freedom of the air throughout the world. And then that brought me back to ourselves. We are earthbound and we are landlocked until we break out by going upward. Only as our vision goes upward out of this body, out of this world of force, to we get up into a free strata, a free realm, where we’re no longer body locked, landlocked, earthbound, but where we are free souls. You know that all of this world, except the mystics or those on the mystical path, are locked up in their bodies. Their body is the most real thing to them. They’re fastened into it and can’t escape from it, and that’s where their misery comes—being landlocked inside of the body, being earthbound inside of the body and having no freedom. The very first freedom that an individual attains is when they can look in the mirror and say that this body is not Me. This body is not Me. I am Me. I, I am Me. I am Joel. Not this body, this body isn’t Joel. I am Joel, and if the doctors searched from head to foot they couldn’t find Joel inside of this body for I am not here.

          And that was the great mystical statement: “He is not here. He is risen”. That’s the symbology of the Resurrection. We are not entombed in this body. In our Resurrection we rise out of the tomb of this body and realize I am Joel. I am not body. I am Joel and I am not in a body. They could not search this body from top to bottom and find me for I am not here. I do not live in a body. I live in Consciousness. I live in God. I live and move and have my being in God therefore I fill all space. I am here and I am there and I am everywhere. I am where God is, God is where I am for we are one, and that one is not limited to time or to space or to place. And that’s why the materialist fears death because they think that with the end of the body, there comes an end of me. How foolish! I’m not in the body. I never was in the body. I won’t live in the body and I won’t die out of the body for I will never be in the body. And therefore, there is no need to fear death because death is just checking the body at a weigh station while we keep going on.

          We have gotten used to the idea that we can’t tell our money with us and our property—that all—even our jewelry—all has to be left at the probate court and we know that. We’re used to it, but we just can’t get used to the idea that we just leave our bodies there too while we go on, and we do go on because there is no end to the I that I am. There is no end to my identity. There was no beginning to it—no beginning, no end. It coexists with God and it will go right on as long as God is, I am, for I and the Father are one.

           And now the moment you perceive that, the moment you perceive that the nature of your identity is I you won’t be so landlocked and you won’t look for power in the body or in the pocketbook. You will understand now that you’ll attain your complete freedom by rising upward. Only as your Consciousness mounts up and realizes I am not locked in below. I am free to roam the highways and byways of the sky—the highways and the byways of heaven, of Consciousness, of life, of love.

          I am encompassed in love, encompassed in wisdom, encompassed in joy for I and my Father are one. And where God is I am and so I am not landlocked. And I’m not earthbound and therefore I’m not dependent on the weapons of this world and neither is the world dependent on it, but it takes two or more gathered together to know this truth, that we do not have to look on land to see which one has the heaviest bomb or which one throws it first. We do not have to look down here on land to see who’s fencing us in. We’re only fenced in while we’re earthbound. We’re only fenced in while we’re landlocked. The minute our vision goes up, we are free. There’s no limit to our activity, no limit to our freedom. And that’s why as we travel all around the world, we see Swissair wherever we go. So we know they’re not landlocked. We know they are wherever their imagination can send them because there’s nothing to hold them in.

          All of Russia’s wars have really been trying to find an outlet into the sea. She’s fought with everybody to get an outlet into the sea. All she needs to send are airplanes up and she’s not landlocked any more. All of this sense of limitation has been because we can’t see anything higher than down here. We look in the mirror and we see our bodies and then we wonder what’s going to happen to us. All we have to do is get out of that body, and the way to get out of it is the same way that you get out of being landlocked in Switzerland: Get in the plane and go up and you won’t be landlocked anymore.

          And go up in Consciousness. Take yourself up in the word I and try to realize that where I am God is for we are one—not two—just one. I and my Father are one, and the place whereon I stand is holy ground. It couldn’t be holy ground if it were limited or if it were locked in. And then you’ll begin to laugh at these earthly powers, earthly weapons, we have one way up there in the sky—the Spirit of God that dwells in me. This is the only power. This is the only power the Spirit of God that dwells in me—not by might, nor by power but by my Spirit.

          And so we come, just as we’ve come with Switzerland to a new dimension. First earthbound and landlocked and then squeezing out a little bit with railroads, and then squeezing out a little further with ships, all of a sudden we get complete freedom by bounding out into the sky. Well so it is that we are earthbound with force and there are always forces and powers called the weapons of this world. And the whole question is, what force do I use or what power do I use or how do I use it? And eventually they even took to praying to get a God power.

          Just last night reading about the Incas of South America I discovered that their very first prayer was praying to an unknown power to give them food, and give them water. That’s how far back this paganism goes that we indulge. It goes all the way back into antiquity this praying to an unknown power to give us something. Now, all of this indicates that having exhausted all the material powers and all the mental powers, people had to start looking for some unknown powers. And the secret lies in a new dimension: no powers, no might and no power, just my Spirit. That’s the secret of the new dimension.

          Not by might, nor by power. So when you are going to pray for world conditions, please don’t pray for any God powers. Don’t pray for any new powers or forces or mights. But make your prayer a realization of not by might nor by power but by my Spirit will peace reign on earth. Not by treaties. Not by unions. Not by any of these man-made institutions—all of which have failed.

          When they founded the League of Nations in The Hague they were men of good will. When they founded the League of Nations in Geneva, they were men of good will, and when they founded the United Nations they were men of good will. They were all of good will—just stupid. They just don’t have the ability to learn. That’s all.

          There is no way on earth to have peace or harmony or justice or equality or equity as long as we are looking out from this level. None, because every individual and every group of individuals thinking only in terms of me and mine—and so we’re landlocked again. Earthbound again. Only, only freedom will come with the realization of His Presence. Harmony will come with the realization of His Spirit. Health will come with the realization of His Spirit. There is only one secret: there is no awareness of God and where there is no awareness of God there has to be turmoil. There has to be earthbound people and landlocked people. And worst of all is when they’re confined to their bodies; their body becomes the extent of their kingdom, of their nation, of their world. And the only harmony there is, is when the body is harmonious. That’s not true, the body can be harmonious and the world collapse. Or we could be saved when the world collapses but it wouldn’t give us happiness.

          I read today where this one hundred is going to be saved tomorrow. I don’t know what joy they’re going to have after we’re all destroyed. They only have themselves to mingle with. It could get awfully monotonous, couldn’t it? There is no joy in life unless you can witness a measure of universal freedom, unless you can be a part of helping mankind free itself. Now you can’t do that by external means. You can’t do that by joining prayer groups. You can’t do that by enlisting in armies. Oh, if war comes and we’re called, we all serve wherever we can, but that’s not the answer. The answer lies in rising up out of the body, rising up out of our nationalism, rising up out of our prejudices and biases and bigotries and rising up into God and there realizing that there is but one Father and man shall not live by bread alone.

          Man shall not live by bread or bullets or bombs, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. So don’t you see that when you pray, there is no uniform prayer? There is no way to pray the same way day after day. Each time you go into prayer something new evolves. Something fresh comes forth that brings you the assurance: not by might, not by power—only it says it in a million different ways. Not by might. Not by power. Where the Spirit of the Lord is there is freedom. In My Presence is fulfillment. In the presence of God is fulfillment, is fullness of joy and peace and harmony.

          And so you see that The Infinite Way is a way into a new dimension. It is a way out of the old dimension of force and power, out of the old dimension of physical limitations, into an ascending. Ascend in the I that I am. Ascend out of this landlocked self, this body-locked self. Ascend in the word “I.” I and my Father are one. Where God is I am. And where the Spirit of the Lord is there is freedom, and the Spirit of the Lord covers the earth from end to end for God is the life of all being. God is the wisdom, the intelligence, the love. And so each time that you ascend through the word I into God Consciousness your prayer takes on a different form. Each time it’s spontaneous. Each time it’s new and fresh. But each time it leaves you with the same realization: not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit. Peace will come not be might nor by power, nor by treaties, nor by combinations. Peace will only come by my Spirit, “for where the Spirit of the Lord is there is liberty”.

          And so whether you are praying individually for your own experience, for your family, for others or whether it’s worldwide, the answer to pray is receive an impartation from God. Now how you receive it—that’s individual, but receive it because it isn’t what you say or what you think that constitutes prayer. It is the impartation that comes to you from God, the revelation or realization of God’s presence, God’s power.

          There is another question: that has relationship to the part of Jesus in spiritual life, living, study, work. Try to understand the Christ as being the Spirit of God that is in every individual, not realized, not recognized of course. Only those on the spiritual path have been taught that Christ means Son of God, and that the son of God is that which is you, in your true identity. The real you is the son of God. Therefore, the real you is Christ, the spiritual son, the spiritual self.

          Now Jesus is an individual who attained a supreme realization of this. In other words, while the Christ is the true Self of every individual in the world, only those can benefit by their Chirsthood, their divine Sonship, who first of all recognize this truth and then set out developing it. Paul was the teacher who was instructed to reveal this and the manner of it. You will remember that Paul tells us that you are not children of God, that you are creatures who are not under the law of God, neither indeed can be, but when the Spirit of God dwells in you, then do you become the children of God, and if children of God, heirs of God, joint heirs with Christ.

          In other words in your human identity, you have nothing in God and nothing of God. You’re not under the law of God and can never receive a blessing of God and that is why this entire world of people—whether they’re Jews or Christians or Mohammedans or what not—there isn’t a one of them that’s under the law of God or that can have a prayer answered from God. Not a one. Except the rare individual who rises above his teaching through his individual experience and learns that it isn’t your religion that makes you a child of God. It is the Spirit of God dwelling in you regardless of what your religion may be or if you have none. That was the sad lesson that Peter had to learn. Peter thought he was a good follower of the Master. He thought he was a worthy disciple, but when he was called upon to teach the Gentiles, he refused. Why? Well, of course they weren’t Jews so therefore they weren’t children of God; therefore they weren’t entitled to all this good spiritual wisdom. Only Jews, only Hebrews were entitled to that, according to Peter—in fact, according to all the disciples. They fought very bitterly against giving this to anybody but Hebrews because only they were God’s perfect children.

          Now in his experience of the dream, Peter had revealed to him that you must call nothing filthy that is created by God and that was the first sign that he ever had that all the rest of humanity were children of God too even though they didn’t know it. So it was that when Paul set out to teach the Christians, I mean the Gentiles, the heathens, the Europeans, that the disciples fought him on it and even put him on trial because he was daring to go outside of Judaism. But he swung enough of the disciples over to his way of looking at it, so that, it was acknowledged that it wasn’t your religion or lack of religion that made you a child of God, or what your religion was or what it wasn’t, what made you a child of God was, if so be the Spirit of God dwell in you, and Paul could bring that Spirit of God to dwelling in the pagans over in Rome, in Greece. And Peter then brought about an experience of the descent of the Holy Ghost to the pagans under Cornelius showing that the Holy Ghost can come to pagans. The Holy Ghost can come to sinners. The Holy Ghost can come to Mary Magdalene. The Holy Ghost can come to the woman taken in adultery. The Holy Ghost can come to the thief on the cross. It has nothing to do with your religion or not religion. It has to do with the word repentance. It has to do with whether or not we are willing to open ourselves to the vision of God and not ask each other are you a Jew or Gentile or are you a Protestant or a Catholic, but merely do you love?

          Because if you love the Spirit of God dwells in you because only the Spirit of God can love. And I don’t mean selfish love. I mean the impersonal love that’s willing that God’s grace fall on enemies and friends, that God’s grace fall on the saint and the sinner. When we love that much the spirit of God dwells in us because only the Spirit of God could love impersonally like that through us. The personal love is the one that wants to say, “No, no only our people can have God’s blessing or only my family or only my nation.”

          Now try to understand then that every person who attains some measure of spiritual light has attained some measure of the Spirit of God and that means they are in that measure children of God and that the Spirit of God is dwelling in them. Then you will understand that that term, Spirit of God, really means the Christ, the son of God, or sonship, divine sonship, call it what you will, and you have it in the moment of your repentance. That is the very moment that you are ready to let loose of these limiting beliefs, beliefs of limitation, beliefs of separation. The moment that you realize that all that God created is good and that God’s rain falls on the just and the unjust. The moment you are willing to pray more for the enemy than for the friend. The moment you are ready to accept forgiveness as a way of life—in that moment you can realize that to some measure the Spirit of God now dwells in you which means the Christ is in you.

           And Paul speaks of this: “I can do all things through Christ. I can do all things through Christ that dwelleth in me”. Now it wasn’t a man who dwelt in him. He had no man dwelling in him. He had the Spirit of God dwelling in him which he called the Christ. And I can do all things through my spiritual sonship. I can do all things through my divine sonship. I can do all things through Christ, the Spirit of God that dwelleth in me. “I live, yet not I. Christ liveth my life”. Not a man, a Spirit, a Spirit of God. You cannot worship God finitely. You cannot worship God in a place or a space. You have to worship God in Spirit and in truth. Not in a holy mountain, not in a holy city, not in a holy temple, in Spirit and in truth. And the very moment that you know God is too great to dwell in holy temples, you will know then that God isn’t confined in time or space. Neither is Christ. For Christ is the son of God and the son of God was before Abraham, and the son of God was after the Resurrection and the Ascension. In fact, Christ is from everlasting to everlasting. Christ is the son of God, the Spirit of God that dwelleth in you and is awakened and is brought to conscious expression by your recognition and acknowledgment and your willingness that it live in you.

          So it is that when we speak of being hid with Christ in God, we’re speaking of being hid within the Spirit of God, within the life of God, within the mind of God, within the Soul of God, and to understand it better, close your eyes and gently, very gently say to yourself:

          “I. And realize now I am not in my feet. I am not in my knees. I am not in my stomach. I am not in my chest. I am not in my head. Where am I? Why I and my Father are one. Wherever God is there I am. Wherever I am there God is for we are one, inseparable, indivisible one. As a matter of fact He says, ‘son thou art ever with me’. Did you hear that? Thou art ever with Me. Then I am where God is. I am with God, and all that the Father hath is mine”.

          And so I am hid with God once I know that I am not earthbound. And I am not landlocked. For I fill all space. Where God is I am. Wherever God is I am, and if I make my bed in hell, God is there. If I mount up to heaven, God is there. If I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil for God is there. For where God is I am. I am in God. I am hid with Christ, with my spiritual being, identity in God.

          And you see that prayer is a realization of these truths, but you can’t have all of these realizations come in one prayer, or one period of prayer or one moment of prayer, that isn’t possible. But if you pray without ceasing, if you have a period in the morning, or a period at noon or a period at night, eventually you’ll come to where you don’t have periods but where the periods are brought to you. You awaken in the morning with some kind of prayer in your mind, with some kind of a communion with God. You’re busy during the day and thoughts will begin to intrude. And so you’ll find that prayer is never uniform. And that’s what makes prayer fascinating and interesting.   

 End Tape 344 Side 2  

 1960 LAUSANNE CLASS

TAPE 344 SIDE 1

 GIVING, SHARING, FORGIVING IS A FORM OF PRAYER

 By Joel Goldsmith

 Good afternoon.

           Not a warm one though. You know it has been about three-quarters of a year since we were here, and in this time you have been reading the books and many questions should have come to your mind—many, many questions because there are many things in these writings that should be strange to you. No matter what reading you have done in the past there are things in these writings that must be strange and those things are the vital things. The points that are familiar to you are not nearly as important as those things that are strange because it is [though] it is in those strange points that we find the specific parts of the message that are the most helpful to us.

          Let me illustrate that in just a small way. A letter arrived here this morning inviting us in The Infinite Way to join some groups all around the world to pray for peace, and they wanted us to give a list of all our addresses because if there is ever any danger in the world they can notify all these groups to pray. Now you know there never will be any more danger in the world than there is this minute. So if their praying was going to be any benefit this is really the time to be doing it. The world is really on fire even if it doesn’t recognize it. The world is sitting on a time bomb even if it doesn’t recognize it. The world is facing destruction even if it doesn’t recognize it, and if there are any prayer groups in the world that know how to pray to save the world this is the very best day in the week to do it. This is the very best day in the year to do it because today danger threatens from many directions.

          Now, the point that I would like you to see is this. It may not seem strange to you that there are prayer groups all around this world praying for peace. It may not even be strange to you that this has been going on for several centuries, and that peace hasn’t come. But the one point that I would like you to see is that all of that praying is a waste of time and if you haven’t found some new way to pray. If you are not finding in these books something that you haven’t discovered before the books are doing you no good and your study is doing you no good, because what has heretofore been known about prayer hasn’t done much for the individual or for the nation or for the world. And so it is that unless you are finding something absolutely new, absolutely different, then your body isn’t going to be any healthier next year than this year—at least not through this message or your world isn’t going to be any happier or any more secure. It is only in what you find of a different nature even if possible a strange nature—one that will make you ask questions—only in such a point or in such points of discovery are you going to find a teaching that can do more for you than what you have heretofore known.

          And that is why we are really here. Let us not fool ourselves. That had we, any of us, found the peace, the harmony, the safety, the security, the health, the prosperity in the way we were praying, in the way we were worshipping, we would still be at it. We would not be investigating or studying another teaching.

          Therefore, unless you are finding something in these writings, something to startle you, something to open your eyes to past mistakes, something to lead you into a higher or a deeper contact with God, then these books are not going to serve your purpose. And that is why this week you should have some questions to ask as a result of the reading that you have been doing. And if not, then you should be showing forth the greater degree of harmony over a year ago that should naturally follow a year of study of these writings. So do not hesitate if there are questions, write them out and put them on this table before each class so that I can answer them. Because when I leave here this time you again will have a year or maybe two in which to find out whether or not there is something in the message of the Infinite Way that can transform your life or bring into your life greater harmony, greater freedom, greater peace, greater cause for rejoicing that you are on earth.

          It is true, “a thousand will fall at your left hand and ten thousand at your right”. It is true that you will witness during your days on earth many, many terrible ordeals, trails and tribulations going on in this world, but the promise is that, “it shall not come nigh thy dwelling place”. Now the reason that we can be so certain that the problems of this world are not going to be solved overnight, are these. We have mistakenly believed that we were living in an era of civilization. That we were living in a civilized world or in a world of civilized men. Two thirds of this world today, two thirds of the population of the world today, is living in slavery. You could hardly call that civilization where two thirds of the population is in slavery, two thirds of it is in poverty, two thirds of it is not being adequately fed or clothed or housed.

          That isn’t civilization. It may be the dawning of a civilization since one third of the world has at least come out of slavery into a small measure of education, but the educated population of the world is very small. It’s mostly a world of illiterates, and those that are not wholly illiterate are horribly uneducated. And this we’re talking of two thirds of the world. You don’t expect that to be healed by tomorrow afternoon or next week. In the same way, the world hasn’t even arrived yet at a place where its governments are able to govern. There isn’t a government yet that has indicated its ability to govern its own country much more to help in governing the world. The national and the international problems before this world today are greater than they have been probably in our particular day on earth—meaning not that they were solved before but that they were merely undercover before and had not come out into the open. You know before there can be such a thing as a civilization there would have to be a combination of civilized governments, governments headed by men who were civilized, parliaments that were civilized. We don’t have such things on earth today. Each one is merely fighting for his or her own individual interests: election, reelection. They’re not even fighting for their own nation’s welfare yet, that is how far this world is from being a civilized state.

          And so it is that if you are to find first of all the measure of freedom, justice, prosperity, health to which your individual state of Consciousness has prepared you, you will very much need to come out from among them and be separate. You will very much need to know a higher form of prayer than the world has yet discovered. You will need to know a higher form of love, of life because this is what the world does not yet know. The only freedom that you individually are ever going to experience is the degree of freedom you help others attain. The only amount of love that is ever going to come into your life is the degree of love that you can pour out upon this world. The only—the only bit of harmony, prosperity, joy and justice that will ever come into your experience is the degree that you pour forth upon this world. There is none of these things coming to you because there is no place from which they can come to you.

          There is no such thing as love hanging around in the black space in this room.  There is no such thing as freedom or justice up here in space. And if we as a group of individuals wanted to experience love, gratitude, loyalty, fidelity, peace, harmony, prosperity, we have to share it with each other. In other words we must pour it out to each other before it could come back to us individually. Otherwise it doesn’t exist in this room. And so it is as you leave this room you are not going to find justice outside or peace or happiness, you are going to carry them there and then they are going to come back to you. That represents the bread that you cast upon the waters that will come back to you. This the world does not know. And this is why the world is in its condition. It actually sits down and prays, “Give me peace. Give me harmony. Give me health. Give me prosperity”, and who is to do the giving and where is it to come from? And the answer is centuries past and they still sit praying in synagogues, and churches, and mosques, give me this and give me that and they address their prayers to some kind of a blank space—where there’s an unknown God that they hope is listening to their prayers and going to answer them. Why?—For no good reason.

          They haven’t done anything to earn it or deserve it or be worthy of it. Just sat around to pray for it and it isn’t going to happen. When civilization touches this world it will be because of people who put civilization into this world and not sit around praying for it to come to them from some unknown God or from some other people. One nation looks to another nation for its good and that nation is looking to still some other nation for its good, and that nation is looking to a combination of nations for its good, and its all nonsense because good does not come from, “man whose breath is in his nostrils”. Good comes from our ability to place good in the world—to let good flow out from us.

          Of course, prayer is going to save the world. Of course prayer groups are going to save the world; they’re the groups who are not praying to get something—not even from God. Those are the groups that are praying God show me how to serve God and man. Show me how to bestow charity on my neighbor, whether it’s my neighbor in Africa or India or China or Europe. Show me how to serve. Show me how to put love into this world. The prayer groups aren’t serving who are praying to get good out of this world because it’s not coming from anywhere. Good flows out from the center of your and my individual being or it just doesn’t happen.

          There is no record in the New Testament of Jesus praying to God for health or for food or for clothing or for housing. To pray aright means to open one’s Consciousness to receive the gift of God and the gift of God is instruction in the Word. And instruction in the Word always compels us to action. When we receive instruction, the instruction always is, give and forgive and pray for, not pray for your friends, pray for your enemies. Forgive seventy times seven. Give bread. Give meat. Give wine. Give water. When instruction comes from the most high it is always an instruction in how to do good not how to get good. No instruction comes from God on how to receive. It is how to give, how to do, how to act, how to be. Those who have contact with God have no need for getting, have no need for seeking, they have no need for adding to themselves because if they have contact with God they have contact with allness—with all good whether life, fruit, love, and they need never take thought what they shall eat, what they shall drink or wherewithal they shall be clothed.

          Therefore those who have contact with God have it but for one purpose: to be shown how to put love into this world, how to give light into this world, how to be a transparency or an instrument through which the grace of God can touch human Consciousness and enlighten it. The world has no need of any more groups or individuals praying to God to do something. It has need of an individual here and there to acknowledge that God’s work is complete, that this earth is full of God’s grace: in the air, on the earth, in the land beneath the earth and the waters beneath the earth. God’s fullness fills this earth. There’s no need to pray to God for more of it. Love—there’s no need to pray for God’s love. Every single one of us has been given the capacity to love. If we’re not using it, praying to God for more won’t add it to us. We have to use the amount of love that is instilled in us since before we’re born. There isn’t an individual on the face of this globe who doesn’t know that they have greater capacities for love than they are using, greater capacities for giving, greater capacities for forgiving. Why bother God then? At least not until we’ve used up all of the capacity for loving and giving and forgiving that we already have.

          So it is—prayer is going to be found not in asking God to give peace on earth. Prayer is going to be found to be a realization that peace already exists if—and in the degree that—we are willing to be peaceful.

          Now your idea of peace and mine differs from that of the world. All of the world wants peace, but on its terms. If only it gets what it wants first then it will agree to peace. We have come a step further in the line of realization and we know that to ask for peace on our terms is not to ask for peace at all but for war—individually or collectively. To ask for peace means no terms, no ifs, no consideration, just peace, and then let’s work out each problem as it arises without the threat of force, without the threat of war. In other words, if any question were to come up now in this room between us, we could settle it in peace because we could thresh it out until a rightful solution came. And the only thing that would stop that is if somebody said, “But I have a gun.”

          That would stop it because then there’s no desire for peace. There’s a desire for someone to get their way, and that isn’t peace. The way of peace is this: there is no force. There is no coercion. There is only the realization that there is but one Father, one creative principle and that is God, and that we are brethren, and therefore, ours is a relationship of family relationship. Now it makes no difference whether we are white or black or Jew or Gentile The relationship of family still exists because we call no man on earth Father, only one, the Creative Principle, God, that is our common Father. Once we acknowledge that we can settle any question that comes up in this room—whether it’s one of property, whether it’s one of rights, regardless of what it may be we can settle it as long as we have started out with that we’re not trying to settle it on my idea of right, but on the idea of justice.   

          This is equally true nationally and internationally, but the world can’t come to that until it is first civilized. It first must be civilized to the point where it is ready to acknowledge that we do not prosper at each other’s expense, but in proportion to our sharing with each other. It depends on whether you are looking at life from the uncivilized side that says, nothing counts except that I get or the civilized side which says the more I give the more I have, therefore all that I seek is the opportunity for greater giving, greater forgiving, greater sharing. Certainly this is a fantastic idea in the uncivilized world. It is only in the world of absolute Christianity—not the world of Church-ianity, the world of Christianity in which it has been revealed that our only having is in proportion to our sharing, our only having is in proportion to our giving and our forgiving and our resisting not evil, and if there are still some thieves among us to let them run away with their plunder because in the kingdom of God there’s an infinity more for us. We do not have to live on yesterday’s manna.

          So it would make no difference if each day of the week everything we have is stolen from us; we have the next day to start over in. If, if we have reached a state of civilization in which we live by grace and not by might and not by power—in which we live by God’s grace, not by man’s favor. So it is, prayer must be taught. The prayer of the world must not be accepted. It must be rejected. It has failed for too may thousands of years and the reason it has failed is that its motive is wrong. Its motive is getting, and [Christianity teaching then] Christianity’s teaching is that one’s only motive in prayer should be giving, sharing, cooperating, benefiting, forgiving, holding no one in criticism, judgment, condemnation.   

          Now as you come to the study and the practice of the principles of The Infinite Way you will learn that you can have nothing but what you express, that you are one with the source of all good. You are one with the life-stream, the stream of eternal, infinite, immortal life. That you are fed not by bread alone, but by “every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God,” and that you do not have to look to man whose breath is in his nostril because you live by grace. Now to read this, I suppose is beautiful, but that kind of beauty has never appealed to me—only the beauty of practical living, only the beauty of proving principles. Beauty of words is meaningless in religion. Beauty of ideas that prove practical and demonstrable, beauty of ideas of justice, mercy, freedom, this is a different kind of beauty. And this is the kind of beauty we are looking for and this is the kind of beauty in life that I have sought, that I seek and that I hope to express—this beauty: I am one with God. I am one with all that God is, and I am one with all that God has and I am an instrument, or a transparency, through which God’s grace flows and if only I can let enough of it flow out through me, from me, enough will flow back to me to take care of my daily needs with twelve basketsful left over each day.

          Our concern must never be prayer with the idea of getting. Our idea must be prayer with the idea of giving, forgiving and sharing, otherwise we’re treating ourselves as if we were barren trees asking our neighbor for some of its fruit to hang on our limbs. Like a Christmas tree all hung up with lights, and nothing on it to eat. The only fruit that is tasty and the only fruit that feeds us is the fruit that flows out from us—not that which comes to us, that which flows out from us like the fruit that grows on trees.

          Prayer will have to be studied and practiced and understood, but prayer with a whole new meaning. We must have a new concept of prayer before we can pray aright because the old one has failed. Just as we must have a whole new concept of God before we can pray aright because the old concept of God has failed. All those who are praying to God for something are wasting their time. All those who are praying to God for something are living in past centuries.

          If God is withholding anything from us, God isn’t worthy of being prayed to. If God has anything left to give us, God isn’t worthy of being prayed to. But there is no such God. There is no such God that has anything to give. God is a givingness. God isn’t withholding sun, moon or stars, or tides. God isn’t withholding fruit from trees or flowers from bushes. God isn’t withholding grass. God isn’t withholding rain. God isn’t withholding fish from the sea or birds from the air. God isn’t withholding do re me fa so la se la ti do. God isn’t withholding two times two is four. What is God withholding? Coal from the ground. Diamonds in the ground. Pearls in the sea. God isn’t withholding. This earth is full of God’s glory. The heavens declare the glory of God. The earth showeth forth his handiwork. All that there is testifies to God’s infinite grace. Pray to God for more? It’s a waste of time and it is an insult in the face of God.

          God is already expressing infinity, eternality, immortality, and our function is to be a transparency through which that grace is poured upon this earth. Certainly there are always states of Consciousness further along than the masses. Moses was far ahead of his people, so was Elijah, so was Isaiah. Jesus was a million years ahead of his people, so was John. There always have been people far ahead of the states of Consciousness of the masses and that is why it is said, “from those who have much, much is expected”. So it is there are those who have attained some measure of civilization. You can look around the world to see how few there are, but from those who have attained some measure of spiritual enlightenment, cultural enlightenment, educational enlightenment, these are the ones who are responsible for pouring forth all that God’s grace has given them because not one of us would have what we have but for God’s grace.

          Not one of us would have what we have of awareness of life, awareness of love, awareness of abundance, awareness of God’s grace if it weren’t for God’s grace. Therefore having received it freely, it is our function to give it freely and each one according to the measure and the degree of his light.

          There are ways of praying which help to open the Consciousness of those who are still in darkness and we have to learn how to pray that way, how to bring spiritual light into darkened human Consciousness. We must learn how to pray that way.

          We can lift the burden of guilt that is carried by much of this world. A great deal of the diseases of this world are caused by people carrying guilt complexes—some for wrongs which they have done of a serious nature, some for wrongs of a very mild and unimportant nature and others for sins of omission, sins which really haven’t been executed at all, and yet their sensitiveness carries or enables them or compels them to carry a guilt complex and eventually this results in disease. This results in unease, lack of ease, discomfort, and we can, if we learn how, we can remove a great deal of that burden from the earth because we can pray the Prayer of Forgiveness. And that Prayer of Forgiveness will reach those who are needlessly laboring under their burden. The only ones who must continue to live under the burden of guilt are those who are consciously, specifically, continuously doing evil. There is no help or hope for them until they awaken because the key word is repentance: “Turn ye and live”. “God has no pleasure in your dying”. God has no pleasure in your punishment. God is not punishing anyone. That the Master made clear—we punish ourselves and God has no pleasure in our doing it, but our punishment only lasts while we are in the act of our wrongs. At any given moment of repentance or desire for forgiveness, we can be freed. And even if we can’t accept it if there are those in the world who know how to pray the Prayer of Forgiveness, they can release us from our guilt complexes and set us free to be healthier, to be happier, to be freer, and so there are those ways of blessing.

          There are always ways of giving that help to lighten man’s load. Just this very day also I received a card from way off in Korea. Someone instead of sending me personally a birthday gift had sent a care package of agricultural tools to Korea and here is some family now out in Korea with tools to dig around in their garden or farm because someone was thoughtful enough instead of sending me a box of candy that wouldn’t help sent them a box of tools that will help. It’s a way. It’s a way of being a blessing. It is being an instrument for God’s grace that farmer little knows out in Korea how God acted in mysterious ways to bring him his tools. He may really believe that it was some good-natured person who sent that to him. That isn’t true at all. It was somebody’s impersonal love for me and that’s God in action as impersonal love, so it was really God who met that farmer’s need. If he only knew that, he would be helping to free somebody else. If only he didn’t believe that it’s just some generous American with lots of money. If only he could recognize that this was impersonal love in action, he’d help to set somebody else free.

          So it is. Oh, there are so many ways in which prayer can be made effective. And on different levels of life: the very practical one of giving, sharing, benevolence, the higher more spiritual way of forgiveness, the still higher way of opening human Consciousness to receive more of spiritual enlightenment, and in between there are still a thousand ways in which our givingness can be instruments in creating a new world of civilization.

          Now, personally I don’t often give credit to those who claim they believe they’re doing good when they’re doing evil because I can’t quite see modern man as being that stupid and so I really believe that much of the evil that’s being done in the world is being done by those who know right well that it’s evil and don’t care. But, in any case, it isn’t going to stop except through prayer because human nature has a way of perpetuating itself rather than seeking ways to reform itself. And reform has to come through those who wish not merely to reform human element but who wish to introduce spiritual element into human consciousness. That is where the great reforms come from.

          One of the greatest reforms in modern centuries has been this entire idea of freedom, and justice, equality. The events which came to us out of the French Revolution, The American Revolution, the Brazilian Revolution, and all of these other revolutions that have either overthrown churches or overthrown governments or overthrown tyrannies in order to establish men’s rights on earth. Now these were not human reforms, these were spiritual reforms and in every case they were begun by individuals who were endowed spiritually. If you can go back to the beginnings of all of these movements for freedom, you will find they had their beginnings in men and women who were spiritually endowed and who thought it a privilege to die if necessary that future generations might be born free. That takes spiritual endowment because the materialist believes that with death we comes to an end. It is only those spiritually endowed who have no fear of dying because they know that living or dead they are still living. Neither life nor death can separate me from the life and the love of God and only those who are spiritually endowed are absolutely certain that whether they walk this earth or the next plane, they are still living and therefore they have no hesitancy whatsoever in giving their human frames if only it will help to establish someone else in freedom, justice, equity, equality, mercy. So it is—only those who are spiritually endowed can be the instruments through which peace on earth is to come. And no one that is spiritually endowed is sitting around praying to God for peace or praying to God for anything else.

          Those who are spiritually endowed are already sufficiently one with God Consciousness so as to know that all that can ever reach mankind must reach it through the Consciousness of the individuals who are on earth or have been or will be. It must come through our Consciousness or the Consciousness of mankind. God’s work is established and if we darken all of these windows even though it may be light outside, that light cannot come into this room. And all of God’s grace and God’s freedom and God’s abundance and God’s life is already established on earth. It cannot reach mankind except through the Consciousness of those who are willing to be transparencies to let the light into human Consciousness. And be assured I’m not speaking of the groups that are asking God for peace or telling God what we need on earth.

          So it is to be a part of the world of prayer means first of all to know God aright, to know the nature of God, to know what God is and how God operates, then to learn the nature of prayer so that we can pray aright: the prayer of efficacy, the prayer of a healing Consciousness, the prayer of restoration. And to do that we need to forget much of our religious past and see if we cannot discover a religious present and future. And of course there is no better place to begin than within one’s self because God has not hidden from you individually any of his secrets. On the contrary, God has implanted in you every so-called secret and it is within you now awaiting your bringing to life. When the master taught that the kingdom of God is neither lo here or lo there. It is not to be found in holy mountains or holy temples—that it is to be found within you, he wasn’t trying to fool anybody. He was trying to reveal. He was trying to reveal that which had been hidden from man by the church. Certainly the church says you must come and spend all day Sabbath day here. Certainly you must come in every morning and do something here and give something here. Certainly it has to find a way to perpetuate itself. And there’s no better way than hiding truth.

          Let an individual discover the truth that the kingdom of God is within you and you won’t have slaves on earth any more. You won’t have an uncivilized world. You won’t have a world groveling at the feet of political masters, religious masters. Let this truth be revealed that the kingdom of God is within you, and that you can turn to the Father within you for all of the grace that you will need throughout this world and all of the worlds to come and that you’re not dependent on favors from, “man whose breath is in his nostril”—whether he has political titles or ecclesiastical titles. You are dependent only upon the grace of God which is established within you since from everlasting to everlasting, before Abraham was I, God am in the midst of you and you can turn to that God within you. Then you will help to free mankind from the slavery in which he finds himself.

          Whether or not you believe it, it was in the newspapers just a week ago, the top representative of a big church announcing that it’s God’s will that the Negroes be slaves unto them, and although it was a Christian teaching, he proved that by the old Testament. Yes, a whole—well half of a continent is being ruled on that basis by a church: that you were meant to be slaves for us because 4,000 years ago your ancestors sinned against us. Well, that’s an exaggerated case. Oh, a factual one, but I mean it’s an exaggerated case of the wickedness of men in high places. But none of it would be possible if it were universally taught that you are not dependent on the grace of any individual in high places but that the kingdom of God is within you. And that you can learn how to pray within you, and that the place whereon you stand is holy ground. So you can pray just as well in your bath tub as you can here. And you can pray here just as well as you can in any church on earth for the kingdom of God is where you are. It’s neither lo here nor lo there, it is where you are. There’s nothing wrong about praying in churches. In fact it would be wrong to go there and not pray. The wrong is in believing that that’s the only place to pray in.

For praying should be without ceasing, in bed and out of bed, on your feet or on your knees scrubbing the floors. Praying is without ceasing because it is only effective when it is realized that the kingdom of power is within us and that it must flow out from us to the world, that nothing is being released into this world except what we release of good, of love, of life. And as we as an individual group, or as a group of individuals, as we cease turning to God for anything but turn only for enlightenment to pour out upon this world, for more grace to share with this world so that we become greater instruments for an outpouring, in that degree will we serve the world and at the same time be praying for ourselves because what we get is only the reflex action of what we give. And nothing more can come back to us then what we send out.

Someday everyone will be high enough in Consciousness to learn that what we do to another we are doing unto ourselves because there is but one Self, because there is but one Father within us. There is but one life, one being, one Soul and therefore my Self is the Self of you, your Self is the Self of me for I am in you and you are in me and we are in God. This is the great revelation: you are in me and I am in you and we are in God for we are one. And only those who learn that because this is true that we are members of one body that what I do to my right hand hurts my left, or hurts my foot, what I do to you, the harm I do to myself, but what I do to you of good I do to myself, fore there is but one Self. When we learn that the history of the world will change. When we learn why the Master said, “inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least one of these, you have done it unto me,” because we ultimately learn this is true.

 Anything that we do unto the least in this world we are really doing unto ourselves and it’s up to us to choose whether we are doing good or doing evil. So you see that in the message of The Infinite Way there is a great deal that may not be familiar at first reading. There is a great deal that is or should be strange. There is a good deal that is new in religious unfoldment and so it is that in your studies be sure that you are understanding these principles because understanding them enables you to demonstrate them. And in demonstrating them, don’t think for a minute that you’re limiting your demonstration to yourself, but whatever you demonstrate for yourself you are helping to demonstrate for mankind just as that friend and student who demonstrated her love for me with a little gift ended up by demonstrating harmony and more abundance for a farmer in Korea. And so should our lives be.

          Thank you.   

    End Tape 344 Side 1

1960 HOLLAND OPEN and NEW YORK UNITY CLASS

TAPE 341 SIDE 2

THE MEANING OF TRUTH TEACHINGS

By Joel Goldsmith

 Good Evening. It is a joy to be here and to all of you who are here, it is a joy to be with you, more particularly, as Reverend Paulson said, because we are uniting in the Spirit. And regardless of our approach to Truth, we can unite because the Principle of Truth, as long as we are following the Christian, mystical path, is One. There is only one Principle regardless of how many different ways we approach it.

 When the Master, Christ Jesus, was giving His message, He was a Hebrew rabbi, speaking in the synagogues and speaking on the highways and the byways of the Holy Land. And because He was a Hebrew rabbi and because He was speaking to Hebrew people, they thought that He was just giving them another slant of Judaism, another facet of the Judaic teaching.

 They did not realize at that time that He was pointing out to them the errors of the Hebrew teaching that they were receiving and that He was pointing out to them a higher dispensation, a newer dispensation, a complete change from their Judaic teachings. He made it very clear to them that this day that they spent in the Temple, the Sabbath day, was really not as important as the church made it seem, because man was not made for the Sabbath, the Sabbath was made for man.

 He made it clear to them that all of this running to the synagogues, more especially the need for it every year, was not as necessary as it seemed, because God could not be found in holy mountains nor even in that Temple of Jerusalem, because the Kingdom of God is neither lo here, nor lo there, the Kingdom of God is within you. He made it clear to them that the sacrifices that were so much a part of the temple worship was not only unnecessary, but it was wrong. He made it clear that God hath no pleasure in your sacrifices. He made so many things clear, or tried to, so that He could lead them into a higher realization of the nature of God, the nature of prayer, the nature of true religion. And it is for that reason that the Sermon the Mount is of such importance.

 He made it clear to them that ye have heard it said of old, this is what was given to you in that ancient Hebraic dispensation, “But I say unto you … “ and then He gave them a teaching completely contrary to that in which they had been educated. And so it was, that actually, the Master gave to the world a new teaching. It was not merely the teaching of the Hebrew religion with a few new touches, it was an entirely new dispensation.

 Those who were able to perceive that were able to follow him into the higher consciousness. You will remember his own disciples couldn’t follow him all the way, that even after the crucifixion and the resurrection and the ascension, even after this, Peter was still adhering to the old teaching of not eating the meat of pig, still conforming to the dietetic laws of the Hebrew teaching. And all of the disciples, remember, refused to let the teaching of the Christ be given outside of the Hebrew dispensation. They made it mandatory that an individual be a Hebrew before he could be admitted into the teaching of the Master. And it was only years and years later, when Paul made it so clear that this teaching of Christ Jesus was not meant for a sect, a church, a religion or one people but that it was meant for all people, that some of the disciples were won over and finally consented that this message be given to the Gentiles, that this message be given to anyone or everyone that indicated an interest in the message. Some of the disciples never accepted that, and always remained what they were in the beginning, just members of a Hebrew sect.

 Now, when we come to this present age, there are still many people, including, many students of Truth, who actually believe that the Truth teaching of today is just the same teaching that they had in their former churches, only with a few additions, like spiritual healing. They still believe that the Truth teaching of today is just another of the Christian teachings with the addition, perhaps, of spiritual healing or emphasis on the demonstration of things.

 The Truth student will only begin to make real spiritual progress when they begin to realize that the Truth teaching must be studied and understood from the standpoint of a Truth teaching, and not with the regard to whatever their own religion may have been in the past. Not that a Truth teaching deviates from the teaching of Christ Jesus but that is does deviate from the teachings of the various Christian religions.

 Differs, how? And it is only when you begin to understand “how” Truth teachings differs that you will begin to understand your progress or lack of progress. You will understand why it is possible for you to be healed or why you are not being healed. And so I would like to point out to you that these differences between the ancient and the new are sometimes as startling as the differences between “What ye have heard of old” and “What I say unto you”.

 To begin with, Truth teaching reveals the nature of God. And there is no other place today where you can find the nature of God revealed except in Truth teaching. For instance, you have undoubtedly heard this of old, that God punishes you or God rewards you. But if you are entertaining that concept of God, you are not only not in Truth teaching, but as a matter of fact, you are preventing your own healing, healing that may be physical, mental, moral or financial, because there is not God that punishes or that rewards.

 The teaching, that as ye sow so shall ye reap, is an absolutely true teaching. But you will notice that is says nothing in it about God punishing you or rewarding you. It is as “ye” sow that “ye” shall reap. In other words, it is your conduct or your thought that reacts upon you, and it has nothing to do with God. Until you can see that God is too pure to behold iniquity, until you can begin to see why the Master could say to a woman taken in adultery; “Neither do I condemn thee, thy sins be forgiven thee;” until you can see why the Master could say to the thief on the cross; “This night I will take you with me into Paradise;” until you can see that, you are not understanding the nature of God. And you will be continuing to keep yourself under that karmic law of “as ye sow, so shall ye reap”.

 There is no need for anyone to accept punishment. There is no need for anyone to look for reward. Because in the Truth teaching it is revealed, God is Love, God is too pure to behold iniquity, and if you have offended, neither do I condemn thee, thy sins be forgiven thee. Not once or twice or three times, seventy times seven, the Master says that your sins must be forgiven you. Every single day you start your slate fresh and with no penalties from yesterday, only the penalties that you bring about today. Which at any moment of the day, you overcome with the realization that I of my own self, do not sin, but I do find a universal sense of sin in me, and in the realization of that, free yourself.

 In the same way, you have been taught of old to pray to God to heal your sickness, but do you not notice that all over this world there are ministers and rabbis and priests praying to God to heal the ills of the members of their congregation, and not having any success with it. That is why the churches of this world are becoming interested in spiritual healing. That is why they are interested in Truth literature because their prayers to God to heal their sick have not been fruitful. And therefore, if we as Truth students are still praying to God to heal us because we deserve it, it is not surprising if we are not getting results, if we are not finding fruitage.

 When the Master healed, he never once prayed to God to heal any of the sick who came to him. The Master healed the sick by knowing, that since God is All-power, there is no power to this condition that confronts you. And so he could say to a crippled man, or impotent man, a paralyzed man, “What did hinder you? Pick up your bed and walk.” What power is there but God? “Pick up your bed and walk.” He could say to a blind man, “Open thine eyes.” He did not pray to God to heal the blind man, he merely said, “Open thine eyes;” inferring there is no power here to keep those eyes closed.

 You dishonor God if you believe that there is a power in any condition, any power in any condition. It is only when you recognize God’s Omnipotence that you are aligning yourself with the spiritual Power that heals. Many of you can be healed of many things and help to heal others, if instead of accepting the universal belief that we are going through terrible times, times of great evils, if you will only stop that. Stop praying to God to overcome these evils, stop praying to God to overcome the evil men and women, or the evil conditions, for there aren’t any!

 These conditions that you are witnessing in the world today, which the newspapers call “evil”, they aren’t evil at all. They are the breaking up of evil. The evil was when we were indulging those things that now are being corrected. We are in an age today when the evils of man’s inhumanity to man are being corrected. We are in an age where the inequality of the races, religions and colors is being corrected. We are living in an age where those who heretofore have been refused education, culture, refinement, are now having these things opened to them. You call this evil? Oh, no, no, no, no! This is right now the age of the passing of evil and there is a reason for it.

 There is a reason why there is this breaking up of evil conditions throughout the world, and the reason is this. Since the introduction of Truth teachings, we have been given an understanding of some Bible passages which have never heretofore been explained. And it is because we now know and can demonstrate those passages of Scripture that we are bringing about; we, the Truth students. And please be assured of this, I am referring to the Christian Scientists, I am referring to the Unity students, I am referring to all the New Thought teachings that have a spiritual basis when I say to you that we, as a united Truth consciousness, are bringing about the conditions that are now looked upon as evil in the world, but which actually represents the breaking up of evil. And it comes about in this wise.

 Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. Now, where is the Spirit of the Lord? It isn’t in declarations, it isn’t in reading, it isn’t in sermons. The only place where the Spirit of God is in active manifestation is where an individual is in meditation until the Spirit of God comes through and takes over.

 The Presence of God is not in the mind, the Presence of God is not in thoughts, the Presence of God isn’t in mental powers. The Presence of God is where God is realized and demonstrated. In other words, when you meditate, regardless of what method you use or regardless of how many affirmations you may use to get into the Spirit, if you meditate until there is an answering response, until you feel within yourself a release or a rest or a relaxing, or until you feel within yourself that the Presence of God is on the field, or until the still, small Voice speaks to you, if you meditate until then, you have released the Presence of God out into the world. It will do something to your own mind, It will do something to your own body, but It doesn’t stop there. It goes out, and It does not merely bless those who are in this room.

 Let me tell you of an experience that happened just two weeks ago today. We were in London and I was giving two talks, one at 7:00 P.M. to a large group, and one at 9:00 P.M. to a group of our sort of inner circle of students. Those who have been with us enough years to really understand the Principles and have a demonstrable understanding of them, and really to be dedicated to our work. And during that hour to talk, following that first hour, I myself received a tremendous uplift. I was “high in consciousness”, if we may use that term. In other words, I was more or less absent from the body and present from the Lord. It was a beautiful experience. But you can be assured that I wasn’t treating anybody or praying for anyone. I was merely giving forth a message of Truth as it spontaneously came through me. But the very next day, I had a telephone call of one patient in England that during that period was completely released from a condition of mental unbalance which was causing her to be incarcerated in a mental institute. But in that period of our work, she was completely and wholly released.

 When I arrived here in the States just a few days later, there was a letter in my mail from a student in Canada, who had some time before asked for help because she had become totally deaf in one ear. And evidently up to this minute, the help had not been realized. However on this same Sunday, and in those hours of this work in London, all of a sudden a complete release came from her, or through her, and her hearing was restored, but in its fullness, in its completeness. Then a few days later, came a letter from the West Coast, telling me of a man who had asked me for help, and who during this period had been completely freed of the presence and the pain of a cancer.

 Now, this is what happens when any individual is in meditation and feels the Presence of God. Not because the individual is a healer; God forbid that anyone should ever believe that they have healing power or spiritual power, for all Power is of God, not of man. But in the degree that a man, or woman or child meditates and feels and realizes the Presence of God, out through them escapes this whole perfume and atmosphere of God, and It touches those who have attuned themselves. In other words, It touches your relatives, your family, your friends, your patients, your students. And it may not touch all of them at the same time but it will touch those who are attuned and ready for the experience of their uplift.

 So it is! Every time that you meditate, every time that you have a period of silence in which you are not seeking things, in which you are not trying to demonstrate a home or companion or supply, you are merely trying to demonstrate the Presence of God with you, the minute you attain that, an atmosphere goes out from you. And do not be surprised if you have helped the situation in Africa, or the southern States, or the election in England, or the election in the United States. Because wherever the Spirit of God is, there is liberty.

 And again, don’t go back to what you have been taught about God punishing or rewarding, because God’s rain falls on the just and the unjust. And it may very well be that those who are called the greatest “monsters” on earth today may be the very first ones to respond to your Christ impulse. Why? They have the greatest need, they have the greatest hunger, they have the greatest awareness within themselves that something is missing!

 It has been said, you know, in truth that it is easier to heal a sinner than a saint, and it is, too. But the reason is, the saint is so blown up with their ego and the idea of their goodness and their self-righteousness, that God simply can’t get past. Whereas the sinner has really emptied the vessel. He knows, “I’m no good,” he knows, “I’m not good, I’m not worthy, I’m not deserving.” He has emptied himself out and made himself ready….but God, you come in and take over…and in that absence from self, be assured God does. Don’t you know, well, those of you who have had experience with sinners, with crime in any form, you know the great hunger there is in those people for something worthwhile, even if they cannot call it God.

 When you overcome the concept of God as one who gives or withholds, or one who punishes or rewards, and you begin to realize, why God is Being, and God is Being closer to me than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet. God is really the Almighty at the center of my being. The Father within me is God, the Presence within me is God. I am never separate and apart from God. And it really makes no difference if I am the thief on the cross or the woman taken in adultery, God is still closer to me than breathing, and ready to say, “Neither do I condemn thee … thy sins be forgiven thee.”

 Remember, “Though you make your bed in hell, I am there with you. If you walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I am there with you.” And all we have to recognize is, not that ancient teaching that God is separate and apart from us because we sinned, not that God is separate and apart from us because we were ignorant, but rather the Christ message. “I will never leave you nor forsake you,” never! And He doesn’t say, “Never when you are good,” or “Never when you are healthy,” not even, “Never when you are dead …. or alive.”

 But rather, “Neither life nor death can separate me from the Life of God, or the Love of God, or the care of God, or the infinite abundance of God. Neither life nor death, nor sin, nor purity can separate me from the Love of God. And the greater my need, the greater the Love that I find embracing me. The greater my needs, the greater my sin, the greater my forgetfulness, the greater my sickness, the greater the measure of Love I find encircling me, embracing me.”

 You see, it is absolutely necessary to come out from these ancient superstitious concepts of God until you understand the God of the Gospels, the God that never leaves you, the God that never judges you, or criticizes or condemns you, the God that never punishes you in this world or the next world, and the God who does not demand that you read so many pages each day, the God that doesn’t demand that you go to church so often, the God that doesn’t demand that you belong to this church or that church. But remember, it is the God who has no church, the God who recognizes no church, where church only becomes an instrument to draw you into the Love of God, where church only becomes a vehicle into which you can move and there find a togetherness, a united-ness, a Oneness in God.

You can do it outside, but the church makes it possible to have a place where occasionally you can meet inside. As long as you do not believe that being in that church is and of itself a virtue, only when you can believe in the one, true God, whose dominion is within you, whose place is within you, whose Love and whose Law is within you, even, even when you are walking outside, through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, or when you are walking outside, lost in a desert.

You see, healing work is accomplished, actually, by only one thing, and that is the realized Presence of God. You may attain your realization of the Presence of God through something that you read in your Unity writings or literature, but you could just as well attain your realization of God by something that you might read in the Christian Science literature, or the Infinite Way literature, or the Bible itself, or one of the more ancient teachings. It isn’t what you are reading that heals you, or who the author of it is, or which organization promotes it, it is what degree of vision or enlightenment do you get from what you are reading so that you can settle into a meditation until you feel the actual Presence of God. Because when you feel that Presence of God, it is in that split second of realization that the healing consciousness is at work for you, for those who look to you. It is only when you attain that moment of realization that healing takes place.

Now, I say this to you because you have the opportunity of asking your practitioners, your teachers, if it isn’t true that when they meditate and have that split second of realization, that the healings take place, or the inspiration comes through. If one needs a lecture, that comes through for that split second of realization. If one needs a sermon, if one needs the secret of an invention, whatever it may be that is our human need, it comes into our experience only because of that second of realization of God’s Presence.

You can reach that realization through….oh, I know of a thousand books of inspiration that an individual can sit and read, and then all of a sudden put aside and attain that moment of realization, but it is that moment of realization that does the work. If you have prepared the way by not being cluttered up with that ancient concept of a God that is giving or withholding, a God that will give you, if, under certain circumstances, a God that will give you if you do this, that, or the other thing, a God that will withhold if you do not do this, that, or the other thing, you first must overcome your false sense of God.

You, first of all, to succeed in any Truth movement, you must come into an awareness of God that really means a God of love and a God of wisdom. When the Master says, “Your Heavenly Father knoweth that you have need of these things,” he is saying to you that you need not tell God anything at any time. And if you are telling God anything at any time, you might as well know that you are on the wrong path for spiritual demonstration. Because you are virtually saying, “Isn’t it nice, God, that I know more about me than You do, and I know more about my needs that You do. I even know more about what the world needs that You do, and so I am telling You.”

You see, that is a concept of God that many people still entertain, that you must tell God what you need, that you must tell God what this world needs, you must even tell God that we need peace on earth. He knows it more than we do. Indeed, if God could only be personal for a second, He’d cry tears over us the way the Master did in Jerusalem when he could say, “Oh, Jerusalem, oh, Jerusalem, I would take you under my wings but you just won’t listen,” that’s what God would be if God could be personal for a little while. He’d cry real tears over us. Trying to tell God things that we know, but I suppose we must believe that God does not know.

And again, the Master follows this by saying, “It is God’s good pleasure to give you the Kingdom.” Is there any need to ask, any need to petition, beg, plead? And so we can do away with telling God what we need, and we can do away with asking for something. Because according to these passages, God already knows, and it is God’s good pleasure to give us the Kingdom.

How, then, shall we bring ourselves to receive that which God knows we need, and of which it is said, that it is His good pleasure to give us the Kingdom? How do we prepare ourselves to receive our good? First of all, by learning that power is in the Word of God, not the word of man. And thereby, learning how to meditate so that when you sit back you can say sincerely, “Speak, Lord, Thy servant heareth,” and then make yourself as receptive and responsive as you can to receive God’s Grace.

Only by the impartation from God are the problems of the earth solved or dissolved. “When He uttereth His voice, the earth melteth.” The very moment that you become aware of an impartation from within, the discord out here begins to melt, the change begins to take place, but it has nothing to do with what you said to God or asked of God for that was just wasted time. It is only when you settle down into the listening, attentive attitude….ah, yes, and then become fruitful, because most of us are living a lie.

When you say to God, “Thy Grace is my sufficiency in all things,” you have to be very careful that you do not also say, “But I need a little rent, or companionship, or a home, or employment.” You have to really mean “Thy Grace is my sufficiency, and if you chop my hands off or tear my eyes out, I will not ask for anything beyond Thy Grace, and I will be satisfied with Thy Grace, with Thy Wisdom, with Thy Love.”

You see, it is just a carry-over from these ancient forms of religion that makes us say, “God, give us our daily bread.” Yes, if we could say, “Give us our daily bread,” the way the Master said it, that would be well, because he wasn’t thinking of baker’s bread. He was not thinking of the meat on a butcher’s table when he said that I am the meat. When you understand the Master and know that bread, to him, meant the Word of God, meat meant the very substance of Life, water meant the very bubbling up of joyous eternal Life, that wine meant inspiration, divine Impartation, when we stop praying for material things and begin to pray for that Water that cometh down from Heaven, that Wine that cometh forth from God, that Meat and Bread which I Am, then, you see, we can truthfully say, “Thy Grace is my sufficiency in all things.”

There is no greater prayer, there is no greater prayer than “Thy Grace is my sufficiency” and then a silence, then an absolute silence that God’s blessing may pour down upon you. Of course, God’s blessing will come first in the realization of His Presence, but then secondly, it will come as the tangible supply of everything needful in your experience. Of course, if you go to God outlining what you think you need, you may be overlooking God’s blessing, which does not always come the way we expect it. It is always wisdom, in going to God, not to have an idea of how God’s blessing is to come to us, what form it is to take. It is always better to remain in that nebulous “Thy Grace is my sufficiency,” and have no ideas at all what form that Grace is to take.

You see, we are all victims of teachings, not only religious, economic, political. We are all victims of teachings that have been handed down to us from previous generations. And the reason we are victims is that those religions, and those politics, and those economic principles may have been all right for their day; looking back on them now, I certainly do not believe it. But even granting that they may have been the best possible at that time, they are outmoded in our time, and they are outmoded for one reason.

 We are entering an era of life in which you shall not live by might or by power. You shall not live by taking thought, for who by taking thought can do even the least of these things? And if you cannot by taking thought do the least, how do you expect to do the greatest? We are entering a period of life where life will not be by struggle or strife, by might or by power, but where life will be lived as Children of God, by Grace, Heirs of God. Life will just unfold as naturally to us as the sunshine breaks through in the morning, the stars break through at night. It will just be a normal, natural unfolding process in which we will always be on the receiving end; never on the striving or the struggling end.

 And do not think it is farfetched. It was promised of old that none of the evils shall come nigh thy dwelling place, if only you make your dwelling place the secret place of the Most High. The Master promised that if you would abide in the Vine, that you would let the Word abide in you, that you would bear fruit richly. And all you have to do, and you may follow me now in doing it, first of all, see in your mind’s eye a branch of a tree, walking down Broadway, all by itself. See that branch of a tree, no matter how flourishing it seems to be at this moment, you and I looking on know that it is entering its doom. Every step it takes, it is using up some of the life that is still in it, but from nowhere is coming any renewal, from nowhere is entering into that branch anything. Therefore, all that branch can do is keep right on withering and withering and withering, until it drops.

 And this is a human being, and this is the way the human race is living. Exactly! They are walking up and down the street, and all there is to them is this. And every day they are using up a day of their life. Every day they are using up a day of their earning capacity. Every day they are using up some measure of their ability to study, or to think new thoughts, or to renew themselves. And the Master knew that and he said that they are a branch of a tree that is cut off and withereth. But he said, “If you abide in the Vine…”. Now let’s visualize that branch. Let’s graft it back onto the trunk of the tree, the Vine is the trunk of the tree. In those days He had no tree handy, He was talking from the standpoint of the grape vine.

See now the branch of the tree connected to the trunk, and now look down that trunk all the way to the bottom, right down into the ground, and see the roots there. And then note that the roots are drawing up into themselves all that exists that is necessary to them from the earth around them. And as it enters the roots, there is a Force, a Presence, a Power there, call it “Nature”, call it “God”, that is transmuting what have been drawn up from the earth, sends it up through the trunk, out into the branches. And the first thing you know, green shoots appear, and leaves, and blossoms and fruit. Think of it, all this fruitage on the branch. Why? Because it was connected with the whole tree and the tree was connected with its Source. And we call that, mystically, rooted and grounded in God.

So it is, the connecting point between you as a branch, and the tree, is your consciousness. So that, if you consciously declare, remember, I said consciously, if you consciously declare, “I and the Father are One, I live and move and have my being in Him, I am rooted and grounded in God, so that because I and the Father are One, all that the Father hath is mine.” Scripture says, “Son”, branch, “Thou are ever with me, and all that I have is thine.” Now you are consciously remembering that. You are consciously remembering that you live in God, and God in you, and that you and God are One. And that you are Heir of God, and joint heir with Christ to all the heavenly riches, and because of this, your consciousness now is a receiving place through which all of the good comes up from the God-ground, pours into you and through you and out from you as fruitage. Therefore, the Master taught, “Ye shall know the Truth and the Truth shall make you free.”

 Therefore, when you overcome the old concepts of God, a giving God or a punishing God, or withholding God, or a rewarding God or a punishing God, when you overcome the belief that God has a certain religion and begin to understand that the only God there is, is closer to you than breathing, the Kingdom of God is within you, and you begin to abide in this Word, consciously, and let this Word abide consciously in you, you are then practicing the Presence of God. You are practicing the Presence of God, you are communing with God, you are One with God. And then and only then can you begin to live by Grace. No longer by might or by power, no longer by striving or struggling, no longer by unfair competition, no longer by mental powers, now you can relax in Him and live by Grace because you have brought yourself consciously into Oneness with Him.

 And Reverend Paulson told you that when you are One with God, we are One with each other. Ah, yes! Not only we are One with each other, because the Love of God that is flowing through me, now is flowing through you. The Love of God that is flowing through you now is reaching me. We are already One in God. But even more than this, you are One with your good. The moment you become consciously One with God, you become One with your good. And if it has to unfold, then, as home, or companionship, or transportation, or employment, it will come but without taking thought; without taking thought for what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink, or wherewithal ye shall be clothed. You will only have to take conscious thought for the remembrance of your Oneness with God.

 And don’t waste time condemning yourself for your sins of the past, the sins of omission or commission. Always abide in the realization, “I am forgiven seventy times seven.” On the other hand, don’t hold anybody in condemnation who has wronged you, for the price that you have to pay for the realization of God’s Grace is the forgiveness, the praying for your enemies. That is the only price that is demanded of us by the Master. You must forgive seventy times seven, you must pray for the enemy, and then you are the Child of God.

End Side 2

1960 HOLLAND OPEN CLASS & NEW YORK UNITY

TAPE 341 SIDE 1

 UNDERSTANDING GOD AND PRAYER

By Joel Goldsmith

I think most of you know that just one hour ago we arrived, and so we have had a whole hour of holiday. But this is really only the beginning of what I know will be a beautiful week.

 Every year since I first came to Holland with this Message, we’ve had a most beautiful experience. Many of you have been listening to this message of The Infinite Way since my very first trip and I know that you are at least beginning to understand why it is that there is this message and what it is that I am trying to say that should be different in your ears. It should be different to what you have heard before if you are hearing it correctly.

 Ever since man ran into his first trouble on earth, he has looked for some way to solve his problems and history shows us that he always sought to solve his problems through material means, that his most natural instinct was to find a great power, a greater power, than his problem. And when he came to the end of human solutions, he began to seek for something super-human, something greater than human, and so began a search for what eventually became gods. Because they may have found one god to start with, but that god did not satisfy all of their needs, and so they looked for another. And they found another and another and another until men in different parts of the world were worshiping a dozen gods or dozens of gods.

 There was a different god to meet every need. If we needed a big crop of fish, why we had one god for that. And if we needed abundant crops, we had a god for that. And if it was health or beauty or fertility, whatever it was, a different god appeared. And even in war, we found gods that would help us destroy our enemy. Of course, it wouldn’t destroy our allies, only our enemies. But as you so well know, all of this proved fruitless, these gods did not really perform, these gods did not meet the needs of the people. And so instead of there being recognized certain gods who actually performed, in every part of the world there was a different god or a different set of gods, different mode of worship.

 Well, we may pass over many, many centuries hurriedly to come to the time of Father Abraham, when he, having received enlightenment from further east, accepted one God. Now actually the problems of the world would have been solved by Father Abraham had they not made the mistake of going to that one God for all the same things that previously they had been going to many gods. In other words, they were not praying aright. And when we do not pray aright, it really makes no difference whether we are praying to one God or whether we are praying to dozens of gods, there is the same lack of answer.

 It isn’t really a discovery of what is God so much as it is, first of all, the realization that there is only one God. Of course after all of the centuries that have passed since Abraham, you would imagine that this world now is in agreement that there is only one God. But if you are familiar at all with even contemporary religion, you will know that almost every sect, every denomination, every religion has a God of its own; “And your God is not that right one, it is always our God that’s right. You are undoubtedly going to hell because you haven’t the right God.” On the other hand, the very same person who is convinced that he has the right God is being told by someone else, “You are going to hell because we have only the right God.”

 In our modem age they have been trying to break down bigotry and bias, prejudice, by having organizations like “The Brotherhood of Christians and Jews”. You would think that at least as long as they are going to have a Brotherhood that they would agree that there is only one God, and they do. There is only one God but it’s “my God”. The Jewish God is not the Christian God, the Protestant God is not the Catholic God, the Catholic God is not the Vedantist God, and the Vedantist God certainly is not the Taoist God. And so even in what we like to consider this enlightened age, we have not yet agreed, not even among the intellectuals of the world, we have not yet agreed that there is one, universal God. Whether we speak of the God of Jews or the God of the Christians or the God of the pagans, there can still be but one God.

 We would be far along on the path of universal peace if only we could agree that there is one God, and that it is a universal God, and that whether you pray a Jewish prayer or Protestant prayer or Catholic prayer or Hindu prayer, still there must be but one and the same God. That, at least, would fulfill the Master’s teaching, “Call no man on earth your father, there is but one Father, the One in heaven”. And if only we could agree that this is true, then all the rest of us on earth would be brothers and sisters regardless of which church door we went into. And even if we went into none, at least we would be in agreement that whether we are white or black, or yellow or brown, that still there is but one God and we be brethren. This alone would be the breaking down of bias, prejudice and bigotry, without trying to be tolerant, just being truthful. But acknowledging one God is but the first step to the solution of our problem.

Whether the problem is an individual one or a collective one, whether it is a problem of yourself or your family or your community, or whether it is a problem of the nation or a world of nations, we have only covered one half of the ground when we have acknowledged that there is but one God and that we, all of us, are offspring of that God, heirs of that one God; joint heirs. Because the second step has to do with making contact with that God and that can only be done through prayer.

Prayer is the only means of contact with God. There is no other way, there never has been any other way, and there never can be any other way of making contact with God, other than through prayer. And here is where our next and greatest step has to be taken away from all that we have previously been taught about prayer. I am speaking now of most men and most women.

 Going back again to those of our ancestors who worshiped a dozen gods, you will find, those of you who have studied the ancient religions already know, that the people prayed for food or for crops or for rain. They always found something that they, themselves, could not provide and then sought it from their deity, as if actually God were withholding it and by their prayers they were going to get God to let loose of it.

 Then we come again to Brother Abraham, the friend of God, and we find this same mistake perpetuated. We find them still going to God to pray, not only for the things they thought they needed, but they emulated the example of their pagan brothers, they even prayed to God to give them victory in war. They prayed, as the pagans did and as pagans still do, for victory in war. “Help us to destroy our enemy”.

 We have never left the age of paganism. And we still pray as if a god, who art God, could destroy one and leave another, or as if any of us on the face of the earth had attained such goodness that we deserved to be spared while others were being destroyed. Is there a nation of people on earth who really believes that they are good, good enough to deserve God’s Grace, and their neighbor across the sea deserves the heavy hand of God’s destruction? Yes! Yes, there are people who still go to church to pray, “Save us, and destroy our enemies ….. Do this for us, but withhold it from our enemies.” It is as paganistic a prayer today as when it was voiced by those who had a dozen different gods.

 So it is, as long as men and women continue to pray for things, whether it’s for what ye shall eat or what ye shall drink or wherewithal ye shall be clothed, or whether they pray for homes or for automobiles or for safety or for security, as long as they are praying for some “thing”, their prayer is as paganistic as it was five thousand years ago. And as long as an individual is praying to God for me or for my family or for my nation, it is as paganistic as it ever was at any time in the world’s history because it displays an ignorance of God.

 God is not a respecter of persons. God’s rain falls on the just and the unjust.  And so if we are to bring the Grace of God into our experience, individually or collectively, we must first of all learn how to pray. And be assured of this, the world, as a world, does not know how to pray. And the proof of it is, “By their fruits, ye shall know them”. And the fruitage of the world’s prayer is certainly not peace on earth and good will to men, not yet! And it isn’t a universal abundance, not yet!

Probably one belief sets up the whole of the paganistic beliefs about God and prayer that are still entertained, and that is the belief that it is possible to get God to do something for you or for me, or for my family, or for my nation. Until this belief is wiped out of the thought of an individual, he has absolutely no possibility of receiving God’s Grace. As long as an individual believes that he can be set apart, or that because he belongs to this faith or that faith that he has an “in” with God, a pull, an influence with God, he’s far, far, far from the ability to realize God’s Grace.

So our first step really must be to turn to Scripture, and to turn within, and see if we cannot attain a higher concept of God than we now entertain. And we must know this; that our concept of God has not yet reached the kindergarten stage if we believe we can pray to God for something and get it, or if we believe we can pray to God for something for me or for you, and get it. We haven’t even entered the kindergarten stage of prayer. In fact, we have not come out of paganism. We have not even made the first move out of paganism while we believe that God is a respecter of persons, or churches, or nations or religions.

 If we believe that God is in any way responsible for the sun, the moon, the stars, the rain, the snow, we must know that these things exist not for you or me, or for your nation or my nation, or the members of your church or my church, they exist universally for all who wish to avail themselves of it. If we believe that behind the scientific discoveries of the world that have made automotive engineering possible, airplanes possible, wireless, all of the great electrical achievements, and now all of the atomic achievements, if at all we believe that behind these things there is a Principle, certainly that should teach us, then, that there is nothing personal about God’s Grace. Because these are available to anyone who wishes to open their mind or consciousness to them.

 Certainly, if we look at the history of paintings, of statuary, of art or literature in any form, and if we believe at all that God is the Source of these and the Source of the inspiration of these and the Source of the art of these, then certainly we must know that God is no respecter of persons, or religions or nations, but that God’s Grace is a universal one. And it belongs to anybody who will open their souls, open their consciousness, to receive; whether they want to receive art, or literature, or languages; whether they want to receive inventive ability or scientific discovery ability. Whatever it may be, it is open and available to anyone.

 I am sure that for awhile it shocked many people in the United States to find that one of the great scientific discoverers, a man who has added a great deal to knowledge of scientific facts in the States, is a Negro, born of parents in slavery. I am sure that it must shock a lot of people to learn that some of our great discoveries, some of our great works in the world have come from, not your religion or mine, or not your belief or mine, or not your race or mine. And must not this open us to the realization that God’s Wisdom is available to those who open themselves to receive it? The fish are in the sea in every part of the world, close to the bad people and the good ones, and the black ones, and the white ones. Fish are in the sea and birds are in the air. God is no respecter of persons. Let any individual open their consciousness to receive the Grace of God, and they will receive it and not because God is choosing them particularly, but because God is as universal as sunshine and anyone may have the warmth and the light of the sun who will open themselves to it.

 First of all, we must understand God, and we must understand God not as the pagans did, as an individual holding out the things that we need and forcing us to our knees to make us pray for it or sacrifice for it, we must understand God as love but as universal love. We must understand God as “That which is closer to us than breathing, nearer than hands and feet”, regardless of who we may be. We must understand God to be the Light and the Life of all being; the Wisdom. Then when we have found within ourselves an acceptance of God as Universal Being, as Universal Life, as Universal Love, as the Life of the human world or the animal world or vegetable world or mineral world, Universal Life, when we have acknowledged a God of that nature and the God closer to us than breathing; a God that enables us to say, “The place whereon I stand is Holy Ground;” a God that enables us to say, “Whither shall I flee from Thy Spirit; if I mount up to heaven, Thou art there, if I make my bed in hell, Thou art there, if I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, Thou art there; whither shall I flee from Thy Spirit and Thy rain falls on the just and the unjust;” once we have opened ourselves to that God, do you know that we are halfway home in our search for harmony, safety, security, peace, abundance? Not by desiring any of these things, merely by coming into an awareness of the God that really is. That is why Scripture says, “To know Him aright is life eternal”. The world ought to know by now that they do not know Him aright because they have not found life eternal. They are having a hard time stretching it out to three score years and ten with this bomb hanging over our heads.

 Now it is true that to know Him aright is life eternal. It is true that from the very moment we begin to understand God as the Life of our being, the Life of all being, we are beginning to understand God aright. The very moment that we acknowledge that God has placed cattle on a thousand hills, and crops in all the soil, and fish in all the sea, and birds in all the air, that God has done this not for you or me, and not for Jews, and not for Gentiles, and not for Orientals but for God’s own Grace for His children, the moment that we have acknowledged that God has done all of this for His children, not for a personal you or me, from that moment on we are getting closer to the Throne of God. Because we now can learn the meaning of praise and thanksgiving which is one of the highest forms of prayer.

 You cannot praise God or fight God for anything that you receive.  And those who are praising God and thanking God for something they have received, are praying amiss because God did not send it to you, God sent it to earth for all of us, no matter who we may be.  And the very moment that you begin to change your prayer, your praise and your gratitude, the very moment that you begin to change the form of saying grace at your table; if you do it; and instead of thanking God for what is on your table, as if God had anything to do with it, and begin to thank Him aright. Thank Him because He grew the crops, thank Him because He grew the cattle and the fish, thank Him because He made all of this universe possible for us. Then when you are thanking Him for His Grace on earth, and realize that it is here for all of us. He does not deliver it to your table or to mine; He has placed it here on earth. And He has also said, “Son, all that I have is thine”.

 Now just think. The minute we give up the idea of personalizing God, the minute we give up the idea of personalizing our sense of prayers and gratitude, and begin to be grateful with every meal we eat, be grateful that there are vegetables and fruits in all the lands on earth for all the people. Be grateful that there are fish in every sea and birds in all the air. Be grateful that the sun and the moon and the stars are governed by God, the incoming and the outgoing of the tides governed by God. Be grateful that man does not have something to do with it or it would be in a mess. Be grateful that the Laws of God are under God’s jurisdiction!  Roses come from rose bushes, peaches come from peach trees, apples come from apple trees. Why? Because man cannot interfere with that, that is the province of God. He has not done it for you or for me.  He has not even made tulips for Holland, they’re for all the world. You just appreciate them more and that’s why you have more of them!

 So it is, anything that we really appreciate unselfishly, we can have an abundance of, it is when we begin to love it selfishly that we find we’re choking off our supply. Just be assured of that, that you can watch it in your gardens, the minute you start growing things for you, you have put limitation on it. And when you plant your gardens with the realization that anybody and everybody can come along and enjoy their beauty and their fragrance and their color, in that moment, you are starting to demonstrate abundance, abundance, infinite abundance! Personalize it, and it begins to dry up.

 So it is, this thing of saying grace, “Thank you, God, for what you have on my table,” what about all our neighbors’ tables? Is that no concern of ours? “Love thy neighbor as thyself”. We should learn to say grace with very meal, but let that be a praise and a gratitude that the crops are in God’s hand, and the things of earth are in God’s hand, and because they are in God’s hand, they’re universal, impersonal, impartial, and they are meant for all men. And if all men do not have them, that’s their demonstration, or lack of it. Because it is said that if you abide in the Word and let the Word abide in you, you will bear fruit richly. But if you do not abide in the Word and you do not let the Word abide in you, you will be as a branch of a tree that is cut off and withereth.

 So you will discover that if you abide in this Word of prayer, if you abide in this Word of God, if you understand God to be Love and to be Life, if you are praising God, thanking God for universal good and for its ever availability, you will bear fruit richly. The very moment you try to personalize God and siphon Him down into your garden, you shut yourself off, you become as a branch of a tree that is cut off and withereth.

 The whole secret of life lies in understanding God aright, then in understanding prayer aright. Prayer must never be selfish. Prayer must never be a going to God to do “me” a favor, because in the very instant that I am seeking it, I am certainly neglecting my neighbor, and desiring something for myself without any thought of my neighbor. And this is not loving thy neighbor as thyself.

 That is why it astonishes many people, even many who believe they know the Bible, when they are reminded of the fact that the Master said, “It profiteth you nothing to pray for your friends, you must pray for your enemies,” and then He tells you why, “In order that you may be the Son of God.” Think on that and you will know where our mistakes have been. We have prayed for our friends and for our allies and for our families, and mighty little praying for the enemy and for the stranger without the gate. And yet it profiteth you nothing to pray for your friends.

In other words, prayer, in order to be the prayer of a Son of God, must be the recognition of God as equally your Father and mine, the Father of the enemy and the Father of the friend. And we must pray for our enemy the same as the Master prayed for Judas Iscariot, not to condone their offense but, “Father, forgive them, forgive them, they know not what they do.”

 Have you ever had the experience of feeling that you had done something wrong for which perhaps you were either being punished or from which you couldn’t get your peace? Have you ever had an experience whereby you said to yourself, “If only I could be forgiven” or “If I could only forgive myself.” If you have had that experience, you will know exactly what it means to pray for your enemy because there isn’t an individual under the canopy who has not, through omission or commission, done something or left something undone that should not have been so.

 And just think what it would mean if we, those of us who are in this room, those of us who have something to regret in life, something for which we are sorry, something we know we should not have done, think, if in this moment we could be assured, “My sins are forgiven me.” Think of it, if we could have the full and complete recognition, “There are no more offenses charged against me, I am free, I am completely forgiven.” Why, do you know there wouldn’t be a disease within a hundred miles of our bodies the very moment that we would realize that every sin of omission or commission has been completely erased from consciousness.

 And this I can say to you, forgive those who wrong you, forgive those who have persecuted you, or your race or your nation. Forgive and ask God’s forgiveness, knowing that whatever has been done has been done through ignorance, and you will fulfill the Lord’s Prayer. “Forgive us our debts as,” in proportion as, “we forgive our debtors.” Stop and think how many times you have put a rope around your own neck in praying that very prayer. “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors,” and then not forgiving them, and finding ourselves not forgiven. Then you will know why that you only become a Child of God when you start releasing everyone on earth from their sins, from their offenses. The moment that you begin that, you, yourself, are released.

 Actually, there is a mystical reason for it, one that is never taught in any of the religions except the mystical religions, and that is this. There is only one Self, God is the Self of every individual because there is only one Life and there is only one Mind, there is only one Soul. Therefore, God is the Self of every individual, and that means that I am you and you are me, for we are One. You are in me and I am in you and we are in God, and therefore, what I do to you, I do unto myself. What I do of good unto you, I have done good unto myself. The bread that I have cast on the water comes back to me. The evil that I do to you, or the good that I leave undone unto you, is the good that never reaches me.  Because I am in you, and you are in me, and we are one in God!

 There is only one Selfhood, and what I do unto another I am doing unto myself. And when I learn to forgive, be assured, I have learned how to be forgiven. When I have learned how to be philanthropic, I have learned how to receive philanthropy, not charity, love. When I have learned to give love, I have learned how to receive love. When I have learned to give abundance, I have learned how to receive abundance. Why? Because I am only giving it unto myself, which you are, and which I am.

 Once you learn that there is only one God, and that God is closer to you than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet, you will know that that’s the God that is closer to me than breathing, nearer than hands and feet. And therefore, there is only one God in you and in me, it is your Self as it is my Self, for we are One in spiritual Sonship. We are One in divine Being.

 Any prayer that is aimed at directing God’s goodness to someone someplace, sometime, is a waste of time. It is a waste of time! God cannot be influenced by man. Just think of the prayers that are uttered by the billions every day in attempt to get God to do something for somebody, as if God were not infinite Intelligence; as if the Master had never taught, “Your heavenly Father knoweth that you have need of these things;” as if the Master had never taught, “It is God’s good pleasure to give you the Kingdom.” Yet we go on telling God, begging, pleading, sacrificing, trying to get God, trying to influence God, trying to move God, instead of learning this.

 We have to yield ourselves to God; not my will be done, Thy Will. We have to let go of what we think is good for us or our neighbor, and trust to the fact that the God that we behold out here in the sun, the moon, the stars, and the times and the tides, and the crops; this God that knows all this surely knows more than we do. And any attempt to teach God, tell God, influence God must be throwing dust in the face of God. Actually it’s an insult. But since God isn’t easily insulted, the insult comes back to us, for it is an insult to our own intelligence to believe that we are so superior to God’s Wisdom and God’s Love that we can tell God, direct Him.

 You see, this isn’t the first time in the history of the world that a civilization stood on the brink. It has happened many times before, and each time before, the civilization was wiped out. Each time before that civilizations have been threatened, civilizations have been wiped out. Not one has ever come to a place in history, such as we are in today, and been saved. Everyone has gone down to utter destruction. Out of each one there has come a remnant. And that remnant has been the start of a new civilization, and in each time an improved one but up to a certain point, and then destruction.

 Now we all read the newspapers, or perhaps listen to the news on the television or the radio, and I wouldn’t be surprised that some of us even believe that if we were president or king or emperor, that we’d know more what to do than our present ones are doing. Probably we could give them some advice as to how these human problems could be met. But if there is any man or woman here willing to face themselves honestly, they would have to admit that right now they wouldn’t like to be the president of any country, or the prime minister of any country. It would be a bad spot to be in.

 And I wonder if there is anyone in this room who really believes that there is a human solution to the problems that face the world today. I wonder if there is a thinker in this room who believes that there is any human solution to any of the major problems that are facing civilization today. It would certainly be a husky individual who could claim to know how the situation is going to come out in South Africa; well, you know, not only in South Africa, United States, Russia.

 It looks very much as if an infinite, an infinite power had hit up against an irresistible barrier.  It looks almost as if we were at that point where we are stalemated. And if there is anyone in our political world who even believes that he has a solution, you know, he’s keeping it secret. There hasn’t been one advance on any of the major points that are threatening this world. And the reason is clear, there isn’t a human solution, there just isn’t!  It is an irresistible force meeting an immovable object.

 But there is a spiritual solution, and there always has been. There has been a spiritual solution to mankind’s troubles ever since the world began. And the question is, will mankind now avail themselves of that spiritual influence and receive a spiritual solution?

 It is easy enough to say, “Oh, we’d like to, show us how.” But it isn’t that simple because while I would dare say what I have said here tonight to you, be assured, it is only because you came here of your own free will and accord. You weren’t advertised for, you presumably knew something about what you would hear before you got here. I would no more go out into the public places of the world and say that there will be no solution until we change our concept of God and prayer, because believe it or not, the world is not yet ready to give up its paganistic ideas of God or of prayer.

 The only time and the only place where you find those really seeking God and the things of God are when you do find the small groups who have gathered together in many places throughout the globe, drawn together by a Spirit; not by advertising, not by somebody’s popularity, but drawn together by the Spirit.  And they seem ready to hear that we will have to go within and learn more about God, learn more about prayer, and begin to prove in our individual lives that there is a God influence available to all of those who are willing to impersonalize God and prayer. And to begin to understand the nature of a God that can’t be sought for loaves and fishes, a God that need not be prayed to for what ye shall eat or what ye shall drink, but a God who must be understood as Infinite, Divine, Universal Love, Life, Being. And then relaxing in that confidence and assurance, and watching God’s Grace as it picks us up when we are no longer praying only for our friends but are praying in a universal manner.

 Throughout all ages there have been individuals who have sought and found the Kingdom of God. Every one of them has revealed that the Kingdom of God is within you. It is not to be found in holy mountains. It is not to be found in holy temples. It is not to be found in holy teachers or holy books. For the Kingdom of God is neither lo, here, nor lo, there! The Kingdom of God is within you. The very moment you acknowledge this, you must acknowledge that this is a universal Truth. It cannot be the truth about you alone, for God cannot be a respecter of persons. For God to be God, God must be closer to you than breathing, closer to me than breathing.

 Then, when we have acknowledged this…..when we have acknowledged within our own being this universal nature of God and when we have begun to pray praise and gratitude…..not for what God is doing for me or for you, or for your nation or my nation, but for what God has done in this world, and what has, God has, placed here for our benefit, that we, through the Spirit of love that we entertain for each other, may find available for us. And be assured of this, it becomes available to us in no other way than through love.

 And that is why the Master threw out nine of the Ten Commandments and saved out only one of them, and added another one. When we love the Lord our God with all our heart, with all our soul, and when we love our neighbor as ourself, this love becomes our salvation, physically, mentally, morally, spiritually, in every phase of our existence.

 And so it all comes down to these words, “Ye shall know the truth, and the Truth shall make you free.” Don’t go looking to God to do something, it is “ye” that must know the Truth, and then the Truth makes us free!

 *****

1960 TORONTO PRIVATE CLASS

ADVANCING ON THE PATH – Tape 335-2

 By Joel Goldsmith

           Good evening. There is a Principle in that meditation which is one of the foundation stones in our entire way of living. When we are consciously One with God, we are One with all of the good that can ever be needed or experienced in our lives. In other words, the only way, except by human will or human force, except the only way to actually experience a life of good in all departments is to make contact with our Source. You can understand that, of course, in the human life as you, for instance, look at these electric fixtures and realize that there is no way for each individual light to be lighted unless it has made its contact with the electricity. Once it has made its contact with the electricity, the light can be, but without that there would be no light. Even if there were a lamp, even if there were a bulb, even if there were wires, there would be no light without that contact.

          And so it is that our supply, our employment, our business, our profession, our skills, our families, our home, they all exist but we have no way of demonstrating them, of bringing them into our conscious experience, except through making our first contact with God. And then, they come into our experience of their own accord, without might and without power, without blood or sweat or tears, without labor.  All good naturally flows into our lives just as the light flows into those bulbs without any effort, without the use of might or power, just the natural flow through the contact.

          So in this question, “Does an individual have to be crucified in seeking employment,” of course not, of course not.  In the human scale, anything may happen, but the human life is one that is lived separate and apart from God, therefore, it has no help from God.  Now the only way that an individual has help from God, and be assured that praying won’t bring it to him, the only that one can have help from God is to make actual contact with God.  Now, the Kingdom of God is within you. It is neither lo, here, nor lo, there, it is within you.  So you don’t have to go to holy mountains, you don’t have to go to holy temples, you don’t have to find holy men or women, or holy books, because the Kingdom of God is not external to you, it is within you. And therefore, the contact must be made within you. And if you make your contact within, and this you do through your meditation, if you make that contact with, you will find that your good begins to flow to you, not by effort, not by labor, but really as a gift of God; or as it is said in Scripture, “By Grace”.

       Now that brings us to this question. “The Infinite Way® study says that we are not to ask for anything of God, and yet in Matthew it says, “Ask, and it shall be given you”. Well both statements are correct, ask and not ask. As you will find, all Scripture is written in both the “yes” form and the “no” form.  Scripture always says that a thing is right and it also says that it is wrong. That is the way Scripture is written, all spiritual writings are written that way in order to reach every level of consciousness. Now, when the Bible says, “Ask, and ye shall receive”, who do you think you are asking? What do you think God is, or do you think that is unimportant? How can you ask anything of a God whose nature you do not know?

          Now, once you begin the study of Scripture, you will learn this important thing, God is Spirit. And you will find that this is so conclusive, from beginning to end, from Genesis to Revelation, that God is Spirit and God is infinite, that you will soon learn that there is nothing that you can ask God for except Spirit.  So it is, that when you ask, if you must ask, when you ask God, ask God for that which God can give, and that is Spirit, Himself. And beyond Himself, God has nothing to give for God is infinite.  And as a matter of fact, God hasn’t it to give, God is forever expressing.  And the function is upon us to receive that which God is already giving.

          Now, of course, the difficulty that comes in is that this world has been incorrectly taught for so many dozens of centuries that the world does not know that you and I cannot receive anything because all that the Father hath has already been given to us. “Son, thou art ever with Me and all that I have is thine.” Now what more are you going to receive? What more is there for you to receive? Have you accepted all that has been given you? Have you acknowledged that all that the Father hath is already yours?  Have you acknowledged that as a Child of God, “I am already heir to all the heavenly riches,” now what in heavens name would you ask for?  You already have that all that God has, is there anything left to ask for? Or is it not that we have not known and have not availed ourselves of all that the Father hath already given to us. And it is for this reason that you have been told that you must open out a way for the imprisoned Splendor to escape.

          You must open a way, you can never receive.  You are already filled up with infinity. You are already filled up with all that the Father hath. But whatever lack is in your life represents something you are holding onto and will not give up.  What is it that you are holding on to? Is it forgiveness that you haven’t yet given four hundred and ninety times? Is it praying for the enemy that you have not yet given up, or given out? Is it service?  Is it love?  Is it a confidence in God’s Presence? Is it a sharing? What is it? Be assured of this, lack always represent something we are clinging to, and we are not making room for any new flow. We are trying to keep our bottles filled with the old wine instead of giving it away or spilling it out and making room for the new.

          It is exactly like your rose bushes, if you don’t take some roses off of it, you can’t expect others to grow. You have to make room, you have to take the fruit off of the fruit tree before another crop can come around to it. You have to open out your clothes closet and see what is hidden back there, unused, unneeded, and yet hoarded. You have to look within yourself.

          Let us go back to Scripture again, the case of the poor widow. Now I suppose, humanly, we all ought to pity that poor widow. She is so poor that she is about to sell her son in slavery so as to get money to pay her debts; a very pitiful picture. But the Hebrew master doesn’t believe her one bit, and he doesn’t sympathize with her, but he says to her, “What have you in the house?” And if we did that to one of our students today they’d go out and say how cruel we are, we were going to take away from them their last drop of food. But that master with vision said, “What have you in the house?” And her answer was, “A few drops of oil, a little meal.” “Well, fIx’em up and get them ready for me.”

          And as she began to pour, she found it just didn’t end, it kept right on pouring. And the Master used this same Principle when there was a multitude to be fed, and seemingly, nothing to feed them with. And He said to the Disciple, “What have we?” That’s a very foolish question, you know, “What have we,” when He knew right well we had nothing. But we had a multitude to feed, and the Disciples answered, “A few loaves and fishes.” “What is a few loaves and fishes among so many,” says that state of ignorance. But the Master says, “Break, share, give,” and they were all fed, and twelve baskets full left over. And it has been our experience in this spiritual life, that it is only as we give, that the pouring can take place.

          I had an experience with a man in Boston when I was a Christian Science practitioner, many, many years ago. And this man had been all over the town to be healed of something or other, and no one had been able to heal him. And he finally heard of me and came to me.  And he told me a story and he told me of all the practitioners and teachers who had tried to heal him and they’d all failed. And then he went on to explain to me what a very good Christian Scientist he was. He never missed a service and he ushered and he did literature distribution work. And he was at every single meeting of the church, and oh, he did the lesson every day. And with all his goodness, he couldn’t be healed.

          And then this divine inspiration was given to me. And I said to him, “Why do you go to church so regularly. What do you do there?”

          “Oh, I go there to hear Truth, to learn more.”

           “You do? You mean after all the years you’ve studied these books you don’t know what’s in them? Is there still something that you’re going to learn? You only have these two books, the “Bible” and “Science and Health”. And you’ve been reading them and doing the lessons for all these years, and you still believe there is more for you to go over there and learn?”

          “Well, yes, I thought so.”

           “Well, when, when in your life do you start giving out what you have already learned?” Well, that was an idea that had never come into his mind, that there was going to be a time when he’d have to give out what he had taken in.

           And I said, “Now let’s change this program, and from now on don’t go to church to get and don’t go to church to receive, but go over there knowing that since you have been reading the books all of these years, you have something to give. You have some spiritualized consciousness to give. You have some knowledge of Truth to give. You have a treatment to give for all those who may be new or beginners, who do not yet know what Truth is. Go over there and pray for them. Pray that God open their eyes, pray that they behold the vision of the Christ. Pray, pray. Give, give, give. You’ve been taking in all of these years, unbottle it, give it out.” And just in one week, that man was healed. And he didn’t get any treatments. There weren’t treatments needed. The treatments he needed was the self treatment of giving, giving, open out, give.

          And so it is whether we are holding back money in the thought that we have too little, or whether we are holding back service or devotion, or whether we are holding back gratitude or forgiveness, be assured of this, we are holding back if we are lacking. Because there is no such thing in the heavenly Kingdom as “getting”. You are already the Child of God, and if a child, then an heir, and if an heir, you are heir to all the heavenly riches; and, “Son, thou art ever with Me, and all that I have is thine.”

          And another thing, have you accepted the teaching of the Master that I have meat the world knows not of, or are you still looking outside for more to be added unto you? Now until you begin understand that every word that the Master spoke was a lesson to us, you never will understand the New Testament. Until you understand that the Master’s only purpose in teaching was to reveal to us the Truth of Being, which we should know; “Ye shall know the Truth and the Truth shall make you free;” and He was teaching us the Truth that we should know. What is the Truth? “I have meat….,” now what advantage would there have been if He’d have said, “I have meat the world knows not of, but you haven’t.” What good would He have been as a Way-show-er if He wasn’t showing us our Way? And so it is, you have to read the Master’s teaching as if you were a student of His and He was your teacher. And He is saying to you, “I have meat the world knows not of,” meaning you have meat the world knows not of, or, “I will never leave thee nor forsake thee.”

          Now just imagine, if it were possible for you to walk around this city, holding the hand of Jesus Christ, would you still be looking for something else beside that? Would you be expecting still more good than that? Or would you not feel….oh, no, that’s as much as I can handle in one lifetime, to walk around these streets holding on to the hand of Jesus Christ walking beside me. Will you have something more important than that? You have the Christ, which was in Him. The same mind that was in Christ Jesus is in you. And It is saying to you, “I will never leave you nor forsake you. I will be with you unto the end of the world. I am your meat and wine and water.  I am Life eternal, your Life eternal.  I am the resurrection.”  

          And so it is, when you learn to turn within and realize, “Just think, that I that Jesus spoke of is within me. And that I has meat the world knows not of, in fact, that I is the meat and the wine and the water, and the resurrection and the Life eternal. I, in the midst of me, is all of That. And here I am walking the street with the fullness of the Christ within me, and claiming a lack without.

          No, the reason for lack is the belief that supply must come to us from without, instead of understanding that supply must flow out from us, from within our own being. We start out every morning with the infinite Storehouse of God, pouring Itself out into expression. And all we have to do throughout the day is be sure that we give out enough, and take no thought about what shall come in. Our entire thought must be how much giving out can there be. And even though we can only give out pennies or nickels or dimes, at least let us give that and do it joyously. And then look around for the other things, the forgiveness that we must give out, the praying for others that we must do, the loving of our neighbors as we would love ourselves. And remember that all of this is giving, all of this is supply, all of this is Something you have in your house and It must flow out from you. “House” means consciousness. What have you in your consciousness; a little more love, a little more gratitude, a little more service, a little more joy. And you see that’s one of the reasons asking God for anything, after God has already given us His own infinite Being; “Son, all that I have is thine;” is a waste of time.

          “We arrive at the place where one’s desire is only the Presence of God realized. ‘Ask and it shall be given you’ is now bothersome, except that the asking need be for the holy Spirit which would interpret Itself as the thing needed, is this correct?” You see it is correct, indeed, it is, as long as we are desiring only the realization of God, the Kingdom of God, as long as we are desiring only an inner communion with God, as long as we are desiring only to tabernacle with God, to walk with God, to serve God. That is the only asking that is necessary. And then the Spirit, in Its own way, fulfills us, and always in accord with our immediate need.

           “In the practice of healing is it wrong to make one’s mind a blank in order to eliminate error from consciousness?” I have heard it is dangerous.

    As a matter of fact, it’s not dangerous, it’s impossible. There isn’t anyone that can make one’s mind a blank. It has been tried by experts. It has been tried by people for centuries. No one yet has accomplished it. Now, the mind automatically becomes still, and without thought; you can’t do that but it can be brought about by you; and that is in the way that I gave at our first Class session, through contemplative meditation.

          As you go through the processes of contemplative meditation, keeping your mind stayed on God, thinking of God and God’s Grace, and God’s Omnipotence, Omnipresence, Omniscience, gradually you come to the end of thinking. And then for twenty, thirty, forty, fifty seconds, you find yourself completely without a thought. You haven’t blanked your mind. You mind has come to the end of its thinking process for a moment, and enables you to rest in a complete silence from thought. It doesn’t last long, sometimes one second, two seconds, ten seconds, and then you are back. But, those few seconds were really enough to bring healing of any nature.

          Would you elucidate the following verse. “Among those that are born of woman, there is not a prophet greater than John the Baptist; but he that is least in the Kingdom of God is greater than he.”

         Yes indeed this is one of the cornerstones of The Infinite Way®, and I spoke to you about that also at the opening session of this Class. Do you remember that I said that if you obeyed the Ten Commandments fully and completely and perfectly, you would still be a million miles away from heaven. In fact, you wouldn’t be a bit spiritual, not by virtue of obeying the Ten Commandments. You might be spiritual in spite of it, but you would never be because of it. In other words, no matter how (good) a human being you are, that does not count one single bit in the Kingdom of heaven, and it doesn’t get you into heaven. All of the teachings that claim that good people go to heaven are pure deception. It is not goodness that gets one into heaven, it is spiritual illumination. And spiritual illumination can come to a sinner sometimes more easily than the self-righteous saint. It’s strange and it’s hard, but it’s true.

          Now, John the Baptist, born of woman, meaning human being, was the greatest prophet according to Jesus, in that he was a good man, a perfect man, and he obeyed the laws fully. He lived strictly by the law, the letter of the law. And there are loads of people who do that. But he that is least spiritual is greater than John the Baptist. And so it is that a person who has attained even a grain of spirituality is so far greater in the Kingdom of Heaven than even the best human being on earth, that there isn’t even a little space between them. There is a big space between them. This idea of being a good human being and getting into Heaven by it, just is a wrong idea. But how do we attain that least degree of spirituality that makes us greater even than all of the good people in the world?

          And the idea is revealed by the Master, Christ Jesus. Not whether you spend all day Saturday, or Sabbath day in church, not whether you go to holy mountains or holy temples to worship, not whether you abstain from meat on Friday, not whether you abstain from bread in the Passover season, not whether you sacrifice, not whether you give tithes, none of those things count in the spiritual scale. What counts in the spiritual scale is do you love the Lord, thy God, with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy mind, and thy neighbor as thyself? Ah, there’s the rub. Actually accepting God as infinite and as all power, and not acknowledging that even Pilate can do anything to us; the highest temporal law. Not acknowledging that weather or climate can do anything to us, not acknowledging that there are powers out in the world than can do anything, but living continuously in the realization, “God, and God alone, is the Power onto my experience,” and then, “Loving my neighbor as myself.” How do I love my neighbor as myself? He tells us, “Pray for your enemies …. forgive them that despitefully use you” and all the rest of those passages that ordinarily are ignored.

          The Kingdom of God has no relationship to human conduct, except that attaining the Kingdom of God, our human conduct becomes what it should be, not by virtue of our righteousness but by virtue of our new identity. How shall we put that? When one has been touched by the Spirit to the extent of real….well, let’s take this. Supposing now that I should accept this revelation that has been given to us that I have meat the world knows not of, or that I, the Christ within me, is my bread, my wine, my water, my supply. Supposing I accept the scriptural teaching that God is my Fortress, God is my High Tower, God is my abiding place. And all of this is embodied within me. And through the activity of the Christ, all of this is mine.

          Now in the moment that I accept that, is there anything that you have got that I would want, or that I would need, or that I would desire? No, because I already have all that God has, and I have within me the activity of the Christ to bring into visible manifestation all that I need. And in that realization, I have lost the capacity to steal, I’ve lost the capacity to cheat, I’ve lost the capacity to falsely advertise, I’ve lost the capacity to falsify, I’ve lost the capacity because there is no need, they’re dead, there is no reason behind them, no function. All that God is, I am. All that the Father hath is mine. And therefore, do you see how that would make my conduct perfect? Not because I am good but because now with the activity of the Christ, I am fulfilled. I have all that I can ever have. And anything I need tomorrow or next week or next year, the activity of the Christ is right now developing for me.

          Just like right now the fruit is forming within your trees, the flowers are forming within your bushes, even if they are not yet visible, you know that there is a spiritual activity forming them. And so, you don’t have be jealous of your neighbor’s garden or his fruit trees, and you don’t have to be avaricious, and you don’t have to think of staying up late at night and going out and stealing them. Why? Because you look at your own garden and your own fruit trees and you say, “I have all my neighbor has, in fact I have all God has.” And so you have no capacity to do anything other than wait for your own trees to blossom and bear fruit, and your own bushes to give forth flowers and enjoy them.

          And so it is, once you know that there is an invisible Christ within you, an invisible Presence of God, and that at this very moment It is out here preparing mansions for you, It is out here making the crooked places straight. It is out here drawing unto me my own, whether they have to come to me from Africa or Australia, from Europe, from the United States or Canada. Somewhere out in this world, the activity of the Christ is, right now, drawing unto me those who will be in my classes in London and in Holland and in Switzerland, and back in New York, and then out in Japan, and Australia, right now the Christ is doing all that. And when I get there, they will be sitting in chairs out here. And I may not know them, just as I may not know you, until this visit. And yet, here you are. And I humanly didn’t do it, but the Spirit of the Christ has been working in this city and in you to bring us together. Do you not see that?

          So it is, whether your need is for something physical, financial, mental, whether it is for instruction, whether it is for food, or clothing, or housing or raiment, you do not have to take thought for that. I, in the midst of you, the very Christ of your being, I am functioning, and I will never leave you nor forsake you. And I am out there preparing mansions for you. And I am making the crooked places straight for you. And I am seeing your own come to you. Do you not see then that that changes your whole life, and makes you the kind of human you should be, not because of your goodness but because of Its functioning, Christ functioning within you.

          The more you rely on the activity of the Christ within you; “I can do all things through Christ, He performeth that which is given me to do, He perfecteth that which concerneth me, He that is within me is greater than he that is in the world;” and as you live with those passages and learn to rely upon them from morning to night and from night to morning, your vision is drawn back from out here. And then you’ll find that your human conduct is right in line with spiritual conduct, which is Love.

          The following Bible quotations are very confusing. “Your adversary, the devil, as a roaring lion walketh about seeking whom he may devour. Resist the devil and he will flee from you. Ye have not yet resisted unto blood striving against sin.” Then in the end, “I say onto you, resist not evil.” See how these contradictions come in Scripture? And of course the reason is that these illumined are speaking from different states of consciousness to different states of consciousness, and very often, these Bible passages were incorrectly translated. You do not know how many of these Bible translations are incorrect, and they are now being found totally erroneous. Why? Because the old Hebrew manuscripts were in an ancient Hebrew that went out of existence before the days of Jesus. During the days of Jesus there was a different Hebrew than the original Old Testament, the Aramaic.

          So you have two different languages for one thing. Then you have another thing, in the ancient Hebrew there were no word endings, there was no punctuation and no paragraphing, and there were no vowels. Now you just try to visualize a page of print without vowels and no punctuation and no sentence endings, and you are to make up your own sentences. You are to make up your own words and put vowels in where you think they belong, and see how many interpretations you would get. And that’s what happened. Then after all of this, these manuscripts had to be translated into Aramaic, from Aramaic into Greek, from Greek into Latin, and Latin into English. By that time you can imagine what they looked like. And one of these days when you get the translations of some of the originals, you’ll find just exactly how different they are. But in addition to that are the different states and stages of consciousness.

          Now then, if you were listening to Peter at one time, to James, you would have heard them preaching that unless you are circumcised you cannot enter the Kingdom of God and you cannot be a follower of the Christ. And a few years later, if you were listening to Paul, you would hear him say, “Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision availeth you anything.” If you were listening to Peter at one stage of his missionary work, after the Crucifixion, you would have him preaching, “You cannot be a Christian and you cannot follow the Master if you eat the meat of a pig.” And then later after he has this great experience, all of a sudden, “Ah, no, even the meat of a pig is all right.” And so you see that it all depends on when these things are said, to whom they are said, why they are said, and so forth.

          But this you can accept, when the Master is speaking, He is speaking from the standpoint of the spiritual. And from that standpoint, you do not resist evil because you have come to the realization that evil is not a power. A simple illustration is this: If any of us were to go downstairs and walk through the bar room or cocktail lounge, we would not have a single twinge of desire, we would not have a single thought about reaching out. Why? Because alcohol is not a temptation to us, therefore, we don’t have to resist it, it just has no power. Why do we have to resist something that has no power? We would walk right through that bar room without ever turning around and saying, “Now, God, help me to get through, and, God, keep that devil away from me.” Why? It is not a devil to us.

          But now think of the alcoholic or the near alcoholic and try to get him through that room safely, and I’m sure he would have to call on God to help him resist the wiles of the devil. Why, there isn’t any devil there and there aren’t any wiles there. It all exists in his misperception, it’s all in his mind, it’s not outside on the shelves. Because you and I know there is no devil on those shelves, there’s no evil on those shelves, there’s no temptation, therefore, we don’t have to resist.

          Well now, a spiritual healer is an individual whose consciousness has been spiritualized to the degree where disease is not a power, therefore, it does not have to be resisted or overcome. It is a state of nothingness. It is state of illusion. It is a misperception. It is an ignorance really of God’s Omnipotence. The moment a person has the vision of God’s Omnipotence, what power can weather have, or climate, or germs, or infection, or burns, or breaks. They can’t have power. God alone is Power, and therefore, disease is not a temptation to the state of consciousness that has been touched by the Christ. Therefore, it does not have to resist evil.

          Ah, yes, the Master, when he is confronted with the devil who offers Him three temptations, you don’t find Him resisting it, you don’t find Him running away or turning His back, He just very calmly says, “Get thee behind Me.” In other words, “I am not interested, I’m just not buying today.” So in the same way, the higher you go in spiritual consciousness, the more you can see that what the world calls “evil” isn’t an evil at all, it’s just a non-evil appearance. It is just a discordance appearance. It is an ignorance of the Truth that God is Omnipotence.

          And so it is, your practitioner doesn’t have to resist evil, he has to know the Truth that what is appearing as evil is neither good nor evil, it’s an illusion, it’s a false sense, it’s an ignorance of God. So it is that you can go step by step and think of anything you like that might be at this moment a temptation to you, and just remember this, that because it is doesn’t say that it is evil. Because that same thing could be presented to a million other people and it would be no temptation to them and it would be no evil to them, and they would see right through it.

          And so it is that the evil lies in our erroneous concept of what we are beholding. That’s where the evil is, the evil lies in our ignorance of what we are beholding. And when you are spiritually illumined, you know that God is infinite. I mean, you don’t know it because it says so in the Bible. You don’t even believe it because it says so in your favorite metaphysical book. You know it because there has been an experience within you that revealed it to you. “I am the only Power. Beside Me, the I within me, there is no other power.”

          Then you come to this state of consciousness which we are revealing in the message of The Infinite Way®, which is a realm of no power. You don’t use a power to overcome any devils, you don’t use any God Power to overcome sin and disease, you relax and rest in the assurance that these aren’t power, since God didn’t ordain them. Now there’s a point, too. Have you ever stopped actually to do a little meditating on that, as to whether or not God gave disease to the world or God gave death to the world? All you’d have to do is follow the Master for three years through the Gospels. And you would find out that He says, “My doctrine is not mine but His that sent me. If I speak of myself, I bear witness to a lie. My whole mission is the God mission.” Now if you can believe that, then the next step is this. Jesus healed all of the sick that He came in contact with. And if He was doing what God ordained for Him to do, God could not have caused disease, because the Master’s mission was to heal it.

          God wouldn’t have sent anybody to destroy God’s work. Therefore, disease cannot be of God. Now if disease isn’t of God, death can’t be. Because it’s only disease that leads up to death, disease in some form even if it’s disease called “accident”, it’s always disease, even if it is old age, it is a form of disease. And if God ordained death, what becomes of I am life eternal? “I am eternal life,” how can anybody be eternal life if God ordained death? That would mean that God’s Will was being thwarted. Therefore, once you know that disease is not ordained of God, not created by God, and that there is no Law of God to sustain it, how can you fear it anymore, how can you worry about overcoming it? Does it not become natural to rest back in and say, “If God didn’t make you, you weren’t made. If God didn’t give you a Law to sustain you, you can’t last.” And drop it, drop it in that realization.

          That which God made is forever that is why there is a mistake in the marriage ceremony, a mistake that should never have been permitted to remain there. It says, “What God hath joined together let no man put asunder,” and that means that man is more powerful than God. If he can put asunder what God hath joined together, isn’t that ridiculous. Now it should have been, “What God hath joined together, no man can put asunder.” How can any man have more power than God? That doesn’t mean that all marriages were made by God by any manner or means. But whatever is, whatever marriage has been made by God, there’s no man, no circumstance, no condition, not even death itself, could put it asunder.

          Now when you understand that then you do declare, “What God hath joined together, nothing can break, and God hath joined me to my Life. I and my Life are One.  I and my Life are indestructible and indivisible. And God joined me to my Life. I and my Father are One. I and spiritual Life are One. I am the Son of God, and this is a God ordained relationship. I didn’t make God my Father, God made me His Son. And what God hath made is a forever relationship. We can never be disinherited by God, we can never be disowned by God, and none of us are illegitimate children of God, He didn’t have any. All that God made Is, and what God hath joined no man can put asunder, and I and my Father are One, is an indestructible, indivisible relationship.

          And so we come to this very important part of The Infinite Way® Principle. Now this is the part that all students find difficult to work with, and therefore, it takes time before you can really assimilate it. Error, evil of any nature, is not personal. There is no such thing as you being responsible for your ills. There is no such thing as any wrong thinking in you being responsible for your troubles. There is no such thing as any sin of yours being responsible for your troubles. And the reason is that whatever form of error or evil or sin or disease that is in you, had its origin, not in you, but in an impersonal source.

          Now once you remember that all evil is impersonal, it is not in you or of you or through you. You may be at this moment manifesting it by acceptance, but it does not have its origin in you, and therefore, it is no part of you. It is like putting some dirt in this clean glass of water and then saying, “It’s dirty water.” It isn’t dirty water, it never becomes dirty water. The moment you take the dirt out, you’ll see the water is as clean as ever. It was always dirt in the water, not dirty water. The dirt and the water are always separable and divisible.

          So it is, whatever the evil that we may be manifesting at any moment, is not in us or of us. It may appear to be, but it is imposed from without. And that without-ness is the impersonal source. So that if you were to see a man steal a wallet, don’t call him a thief, but look away and realize immediately that the evil lies in an impersonal source. And you might not be surprised to watch the man put it back again.  Because you can heal him in the twinkling of an eye the very minute you separate the evil from him.

          Now you watch in your family life and with your pets. If instead of saying to your dog or cat, “You’re a bad dog,” or, “a bad cat,” or instead of saying to the child, “You are a bad child,” or, “a naughty child,” if instead of that you realized to yourself this is not of them, this is an impersonal source, they, themselves; the child, the cat, the dog; Child of God, and this evil that is appearing is of this impersonal source. The very moment you do that, you bring out such a love in them for you that you’ll wonder what happened, because you voiced nothing openly. But they felt that you took the burden of guilt right away from them. You took the burden of guilt, because they knew all the time they weren’t bad, the badness was just coming through them; what Paul recognized, “I am not sinful, but I feel a sense of sin in me.” In other words, “I, myself, have gotten past the point where there’s any possibility of sin in me, but then there’s a universal belief that’s so strong that I can have a sinful sense at any moment, and I might have to deal with it.” And the only way I could deal with it is not by calling myself bad, but by recognizing, “Ah, ha, I recognize you, get back there into the worldly sense, you don’t belong in me.”

          Now when your patient or your family come to you with ills, don’t pin it onto them, but immediately separate it from them by realizing, “This is of that impersonal source.” In our work in The Infinite Way®, we say that you can call that impersonal source “devil”, or you can call it the “carnal mind” or “mortal mind”. Call it anything you like as long as you realize, number one, that it is an impersonal source, that it’s never a person. Secondly, that it’s not a power.

          In other words, when the original idea of “devil” was conceived, it was a right idea. It was saying that all evil doesn’t exist in man, but out here in an impersonal source, to which they gave the name “devil”. But later on through ignorance, people began to fight the devil as if it were an enemy instead of recognizing it as an impersonal, universal source of evil without power. Then later, the term “carnal mind” was conceived as the impersonal source of evil. But again, ignorance twisted it around until Paul said, “the carnal mind is enmity against God,” and started another whole train of error. Because the carnal mind is not enmity against God, the carnal mind is the impersonal, universal source of evil, and it is the arm of flesh or nothingness.

          Later on, Mrs. Eddy coined another term, “mortal mind”. And she used it as the impersonal source of evil. And in her early healing days, she taught her students, “No matter what the error is, just call it ‘mortal mind’ and forget it.” And they did such wonderful healing works that the movement spread around the world and had three thousand branches and eleven thousand practitioners. But her students lost it again because they took old mortal mind and made a devil out of it, and they began protecting themselves from it and getting up at four o’clock in the morning to get ahead of it. And looking out for it around all comers to see what it was going to jump at, and then blaming the Roman Catholics for it, and the Hebrews, and the Orientals, until everybody was mortal mind, except “me”, and I was too unless I was authorized.

 ******** End Side 2

                                                THE START OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE -  Tape 335-1

           Good afternoon. Because meditation presents difficulties and because meditation is so important, there must be steps leading up to the act of meditation itself, and that we have provided for in the book, “Practicing the Presence”. Now that operates on this basis. When we awaken in the morning, if before even getting out of bed, if we will instantly turn our attention to the fact that this is the day that God hath made, that it, was the activity of God that brought daylight following night, that it is the activity of God that brings the sunshine, that it is the activity of God that maintains and sustains this universe, regardless of what God may be, regardless of what one’s concept of God may be, there is a Law, there is a Being, there is a Cause, there is a Something responsible for the operation of this world. If this were not so, you could never be sure of getting roses from rose bushes or apples from apple trees, blueberries from blueberry bushes, because if there weren’t some intelligent and loving Principle at work, all of these things could be accidental. If it were not for an intelligent and loving Principle at work, we could not navigate. Certainly those who navigate by the stars would never be able to do it because they’d have no assurance that the stars were in their rightful place or that they would be tomorrow night.

          So it is, regardless of the nature of your activity in life, unless you can perceive that there is Something behind this universe, invisible; invisible but nevertheless a Presence and a Power and a Law; and that whatever This is, It is intelligent and loving in Its activity, unless you can perceive that, you have no where to go on the spiritual Path at all. But if you do perceive This, and we call it “God”, others call It by other names, and the name is of no importance, what is important is that we know Him aright—for to know Him aright is life eternal. And if you know Him or It to be this invisible, universal, Law, Life, Source, Intelligence, Love, and if you acknowledge this at the very start of your day, you bring It into expression in your life immediately. Because It only comes into expression in your life through your acknowledgment of It.

          It may be functioning perfectly for me, and yet a thousand may fall at my right hand and ten thousand at my left hand. It may be functioning perfect for you, and yet your neighbor may be in all kinds of dire trouble. Why? It isn’t that God is a respecter of persons, and it isn’t that God cares particularly what your religion is, or even if you don’t have one, the difference is in acknowledgement. “Acknowledge Him in all thy ways and you will have rest. Thou will keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on Thee.”

And therefore, those who learn to awaken in the morning and acknowledge instantly the government of a divine Intelligence and a divine Wisdom, a divine Love, a divine Activity in their experience, immediately start the day aright. And they start the day with God consciously realized. Now one is free then to get up and make their physical preparations for the day, or whatever other demands are made upon them. But no later than breakfast time, there must be another pause and that is for an acknowledgement that the Grace of God set your table. Oh, it may be that you’re convinced that you had enough money to do that with, but you will soon find on reflection that your money won’t grow crops, it won’t produce ham and eggs. It takes a Law of God to do this. Your money won’t produce the food on your table and your money isn’t digestible.

          Therefore, it isn’t your money that sets your table, it is the Grace of God operating as nature, operating as the cattle on a thousand hills or the crops in the ground. It is God, the Grace of God, the Law of God, the Life of God which sets your table. And so a momentary pause of silence just to acknowledge that it is the Grace of God that has produced this, once more keeps your mind stayed on God and keeps God alive within you.

     As you prepare to leave your home for business or profession, shopping, marketing, the spiritual student stops at the door to realize that this invisible Presence goes before me to make the crooked places straight. This invisible Intelligence and Love goes before me to prepare mansions for me, this Presence, which is divine Love, is the cement in my relationship with all those whom I am about to meet. But for the Grace of God going before me, I do not know who I would meet or what their attitude toward me would be. But sending Love before me; or, not really sending It, It fills all space; but recognizing that the Presence of Love has gone before me, carrying the message of Love, enables me to meet men and women in all parts of the world, at all levels of consciousness, in all walks of life, and find that I can get along harmoniously with them and they with me.

          Then comes this matter of our business, our task, our profession. Do we really believe that we alone are capable of meeting all of the situations in life? The ancient masters thought otherwise; “He performeth that which is given me to do. He perfecteth that which concerneth me;” always this acknowledgement that there is Something; “He that is within me is greater than he that is in the world; I and my Father are one, but He is greater than I.” All of these acknowledgements enable us to receive God’s help, God’s Grace, in every activity of our experience. It makes no difference what we are called upon to do, or even if we do not have the ability to do it, it still will be done by our recognition of an inner Grace. Not a God of far off, remember, not a God who doesn’t know your need, always remember that the Kingdom of God is within you, that He is closer to you than breathing, nearer than hands and feet, that we are always talking of what the Master called, “The Father with me,” or what Paul called, “The Christ that dwelleth in me.”

          And so our recognition of this, that I am never separate from God and God is never separate from me, this infinite Wisdom of the universe, this divine Love, is ever with me. And therefore, It knoweth my need before I do, it is His good pleasure to give me the Kingdom, to perform that which is given me to do, to perfect that which concerneth me, I need only constantly and consciously remember this. And then I find that having made room for this divine Presence, having consciously accepted Its Government and Its Grace, really does perform for me, through me, with me.

          And so we go through our three or four meals of the day, always acknowledging that but for the Grace of God this food could not be. And so we go through the day in constant praise or thanksgiving that the Presence of God walks beside me and before me and behind me, a constant hymn of praise that there is Something greater than my human intelligence, my human strength, or my human health, Something greater even than education or influence or pull, Something greater than anything and everything of a human nature, even greater than any danger. Remember the Master before Pilate, “Thou couldst have no power over me unless it were given thee of God.” And so it is that we can face sins, temptations, desires, enemies, tasks, with that same realization, “Thou couldst have no power over me, the Grace of God is the power operating, functioning in and through my experience.”

          Now you will find that just a week or two of this kind of a program will bring about a change in your inner nature. You will find yourself attaining periods of inner peace, inner quiet. In other words, this Presence will more and more take over. Then you are in the position to meditate. Because now when you sit down the mind will be freer because God has occupied a greater place in it. But for even a greater reason inner peace will come to you. Within a very short time after this that we call “practicing the Presence”, you will find that you lose the temptation to look to God for anything. You will not be reaching out to God to help you. You will not be reaching out to God to get something for you, do something. You will so live in the conscious realization that God knows your need before you do, that there will be no more future tense for you. There will be no more of what you want God to do tomorrow. There will only be the recognition of what God Is now.

          And so, you will be able to attain the ultimate of prayer and meditation, which is going to God but not for anything, going to God for the joy of communion, going to God for the joy of meditation. In other words, knowing God aright, you know God to be the infinite Intelligence that knows that following this daylight there must come night, following night there must come morning. This Intelligence, that you know now, is appearing in your gardens as leaves and fresh buds and blossoms, and that in another week or two will be berries and fruit and flowers; knowing that you do not have to pray between now and then that this take place because your heavenly Father knoweth what those trees will need a week from now, or two, that knows what we will need in the way of fruits and vegetables and plants and beauty.

          And so gradually you will learn the secret of prayer, and that is never to go to God for anything, only for a continuous recognition and acknowledgement of His Presence, His Intelligence, His Love, His Grace. Then when you sit down, you have nothing to go to God for except communion. “Here I am, Father, Thou art closer to me than breathing. If I mount up to Heaven, Thou art there because You go right with me. If I am making my bed this moment in hell, Thou art with me, for we are inseparable, indivisible, One. Where I am, Thou art. Where Thou art, I am, for we are One. The place whereon I stand is holy ground because God is here where I am. And all that the Father hath is here where I am. ‘Son,’ It says, ‘Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine.’ And so, Father, I do not have to come to your Presence for anything. Being a Son of God, I am an heir of God. I do not have to ask for anything. I do not have to take thought for what I shall eat, or what I shall drink, or wherewithal I shall be clothed or housed. I do not have to take thought for what my tasks will be today or tomorrow. I live only in this conscious realization of Thy Presence.”

          This is a form of contemplative meditation; we are contemplating God and the Presence of God, and the Laws of God, the Life of God, the Omnipotence of God, the Omnipresence of God, the Omniscience of God. “Here where I am, God is”. I do not have to seek God in holy mountains, nor holy temples, nor Jerusalem, nor any other city on the globe, for the Kingdom of God is neither lo, here, nor lo there, but the Kingdom of God Is within me. Therefore, Father, I am in Thy Presence here and now, and Thou art within me here and now. And I am in Thee and Thou art in me, for we are One. And it is my joy to acknowledge this and to tabernacle with Thee, to commune with Thee, to feel Thy Presence, to acknowledge Thy Presence, and Thy dominion, and Thy Law in my inner parts. And I acknowledge Thy Law and I acknowledge Thy Life. I acknowledge Thy Presence. I acknowledge also that there are no other powers, that that which the world calls the power of evil isn’t a power, it is a belief in two powers, it is the “arm of flesh”.

          That which the ancients called “devil” or “satan”, the impersonal source of evil, was never more than a tempter, never a power. That which Paul called the “carnal mind” was never a power, it was merely a universal belief in two powers. And it operated under the name of “carnal mind”, but it wasn’t a power, it was a nothingness. And that which modem metaphysics calls “mortal mind”, this is not a power that one protects oneself from. This is not some mysterious evil or source of evil. Mortal mind and carnal mind and devil all mean the same thing, a belief in two powers, a universal and an impersonal belief in two powers. But it is merely the arm of flesh.

          To those who accept two powers, two powers function in their lives, sometimes good and sometimes evil. To those who come out and become separate and acknowledge God as Omnipotence; and thereby, recognize that the carnal mind or mortal mind is not a power or a law or a substance but is merely a universal belief of an impersonal nature, and it really has no person in whom, on whom, or through whom to operate; and as we know that, we become free of the claim of two powers. We become free of the claim that there is a carnal mind that is enmity against God or a mortal mind that is of some danger to mankind. And we recognize that “carnal” or “mortal” mind are merely names, just the same as the Hebrew prophet, Hezekiah, used, “They have only the arm of flesh,” temporal power, nothingness. And when you understand that the carnal mind, mortal mind, is but that arm of flesh, or temporal power or nothingness, because of Omnipotence, then you have started the process of being free from the operation of error in your life.

          And therefore, as you sit in this meditation you are ready for the second step of meditation. Now this contemplative meditation, which begins in “Practicing the Presence”, is continued in the book, “The Art of Meditation”, and it leads to the second step of meditation which is where the contemplative comes to an end. And having contemplated God, having contemplated Truth, you now come to a period of stillness and as if you were saying, “Speak, Lord, Thy servant heareth.” Now you are so innerly still that you can listen, keep the ear open, be in an attitude of expectancy. And even if it last twenty seconds or thirty seconds, it’s plenty. It’s enough to have opened your consciousness to the Presence, power and activity of God, and now you can get up and go about your work.

          If you persist in this practice, for a long enough time, you will find yourself actually in a silent meditation for two, three, four, five, six minutes without a thought stirring in your mind, without a desire, without a wish for God to do anything, just a stillness. And that will prepare you for still another step which is the actual communion with God. And it is in that communion that you begin to feel an actual Presence with you. You actually have the awareness that there is not just you here, there is Something more than you, and you sit in a very silent communion with It. And very often you feel as if there were a flood of love going from you to the Presence, and then another flood of love coming from It to you. And you will know that you are in communion with the Christ, the very Spirit or Presence of God.

          And you will know this whether you are a Christian or a Jew or an Oriental because the Christ isn’t a man, It is an impersonal Son of God, which is available to those of any religion, or no religion. Because God, as you must know, is not a respecter of any religion. For in the Kingdom of God there are no religions, there are only Children of God. And so it is, you will find that whether you have a Hebrew background, a Christian background, a Vedantist background, a Taoist background, the Christ will still be there, only you may call It “Christ”, or may call It “Tao”, or you may call It “Brahm”, or you may call it “Darshan”, you may call It “Buddha”, but it will make no difference. It is the same Christ or Son of God that existed before Abraham was, and that will exist until the end of the world. And It brings you this assurance. “Before Abraham was, I was with you, and I will be with you unto the end of the world. I will never leave nor forsake you. I am the bread and the wine of your being.” And so you will know that this great Presence, this great Power, has been within each and every one of us, from everlasting to everlasting, awaiting only our recognition to come into experience.

          Now, the human race is cut off from God and cut off from the Christ and that is why its prayers are of no avail. That is why it has been praying for thousands of years for peace on earth and never attained it. And parents have been praying for their children, and children have been praying for their presents, and it has availed nothing. Very little has ever been accomplished with the power of prayer, in the sense of the prayer that is known with the mind. “Oh, God do this,” or, “Oh, God do that.” Very little results have ever been attained. What little result has come usually is through some individual who has risen higher than their teaching and has actually, through their own spirituality, has attained a measure of this God realization.

          All of this time that we have gone through wars and depressions, all of this time that we have gone through infections and contagions, all of this time that we have gone through the tragedies of life, none of these things were necessary. Anyone could have, and many have, avoided all of them. Because once you make contact with the Spirit of God within you, none of these things can come nigh thy dwelling place. A thousand may fall at your left and ten thousand at your right, but it will not come night you. And the Master repeats this in the Fifteenth Chapter of John, “If you will abide in this Word and if you will let God abide in you, you will bear fruit richly. If you do not do these things, you will be as a branch of a tree that is cut off and withereth.” And that’s what the human race has been, a branch of a tree that is cut off and withereth. Generation after generation it has been cut off and it has died through wars, and it has died through disease, and died through accident, and died through alcoholism, and died through drugs. Why? Only because we have forgotten the teaching of the great masters of all religions, throughout all time, “Abide in Me and let Me abide in you.” Consciously live and move and have your being in the Kingdom of God. Consciously acknowledge Me in all thy ways. Consciously call upon Me, not me up here, and not a Jewish me and a Christian me, but the Me that is within your being, the Spirit of God in you. And acknowledge It in all thy ways.

          Acknowledge Him, acknowledge this Presence, acknowledge this Power, live with It, move with It, have It in your being. Acknowledge It that It gives you the intelligence to perform your work. Acknowledge that It gives you the love that enables you to share with your neighbor, to love thy neighbor as thyself. Acknowledge that you, yourself, are not good enough to sit down and pray for your enemies, that only by the Grace of God can you take out fifteen minutes of your time every day to praying for your enemies. And if you don’t, you have no hope whatsoever of becoming a Child of God.

          The Master has made it clear that praying for your friends availeth you nothing. In order to be the Child of God, you must pray for your enemies. You must pray for them who despitefully use you. You must pray for them who persecute you, and then you have to forgive them seventy times seven for their offenses before you can become the Child of God. And if anyone thinks they can become a Child of God just by being born into this world, they have tragedy ahead of them. There is only one way to become a Child of God and that is learn the lesson of spiritual Truth. Learn to abide in God and let God abide in you. Learn to acknowledge Him. Learn to pray the prayer of forgiveness. Learn to pray for the enemy, that their consciousness may be opened to the government of the Christ, that their hearts may be opened to the government of God, that their souls may be purified by His Presence. Then you are really praying.

          The well man doesn’t need a physician and the holy man doesn’t need your prayers. It is the sick and the sinning, they who need us, and don’t forget to some extent we are the sick and the sinning, too, so that we need each other. And we need forgiveness for our offenses of omission and commission. Let no one glory in His perfection for no one on earth is perfect. And if they were humanly perfect, they still would have no entrance into Heaven.

          That was the meaning of the Master’s teaching when He did away with the Ten Commandments. If you obeyed all of the Ten Commandments, you still could not get into Heaven, for you would only have attained human goodness. And He wiped these out and said, “I’ll give you a couple that will get you into Heaven …. Love the Lord thy God with all they heart and with all thy soul, and love thy neighbor as thyself.” Obey these two and you will have entrance into Heaven, you’ll sit at the right hand of God and at the left hand of God and by God’s feet. You will know the whole Kingdom of God if you can live by these two Commandments. And the reason He gave these, He knew that if you love God and if you love your neighbor as yourself, you can’t steal, you can’t lie, you can’t cheat, you can’t defraud. You can’t do any of those things while you are loving your neighbor as yourself because you would not do to another what you would not have another do to you.

          And therefore, only in that love is there salvation. But to refrain from envy, jealousy and malice, to refrain from theft and murder and adultery, and not have love, well, Paul told about that too, didn’t he? If you did all of these things, if you gave away all of your fortune, if you did all of these wonderful human things on earth, but did not have love, you would have nothing. Love is really man’s salvation. But love…..yes, if you say you love God who you’ve not seen and do not love your fellow man whom you have, you are a liar. Now how can we love our neighbor as ourself, and only in one way, forgive him as we would be forgiven.

          How many people do you think there are in the world that put a rope around their own neck and then pull it, just by praying the Lord’s Prayer? Just praying the Lord’s Prayer is enough to send a person into hell. Why? “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors”, and then don’t forgive your debtors and see if you haven’t put the price on your own neck. It’s clear. I would only be forgiven in proportion as I forgive my debtors. I’ve set the price, I have to perform. And if I do not take a period of each day for the conscious realization of this forgiveness and this universal love, in that degree am I held in my own sins or errors or punishments.

          Now I will admit this, that very often there are offences against us, or against our nation, or against our religious convictions, or against mankind, which we find very difficult to forgive. We are right now reading about such an instance in the newspapers in the arrest of this Eichmann, and the possibility of his trial in Israel. Now as you stop to think of this man’s offences, and more especially if you either have any Judaism in or around you, or have friends or relatives or acquaintances that have come under the horrors of that experience, it must be natural to say, “I wouldn’t know how to forgive that man or those that were with him.” I wouldn’t know how to say, “Oh, well, you’ve killed six million people in brutal murder and I forgive you.” I can’t myself quite conceive that that’s a very easy thing to do. Therefore I have at least discovered a step that if I can’t wholly release him and his sins and give him the full forgiveness that under Christ we would be supposed to do, I can at least pray, “Father, You forgive him. I find it difficult but you take over. What I can’t do, you surely can do. But forgive him, do not hold him in bondage to his sins,” remembering that he knew not what he was doing. Nobody could commit such an offence if they were sane. Nobody could be responsible for such offences if they were sane, or in their rightful mind.

          There isn’t one of us in this room who could be guilty of it and that is only because of the degree of sanity or Christianity that we have attained. And without sanity or without Christianity, there would be no sanity, without this ability of love and universal brotherhood, there could be no sanity. And so we can say, “Father, I can’t quite forgive him all the way but you take over and forgive him through me, because I do know this, he couldn’t have known what he was doing.” We would find it difficult to snuff out the life one man, of one woman, think how insane a person would have to be to snuff out six million.

          And so it would be then, in some way, we must forgive or we must be willing that God forgive. And remember this, that if you can get to the point of praying a prayer of forgiveness for him, you will be able to forgive anyone else, for no one else in our generation has quite that much of a sin to be forgiven. And so it will be that we will demonstrate that we can love the Lord, our God, and we can love our neighbor as you, even our enemy neighbor.

          Now, deep down within us, not physically, but deep down within our consciousness is the Source of our being. It is the point of contact with our Source. Separate and apart from that Source, I am nothing and can be nothing and can do nothing, even as Jesus Christ could be nothing and could do nothing of himself, separate and apart from the Father. And always remember that, of yourself, you are a branch cut off from the tree that withered, but by virtue of this contact, of your Oneness with this Life stream, this Fount, this Source, this Christ, this God, and your conscious Oneness makes it possible for infinite Wisdom, divine Love, all Power to flow through you.

          Your Oneness with God constitutes the Source of spiritual Power. Without it, you have none. With it, you have all, even to the ability to heal the sick and raise the dead. But within your consciousness is the point of contact that reunites you. As a matter of spiritual Truth, you have never become separated and you are always one with this Source. The real spiritual Truth is that I and my Father are One, now. But in our experience, this is an unrealized relationship, and therefore it is of no value until the point of conscious recognition, acknowledgement, and ultimately, realization.

          So that when you feel this contact within you, when you feel a deep breath, when you feel a measure of warmth, or stillness, quietness, peace, then you will know you are reestablished in that original relationship and that now the Source, the whole Godhead Bodily is flowing through you. It says, “Son, all that I have is thine.” All, not a bit of It, not a part of It, all that the Father hath is mine when that contact is established, when that relationship is realized.

          And that is why it has been found of old that it is our acknowledgement of God, keeping the mind stayed on God, abiding in the Word of God that leads us to that state of peace wherein the experience takes place, the actual feeling of the Presence. And as we continue in this, we find that whereas in the beginning we can only establish this contact consciously, occasionally, the more we practice, the more we find that we can establish it at will. And the reason is that it is only a matter of a year or two when we are permanently established in It and only need certain periods of renewal. In other words, eventually you are living with that Source continuously flowing. But two or three times a day it is necessary to go within and get the conscious realization of It again, and then it goes continuously.

          It has been my experience that this relationship should be renewed many, many times during the day, and night, too, if we awaken. The goal of all this Paul has described. “I live, yet not I, Christ liveth my life.” And so it is that through this practice, the contact is so consciously made, so specifically made, and so continuously established that we never have to take thought again, consciously. We are lived through this Withinness, and then we just go through the motions of life every day, doing that which is given us to do and knowing that we are doing it well because of this divine Grace that is performing it through us.

          Now, all of this that I have told you today, with the exception of two points, is really universal Truth of such a nature that it should never have been lost from the face of the earth. It has been taught many times by many teachers, and it will be taught many times again. There are two points which have not been taught. And those I am going to elaborate on in our next Class session which will be tomorrow night, at 7:45 tomorrow evening, in this room. Dh, because it will take that full session to cover these specific Principles which we use in our healing work, and which we use for what the Master called, “The overcoming of this world,” that is, the powers that interfere with the harmony of existence.

          There would be no evils on earth if it weren’t for the operation of an invisible and an impersonal power, which in reality is not a power but operates as a power. And because it is impersonal, it is easy to deal with. Now the world has found it difficult because it has personalized this power and this evil and it says that you are evil, or that you have evil qualities or erroneous traits. It says that you may be envious or jealous or malicious, or you may be sensual, or you may be unkind. Of course, this is not true. It isn’t true of any individual on the face of the earth. Evil is never personal. And the reason that the mental sciences like psychology and psychiatry are such failures, and are finding it necessary now to seek for new principles, is that they make the basic blunder of personalizing the evil and looking for it within you. Some metaphysical practitioners do that too and try to uncover the error in you or find out that you are unloving, or you aren’t generous, or you hate your mother-in-law. And it wouldn’t make a difference if you did, actually it wouldn’t be your fault.

          And that is what we are going to take up, the impersonal nature of the evil that besets this world, and how to deal with it so as to overcome it or its influence in our experience. And when we learn how to impersonalize and nothing-ize evil, you will find that it is literally truth that God is Omnipotence and there is no other power. But you cannot prove the Omnipotence of God as long as you personalize evil, or as long as you try to overcome it. For those who live by the sword will die by the sword. Those who try to use a power to overcome evil, will end up victims of the evil. It is very much like those who try to protect themselves from evil and then find they have brought those very evils upon themselves. Whereas the proper sense of protection would have been the realization of the nature of that which operates in our consciousness as error until we know its nature.

          And so for that, we will wait until tomorrow night. Tomorrow afternoon in the public lecture I am going to give as much of this as can be given, uh, more especially if there are not too many of those who are not familiar with this work. And I don’t think there will be too many. And so until tomorrow afternoon, thank you for being with us, thank you for this opportunity of sharing with you.

***********End Side One

 Blessings 

Mary

 Mary Noack
Hudson, Fl 34667
727-861-7310
“Thy Grace Is My Sufficiency”

By Joel Goldsmith

Excerpt-Chapter 1 / Pure Being

Page 18

           If you have not learned from the message of The Infinite Way that the only good you are ever going to receive is from within your own consciousness, then you have failed to perceive the nature of its message and mission, which is that God constitutes your consciousness and that through meditation you must draw forth from within your own consciousness the allness and the fulfillment of life.

          Infinity and immortality are made manifest as the consciousness of the individual, and the name of this divine Consciousness, which is our individual consciousness, is I. You must understand that you are not to direct this I, enlighten It, plead with It, or try to be a master of It, but that you are to submit and yield yourself servant to the I of your own being, so that your prayer is that I fulfill Itself as your individual experience, that I be the Grace which is your sufficiency, and then let this I which is your true Selfhood govern your life in Its own way.

          When you then go into prayer and meditation, there must be no preconceived idea as to what you want or how you wish your prayer to answered. There must be a complete yielding as you daily realize, “Not my will, but thine, be done.” Do not go to God with your thoughts and do not try to have God fulfill your way, because you will fail. You must go to God, the divine Consciousness of your own being, the very I which you are, with this prayer: “Reveal to me Thy way, Thy will, Thy thought, and this, then, will be my way, my will, and my thought.”

 *****

From – The Mystical I

By Joel Goldsmith

P.136

 The Purpose of The Infinite Way

             Once again let me remind you that the function of The Infinite Way is not merely the healing of disease or the overcoming of sin or of lack. It is rising out of the three-dimensional consciousness, out of the consciousness of good and of evil, into the Fourth Dimension, the illumined consciousness which is aware of the things of God. In this fourth-dimensional realm, you are in an area of consciousness where you not only know the things of God, but you receive the things of God, and you live under the law of God. This is Grace.

          The Master, who of all persons was best known for his realized state of Christ-consciousness, used as his principle “resist not evil” and “put up…thy sword,” which is a recognition that there is no power out in the world, nothing to fight. He understood the non-power of the world of effect.

          You, too must lay the ax to the root, and the root of all evil is the universal belief in two powers, what Paul called “the carnal mind,” the mind of good and evil. Once you understand the principle that all evil is impersonal and that it does not have its rise in any individual, you will begin to have the secret of healing work and the secret of world work, because you will not attach the sin, the disease, the struggle for power, the wrong thinking, or any other thing to an individual.

          That which is anti-Christ, or so-called evil, is the carnal mind, the universal belief in two powers, which constitutes a universal hypnotism. When you have thus impersonalized and recognized the nothingness of this universal belief, you have lifted your consciousness closer to the Christ-consciousness, and then you will discover why you do not have to resist evil. God is not in the whirlwind. Power is not in the evil condition. Power, God, is in the “still small voice.” Do you want God? Do you want God-power? Do you want God’s grace? Then be still! And when the still small voice speaks, you have it. What happens when you are in the inner stillness is that the presence of God is realized, and it does the work, whatever the nature of that work is.

          The importance of this principle is far greater than you can imagine. The realization of God is not so that you or anyone else should find health, abundance, or happiness. Be assured that God has no interest in that at all. If, in The Infinite Way, there were ten thousand or a hundred thousand of us who really attained health, wealth, and happiness, it would still not be too great an accomplishment, since there are millions and millions of people on earth and more being born every day. So our individual regeneration would be practically meaningless.

          It is only insofar as the light coming to you and to me is permitted to be shown forth in the world that we serve any purpose on earth. We were not sent here just to become happy human beings. We were sent here on earth to glorify God, that God’s laws should be made manifest through us and that through us the world might witness the laws of God in operation, the laws that make men free.

          There is a mental inertia that operates universally in this human world, preventing even those who have been taught how to prepare themselves spiritually for the day from doing so. This mental inertia makes them forget to realize God’s presence; it makes them forget to realize that mesmerism or malpractice is not spiritually ordained, and therefore is not operative in the individual consciousness that has realized the Presence. For the person, however, who does engage in daily spiritual preparation, the realization of the presence of God and the nonpower of mesmerism or malpractice nullifies the effects of universal hypnotism, and in some degree these effects are also nullified for the entire world. A group of diligent students could not only free themselves from discords, but they would gradually free their communities, families, neighbors, friends, nations, and eventually free the world.

          Because each of us is so individual, we each play a different part in letting the light of the message shine through us. There are those who may invite members of their family or friends into a group to hear the tape recording, and in that way the light goes out into human consciousness. Some are further developed, and they become practitioners and teachers. Still others may aid in the financing of the different activities of the work, and thereby help to send it out around the world. Eventually, there are those who, perhaps with greater discernment than others at the moment, perhaps with greater preparedness, begin to understand the principles of The Infinite Way in such a way that they individually can be instruments in a greater measure to bring divine Consciousness to human experience. Each plays a part, and no one chooses which part he will play. But whatever is given to anyone as his particular forte, that is the manner in which he must function in this message.

*****

LUCINDA SHOOK

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From – The Contemplative Life

By Joel Goldsmith

Our students dare not forget for a single day that whatever transpires in their experience comes as an activity of their own consciousness, and therefore it is essential that there be a constant reminder of God as the one and only Power, the conviction that power is not in person or effect, but only in the invisible consciousness of the individual.

Because of mesmeric world sense, we must regularly bring to conscious awareness the understanding of these revealed principles. By a neglect of these principles, we unknowingly accept the problems of human existence. On the other hand, by a conscious remembrance that God is the only power and that there is no power in effect, we dispel the illusory belief in two powers and its activity.

In order to build a consciousness of truth, all Infinite Way students should know the following passages as well as they know their own names:

The New Horizon                                                from The Infinite Way

God Is One                                                          from Living The Infinite Way

Protection                                                           from The 1955 Infinite Way Letters

Break the Fetters That Bind You                      from The 1958 Infinite Way Letters

Contemplation Develops the Beholder             from The Contemplative Life

Introduction & Love Thy Neighbor                  from Practicing the Presence

The Relationship of Oneness                            from The Art of Spiritual Healing

2. Practicing the Presence ~ once a student begins to be aware of the Presence and to witness the effect of this awareness more and more, there comes an inner quiet that prepares him to study the next book.

3. The Art of Meditation ~ once some proficiency in meditation has been attained, the student is now prepared for serious study and practice.

4. The Art of Spiritual Healing

5. The Infinite Way

6. Spiritual Interpretation of Scripture

                        and then the other writings.