1955 Kailua Study Group

Joel S. Goldsmith

tape 110A – One Power 4/4

Now, I, if I be lifted up, shall draw all men unto Me. And so it is that in proportion, as I personally, individually, am freed from fear of persons, things, circumstances or conditions, I can release you of evil or destructive persons, conditions, beliefs, discords, inharmonies. But, it is because you, yourself, have been given sufficient grace to be prepared for this experience. If I were to go into a prison or into a hospital, I could not have the same degree of success on a broad scale that I would have in this room. I would have the same degree of success in the prison or in the hospital among those who are brought to my state of consciousness, who are led there and willing to be receptive and responsive to it, but not to the others.

So it is that this victory is achieved one by one and two by two, until someone witnessing harmony and joy and success in my individual experience may be led to say, “Show me some of that.” In the same way that someone, whether in your family or among your friends, noting some change in your physical, mental, moral, or financial standing, says, “Aha, I have witnessed this. What is it?” And they may be led. Others may never even witness it. It is said that two shall lie in bed together and only one shall be taken. Even those that close to us may remain blind forever.

The point now is this—in studying The Infinite Way or practicing it, do not be led to believe that you are being promised that a God will do something for you in The Infinite Way that it didn’t do for you in Judaism or Catholicism or Protestantism or Christian Science or Unity or New Thought, because we have not found any shortcut to God, nor any way of becoming God’s favorite.

The promise that is made is this—there is a principle of life which we heretofore have not known, which even though it is stated in scripture in the first commandment of Moses, repeated as the basic commandment of Christ Jesus, nevertheless is ignored by the world—God is the only power. Beside God there is no other power.

And therefore, you are having your attention drawn to the fact that you can go forth from here and look upon any form of discord, as long as you do it silently and secretly, and realize within your own being, “Thank you Father, besides God there is no other power.” And as you learn to relax, give up this struggle against error, you will then learn the real nature of error, its illusory nature—The fact that error exists as a belief which we have accepted in thought and then begun to fight. It exists as an appearance which we look upon as a reality, an entity. It is almost like looking at the horizon out on the ocean and saying, “I don’t think I’ll take the Loralei.” It will run into that horizon and then where will we be?

That limited people on earth for thousands of years. In fact, it’s only a matter of 600 years since people have been willing to break through that terrible horizon where all ships will fall overboard into the deep, deep nothingness. Now you see the horizon doesn’t exist as an entity; it doesn’t exist as a concrete thing. It exists as a false appearance and the moment an individual knows that and knows that I can’t be fooled by the sky sitting on the water because my intelligence tells me, that then you get into your ship or your airplane and off you go with no fear. In the same way, we witness the car tracks, the train tracks, come together in the distance and decide that we won’t get on the streetcar or the railroad train because just a short distance ahead we’re bound to run off, those tracks coming together that way. Ah, but our intelligence tells us that the tracks coming together in the distance is not actually an existence, an entity, an identity—a thing; it is merely an illusory picture which isn’t out there at all, its up here in the mind.

Eventually, you will come to see the same thing regarding evil conditions of mind or body, erroneous conditions of persons or circumstances.

You will begin, little by little—if you practice, to understand you must not fight the people and conditions of the world. You must rest and relax, secretly and sacredly declaring within yourself, “Thank you Father. I accept the first commandment. I accept the fact that besides God, there is no other power.” If this commandment be not true, Christianity never was true, nor Judaism. And yet Judaism and Christianity survive and are on the increase.

Now let us remember this. We have no hope of ever achieving harmony, individually or collectively, if there are powers other than God. If there are such powers, we have no hope. No way has yet been discovered of bringing God into the picture to do something to sin, disease, death, lack, limitation or wars or rumors of wars, or epidemics. No way has yet been discovered of bringing God into that scene. The reason is, there is no such God and there is no such scene.

As you study these writings pay particular attention to every passage that relates to the nature of God and the nature of prayer, because once you come to the realization that it is true that God is love, you lose all fear of persons, places, things, conditions—else you haven’t come to the realization that God is love.

Once you come to the realization that God is life, you lose all fear of disease and death—because God being infinite, life must be eternal and immortal. That life being infinite, eternal and immortal must be your life since there cannot be an infinite life and yours. That infinite life must be yours. The moment you realize God as your life, no thought ever comes into your mind of age, dissolution, death. It is only as we entertain the belief of duality, two powers, two lives, that we have all of the problems of human existence.

The nature of God is revealed as one. If that is true, the only law, if there is such a thing as law in the world, then the only law there can be is the law of God. Don’t you see how that wipes out the laws of heredity, laws of matter, laws of disease, laws of sin, laws of false appetite? If at all, there is any law on earth, it must be the law of God. Since God is infinite, God’s law must be infinite; God’s law must be good.

Now these are the things that you take into your consideration to spiritualize your consciousness, to attain that mind that was in Christ Jesus. You must consciously and concretely come to the realization that if there is a law on earth, it is God’s law and it is good. And so you stop fighting that which the world calls laws. In the same way, if you acknowledge God as infinite, then if there is any activity in this world at all, then it must be the activity of God, and so you cannot fight what appears to be discordant activity, since you’ve come to the realization of only one activity.

Ah yes, but be assured of this. If you can be made to fight or look to God to overcome some other activity, you will lose. If you can be made to look to God to overcome anything on earth, you will lose.

It is only in proportion as you realize that as in heaven so on earth—God is infinite, and therefore the battle is not yours, only in the attaining of that consciousness can you come into harmony. Otherwise, you will always go around with a chip on your shoulder, fighting persons, sins, diseases, false appetites, lonesomeness, poverty. One condition after another will rise in your experience as long as you are a fighter. Once you come to the realization of God as one, and can sit back and look out on the sun, the moon, the stars, nature, tides, and realize how wonderfully God operates; see the birds in the air and the fish in the sea, see how wonderfully God operates, then you learn to sit back and say, “Ah yes, God is in His heaven and all is well on earth.”

Now, now can you see that part of our failure to achieve harmony has been the belief that there is a discord, an inharmony, and that only if we can be deserving of God, if only we can get to God, if only we can understand, if only we can reach, something will be done about it; in that we have prolonged our own discord.

On the other hand you will watch this, that in proportion as you can say, “They have only the arm of flesh, nothingness—nothingness. We have God, the Lord God almighty governing this universe,” and rest back in that, then you will find harmony appearing in your experience.

Now, the question comes up, “How do you achieve, let us call it a greater realization of this truth than we now have?” We do it in this wise. Every time a problem is presented to us, we bring to conscious remembrance whatever of truth applies to that situation. Not for the purpose of destroying it or overcoming it, but of meeting it in our own thought.

For instance, if you picked up the newspaper and saw there these fears expressed about this polio business and these vaccine businesses, you would have to consciously remember, all power is in God, not in polio and not in vaccines. You would have to consciously remember that the life of my being or my child’s being is not at the mercy of man whose breath is in his nostril and what he discovers or doesn’t discover. The life of my child is God, God is the life of my child, and God is its infinite being.

Thereby you remove the belief from your own self and from that of your children of a power in the disease or in the remedy. It’s just as sinful to believe that power in a remedy as it is to believe there is in a sin.

Eventually you are going to see it’s just as much of a sin to believe that there is power in a good thought as to believe that there is power in a bad thought. That was the original discovery that started The Infinite Way on its way when I realized, 1932, that a good thought isn’t any more powerful than a bad thought. Why? Because a good thought is just as human as a bad thought and a human thought isn’t power.