1960 TORONTO PRIVATE CLASS

TAPE 335 SIDE 2

ADVANCING ON THE PATH

By Joel Goldsmith

Part 4 of 4

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 one 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 Part 4