1954 Chicago Practitioner Class

Joel S. Goldsmith

60B – Contemplation, Meditation 2/4

Now that is the experience of your spiritual practitioner when they are meditating for you; the Holy Ghost comes upon the practitioner, the power of the Highest overshadows him or her and then in that split second of conception, the Christ is revealed and then It is born of thee and it is called the Son of God. That is not removing your ills and giving you good health. That is removing your humanhood and giving to you your spiritual identity.

The mental practitioner merely transforms a belief in sickness into a belief in health, merely removes 102 fever and gives you 99 and.4 or 5, 2-tenths or two-fifths of normal temperature; but your spiritual practitioner, the individual who lives so as to be consciously one with God, lives for only one purpose and that is that the Holy Ghost may descend and remain upon him and that this power of the highest shall always overshadow him or her. Then in that overshadowing, this instant of spiritual conception takes place; and the Christ is conceived and then It is born. But it is born in the death of your humanhood and the birth of your… and the revelation and demonstration of your spiritual selfhood and harmony.

Now, this period of the Holy Ghost descending and the power of the Highest overshadowing, comes only after you have attained some measure of the realization of God as the one power and have given up all attempts to fight error or to use truth to overcome evil. Only when you have given up this struggle and realized the battle is not yours but God’s, …stand ye still… only when you have come to the place of realizing…Not by might, nor by power but by my spirit…When you settle back into that and realize, “There’s no use my giving a treatment. It’s not physical might; it’s not mental power. It’s Thy Spirit, Father.” When you can settle back in there, with no longer a warfare against the flesh, against the principalities and powers of this earth, because you have realized the first commandment, that God is the only power, then you are overshadowed with this power of the Almighty. You do feel the descent of this Holy Ghost; you do feel yourself empowered from on High and then you know that it flows out from you, through you, to all who come within range of your consciousness.

For those of you who have ever experienced treatments of animals, pets, birds, must have noted this miracle: that even though the animals may not have known you personally beforehand, once you have treated them, they know you specifically by name and the minute you walk into the room, they will rush up to you and jump in your lap and they will not leave you. They just won’t leave your side. You say, “How could that possibly be?” I’ve had it in my work dozens of times, because having been born and brought up in New York City, I am not naturally an animal lover. In the first place, I don’t understand them, but I do know this: that that love which is of God flows through me, not only to men and women but to animals and to plants and to all things animate or inanimate, and so it is just as pleasing to me to be called on to heal one’s cat or dog or bird as it is to heal their child or themselves because to me, life is God and God is life; and it’s all one and all is equal in the eyes of God. But I have noticed this: that invariably after having worked for an animal or a bird, that I have made a life-long pal; and no matter how often I come into the home where it is, no one else has a chance. I’m tough competition for everybody. I’ve even seen a good bird. Now, as a matter of fact, I have had the experience in Victoria, B.C. in a prayer garden, Emma Smiley’s prayer garden, of having been in meditation for more than an hour, out in the prayer garden, and then found that eight wild sparrows–just ordinary flying sparrows that never come near an individual—circled me for minutes, and then one of them came and sat on my shoulder and pecked up here and then ran away, flew away. That is a very unusual experience, because sparrows are not that type of bird; yet it happened in this period of meditation. Now, the reason is this: God, at that moment, is my individual consciousnesses and God is the contact or consciousness with these birds or animals. Now they do not have reasoning minds, but they do have the one mind; that is why they are enabled to find their way North at the right time and South at the right time and so forth and so on. They are led by a spirit, which we originally were led by, before the fall of man, before we became egotistical and went out as the prodigal on our own, and naturally to which we return, the moment we give up this personal sense of selfhood with its idea that physically or mentally it is a great power, or can be a great power. The moment we give that up, we are restored again in our spiritual being and we function as spiritual beings without taking conscious thought, without having to plan where to go or why or how much it costs to get there. That functions, though, only as we have transcended this intellectual sense of existence, but that only takes place when, first of all, we have come into this practice of the presence of one power, God as one power, the invisible as the only power; and then, of course with that, goes the second commandment, of loving our neighbor, that sense of forgiving and praying for, rather universally.