1964 Oahu/Maui Series

Joel S. Goldsmith

546A – Between Two Worlds 3/4

Now, if you can learn … if you can first unlearn the material sense into which you were born, the material sense that, “Oh, let’s be practical. We must have money. We must have food. We must have clothing.” If you can unlearn this and say, “No, no, no, spiritually, I can grasp the fact that God is Spirit, and therefore, my need is God or Spirit, and having God or Spirit all these things will be added unto me and therefore, I am not going to be practical.” I will be practical with the product by the time the money or the property comes into my hands or the business or the profession. I will then be practical and not wasteful. I will not throw it away. I will not pauperize others with it. Then I will be practical, but I will not be practical in believing that I, myself, am living in a material world and must do something of a material nature to bring about my own unfoldment of supply, of ideas, of home.

No, I will learn that there must be morning, noon, and night turning within to the realization: I have access to the infinity of God, and God is Spirit, and His Spirit floods me, His love, His grace, His peace. My peace give I unto thee, and in this moment of contemplation I receive It. And then, having been fed by the word of God, I now go about those human tasks that are given me to do today, not being concerned with what I may do next year, but rather follow out all instructions given me today.

As we begin to perceive this, we begin to perceive … well, we begin to experience something wonderful; the nature of our human life changes. In other words, I am a business man up to a certain point and then, this adoption of the Spirit of God begins to change the nature and I find myself with a gift. One finds himself with a healing gift, one with painting, one with writing, one with sculpture, one with music, and so life begins to take on a different complexion, so that either during our business or professional life, it is interrupted, and we are turned off into another direction. Or at some period of retirement, very often in the case of women, when their children are sufficiently grown so that they can be freer of the home responsibility, something begins to unfold in their consciousness that also broadens their experience, widens it, takes it out into new directions.

As this unfoldment takes place, it also dawns that since God is infinite, the unfoldment continues to take place increasingly. In other words, even though the Spirit of the Lord God is upon me and I am ordained in one way or another, showing forth His grace, it never is static. It never remains one way forever. There are always progressive stages, advancing stages, and then you’ll discover that eventually you have been lifted so high in consciousness that you are functioning virtually without the body. Everything is taking place up in the soul, in the consciousness, and the body is playing a lesser and lesser part, and then it will not surprise you one day when you step right out and discover that you are no longer walking the earth, but that you are now living out and in consciousness. Your friends and relatives will say, “You know, he fell asleep or she fell asleep,” and that will be that, but that isn’t what has happened.

Just as we outgrew our infant body; just as we outgrew our youth body; just as we even outgrew the body of maturity, the age of child bearing; just as we outgrew that, so eventually we outgrow the entire form, and have no need for it, and then go on into the higher forms of life where we operate behind the scene. Now, I must tell you this, and there is no better day than Easter to tell it to you. Human beings left to themselves would just go on being human beings. There would be no such thing as progression. What they are today they’d wake up and be tomorrow, and what they are tomorrow they’d wake up and be the day after tomorrow, and year in and year out they’d go on living that materialistic sense of life. But fortunately, each one, at some time or other, finds that their thought does turn away from the pains and the pleasures of material sense, and we begin to seek something of a higher nature.

Now, in this day, you can see how that is taking place when you notice the amount of our college students who are seeking and searching for something higher than their church religious teachings, which haven’t satisfied them. They are seeking and searching, and some are finding. I had the pleasure yesterday of receiving a letter from an Episcopal Seminary College telling me that The Infinite Way writings are all the rage on that campus. This is a sign of what I mean that consciousness is reaching up and out. It is not satisfied with material success, and it’s not even satisfied with rites and rituals of religion. Consciousness is seeking a higher something, and that higher something is God realization, not merely the story about it.

So it is, to each of us individually comes a time when this reaching out takes place, and I want you to know today that behind this visible scene, those who have attained the consciousness of a Moses, an Elijah, an Isaiah, a Jesus, a John, a Paul, a Buddha—they still live. They have never died, nor have they let us die out of their consciousness, and the same Spirit that prompted them to teach and heal while on earth still animates them to heal and teach from their present elevation of consciousness, and they are reaching us just as readily as they did when they were walking on the earth. Just remember this: When they were walking on the earth it would have been almost necessary for us to go to the land where they functioned to receive their grace. This is not necessary now because they have transcended the belief of time and space, because time and space are another part of the materialistic sense.

You know, there is no such thing as time. Just for a moment visualize the face of a clock, and notice at the top, number twelve and then one, two, three, four, and so forth, and we will say it is twelve o’clock noon. But you see that is because the clock makers put the twelve at the top, and so as the hands go around to the top, we say it is twelve. Had they put three there we would say it is three o’clock. They just decided to put twelve. Time is manmade. There is no such thing as time. There is only now. There is no such thing as a past, and no one has ever been discovered who lived in the past, and no one has ever been discovered who could live in the future, so there is no past, and there is no future, so far as life is concerned. Life can only be lived now. But, as long as we are in this materialistic sense, we are limited. We have been limited by the nonsense of three score years and ten—which we are discovering is not a law. Why are we discovering it? Well, because we’re discovering that in countries like China and India and Africa, they do not live to be three score years and ten. That is not the age of man. It is more nearly thirty-five or forty. And we are discovering that in countries like the European countries, and this continent, that we are going beyond three score years and ten, showing that God never limited us to three score years and ten. We were limited by our ignorance.

Now, the wiser we become in how to live, how to eat, how to keep the mind active, the longer we will live, even humanly, but once we begin to open our consciousness to the Spirit of God, you will discover that we will add still more years, and yet, years must not be the criterion of life. In other words, the mere fact of living to eighty must not be considered a good demonstration. First of all, that eighty must be achieved with health and harmony, faculties, not the way we see too many people reaching it. That is no demonstration.

But it is not necessarily years that determine the spiritual nature of life because Jesus was probably only thirty-six years of age, and none of the disciples went beyond fifty, so years cannot be the determining factor in how spiritual we are. The determining factor is how rapidly do we develop. How rapidly do we spiritually mature, so that we can be done with this particular phase of experience and go on to whatever must be beyond.