Original Iwihub.com transcript. Transcriber: Eunice Lee, proofread by Zane Maser.

1954 Seattle Practitioner Class
Flesh and Flesh
Joel S. Goldsmith
Tape 102B

pdf  Transcript: Flesh and Flesh tape 102B

Good morning.

And we hope that you imbibe silently what’s taken place here for forty-five, fifty minutes. We wish you were here with us, but we couldn’t take you along on that journey.

All right, we will start off with this quotation that has been given us:

Great is the mystery of Godliness—God manifest in the flesh.
Great is the mystery of Godliness—God manifest in the flesh.
There’s the mystery of Godliness. God is your individual being.
God is manifest as you.

That’s the great secret of the entire Master’s message and mission:

God manifest in flesh.
God manifest as your eternal being.

Now don’t get mixed up with the word, “flesh.” The flesh doesn’t mean something you cut with a knife, or that you bathe. God manifest in flesh means God manifest as your individual selfhood, your true being. God is your true being. God is that, which is looking out through your eyes, and which you identify as “I.” I, Joel. I, Mildred. I, Mary. That I, God is that I.

Don’t say, “I am God.” God is I. Never say, “I am God.” Never do that, because you have to be believing that Joel is God, or that Mary is God, or Jim is God. But God IS, and God constitutes all that is really Joel. God constitutes all that is Jesus, and Mary, and William, and Matthew, and Mark, and Luke. God constitutes individual being. God is the life, the substance, and the very form of your being.

Great is the mystery of Godliness—God manifest in the flesh.

Now, as you realize this, you begin to lose some of your personal selfhood. You indulge less and less of that I business, and more and more of that God Selfhood. The more you live with the idea that God constitutes my being, the more you realize that God is responsible for my supply. God is responsible for my business. God is responsible for my professional activity. God is responsible for my home. God is responsible for my success. You see, more and more, God comes in and less and less I. More and more, the responsibility is on His shoulder, less and less on mine. You follow that?

Now, the whole mystery of Godliness is in the realization that God constitutes our being. We are not mortal, as we seem to be. We are not flesh and blood, as we seem to be. God constitutes our being. We have no Godliness of our own. We have no holiness. We have no purity. We have no integrity. We have no loyalty, and we have no fidelity. God is the life of our being. “Why callest thou me good?” There is but one good. God, the center of my being, the reality of me, is good. Why call me wise? There is only one Wisdom, the Wisdom of God, manifest as my individual being.

It makes no difference whether you’re a poet, writer, musician, doctor. Whatever your capacities are, they are capacities not of you. They’re capacities of God, unless you’re one of these high-pressure salesmen. Your salesmanship is not a quality of you; it’s a quality of God. That’s why there is no need for high pressuring. There is no need for forcing our products on anyone. God constitutes our salesmanship ability, and God enables our prospects to know the value of what we have without our coercion and forcing.

The mystery of Godliness is the realization of God incarnate as your individual being, God manifest as your individual being. Certainly Jesus came to say that, “I and the Father are one.” Certainly he came to say that, “thou seest me, thou seest the Father that sent me,” but you will also remember that he said, “your Father and my Father.” They included us in that relationship with God. He didn’t set himself off on a cloud. He knew that it was your Father. He knew that his teaching had no value, if his teaching set him aside as God capacity and not ours, because what could we learn from him, if we was talking about somebody set apart from us?

What good would his example be on Earth, if he weren’t flesh and blood as we are? What good would his teaching be, if he literally were something that God specially sent to Earth? For what purpose, to tell us something we couldn’t live up to? He could live up to it because of his peculiar birth and mission. Can we, if we haven’t that birth and mission? No, but the secret is we have that birth and mission. The secret is that we are immaculately conceived. We actually are children of God. You say, “what about human birth or conception?” Well, I can tell you a little secret about that, too. It has its belief. It has its foundation in the belief that there is a seed in the female, which is the seed of a child, and that there’s a seed in the male, which is the fertilizer, and that when you bring the two together, out of that comes what we call the child.

Now the grand question is, where did those two seeds come from? Did a man make them? Did a woman make them? Have you the capacity to form that seed in the male, or in the female, or is that something that just somehow gets there? And the answer you know. No man or no woman can make that seed. It’s been tried. No man and no woman can combine chemicals and make that seed. And if they could, where would the chemicals come from?

Everything has its basis in the Invisible appearing visibly. And so at a given moment, there is an Invisible, which becomes visible as the seed in the female’s body. At a given moment, there is an Invisible, which becomes visible and tangible in the male’s body. And then there is a moment when they are separate and apart and brought together. And all how? By an activity that none of us know anything about humanly. None of us know even the mode and means of the attraction that brings us together as males and females, even that is an activity of the Invisible that appears on the visible.

Now then, once you comprehend the fact that the crops were in the ground before the seed, you will begin to see that Creation is an act of an Invisible Principle, visibly manifest. God incarnating Itself in manifest form. And then you will know that the Master’s relationship to God is our relationship. Who was it that said, “Call no man on Earth your Father?” Who was it, who said that? Well then, was he saying that no man on Earth was his father or your father? Then he’s calling you of the same blood and same relationship as himself. He called no man on earth his father, and therefore the church says, “he was immaculately conceived,” but they forget that he said, “Call no man on Earth your father.” For one is your Father, which art in Heaven. Gives us the same relationship that he brought to the world. And he could just as well have said, “Call no woman your Mother,” because no woman is your mother. God is the Creative Principle of this universe. God within Itself—the male and female—is the Creative Principle appearing infinitely as the male and female and neuter. But it’s the same Life appearing as male and female and neuter. And so the real mystery of Godliness is what? Knowing your true identity, knowing that God is your Selfhood.