1950 First Portland Class

Tape 4 Side 1

The Christ

By Joel Goldsmith
Part 1 of 5

I am speaking from that point of scripture which states that I and the Father are one. That particularly, because throughout the message of The Infinite Way, you’re going to find authority, truth, in scripture for most of this message. The first thing I said was that if we knew the letter of truth correctly, we could build the spirit or consciousness of truth. You remember, the Master said, “If I go not away, the Comforter will not come to you.” And then he spoke of the Comforter as the Spirit of Truth, the Consciousness of Truth. It took away the personal element of the man, and so with this. Eventually we do away with the letter of truth; we do away with the books; we do away with the human teachers—not doing away with them as to make them unnecessary, but just as merely accompaniments or inspirational guides.
Actually we get our truths from the Spirit, from the Consciousness Itself, and then we can go forward in our spiritual demonstration. But first, we must have the Jesus, we must have the letter of truth in order that the Spirit may evolve within or as our consciousness. Now the first step, especially if we take the Master’s teaching as our guide, the first step that we have to understand is that I and the Father are one. Now that, of course, is merely saying something that you already know and which, as knowledge, isn’t too important, but you must take that idea of oneness, live with it, interpret it, reinterpret it, translate it to yourself in a thousand different ways until the feeling of oneness comes.
So we begin with that letter, that understanding that I and the Father are one. If we understand that, we understand that all that the Father hath is mine. We also understand how we can live by grace; how all things are given to us, rather than that we have to slave for them, earn them by the sweat of our brow. Also, we understand why the place whereon I stand is holy ground; why I don’t have to move anywhere; why I don’t have to go to another climate; why I don’t have to go to a busier city or a more prosperous one; why I don’t have to change my environment, but through the realization that the place whereon I stand is holy ground, here and now, as I unfold in wisdom, in spiritual development, I will be moved.
Of that you may rest assured: that you will not stand still in one place for long after your spiritual development begins. You will be moved, first in consciousness and then, well…. I don’t know how you are situated here in Portland, but almost every city I’ve been in has a ghetto, a very poor district, a tenement district. No excuse for that out here in the west. In the earliest days of the settlement of America, people came over from the old country, or the old countries, and some of them had been living in ghettos, and they just couldn’t shake that out of their consciousness, so when they came to the new country, pretty quickly they formed more ghettoes around New York and Boston and so forth.
Strangely enough, as people moved to the west, some went on and became Marshal Field’s and McCormick’s and other great lights, but some of them gravitated right back into ghettos. Way out on the prairies, Chicago, where honestly, there was nothing but God’s green earth and sunshine and air, pretty soon there were ghettos. And believe it or not, California has ghettos too. You can take a person out of the ghetto, but you can’t take the ghetto out of a person. If that’s their consciousness, wherever you move them, they will start in and found another ghetto. That’s sad, isn’t it?
Well, to some extent, we are like that. We get set in a certain state of consciousness. We get to think, “Well, of course, I haven’t enough education or enough environment or enough pull or enough experience or whatever it is, and we almost get satisfied with the little localized place in which we find ourselves. It may be a ghetto, or it may be something a little better than a ghetto, or it may be a lot better. Regardless of what it is though, we stay in it too long. We have no right to stay in any one environment too long. Ours should be a progressive experience; a progressively unfolding experience toward infinite good.
There is nothing in the world too good for those on the spiritual path: yachts, palaces, all the good in the world should be for those—if they like them—on the spiritual path. Why? For the simple reason, that as you come into the consciousness of God, you come into the consciousness of infinity. And you couldn’t come into that consciousness without it pouring itself through in always greater measure. So if we are standing still for several years, if we are in the same position now where we were five years ago, it is because we stood still inwardly. We have not progressed spiritually. And the sad part is that we may be truth students, and we may know more truth than we knew five years ago, and still be in our little ghettos. Why? Because we have only increased in the letter of truth; we have only increased intellectually, we haven’t yet touched the hem of the robe, of the spiritual robe.
Now, in proportion as you realize your foundation to be: I and the Father are one, all that the Father hath is mine; the place whereon I stand is holy ground; whither shall I flee from thy Spirit?; Lo, if I make my bed in hell, Thou art there—as we develop that, even, let us say intellectually, and persist in that line of unfoldment, very soon we catch the spiritual import of it and we go forward. Therefore, for my basic premise in the message of The Infinite Way, I give you that idea: I and the Father are one, and not two. That is the only relationship that you can have that will give you all that the Father has, and you’re entitled to it under the Christ teaching.
Do you not know that you are children of God? And if children, heirs, and if heirs, joint heirs with Christ in all the heavenly riches. Well, this is why. So if you aren’t having heavenly riches, if you aren’t having infinite health, harmony, wholeness, joy, peace, power, dominion, success, then somewhere you are lacking in a consciousness of oneness.
Someone told us years ago that we must not even have enough space between God and ourselves to fit a piece of tissue paper into. And that’s true. This must be your idea and mine of oneness. All here, I and the Father in this one, and all that the Father hath contained in this one. Then I can say, here, right here, the place whereon I stand is holy ground.
End Part 1