1960 Santa Barbara Open Class
Joel S. Goldsmith
297A – Fourth-Dimensional Consciousness

Good evening…[Students respond spontaneously.] Yes, come! You know, there would never be an understanding between us at all if we keep any kind of a formal relationship. The entire basis of all spiritual teaching is love. And love has to be made evident in our relationships with each other. And that leaves no room for these formalities. Besides that, when there are formalities, you are apt to believe that you’re going to hear a lecture. And, you may be assured of this that you’re not going to hear a lecture tonight. There is just going to be a talk. I’m going to tell you as simply as I can why there is an Infinite Way, what The Infinite Way is, and how it functions.
It begins with a youth and a young manhood that had within itself a vacuum, a lack of satisfaction; plenty of the things of this world, but no inner happiness, and, therefore, a search for something that the world calls God, something that I had never experienced and knew nothing about. Out of all that, or out of that little bit, all of this has come.
When you go back into the history of mankind, if you go back far enough, you find a very sad looking race. A world really illiterate, a world in the rough. Men and women having to work from sun up to sundown for the barest living. The tools with which they worked were crude, whether agricultural, or fishing, or house building, or road building. Their tools were crude. They labored, and there was no printing press, and so there were no books, no manuscripts, no magazines, no newspapers; nothing to read. The only reading materials were the hand-written manuscripts that were done in religious circles, monasteries and brotherhoods.
And the way that came about was this: we like to think today that all men are created equal. Of course, that never could be true and never will be because we are all differing states and stages of consciousness. And there are those whose thoughts rise no higher than earning a livelihood. There are others whose thoughts rise no higher than sports. There are others whose thoughts rise no higher than warfare, conquering, gain at anyone’s expense. But always, and this has been true throughout all ages, there have been a few who, from earliest childhood, showed an interest in something beyond what this world had to offer, an inner seeking, an inner craving, an inner searching. And those few, inevitably, found something and it was always something that took them out of the world, either into a cave in the hills, or the building of a cell, or a monastery.
Eventually, there were these religious brotherhoods, fraternal brotherhoods. And always the few, the few who wanted something more than what you see, hear, taste, touch and smell were led, were directed to these places. And small groups were formed, and eventually societies. And here in these caves, and in these monasteries, and in these brotherhoods, hand-written manuscripts were turned out. Well, of course, even a small manuscript would take weeks to turn out, and therefore, in an entire year, there couldn’t be many copies. And so, reading matter was limited always to the few who could find where these manuscripts were to be found.
Now, as men retired from the world after their first glimpse into something or other, something beyond this world, they reached realms that the ordinary man knew nothing about. Some of them reached the realm of mind. They fathomed their mind. They learned the secrets of mind. Others went much further and went into the spiritual realm, into the fourth dimension, the ultimate. And so we find a, you might say, a whole society built around these men who have discovered the realm of mind and its secrets, and others who have found the realm of God, Spirit, or the fourth dimension, and its secrets.
And so, these men meet. These men travel. They visit each other. They discuss their findings with each other. They discuss the fruitage of their discoveries and eventually, it is revealed to the world that there is, outside of this material realm, a mental realm. There is a realm of mind and wonderful things come forth from this mind if you tap it, if you find the way to release these things, these powers, these activities in the mind.
But in the same way, those who had touched the spiritual realm found something even greater. And this is what they discovered: they discovered that the human race, as such, is a three-dimensional universe, a three-dimensional man and he is limited entirely to his body and his mind. And, of course, the untrained mind and the untaught mind isn’t really much of a mind. But actually, that is as far as the human can go. He can work with his body, or he can work with his mind. And he can live with his body; he can live with his mind. He can live with material powers and forces, or he can go into the mental realm and find mental forces, and mental powers, and mental activity.
But beyond this, there is that which has come to be called the real man, the spiritual man, or the Christ-man, or the perfected man. And, all of this of an infinite nature is found to be embodied as the consciousness of an individual. In other words, we are only limited to this mind and body, and its world, until we break through and there discover a presence and a power within ourselves.
Now, when this discovery was made, it was also seen that the man who touched the realm of his soul, this fourth-dimensional consciousness, was no longer an animal man with animal appetites. He was no longer dependent either on material forces or mental forces. As a matter of fact, coming into the presence of an individual who has touched the fourth-dimensional realm automatically causes the laws of matter and of mind to dissolve and disappear.
And you have an entire…a whole new universe opened in which man is not subject to the law. He is not subject to the law. He lives by grace. He is no longer living by might or by power, but by virtue of this fourth-dimensional consciousness, that which we later come to call Christ-consciousness, or spiritual consciousness, although in the Orient it is known as the Buddha mind or Buddhi. It all means the same thing. It means enlightened mind, enlightened consciousness.
Now, there back in the dark, dark ages, it was known that we of the human race are the unenlightened mind, the unenlightened consciousness. Whereas, the moment we penetrate through into the spiritual realm, we are now the enlightened consciousness, or the Buddha mind, or the Christ-consciousness. All of the monasteries and the brotherhoods had this truth revealed to themselves, within themselves, and in their manuscripts, and as men were led, and of course in those days, women couldn’t be led there because women just couldn’t have religion. It wasn’t meant for them. Their work was to keep house, and run the farm, and the babies. And we men, we had all the wisdom. That was our part, in those days. [Laughter] And every boy, or man, who within his own nature was attracted to something higher than his own surroundings, eventually found his way to one of those monasteries, or brotherhoods, and entered, and in turn became enlightened.