1959 San Diego Special Class

Tape 271 Side 2
Specific Principles – continued

By Joel S. Goldsmith
Part 2 of 5

And the second passage was, “My kingdom is not of this world,” and so I knew that you must never try to demonstrate money or a home or companionship.  You must never try to demonstrate holidays or vacations or automobiles or even transportation because the spiritual kingdom has nothing to do with this world. Yet, when you attain the spiritual kingdom, all of the things of this world are right there for your use.  They are the added things.

Now, this really made up the foundation of my scriptural understanding, but when The Infinite Way book was on the press, four couples in Los Angeles – four married couples who had been patients before – came to me and said they would like to know what I know about the Bible because they knew that it was the Bible that must be the foundation of my understanding.  Well you know, I was embarrassed because it was like living on false pretenses.  “No,” I said, “the Bible is not too well known to me. I know the stories in them, but . . . from reading, I know the passages, but the Bible really isn’t . . .”

“No, no, no . We don’t believe that!”  And they didn’t.

And it ended up by my agreeing to have four Friday nights in my home, and these four couples were to come, and I was to tell them everything I knew about the Bible.  Well I knew that without God’s help I wouldn’t need four Friday nights.  So before the first Friday night, I sat down – that’s why you find this Bible with me; wherever I go, this Bible is my right hand – and I held it in my hand, and I said, “Father, you sent those students to me, I didn’t seek them.  You sent them.  What is it you want me to tell them?  I’ll tell them anything you give me, but I can’t go before them and lie.  I can only tell them those two passages.  If there’s anything else, tell it to me.”

And I waited and waited, waited, and then I opened the Bible, and I opened to something that had to do with Moses.  And I thought, “Ah well, maybe this is it,” and so I went back to the start of Moses, and I continued reading until I reached Exodus 20.  And I read the Ten Commandments, and something there sort of startled me, so I read them over again.  And all of a sudden the thought came to me, “These didn’t come from God.  This is nonsense.  God never told his spiritual son not to commit adultery or to steal or to commit murder or to envy or be jealous.  Now I haven’t . . . I can’t imagine that kind of . . . my father might say that to me, my human father, but a divine Father?  Oh, I don’t believe it.”  And so I just held this Bible and kept reading those passages, and then it flashed into my mind:  “The law came by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ.”

Aha!  Now we have it.  Now we have a secret.  Now we know that the Ten Commandments is only the law.  It’s the law of humans.  Every human has to abide by those or he’ll get into trouble.  But when grace and truth come, you don’t need these anymore.  We are all one in Christ Jesus.  We are just one, we’re not two. We’re not male and female in Christ Jesus, and there are no two pockets in Christ Jesus; we’re one, and there’s one pocketbook, and that’s the pocket of the Lord.  It’s God that is the bread, wine, and water.  Why, then, do we have to steal or even earn our living by the sweat of our brow?  And so I saw the difference between living under the law and living under grace, and that was the first lesson.  And you’ll find it in the bookSpiritual Interpretation of Scripture.

And so the next week, I went back to this Bible, and I prayed in the same way, and I opened to the book of Ruth, and I read it – read it several times – and then finally I saw:  There never was a Ruth, there never was a Naomi – that is merely a way . . . Naomi is just a way of telling about us – we, who left the spiritual kingdom to go down into materiality, and after we got there and had material prosperity, didn’t have enough sense to hold it.  Then we had material poverty and didn’t know what to do about it.  Now we find something that heretofore was as worthless as a daughter-in-law must have been in those days because only sons were important in those days, not daughters. And the daughter-in-law was less than even a daughter.

And here is that which is a nothing . . .  and here, too, was even a Gentile daughter. That really is nothingness.  So here is the nothingness, that is, that which is not regarded, but it becomes the most.  What is that?  The Christ, the very thing we hadn’t thought about, the very thing we’ve ignored, the very thing that we may be thought of lived two thousand years ago.  That very thing that we have not considered is the very Christ of our being, and listen to what it says to us: “Whithersoever thou goest, I will go.”  And you will find in Spiritual Interpretation of Scripture, that that’s the lesson – the lesson of Ruth and Naomi revealed as the Christ of our individual identity.

And so do you know what happened from that group of eight, once a week?  It became a group of fifty, every night of the week, five nights a week.  And the other two nights, we went down to Desert Hot Springs and talked to the students down there.  And then at the end of the sixty weeks – I’ve forgotten now – two or three of the girls in the class had taken shorthand notes.  They typed them and gave them to me and said, “Why don’t you do these notes so that we can have them permanently?”  And so I went away, up to Ojai Valley, and out of it came the book, Spiritual Interpretation of Scripture, and that book represents sixty weeks of work that took place in that office on Hawthorne Avenue in Hollywood.

So you see that every lesson was given to me as it was needed.  Over the years, students have asked me in these questions to speak about love, and I’ve always had to answer and say, “I know nothing about love.  I can’t tell you about love.  It’s something I don’t know.  It’s something I don’t believe I’ve ever experienced.  I can’t tell you what it is.  I don’t understand it.  I never have.”  And then one day I was walking . . . I was giving a lecture on Friday afternoon in Honolulu . . . walking along the street with this Bible in my hand, and all of a sudden I heard a voice say, “Buy me a flower, just a little flower.”  And I looked around and there was no one there.  And I rushed back to a flower stand, and I had her give me two tiny carnations, the kind they use in carnation leis.  And I just walked along with those in my hand and went up on the platform and put them on the desk right here next to me, and when I started to talk, I was talking about love.

I talked a whole hour about love.  I have no knowledge of what I said because it wasn’t recorded, and I can’t remember it, and nobody else seems to have remembered it.  It just disappeared into thin air.  On my next trip to Seattle, I found myself again talking about love; not intentionally, just came out.  And the lady who was taking down the recording just forgot to turn it on, so it wasn’t recorded. And again, we had nothing on love.  But the next time that it came through my lips the recorder was on, and that you have in the booklet Love and Gratitude.  And that’s how love came into my life and how I found the meaning of love because it was given to me.  I didn’t make it up.  It was given to me.  It came.

End Part 2