1960 England Open Class
Joel S. Goldsmith
354B – Transformation of Consciousness 4/4

Who created a power destructive to God or to God’s universe? Who gave power to any power, to destroy God, or God’s kingdom? If God is God, meaning, if God is infinite and omnipotent and omnipresent and omniscient, whence comes another power? And then as we, individually, train ourselves and ultimately bring ourselves to where we can look out at this world and say, “just imagine, the only power there is, is invisible. Therefore I need not fear any thing or anybody in the visible.” If it is visible, it has no power. All power is invisible, for all power is God.”

Just think now, how we can look at our newspapers, how we can listen to our news broadcasts, and quietly remember that not one bit of this is truth. Not one bit of this is power, for only that which is invisible is power, and that is God.

Now this practice is a practice of the presence of God, but it is practicing the truth about God. Praying to God to remove a discord is as nonsensical now as it has been for the past five thousand years, in which it’s been practiced. Praying to God to destroy our enemies is as useless today as it has been ever since it was first practiced. Praying to God to save our loved ones is as futile today as it has been throughout all of these ages that it has been practiced. And, the fruitage that Jesus speaks of, the rich fruitage that is to come into your life in the form of health, harmony, happiness, peace on earth, good will to men; all of this is going to come only through a transformed consciousness that no longer turns to God to ask God to do something, but rather looks out and thanks God that God is already infinite, the all, the only, beside which there is no other.

Another thing: we bar the presence, the activity, and the fruitage of God by either consciously or unconsciously believing that God-power is something external to us that can or will act upon us. And there is no such thing. That is a paganistic belief, that there is a God somewhere that can act upon us, for good or for evil.

God-power is within you. It does not come to you or act upon you; it functions out from within you. The kingdom of God is within you. It is already closer to you than breathing. The place whereon you stand is holy ground because, I and the Father are in one place. We are not separate and apart from each other, and there is no God to act upon me, for I and the Father are one, and the God-power acts within and out from.

Once you begin to acknowledge, the kingdom of God is within me. Closer to me than breathing, the very place whereon I stand. Here God is, and now, all that the Father hath is mine, you are now bringing about a transformation of your consciousness which will make it fertile, which will make it the soil in which and through which the grace of God can function.

As long as you are acknowledging I and the Father are one, we are inseparable and indivisible: where I am, God is, where God is, I am. All that the Father hath is mine. Inseparable, indivisible, one. Here and now the grace of God is, and here and now the grace of God is functioning, you are bringing about a transformation of consciousness, because you are drawing back your vision from looking upstairs or outside, and you are now realizing that all that you’ve been seeking, up in the skies or outside somewhere, is operative and operating within you, just as the laws of nature are operating in the soil of this garden, and in the air that surrounds this garden.

Realize that within the soil and in the air and in the atmosphere above, the law, the laws of nature are functioning. And so it is that within you, and in the atmosphere about you, the grace of God is functioning. And the grace of God is functioning for the purpose revealed by the Master, to heal the sick, raise the dead, feed the hungry, preach the gospel, bring comfort to the comfortless.

This that performs all this has been given many names: Christ Consciousness, Spiritual Consciousness, Buddha Mind, Transcendental Consciousness. And what it means is, your individual consciousness, when your consciousness has accepted God as one power; when your consciousness has accepted Omnipresence, the presence of God where I am; when your consciousness no longer looks out to God to do something to you or for you, but lives in a constant Twenty-Third Psalm: the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He leadeth me, He maketh me, He setteth for me, no future tense to it, and no asking Him for it. But this is a transformed consciousness, the consciousness of David’s. I need not pray to God for anything, for the Lord is my shepherd, and because of that, I shall not want. He leadeth me beside still waters, He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. You see, his was already the transformed consciousness before the Twenty-Third Psalm could come out of it.

And so it is that before the Master could say to the crippled man, what did hinder you? Before he could say to the blind man, open your eyes, before he could say to Pilate, thou couldst have no power over me, he had to have a transformed consciousness. The old consciousness that he had as a Hebrew Rabbi would not have served him and would not have performed those functions. It had to be a transformed consciousness that no longer believed in and eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth, and it could no longer believe that a woman taken in adultery should be stoned to death, and it could no longer believe that a thief should be sent to hell.

He had to have a transformed consciousness that would hold within itself no condemnation for the thief on the cross, no condemnation for the woman taken in adultery, no condemnation for Judas Iscariot, but a prayer: Father, forgive them, they know not what they do. There’s no condemnation in that, no judgment, no criticism, no hate. That is a transformed consciousness. His old consciousness was the Hebrew consciousness: an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, and stone the woman to death, and crucify the thief and send him to hell.

But before he could heal, before he could see, before he could experience God’s grace, which was there all the time, but before he could experience it, he had to have a transformed consciousness that no longer hated or feared, that no longer believed in two powers, that no longer thought that all sinners should be burned up, or something else of its nature.

In other words, he had to be transformed from believing that punishment was going to heal anybody or reform them. And above all things, he had to understand, he had to have a transformed consciousness that lived constantly in the realization of one power. Not one power doing something to another power, not one power overcoming or destroying another power.

He had to have a transformed consciousness, which lived and moved and had its being in the realization of God as the all and only, in God as the omnipresence, in God as omnipotence, in God as one. And with that transformed consciousness, he was a healer. And he was more than a healer; he was a forgiver of the sinner. Because without a consciousness of condemnation or criticism, one automatically has the power to forgive sin.

In other words, sin disappears out of the consciousness of a sinner when it comes in contact with the consciousness of an individual holding no condemnation, criticism, or judgment, and yet being able to say, “You’re forgiven, but go and sin no more”, because your very return to the old state of consciousness will bring the old state of consciousness back upon you.

We wonder why, after two or three years of reading the books, or even four or five, we wonder why we aren’t experiencing heaven. And we believe that there is some kind of magic in the books, or some kind of magic in reciting the statements in the books, or some kind of magic in hearing the statements from the books.

Let me assure you that there is only one kind of magic, and that comes from a transformed consciousness. The transformed consciousness of your practitioner or teacher can perform quite a few miracles for you, but for a transformed life, there has to be first a transformed consciousness. The good that the Master could do for anyone was limited, and he acknowledged this: If I go not away, the Comforter cannot come to you, because at most, well, you remember he fed the Hebrews one day, and they came back the next day wanting to be fed again, and he rebuked them. However, they were there, and he fed them the second time, but there’s no record that he ever fed them the third time.

And so it is you must remember that at best, he could feed them for a day or two or three; at best, he could heal them of a few diseases, but he couldn’t make their lives over for them, except in proportion as they were willing that their own consciousness be transformed. In other words, there is no such thing as vicarious salvation. Salvation is individual. There is such a thing as vicarious healing. It’s going on all of the time, practitioners and teachers healing multitudes. But be assured of this, those same multitudes are sick again next year, or next month, and the year after, and it continues until they themselves bring about a transformation of their own consciousness by taking the writings and rebuilding their consciousness through the writings, through practicing the presence of God, through practicing the principles revealed in these works.

If we would spend two or three years in the transformation of our consciousness, we then would find that we could literally see the day close at hand when we would say, “I live, and yet actually I’m not doing it, there’s a Presence within me doing it, going before me and making the crooked places straight, going before me and protecting me, going forward and supplying me. There is something other than myself functioning.”

But this is all done through a transformation of consciousness, and the transformation of consciousness is brought about through the practice of specific principles. And those specific principles constitute the message of The Infinite Way, and they’re to be found in all of the writings and all of the recordings.

And then the degree in which we work with them … remember what we are doing; we’re not trying to work magic, not trying to turn stones into bread. What we are trying to do is transform our consciousness until we arrive at the point where we actually experience: God is the only power, and nothing else is power. And that is it.

Thank you.