Infinite Way Letter

February 1955

By Joel Goldsmith

Part 4 of 4

There Are No Added Things – continued

That is true. I quote Mr. Goldsmith again: “When we hear the Master’s words: ‘I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly,’ do we not immediately think of a greater sense of human health and wealth?” yet since human health and wealth are the things we know best, it is not strange if they become the symbols of abundance. But let us, at least, recognize them as symbols, and never to regard that occurrence as the demonstration. Let us not think that God arranged it for us.

This must be true of all the things that the Voice seems to tell us. We must listen, and obey what we think we have heard, but we must never forget that what we have heard is a human interpretation only, and that that is not what we are after. Especially, we must make no effort towards that translation. Too easily we can go wrong, swung and swayed by our human wills and desires. When we know what we have heard, we know it! When we try and guess, try and interpret, we are more than likely to guess wrong.

This is all akin to the razor’s edge of dilemma that exists in these matters when we try and understand them from a human plane. On the one hand, there is the absolute willing and seeking after God, a turning to God for nothing but God, with a wish to lose one’s sense of self in the realization of one’s Self. That is the furthest we can aim for. But in the meantime (and at the same time) one is—or seems to be—a human being living in this world, and one cannot more than momentarily forget that. And when one returns from that forgetting, there will be human needs and crises once again, problems and troubles that stand in the way of peace and clearness of Spirit.

Once, one would have taken these problems to a practitioner, asking for their dispersal as such. Still, if one cannot achieve a clear vision that dispels them, one will ask for help, for the removal of the troubled spirit, the disturbed or limited consciousness that cannot find peace, that cannot find God. And when that peace has come, how can one help recognizing the freedom that has occurred as the Word of God made flesh? We have seen the loaves and fishes multiplied, sufficing and more than sufficing. Are we to deny those? Yes, as loaves and fishes. The most that we can let ourselves see and recognize is that all fulfillment is in God, and comes from God, and is God, and it matters not at all in what form it is seen. Our gratitude can never be for the loaves and fishes, but that we have been allowed to see and know the fulfillment that is God.

Once, it seemed so easy. In the beginning, there were promises that seemed to be fulfilled, needs that were answered. One thought it would continue in that way, growing better and better. But one cannot expect that the problems will ever vanish totally. As one advances spiritually, they may seem to intensify and to weigh more heavily. Is this a denial of what we were first promised? I think not. If we took that promise as one of an easier road, a road with less and less burdens, we had ignored everything we have ever read of the lives of spiritual men.

If and when we ever achieve the happy ending, with ourselves walking shining and free from chains to a blissful eternity, we shall have lost all sense of ourselves and humanity, and we shall have disappeared from the human scene. But while we live in the human scene, among men of varying degrees of consciousness, we shall find problems that we can grow free of only by an ever deepening, more intense knowledge of God. They will not be the same problems with which we were formerly faced. A grown-up is no longer troubled by the sicknesses and fears of childhood. The grown-up can do his fractions and his decimals now, but the problems of higher mathematics overtake him as his knowledge increases.

We must not ask nor seek for that human happy ending. More and more we must turn to God for the forgetting of ourselves, for the sake of God only, for the realization of God not as A power, but as Power only; not as the Cause of an effect—not even as Cause and effect—but as all there is, with neither Cause nor effect considered. Cause and effect are of the human world, and our reach must be beyond that. We shall be dragged back to this world, to complain of it, or to be grateful for delivery from its troubles. And again and again we must reach forward beyond it.

It is a hard task that is before us, denying us everything we thought essential. No one can say whether the last deliverance will ever be known by any of us. I am in no way sure that it matters whether it will or not. It is the climbing of the mountain that matters, and not the ultimate view from its top. That view is an achievement we will be tempted to think of as having been made by us, or as having been granted by Grace. We should know by now that an achievement, of no matter how rarefied a stature, is never what we are seeking. To believe that a search must have an ending, and that it is useless without one, is to cling still to the material belief of struggle and fulfillment, of winning a final prize, a crown set upon one’s head. And then one is back where one started, in the scale of values one was so desperately trying to leave. In the deepest sense of truth, we are already beyond it. We are fulfillment ourselves, and the harmony and security we are seeking are within ourselves. This is what we have always to know, always to remember. No one has ever said that it was easy.   (A Student.)

End Part 4 of 4