1953 Second New York Practitioner Class

Joel S. Goldsmith

tape 56A – Teaching and Healing From the Soul 3/4

And so, the man who judges righteous judgment is the man who has no judgment, who neither says good nor bad, right nor wrong, aye or no, and lets the judgment come to him from within. There, as you reread your books, you will find that I have said the entire secret of spiritual living is to become a state of receptivity in which you are continuously becoming aware of the truth of being from within. You see?

And, so it would be with this “is.” You would not dare have an opinion or a judgment, nor would you want to change a bad appearance into a good appearance, which could immediately take on seven bad appearances, taking out one devil to make room for seven. And so the safest way always is—the “is”—the realization of God, God is, and this is enough to know. Then let righteous judgment come through.

Now, you do the same thing all the time when you read a play, and you know right well that something has to tell you whether it’s right or wrong. You can’t sit there and judge with your head because who knows what day something entirely new may come into the world in the form of…and if you’re judging by past standards, how are you going to recognize it?

Too many wonderful things have disappeared from our view, because when it was presented to us we judged it by standards of yesterday, by our preconceived opinions, and said, “Oh, this doesn’t measure up, it can’t be good,” and then a Shakespeare came along, or a Edison came along, or a Bell came along. But entirely different than the world had ever dreamed, and so unrecognized.

So it is with art, isn’t it? Always new forms of art and we are all quick to say, “Oh, that doesn’t measure up to the pattern that we’ve drawn this last hundred years, so it can’t be art.” And then a hundred years later somebody discovers it is art. You see? And so it is, if we look out at each other through our preconceived ideas, or our race conscious beliefs of what constitutes good or bad man, we’ll be doing the same thing as has been done for generations.

This generation will always be the worst one, and the good old times will always be the best one. And there never was a good old time, and there never was a better or a worse generation. See what I mean? Now when we however, approach life from the standpoint of the “is,” then this “thing” keeps continuously revealing the nature of that which is, and the rightness of it, even if it’s appearing in forms not recognized by us.

Now, this I have witnessed in the work, that if you look upon cancer, or consumption, or polio, paralysis from the medical standpoint, you’ve got to agree that it’s bad. If you look upon them from the standpoint of our attitude toward them, it’s always bad, you see.

But in the allness of God how can you account for anything being bad? So the best way to do is to take the attitude of not judging, but letting this unfoldment come, and then what happens is these shadows, called those diseases, have a way of disappearing, and no other way.

There have been times when forms of mental practice, which was mental suggestion, worked—even Coué, Coué’s method worked at one time—self hypnosis. “Every day in every way I am”—self suggestion, auto suggestion, “Every day in every way I’m getting better and better.” And pretty soon it gets to be so. Just like the man who is told he’s looking worse, he gets to look that way. Certainly we respond, as humans, to the power of suggestion. That is how propaganda has worked in wartime, and that’s how some forms of advertising work—through the power of suggestion.

Now then, it works less and less. That’s why these advertising firms have to change their system of advertising. Every few months they’ve got to try new gimmicks, for the simple reason the old ones don’t work anymore. The mind becomes immune, and builds up an immunity against propaganda, and against auto-suggestion, and outward suggestion, and so something new has got to be tried.

Well, in the same way, mental healings are not a success, and sometimes where there is temporary healing, it does not prove to be permanent. That is one mind operating upon another mind with suggestion until finally you say, “Oh, I feel wonderful,” and maybe temporarily you do, but then there’s always tomorrow.

Now, in the spiritual healing you do not influence a person’s mind or body. In spiritual healing your contact is with God. The reason your patient gets the benefit of it is they have made the contact. They have said, “Give me health.” And you have said, “Do you believe that I can do this?” Even if you haven’t said it, the mere fact that they are willing to pay you for it shows that they have faith in it. Do you see that? The mere fact that they’re willing to go out and make a visit, to call on you, that they’re willing to do something, to put out their hand. Rise? “Pick up thy bed and walk.” They are willing to pick up their bed. If they are willing to stick forth their hand. Do you see what I mean? If they’re willing to make a gesture, they have that grain of faith that will bring the healing.

The rest then is up to the practitioner’s consciousness—his realization of it. Not accepting an appearance as real. Not accepting any suggestion of a selfhood apart from God, whether of good humanhood or bad. Now, your best, most successful practitioner will be the one who rises the highest above good humanhood. Even your beginning practitioner, who is grateful when the fever goes from 102 to a 100 will do some healing work, but your best healing work will be done by the practitioner who says, “What difference if it’s 106?” Christ still is. You see?

And, in that proportion then, you come to an individual, who is seeing all the appearances of sin in the world and they do not react upon it. He knows their universal nature, and what difference does it make whether this fellow is being tied down with a sin, or this one is being tied down with poverty, this one is being tied down with a cancer. To that practitioner who has arrived at the state of not differentiating between good and bad humanhood, none of these claims make a response. They see through and they get the healing.

But while you still are dealing with error as error, as we have known practitioners to do—to bawl a patient out because they’ve been under treatment for alcoholism, and took a drink tomorrow or today, and then got a bawling out. You know better. You shouldn’t have taken that first drink. You see what I mean. And the same way other people have come in and were bawled out for being jealous, or envious, or something of that kind. That is not the healing state of consciousness.

It doesn’t mean that the individual isn’t aware that there are still these forms of discord, but they are no longer personalizing them. They are seeing them as a universal or race claim, and going still further by not trying to change them into something good, because the real vision is on our Divine Sonship, on our spiritual nature and being.

(Pause)

I hope this will clarify itself, but this is the vision that was there. It was the Master saying, “I send you forth”…and it had to do with: Be wise as a serpent, harmless as a dove, and in that came this.

That as you go forth, you go forth, of course, in your spiritual purity in your integrity, which represents that first commandment, and the second of the Master’s. You go forth in that purity, alright, but in being wise as a serpent it is in the sense of not reacting to the appearances, and not arguing, or fighting with them. That’s the vision I just saw.