1956 Second Steinway Hall Closed Class
Joel S. Goldsmith
150B – Your Names Are Writ in Heaven 2/5

Don’t ever try to use truth. It’s a very wicked thought, that you or I, human beings, people still suffering with problems, can use God. Doesn’t that sound terrible? It’s like saying you could use your own mother and father. You wouldn’t want anyone to believe that you were going to use your mother and father. But the divine Mother and Father, we continually say, “Oh, I’m using truth.” Heaven forbid. If there is any truth to be brought into your experience, let truth use you. Let truth reveal itself within you. Let truth provide for you, govern you, sustain you, but don’t you use truth.

As a matter of fact, what would you use truth against? God is infinite good. What will you use truth for? Do you see that? Be consistent in this work, because a spiritual way of life allows for no contradictions. Oh, it recognizes the fact, with Paul, that we do not claim that we have already achieved its fullness, but forgetting those things which are behind, we press forward, looking always to the day when we will be able to say, “Thou seest me, thou seest the Father that sent me,” and our lives show forth, by demonstration, that we have achieved our Christhood.

But at this particular point, we are standing fast in truth. We are not overcoming error with truth. We are not destroying error with truth, we are not healing sickness with truth; we are not reforming sinners with truth; we are acknowledging truth as infinite being, infinite presence, omnipresence, omnipotence, all power. Now why use truth, when there is no other power to use it against or over.

Last night, I cautioned that it may take months; it may take a year, before that one truth is thoroughly established in your consciousness. It may well be that you’ll find that last night’s lesson and tonight’s will have to be practiced by you while you forget all the rest of this week, until a year from now, and then begin with what may follow.

It has been my experience that one statement of truth occupied me for as long as two years, and I was willing to leave all the other truths in the Bible and in the metaphysical writings alone, while I demonstrated one statement. That began with the very first scriptural statement that ever revealed itself to me. For a good many years, there were only two in the whole Bible that I knew or understood… For many years. The first one was, Cease ye from man, whose breath is in his nostril, for wherein is he to be accounted of. And I spent eight months with that one statement until its correlative came to me from the New Testament: My kingdom is not of this world, and between those two statements, I stood for two years. Why? Because every day people were coming to me for healing, and I had to do one of two things: try to heal them, or forget them. And scripture said, forget them. Cease ye from man, whose breath is in his nostril, for wherein in he to be accounted of. So don’t try to heal them; don’t try to reform them; don’t try to enrich them. Look through the masquerade and behold Christ.

It takes a long, long practice; it did for me, to get behind that, and when its correlative came: My kingdom is not of this world, can you imagine what happened? A man sitting in an office with a busy practice, people coming for all kinds and sorts of things of this world, and having to say, My kingdom is not of this world, so I’m not interested. But out of that, out of those two statements, came the whole message of The Infinite Way.

We’re not here to patch up a masqueraded man. We’re not here to patch up a disguised man. We’re not here to deal with the costume he’s wearing on stage. We are here to look through to the actor, and the actor is God…the one Selfhood, the divine being, and ignore all appearances. If you don’t do that, well you’ll find Rip Van Winkle coming to you one day, and you’ll be trying to make a young man out of him. Then you’ll go back in his dressing room, and he takes his mask off, and you’ll find Joseph Jefferson there, a nice lively youngster. And you’ll wonder why you spent all the time trying to make Rip Van Winkle young again. And so it is, you’ll be awfully busy patching up sick bodies, and sick purses, and unemployed humans, and then some day you’ll awaken and say, “There weren’t any.”

There weren’t any. This was Christ I was doing all this to, and Christ was heir of God, joint-heir with Christ to all the heavenly riches. And then you’ll know why oneness is a supreme principle in this work, to be realized to the exclusion of all else, until it is indelibly impressed, until it is so much a part of consciousness that you never again search around for a statement of truth with which to meet some situation. Now we’ve all been guilty of that: searching around for some truth with which to meet a problem. Well there isn’t any problem, so what do you need the truth for? The truth is that truth is all the problem there is, just in disguise at the moment.

Now this leads us to another subject along the same line, following it up. And that is this: as long as you are trying to correct erroneous conditions, you are acknowledging that erroneous conditions exist. On one hand, you’re acknowledging that there’s a God, an infinite Good, an infinite Spirit. On the other hand, you’re acknowledging that God’s universe has slipped out of God’s control; now how are we going to patch it up. And that won’t do in a spiritual teaching.

Now I will ask you to see this: there is neither good nor evil in any creature. There is no power for good or evil in any person, circumstance, or condition. I know, at this particular moment some of us are meeting with bad people, and some of us are meeting with poor people, and some of us are meeting with sinful people, and some with sick people. But, that is only because we are accepting the universal belief in God and devil, or good and evil. If we were to accept truth, we would know this: all power is in God.

Now you’ve heard that before, but you’ve never heard it given as a principle that you must live by. All power is in God. How exactly would you apply that in the human scene, when you are faced with a diseased body, or a sinful person? Well the answer is very clearly; there is neither good nor evil in any person or in any body, since all power is in God. Now if all power is in God, and God is invisible, there’s no power in anything that you can see, hear, taste, touch, or smell. If you can see it, hear it, taste it, touch it, or smell it, it has no power, and the motivating power of it is an invisible substance called spirit.

Now then, again we’ll use our old illustration. Here is my hand, and I say to you, it is not a good hand and it is not a bad hand. It is just a hand. I say to you, this hand cannot give, and this hand cannot withhold; therefore, it is not a generous hand, and it is not a stingy hand. I say to you, this hand cannot pet, and this hand cannot punch; therefore, this is not a loving hand or a destructive hand. This is just a hand. If anything is to be done by this hand, I must do it. So the hand is revealed, in and of itself, as nothing. It must be acted upon; otherwise it stays here for a million years. It has to be acted upon, and I must act upon it.