1959 San Diego Special Class
Tape 269 Side 1
The Nature of God
compBy Joel Goldsmith
Part 3 of 5
Now, I have had experience in mental institutes with mental patients. I have had experience in prisons, and so I speak to you from 30 years of experience when I say that if you or any of your friends or relatives are in sin, don’t try to stop it or correct it but, rather, see if you cannot awaken in them or yourself a desire to know God because that’s all that’s necessary. When the realization of God takes place in you whether you are taken in adultery, whether you are the thief on the cross, whether you were Judas Iscariot, you are instantly made free.
In other classes I have told our students that when my first spiritual experience came to me, I enjoyed every facet of human life that businessmen enjoy – especially traveling men – and I traveled Europe and America and I knew the so-called good things of life – the joys of cards, the joys of a horse race, the joys of drink – all of the joys that are normal to a human being and yet which in our understanding now completely disappears and is made of no value. And in that one brief second of spiritual life, every bit of that human sense of existence passed away.
Now, since then I have had the opportunities of working with men and women who were more active in sin than I was – more active in what the world calls sin – and I have witnessed that same thing in them – that when that moment of realization came, yesterday was dead and all of its desires and all of its fears, all of its false appetites. And so I say to you, in your spiritual studies, don’t study to get well or to become pure or to become spiritual; don’t waste time that way. Just study to come to know God aright, to experience God, to have the conscious awareness of the presence of God. Then you will find that what I quoted last night is true – where the spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. Where the presence of the Lord is, where the consciousness of God’s presence is, there is liberty, there is a complete and immediate freedom from physical limitation – mental, moral and financial limitation. It all drops away because you cannot be in the presence of God and in the
presence of error at the same time. That’s an impossibility. Therefore, with all your getting, get the realization of God’s presence and above all things – and I think this is one of the most important things – develop a love for God.
Now in my experience I find very few who write to me in the earlier days of their study have even any thought about a love for God. Their entire attention is on attaining physical, mental, moral, financial freedom, or gaining companionship or gaining employment or supply. And they think of God as a means to that end. But rarely do I find in the first, second or third year of a person’s study that God is the object – not the means to an end, but the end itself. And yet this is the message of The Infinite Way. The message of The Infinite Way is not going to God for something. It is not a reaching God for something. It is attaining God, and that’s all, for to know Him aright is life eternal.
I saw that years ago that many people came to me with the idea, for instance, they were sitting in a chair here as the patient, I was sitting in the chair here as the practitioner, and probably I prayed to God and then God’s grace came down to them over here. And that’s a mistake. Because of omnipresence, there is no here, there, and there; for I am, God is, and I don’t have to go anywhere even mentally to reach God because I and the Father are already one, and the place whereon I stand is already holy ground. So there is no going up or out or to; it is merely the realization of withiness. And there is no patient here and the practitioner here. That also is an illusory picture. The reason is that since God is infinite, there cannot be a patient or a practitioner. There can only be God infinitely manifested as individual being, and that wipes out a patient without a funeral service.
Now, for the benefit of those of you who have studied the mental sciences – either Religious Science or Mind Science – I would like to say that this is a completely different field of activity than I am revealing to you in The Infinite Way because it is true that with the power of the mind you can produce effects in the human world. I know that because I have studied not your mental sciences, but I have gone back to those who originally were the masters of the mind – those who knew and practiced the powers of mind and know far more about it than what you are studying. And I do know this, that with power of your mind – if you would imbue your mind with statements of truth, affirmations of truth, realizations of truth – you could produce harmony for yourself, your relatives, your friends, patients, students; there is no question about that. But I also call to your attention that this is not God living or God healing for this reason: You can use the power of your mind for evil. Your mind will work equally for evil or for good, whichever way you determine to direct it. Of course, it may be that you have an innate nature – and undoubtedly you have or you wouldn’t be in this class – which would not permit you to use your mind for that purpose, but that doesn’t mean that you couldn’t if you want to.
In other words, there are people in this world using their mind for evil purposes, for selfish purposes. Sometimes you may not be willing to describe it all as evil, but people who manipulate the mind to sell a product are using that power selfishly even if the product is a good one. And there is always the potentiality of the use of the mind for personal or evil purposes. That has all been witnessed so often in the metaphysical world that it requires no enlargement upon at this moment. So that I say this to you: The Infinite Way does not deny those mental teachings in any claim that you cannot mentally produce healings or good. I have witnessed too much of that so I know that it can be done. I know that also the mind and its thoughts can be used for evil purposes, erroneous purposes, destructive purposes and, therefore, I say to you that our interest in The Infinite Way is not in using the power of mind even for good because our work takes us into a dimension where there is neither good nor evil; where there is only spiritual activity and being. That is the major function of our work.
End Part 3
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