1959 London Closed Class

Tape 274, Side 2

Spiritual Consciousness

By Joel S. Goldsmith

Part 1 of 4

Good evening.

The question has been asked why it is that so few mystics in the world’s history have been healers.  Why is it that one can have actual conscious contact with God and still not become a healer?

The answer is that almost all of the mystics of whom we have actual records have had a religious background, and this it is that prevents their becoming healers.  In other words, their religious background has instilled in them the belief that God is a great power, and that God does something to other powers called sin or disease or wars or lack.  There is that belief in all religious teach­ings that you can turn to God and have God do something for you; and this, of course, is the barrier which makes spiritual healing impossible.  First place, God has no such relationship to man or to the earth; and unless one knows the nature of God and the nature of man, it is an impossibility to attain the necessary consciousness which results in healings.

Now I must illustrate that for you.  God – the great “I am,” Spirit, Soul, Consciousness; that which we call the creative principle of man and of the universe – the creative, maintaining, and sustaining principle is infinite – infinite intelligence, divine love.  And into this realm of God nothing ever enters that defileth or maketh a lie; nothing ever enters the kingdom of God that needs healing, improving, reforming, supplying.  God is of too pure eyes to behold iniquity.  God has no consciousness whatsoever of a world that needs improving, of a world at war, of a world in poverty.

Imagine, if you can, what would be the nature of a God that could watch these last three wars through which we’ve gone and do nothing about it.  Just let it go on, aware of it?  Heaven forbid that there should be such a God!  If God had the power to stop these wars – these bombings, the poverty, the slavery in some parts of the world – and didn’t stop it, God would be fiend, not a God; and if God didn’t have the power to stop it, God certainly wouldn’t be a God – one or the other.  If God had the power to stop it and didn’t, it could not be God; if God had the power to stop it, and didn’t, God would be a fiend.  Not even a human parent could watch this carnage and permit it to go on if they could stop it.

Therefore, unless an individual can understand that God is infinite good – the infinite intelligence of the universe, divine love – one has no understanding of God, no correct understanding of God – even if one had a feeling of God’s presence, which mystics do have – an actual awareness of it.  Yet, there is a blind spot in them, a barrier which prevents their overcoming the old belief that you can look to God to do something for the people of earth.

When you understand God as Spirit, omnipresence, you understand then that man is all that God is; that God constitutes man; and all that the Father hath is thine. And then you understand why there is no need to pray to God for anything; no need to expect anything of God.  The need is that we come into the orbit of God, the nature of God, the realm of God by becoming Sons of God.  As a human being – the creature – you are not under the law of God, neither indeed can be.  If so be the Spirit of God dwell in you then do you become the Sons of God; then are you under God’s grace.

As this creature living in a world accepting the belief in two powers, the Master well describes us: a branch of a tree that is cut off and withereth.  That is the entire human race – until the individual by abiding in the word and letting the word abide in them; dwelling in the secret place of the most High; living and moving and having your being in God is reestablished as the Son of God, living by grace.

Surely Saul of Tarsus was not living by grace.  He knew great miseries and great unhappiness.  Hatred, persecution filled his consciousness, but St. Paul could say: I live yet not I; God, the Christ, liveth my life.  I live by grace.  I can do all things through Christ.  In other words, now I have contact with my spiritual source.  Now I am consciously one with the source of all life, all being; and I can now relax, take no thought for my life, because now there is this Father within that performeth everything that is given me to do – feedeth me,leadeth me beside the still waters; maketh me to lie down in green pastures.  None of this is true of the creature; none of this is true of the person running their automobile into brick fences; stumbling down the street with alcohol, robbing banks, inflicting evil upon each other, brawling in their homes or in their business.  This is not the Son of God living under the grace of God; this is a branch of the tree that is cut off and withereth!

But because of the grace of God, that same individual may later say: “Though my sins were scarlet, I am now white as snow; though I was the prodigal eating with the swine – eating husks, branch of a tree cut off withering – now I am restored to my Father’s house, and once more wear the ring and the robe of authority and Sonship.”

And so with us, though we were mortals, though we were sinners, though we lived the normal life of a human being – sometimes good and sometimes bad, sometimes rich and sometimes poor, some­times healthy and sometimes sick – by virtue, first of all, of a divine grace that turned our thought toward God, and the continuing grace which led us, until in some specific moment there was an awakening, and in that awakening we were restored to our original relationship as one with the vine, and the vine is one with God.  And now all of the Godhead bodily is flowing into us, through us, and out from us by virtue of our conscious oneness with God.

Now as long as we entertain a belief that God can do something for this branch that is cut off from the tree – this withering human race – all of this praying, all of this church going, all of this being religious, amounts to nothing more than making us good humans.  It can do that; indeed it can.  To receive correct instruction can always make us good humans; and it’s far better to be a good human than a bad one; although very often it is the bad one who has the best chance of being restored to his Christhood because he’s driven.  Whereas the good one usually can be so content and so peaceful in that human goodness . . .  just as disease – serious disease – is more responsible for people being returned to divine Sonship than health ever was.

End part 1