From – Spiritual Discernment: the Healing Consciousness
By Joel Goldsmith
Excerpt – Chap.8
Page 127

The Recognition of the Illusory Nature of An Appearance Destroys It

There have been many times when persons have been so ill with a fever that they were sure they could not fulfill some pressing obligation, but they asked for spiritual help, and the fever abated. What happened to the fever? When the picture of a man with a fever was presented to me, I did not give him any medicine or do anything of a material or physical nature. But the fever left. Where did it go? Where was it? It was an illusion in human belief, and when I refused to accept it as reality, it dropped dead. Had I accepted the fever as truth it would have continued.
Error continues forever unless it hits up against a state of consciousness that does not accept it. Then one with God is a majority. The world was supposed to be flat, a square world. For thousands of years it stayed that way until Columbus came along and the flatness or squareness began to dissolve and disappear. Where was it square? In the illusory sense of it. Did Christopher Columbus change it? Not one single bit. Today it is the way it was when the people of his day saw it and believed it to be flat. Now our concept is nearer to the truth.
At one time it was believed that the sun revolved around the earth. That was illusion, but was the illusion ever externalized? No, the illusion existed in universal belief or universal human thought. But let us suppose that in my ignorance I believe the sun goes around the earth, thereby making that belief mine. Or suppose I believe I am ill and I make that a part of me by accepting that belief. I have then taken it out of the universal and made it personal to me, and I will be ill unless I can find someone who will agree to disagree, who will refuse to accept the disease even though I can show it to him, someone who will stand back and say, “Now wait a minute. How can this be? If there is a God and God is infinite, then this cannot be.” You have to have the same vision that Christopher Columbus had in looking at a flat world, a vision that does not merely see through the mind but that has an intuitive sense which sees through the appearance.
Suppose I looked out at an audience and see people, old people. That is what the eyes tell me. But what does my developed spiritual awareness tell me? There is nothing out there but the life of God. What happens when I perceive that? The sick begin to feel well again. The old begin to be young again. There are many examples of people who have reached seventy-five, eighty, eighty-five, ninety, or ninety-five years of age, who are not decrepit, not deaf, dumb, or blind. Some have caught the nature of their true identity, and their body is no longer under the law of matter, but under Grace. When the body is under Grace, Grace maintains it as long as a person has need for it. The material sense of body has arisen because of the Adamic belief in two powers. This material sense of body is lost in proportion as God is realized as infinite Spirit, the Substance, Law, and Activity of the whole universe, including the body.
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