1953 First New York Practitioner Class

Joel S. Goldsmith

45B – A Great Deal on Treatment (3/6)

I cannot remember at this moment whether it was Socrates, Plato or Aristotle, but I’m sure it was one of those three who made or wrote the statement that “You can know God’s love by Its law. You can know God’s love by His law or Its law.”

Now we could again say, “God is love” or we could say, “God is not love.” And I mean without contradiction, because if we say, “God is love,” we would mean not that God is love as human beings understand love, but in some other sense that is far removed from the human sense of love.

We could illustrate that this way and bring to the idea of God’s love being shown forth in His law. Just in the fact of mathematics and music you have laws. Now God does not punish us for the violation of those laws yet we are punished for their violation and necessarily so. Why? If you were practicing music or mathematics there is only one way that you can have any certainty, any surety of what you are doing, and that is that the numbers, their values, the notes and their values forever remain the same without exception.

Now if ever there could be an exception, let us say in mathematics, you might say, “Oh it would be so loving if two times two would only be five today. Oh God, if you could only do that for me today.” That might be a human sense of love, but God has no such sense of love. There is no such love in the mind, heart, soul or activity of God as changing a law even to save your life. You must conform to the law. And in that would be shown forth God’s love. In that sense, we could say, “God is love.”

You look at the chart of the tides and you see they have them charted a thousand years ahead. In that then would be God’s love in that you can know, the navigator can know, the fisherman can know a thousand years ahead, not that he needs it for a thousand years ahead, but for as long as he needs it, he knows the tides, the hours, the depth. He knows and he knows also it will never be set aside, and that constitutes God’s love to him—that as long as he abides by that law he is in safety. The man who violates that knowledge, that law, is in trouble. So God’s law would not extend to protecting the man in violation of a law but it extends to the point of maintaining that law for the benefit of those who come into harmony, into the awareness of its being.

Then God’s power might be said to be the maintaining of Its own integrity, the maintaining of Its own values, qualities, equations. And not in a power such as we think of in the healing of disease or in the regulating of other affairs of our lives. It isn’t a power to which we can turn to get something done. It is a power maintaining the integrity of the universe to which we can conform.

So in saying, “God is not power,” the meaning of it is that God is not power in the accepted sense of the term as being something to which you could turn to do something for you. Or in your garden, God is a power, but try to get God to make an exception in your garden and then you would see that in that sense, God is not power. Now the same sense, people are ill and they are good people very often and they are in tremendous pain and you look to God. “God, why is this happening? How can this happen? Can’t You do something about it?” All the time really expecting God to step out of character to do something special in a certain case where actually there has been a violation of the law and God Itself cannot step in to intervene.

It becomes necessary that “Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.” Not that there is a truth circulating around in consciousness that can come to you to dispel your troubles while you are in violation of the law. Ah, but you say, “supposing we don’t know that law?” That’s sad. That is our task on this path. To learn what that law is and how to come into conformity with it; how to live in accord with it. We have signposts on the way.

There are reasons why in our work we have some wonderful, wonderful successes in healing works and why we have some very horrible failures.

I haven’t yet met the practitioner of any degree of integrity who hasn’t had wonderful success in healing work nor have I met one, regardless of their integrity who hasn’t had some miserable failures. And the answer always is the same, “Why is that true? Why does what I know work so beautifully in one case and the same disease or the same condition in another, it doesn’t work?”

Well, we have certain guides to our living. When we live in opposition to those revealed laws or graces, we bring ourselves under the law—the laws of discord and inharmony, and even God, Itself, doesn’t seem able to remove us from them. Anymore than a navigator navigating against the laws of the sea can bring his ship into port regardless of his, probably purity of character or prayers to God. There must be a conformity to these laws.

Now there are times of course when a person is in ignorance of the law and continues to suffer in that ignorance and nothing can be done about it until the light comes. There are other times when there is a continued willful violation of law and from the experience, not only mine but many other practitioners, there seems no way of releasing people until they give up the violation of the law.

Now let us illustrate here. We of course are assuming that you accept the message and the mission of the Master as a guide. You know that prayer is the means of God contact; prayer is the means of healing, and you are told under prayer…Well you are told in one place that if you go to the altar to pray and there remember that any man has aught against you to get up and make your peace with your brother and then return to the altar. Well there very often is a violation and I’ve seen that the overcoming of that violation, the turning from it has done some miraculous things.

We sit around nursing our grievances: personal, national, international, holding someone in condemnation. It isn’t anything to do with whether it is an individual, a racial group, a religious group, a color group or a national group, we sit holding someone in condemnation and expect to go to the altar and have our prayers heard and answered. In other words we expect the divine harmony of God while we sit around in discord, in violation of the law. Whereas if we’re obedient to that instruction we would get up; we would stop our prayers and sit down and say, “What is this sense? What is this thing that I am holding: hate, condemnation, judgment, criticism, injustice, intolerance? What is all this that I’m permitting to escape through me?”

And then you would understand, “Ah ha, I get it. I’m having two worlds: a spiritual one and a material one. I am holding people in bondage to material sense while inwardly declaring the spiritual nature of being. That would not in any wise prevent us from commenting or noting the irregularities of human existence, but even though we noted them, saw them, witnessed them, there would be no right within us to condemn or hold in personal criticism or condemnation as individual being without the realization of the fact that this was an impersonal thing operating in human consciousness, not as law, not that we should hate, not that we should punish, but rather that we should see through and understand. In the same wise, someone personally injuring us there would be no need, and the law wouldn’t call for us, to be personally on terms of intimacy or friendship or household visiting with them. It would merely mean a lack within us of personal condemnation.