Original Iwihub.com Transcript by Eunice Lee, proof reading Zane Maser

1957 Inner Working Group Series
By Joel S. Goldsmith
805B Behind Even Karma

PDF available

First of all, this subject tonight has reference to the deepest part of our work, and one that is so fundamental that we’re going to have to do a lot of thinking about it.

I will start by telling you this. That from the earliest part of my healing experience, the thing that separated my work from Christian Science healing work, and incidentally the thing that made my work so successful that I became nationally known, as just a nothing but a simple CS practitioner, and yet gained national recognition in that field, came about because I had a secret that was not generally known. And since then, I find out that nobody in the rest of the metaphysical world knows it at all, and that the secret was this: That error is not your fault. The sin isn’t in you. The wrong thinking isn’t in you. It makes no difference if you are envious or jealous or malicious or sensual. It is no difference if you’re robbing banks or committing adultery. It makes no difference what the degree of your sins. The fault is not yours. All error has its foundation in the universal mesmerism.

Now, Paul called that the carnal mind. He even acknowledged that, while I don’t sin, I have a sense of sin in me. But it isn’t I. So it is that regardless of what erroneous thing we may feel, urge, temptation, false desire, it is not I. It is a universal hypnotism of which I am the victim. I’m not responsible. I’m not the cause. I’m the victim. It’s using me in my ignorance, and so, as I discovered that Paul speaks of it as the carnal mind, which is enmity against God, and Mrs. Eddy called it mortal mind. She said, “the sum total of all error is mortal mind,” but then she said, “mortal mind is a nothingness.”

Now then, if the sum total of all error is mortal mind, it’s certainly not a man or a woman or a child. And whatever our errors must be, they must be mortal mind acting through us.

And so, at no point in my practice did I ever say, you must do this, or you must not do this, or you ought to read twenty pages today to get healed, or you ought to be more generous, or you ought to be more thoughtful, or you ought to be kind, or you ought to be pure, never. Never. I never touched a patient. I never once tried to correct them or improve them, but always pointed out that they were victims of so called mortal mind, that is, of the universal mortal illusion. Today we call it the mind of flesh, the mind of man, the carnal mind, mortal mind, the arm of flesh, by which we are to understand that we mean nothingness. That only which is power because we give power to it. Do you see that?

Now, that has been the major secret of my healing work. Spiritual living is something a little different. While always that’s the basis for that particular part of it, the real secret of spiritual living is the discovery that the “I” is God, and, therefore, it has within itself all that the Father hath, and, therefore, I don’t have to look to person, place, or thing for anything. Supply, recognition, anything. I carry it with me in the Infinite Invisible, and it’s part of my own being. It comes through others, but if it weren’t first in me, then it couldn’t come through them.

But in the healing work, the thing that has accomplished the most for me is the fact that I know no such thing as condemnation, for any person. I know no such thing as criticism. As far as I’m concerned, it would make no difference if they stole wallets. It is not therefore they are victims of this universal intelligence, and by knowing the nothingness of the mind of flesh or the man of flesh that nothingizes it, because what has given its power is calling it you and then fearing it.

Now, you can well understand that it was only because of that tremendous success that all of this evolved. And as you’ve seen the success of this around the globe, you know that it can be only be evolving for somebody’s benefit. You can’t tell me that this whole country is crazy and Europe and all the rest of it, if they were not receiving some benefit from this work, they’d have been off this path long ago. Whatever benefit they’re getting comes right from that. That I can sit in any room. I can go out here to the prison and not have in my consciousness one single trace of condemnation, knowing that there’s no such thing as a sinner. There are people with a sense of sin who haven’t learned how to meet it and overcome it, and they never will while there’s a belief of good and evil.

Now, the troublesome part of this to me has been that I have always had a certain percentage of people who did not respond to my work. Either they didn’t get a full and complete healing, or they got so little benefit or healing out of it that I could see that their contact with me was waste of their time. I just was getting nowhere with them. And for no reason that you could put your finger on, I wasn’t to blame surely, because I was being as consecrated with them as I was with anybody else. It wasn’t their fault, because on their part, they were doing whatever they were expected to do. They studied; they read; they did this; they did that, but that percentage just couldn’t respond.

And so the suspicion came to me that there is something so deep in their individual consciousness that a healing [is] not going to take place until it’s uncovered, and they give it up, which many people aren’t capable of doing, because we’re all so certain that we are right and justified and so forth. And then, as my attention was drawn to, first of all these baby cases, Mongoloid blue babies, paralyzed babies, so forth and so on, and the few cases that came to me were never met. I’m speaking still now of back in the early days. Never met one of those cases in the early days.

The suspicion was born in me that perhaps they have brought this over from a previous existence, and it is so deeply rooted in them that it can’t be met. Or if they brought it over from a previous existence, and it may be that it can be met, but it would have to be with hard, hard work over a protracted period of time. And at different times, I’ve experimented but evidently never long enough to heal one of those cases.

All the time that this goes on in my mind, remember, I don’t like it, because it argues against what I have said that the error is never personal. That it is this, their mental illusion and that it has to be met in that direction. And so three times in the last ten years, I’ve started small groups, like ourselves, with the idea that if we worked for these cases seven days a week, and maybe two, three, four, five of us doing it—two or more gathered together—and there’s certainly no selfish motive about it, that perhaps we could break some of these cases. And thereby prove that it isn’t a matter of something brought over from the last incarnation that can’t be worked out but actually just something else that can be worked out in the universal.