1959 Hawaiian Village Closed Class
Joel S. Goldsmith
263A – Three Principles and Their Practice

pdf-49px  263A Three Principles & Their Practice

Now, humanly we have been taught to judge, criticize, and condemn anybody, anytime, anywhere, for anything—as long as it doesn’t fit in with our own sense of what’s right or wrong, but in this work, you have to change your entire attitude so that you never are guilty of judging criticizing or condemning a person, but are always recognizing that the source of whatever it is that is visibly wrong is this carnal mind and hasn’t power.

If it is someone who is seeking help through spiritual means, they will receive it, but even if it isn’t, you still have to take this approach to everyone whom you meet in this life, including the political candidates. That doesn’t take from you the judgment as to which man or woman constitutes the better candidate for that particular office, but it does prevent you from sitting in judgment on them as a person and holding them responsible for the evils for which some of them at least are guilty. It does help you to remove from them that burden of guilt and sometimes also to free them.

Now, these are two steps in our healing practice, probably three steps, but actually two steps when approaching the healing work. The first step is one which we embody at all times: that is the realization of one power and of not fighting or trying to overcome these negative powers or beliefs or claims that come before us.

But the two principles which are used in the healing work are these: First, impersonalization. The moment John Brown asks for help be sure that you’ve put John Brown over on the side, out of your mind. Don’t dwell for one single second on John Brown. And above all, even if you know it, don’t believe it—anything that’s evil about John Brown—dismiss it instantly. Get it out of your thought, and as fast as possible get John Brown out of your thought, because your first function in healing work is impersonalization. Remember that word: Impersonalization. This claim is not a person, not a condition, not a thing: belongs to nobody. It’s an impersonal activity or substance or imposition of what we might call carnal mind or mortal mind. Get it all back there into that term—devil, Satan, whatever you like. Impersonalize it. Take it out of the person. See that it isn’t a person. It hasn’t a person in whom to work or through whom to work. It is an impersonal claim of the universal mind, mortal mind, carnal mind.

When you are sure that you have impersonalized it so that you absolutely have no thought of the individual in your mind, then you take the second step, which is nothingizing, and that means you have to go back to Genesis: God made all that was made. All that God made is good. Anything which God did not make; anything which is not good, God did not make. Anything which God did not make doesn’t exist. Now then, if God made all that was made, and all that God made is good, then God didn’t make a carnal mind or mortal mind or devil or Satan and therefore, it has no existence except as a mental concept in the human thought.

Now, if you want to know how powerless a human concept is, right now close your eyes and build the biggest bomb you can possibly build. Build an atomic bomb and combine it with hydrogen and with all the forms of nuclear fission you’ve ever heard about, and now multiply it by a thousand, and now throw it up here at me, and see what it can do. You understand that? That’s a mental concept. It has no substance. It has no law, has no entity. It has no being. It has form, that’s why you can see it, but you can only see it in your mind as a mental image.

So it is, once you begin to understand that this entire devil is a manmade entity, made in the mind of man, not in the mind of God, and that it has no law, no substance, no activity, no source, no avenue, no channel, you nullify it. You’ve recognized it for what it is: temporal power, the arm of flesh, nothingness. And that’s where your healing work begins.

Actually, regardless of the name or nature of the problem with which you are confronted, you can be assured of this: It’s nothing but a temptation of the devil coming to you for acceptance or rejection, and this devil is nothing more or less than this human mind which exists because of a belief of good and evil. Once you have no belief of good and evil, you have no human mind any more, or mortal mind, you’re operating in and through and with the divine mind. It’s only as long as there is a belief in good and evil that there is limitation, finiteness, negativeness.

Now, often when we are dealing with our friends or our relatives or our patients, we are apt to revert to that human sense of criticism and judgment or the metaphysical sense of saying, “Well, it’s your wrong thinking. Well, there’s something in your mind that has to be corrected.” Of course there is, but the only thing there is is a belief in two powers. The only thing there is is the same thing that has to be corrected in all of us: the belief that God isn’t omnipotence—that God isn’t omniscience, omnipresence.

But aside from that, that whole theory of resentment causing rheumatism, and jealousy causing cancer, and sensuality causing tuberculosis, it’s a lot of nonsense, and that’s all it is: pure nonsense, because not only the metaphysical practitioners can’t prove it, but the psychosomatic medicine practitioners can’t prove it. They can claim it and then say when you get rid of your resentment you’ll be healed, because they don’t know how to get rid of resentment. They don’t know how to get rid of the negative qualities of human thought that all of us are heir to. You know how: by understanding that these are not personal, but that they are impersonal, and that they are not power, and that they have no law to sustain them. Because of our human experience, we have never been taught—well, of course, we’ve never been taught, it has never been … heretofore, it has never been revealed that every phase of discord that comes into our experience is a mesmeric influence that we do not know how to protect ourselves from.

In other words, when you are in the midst of an epidemic of any disease, you are not necessarily suffering from the disease, but from the mesmerism of the publicity about the disease, and probably there are just as many people dying of that mesmeric influence as of the disease itself. In the same way that we know there have been fires in big buildings and more people killed for other reasons than the flames. The flames probably took few lives, but panic, fear, and the lust for life took the rest.

Now, this universal belief of good and evil operates hypnotically upon any and every individual of this world, so that when you leave your home in the morning, if you were to think it over, you’d have to agree that you have no positive assurance you’re going to get back tonight, because between the coconuts falling from the trees, and the automobiles hitting each other, and the lightening, and this, that, and the other thing, you have become a statistic.

And so on any morning of the week they can tell you downtown how many deaths there will be by six p.m.—they just can’t tell you who, so it may as well be you or me or anyone else. We are statistics, and every night at six o’clock there must be so many deaths, and for this reason and for that reason, and so it goes day after day.

And the question now arises, “Is there a way to avoid this?” Yes, there is. Indeed there is. If those who are taught this principle could break through their mental inertia in the morning to the extent of consciously realizing, “There is but one power operating in this universe. It’s not a power of accident or death or disease or sin. There’s only one power operating, the same power that is causing the sun to rise on time and to set on time; the same power that is causing the tides to be in and out on their time; the same power that is bringing fish into the sea and birds into the air—that is the power that is operating in this universe. That is the power that is operating in my consciousness. That is the law unto my experience, and there is no power in this mesmeric suggestion of statistics. There is no power in this belief of infection and contagion. There is no power in mortal mind, carnal mind, or any of its forms, any of its beliefs, individual or collective.”

And watch, watch to what degree the ordinary, every day mishaps stay outside of your experience. A thousand shall fall at thy left hand, and ten thousand at thy right hand. It shall not come nigh thy dwelling place. Who? Who? Who is this “thy dwelling place?” It is the individual who dwells in the secret place of the most High—not dwells in a house, not dwells in an automobile, not dwells in an airplane, but dwells in the secret place of the most High, and how can you do that? It has to be done consciously.