1953 First New York Practitioner Class
Joel S. Goldsmith
45B – A Great Deal on Treatment (4/6)

In other words the opposite sense, “Father forgive them they know not what they do.” I can imagine the Master saying that of Judas and of Peter, but I can’t imagine him sitting down the next day and spending a day at meals or games or instruction with Judas or Peter. Not until they had learned their lesson and brought themselves back into the fold through an adherence to the spiritual law of love.

In the same wise we have, and you will note this very, very frequently in your work, we have a spiritual law: To him that hath shall be given; from him that hath not shall be taken, even the little that he hath. Now you have, who have practiced, think back on some of your patients who have come to the office or those who have written you and whose entire period with you is taken up with a rehearsal of their human lacks, limitations and have-nots. And how very few minutes they permit you to sit with them and give them or draw forth from them the truth of being.

I had an experience of that kind recently in which a lady wrote me a four page letter, and then a six page letter, and then an eight page letter. And every single one of those was filled from top to bottom with human error and always an apology at the bottom for taking so much of a busy man’s time.

Now personally I don’t mind my time being taken up and I wrote that to her, but I said, “I am sure that you could have filled those same pages with what you know of spiritual truth. Then you would have given me a foothold in your consciousness. You would have given truth a foothold.” Now I said, “Let us see if you can begin with this Bible reference: To him that hath shall be given, and sit yourself down each day with plenty of paper and pen or pencil and forget all human situations while you’re at your desk and begin to write what you know of truth.

“Well it may be that at given moment you can only remember one truth, it may be a Bible truth or it may be a metaphysical truth, but that’s all you can remember; your mind’s a blank—on the subject of truth, anyhow. But write that one down and then sit there and wait. And just wait for a second one to come along. I’m sure if you wait long enough you will find that out of the depths of your withinness a second statement of truth will come. Now I would set aside as many periods a day as possible for going back to that paper and write a book on truth. It may never get published but it will be the beginning of one that may ultimately get published. Write a book; write every statement of truth you can remember and what you know about that statement of truth and hold yourself within that bound.”

Now then, we also violate that law of to him that hath shall be given. You watch the miracle in your life as you sit down and let the human experiences for the moment be outside the range of your thought while you sit and contemplate some truth. It makes no difference if you begin with quotations; very soon you will find that you will pass beyond the realm of quotations into your interpretation of the quotation. And from that beginning will come a pouring forth of an infinity of truth within, or from within your own being. To the one statement of truth that you know will be added many, many, many truths pouring forth from consciousness and all of them healing waters.

In the very early experience of practice in Boston, a school teacher came to me who had witnessed some healings there and felt that she wanted to know more about what was bringing those healings forth. And she would come to me every Saturday for some instruction and one day I realized, “This isn’t right; this isn’t right. What am I teaching her? What am I supposed to be teaching her? What am I teaching her?”

Each time she comes we just hit or miss on some subject and we talk about it for an hour and I can’t see that that’s a teaching. I can’t see that she’s gaining much. Something more than this is involved in teaching. Then it came to me, “Well do you know what you’re teaching? Do you know what the principle is itself? Well that’s a good question. Do I know it? Am I certain of this as a principle, as a science?”

And so I sat down and thought, “Well there is a starting point. What is the basic principle?” And I wrote down a Bible quotation and I liked it…Ah, that’s right. That’s our starting point. Now where would you go from here? So I put down another Bible quotation, and before I left my desk I had seven Bible quotations down there that seemed to make a perfect pattern of what I was trying to teach. At least it gave me something that I knew would be good to teach; would be correct and would be effective if one accepted it.

But when I came back to my desk the next day and looked at those quotations, I thought, “That doesn’t seem to be enough…” And all of a sudden that first one began to go around my thoughts and I began writing, and lo and behold I had my own ideas of what that first Bible quotation meant. And before I left my office that day, all seven of those Bible quotations had been carried out to a greater extent than the quotations themselves and that was the basis of my teaching that schoolteacher. She thought it was a wonderful thing. It was so systematic and all based on a principle.

Well you know that after a while it was in those points were embodied in letters that circulated for years and years and years and then became the pamphlet, The Real Teacher and the Seven Steps. Those seven steps had their beginning from the time when I knew a lot of unrelated truths, but all of a sudden I caught the relationship between one point and another; wrote them down and then carried them forth further.

And even to this day without any advertising, without any recommendations, that pamphlet outsells all of the other small pamphlets. I don’t understand it, but evidently those points and the way they are covered gives something to a student.

Now those who have had practice with patients in other cities or states also must realize that every time you write a letter of truth to a patient, you are not only giving them something in the way of a principle, but you are clarifying it for yourself. And very often that is more important than what happens to the patient. Just as the Seven Steps have been more important to me and thousands of patients than they ever could have been to the one who brought them forth originally.

Now watch this, every time that you take some statement of truth that you know and sit down and write a few hundred words about that, you’ll know more the statement that when you began. Therefore it is clear that you are opening your consciousness to a deeper unfoldment and a deeper consciousness of truth by that very fact. Now that is the need for each one of us.

Incidentally, I can look back and I didn’t know it then looking forward, but I can look back now and see that The Infinite Way could not have evolved in any other way. It began with letter writings and it kept on with those seven points, and then it continued by more letter writing. Then those who have copies, there are a few copies left in circulation of the original letters, compare those with the letters as they are today in the book, The Letters, and you will see that they have had quite a transformation.

As a matter of fact, I will tell you the truth. They have had six or seven revisions. They are no more, that book, The Letters, is no more like the original letters that were sent out than our little baby walking is like our present walking. Oh no, no. When I sent those letters out originally, they represented my highest concept of understanding, of truth.

But as I continued writing I could look back and see where I had made mistakes, where I was off and they were rewritten and that is why for years and years patients would write me, “Why don’t you publish these letters?”

No, very honestly, it was nineteen years after they were begun before they were published and oh how happy I am that I was prevented in 1941 from publishing them when I look at them now and see how different they are in 1950 from what they were even in 1941.

Our understanding is never at a standpoint of absolute wisdom—none of it. We may make statements of absolute truth, but none of us have attained the consciousness of absolute understanding and it is for this reason that even when we make these absolute statements that we do not understand them in the absolute. We understand them relatively. Like saying, “God is power,” and then expecting power, that God, to be some kind of a power to something for us as if that power were at our command; as if that power were available to us to use. Do you see why the mistakes we make? Thinking that God is a power available for us to use. The idea itself is horrible, but think how many years of saying, God is power, and of believing that God is power until we come to the realization, “Oh yes but God isn’t that kind of power.” God is the power maintaining Its universe, but God is not the kind of a power that we can use. God is not the kind of power…