Original Iwihub.com transcript by Zane Maser

pdf-49px    302A Nothing Takes Place Outside Consciousness

Nothing Takes Place Outside Consciousness 1/5
1960 Los Angeles Closed Class
Joel S. Goldsmith
Tape 302A

Good evening.

You will remember that our very first Infinite Way principle is that God constitutes individual being. This means God constitutes your being. God manifests as your life, your mind, your spirit, your soul, and even your body is the temple of God. This is the spiritual truth about you.

Now, as you accept this, this makes you a law unto your life’s demonstration. In other words, God has given man dominion over everything. God in giving you His mind, God in giving you His Life, Soul, Spirit, God in giving you His intelligence has given you dominion over ignorance, superstition, darkness, falseness. And this dominion is your spiritual birthright.

Now, the reason we are human beings is that we have forfeited this birthright of dominion and turned it over to the world—what the Master called “this world”—to use against us. I have you told that the basis of our healing work was the discovery of how error operates in our experience, and now I can explain that to you.

All error, regardless of its name or nature, whether it comes in the form of a sinful desire, a false appetite, a disease, unemployment, any of the world’s discords and inharmonies comes to us as a form of, well the correct term is a “mental malpractice,” actually an imposed mental force from outside. It is not your doings or mine, except for the basic fault that we have surrendered our dominion, but having done that, and that, of course, is the “original sin,” having done that the rest of the reason for our discords is not that we are evil, but that we continually accept evil from the world.

Now, let us put it this way. The very moment that the newspaper or radio announces the coming of an epidemic, at that very instant the human world opens itself to the epidemic. And it just lets it come by means of that mentally imposed suggestion from outside. Now, nobody started the rumor just to make you sick, but there it is. It is in consciousness, and it is thrust at you, and without knowing the basic truth of being, you feel, “Well, what can I do about it? I’m a statistic anyhow. So forty out of a hundred get it. I may be one of the forty.” And then you wait around to see. If you’re not, you’re just lucky. Actually, you are responsible for it only because you did not know how to avoid it. You did not know the truth of being. You did not know what caused it or how to prevent it.

Now, let me show you how this operates in another way. And this illustrates it very carefully. In up to nineteen, the end of 1913, we had a President in the White House who had done little or nothing of note and had very little chance of re-election. But they did find one virtue in him. He kept us out of war. And that was a very important thing. Oh this wasn’t ’14; this was up to ’16, ’15. He kept us our of war, and so that was the election slogan—“He kept us out of war.” And believe it or not, he was re-elected, just because he kept us out of war, which I’m sure you will recognize means this: That the public wanted to stay out of war.

But, six months later it was in war. Now why? Why did a majority of the voters of the United States change their minds in six months and beg and plead to go to war? Did they want it? No, they didn’t want it anymore than they had before, but a committee had been formed, called a “Propaganda Committee,” and it was given authority to whip the people up into a fury and send them into war. And motion pictures were made in New Jersey showing the shooting down of schoolchildren in red schoolhouses in Belgium and France. All took place in New Jersey. Stories were printed about “the hun” and the atrocities of the hun. Of course, there were probably some atrocities. There always are in war. But the point is that within a few months the same public that voted to keep us out of war were shouting like mad to let us get at that hun. That is mental imposition against which we could have defended ourselves.

We witnessed that same thing in the next war. When on the night before election we were promised: “Re-elect me. I guarantee you mothers, your children will not set foot on foreign soil in war”—at least not for thirty days. And the same thing happened, remember. The public begged for war. They just wanted it so badly within a few months. Why? Because the mental pressure was thrown at them, superimposed upon them, until they yelled for it.

I’m thinking right now of a passage in Mrs. Eddy’s writings in which she, that she calls it “mental treatment illustrated” and tells the practitioner how to give the treatment, and then says, “and the practitioner keeps up this mental argument until the patient’s mind yields, and the patient says, ‘I am well.’” That’s what I mean by mental imposition. In that case, of course, the purpose is good, but it is nevertheless a mental imposition, and so it is with disease, and so it is with sin. There are impersonal, mental forces operating, and they come at us as person or condition. They come at us as sinful appetites or false appetites. They come at us as threats of lack or limitation, threats of danger, and we respond.

Now, all disease reaches you or this public of the world through a mental imposition and in no other way. Now, it is not personal. There is no person doing it to you, so let us not blame the members of the church next door. Let us not blame the members of some race or religion, because none of that would be true. All evil is impersonal, even though it may come to you through the means of a person. But that person isn’t anymore responsible than you are. They, too, are victims.

Now, the moment that you understand that God constitutes your being, that God is the very life, and mind, and soul of you, then you can understand why you are told in Genesis that God gave man dominion over everything, even over the astrological charts, even over the stars, over the planets, over the weather, over all that’s in the air, over all that’s in the sea and beneath the sea. Man was given dominion by virtue of the fact that he was given the mind and life of God.

Now, the very moment that you realize I am the Son of God, the manifestation of God’s own Being, God is revealing Itself on earth as my being, manifesting as my mind, and my life, and my soul, and my spirit, even as the law unto my being. Then you must say, “And no law can then operate on me. All law must operate out from me, through me.” In other words, only the law of God can operate in my consciousness, on my consciousness, through my consciousness, and nothing from without can enter that defileth or maketh a lie. Once you set yourself up as the child of God, the offspring of God, under the law of God, nothing and no one out here can influence you individually or collectively. You will not respond to urges from without.

But, you yourself will be a law unto yourself, and you’ll be a law of God, not a law of selfishness, not a law of using your mind at somebody else’s expense. You will be a law of love, and a law of intelligence, a law of life. But you cannot do it, unless first of all, you can perceive that God made you in His image and likeness. That God has made you of the very substance and fiber of His own being, and that you thereby or therefore are under the law of God, and the law of God moves in my inward parts. The law of God manifests in my mind and body. The law of God manifests in my soul and spirit, so that even my body is the temple of God, and the law of God establishes me, maintains me, and sustains me, and I’m not subject to external influence. When you establish yourself that way, you are the law unto your life and all things begin to work together for good for those that love God, for those that love this idea of being God-governed and not subject to outside influences.