Original Iwihub.com Transcript by Zane Maser
1958 Chicago Private “25”
1958 Chicago Private Class for “25”
Joel S. Goldsmith
Tape 215A
Now, we find that when Unity was started, they took everything that Christian Science had except one thing, and that one thing was the nature of error. They just didn’t have to know anything about error, because God was so All that there wasn’t any error. It’s a lot of nonsense. And, they have lived to find that out that they’ve had to reorganize and make themselves a religious organization with robes on the platform, and hymns, and candles, and all the rest of those things that belong to Orthodoxy, because you have to have a substitute. If you don’t heal, you have to have a substitute, if you want to stay in business.
We’re faced with the same thing. We either have to heal, or we have to go out of business, or we have to have some way to fool the public. That’s all. Well, if we don’t heal, we’re going out of business. We’re not going to engage in anything to go back to Orthodoxy again.
Now, if you once experience this in your healing work that the sin, the false appetite, the disease, the unemployment, the lack has nothing to do with the person involved. It has to do with the universal belief of good and evil, and one with God is a majority. One with Truth is a majority. Therefore, the truth entertained in my consciousness becomes a law unto your body, or your business, or your art, or your profession, or your health, or whatever it is. One with God is a majority. The truth entertained in the consciousness of Jesus Christ healed his patients. The truth entertained in your individual consciousness heals your patients. There’s no use believing of God did it. You all have heard that story about the practitioner out in Detroit who had brought a woman out of cancer. The husband came in one day to express his gratitude and give the practitioner a check. The practitioner said, “Oh, I didn’t do it. God did it.” “Oh well, I’ll take the check back home with me; see how I can give it to God. I thought you had done it.” You see that that is all a lot of what we call clichés, and that’s all a lot of absolute garbage.
It is the consciousness of an individual that does the work. It is the consciousness of an individual, a consciousness imbued with truth, a consciousness that has discovered the secret of healing. And, the secret of healing is the One Power. The secret of healing is the ability to take any claim that’s thrown against you—mental, moral, physical, or financial—and bunch them altogether as mortal mind or carnal mind and then dismiss them.
Yes, there’s another way of doing it. One of our students brought this to light the other day. A Christian Science practitioner was working on a case and evidently rehearsing the statement when the illusion of sin or sickness tempts you so forth and so on. Evidently wasn’t making too much progress on the case, even with the temptation of sin or sickness. But this student, Infinite Way student, immediately recognized that’s only half the distance. When the illusion of humanhood tempts you, whether it’s good humanhood or bad humanhood, that’s when you have to begin to understand this is not a function of turning sick people into well people. This is not a function of turning sinful people into good humans. This is not a function of turning unemployed people into employed people. This is a function of realizing Christhood, individual Christhood, your Christhood. And, when you have a patient, it’s no good merely to resist the temptation to believe in sin, sickness, and other discords. You have to also disbelieve in good humanhood, until you understand the true identity of individual being as the Son of God.
Now, your experience at healing work, nothing else, will prove to you the rightness of this. My saying it to you or my teaching it to you is no proof to you. It’s merely the setting forth of a teaching. I can’t even prove it to you. If I raised someone from the dead, you wouldn’t believe it. You have to experience whether or not there is any need to battle error, whether there’s any need to fight it, or whether there’s anything to fight it with. You yourself will have to discover for yourself whether error is something that you defend yourself against or something whether you defend yourself against with the recognition of its nature. If you accept carnal mind as Paul did, you’ll be in prison every week, or get beaten every week, and lashed every week, and driven from city to city and post to post. If you understand the carnal mind as he originally understood it, a term denoting “nothingness,” you’ll be free. And, you’ll free others in that proportion.
Now, with this in mind then, and I’ll assume for a minute that you’re going to prove this conclusively for yourself, then the next step is the recognition that the entire world is suffering not from its sins, not from the sins of its leaders, whether it’s a Board of Directors, or whether it’s Stalin or his successor, or whether it’s any of the other dictators who have come on the scene, or any of the ideologies that have gummed up mankind. That’s not what we’re suffering from. We’re suffering from the carnal mind having been accepted as a power. That’s all. When we nullify that, it is just like this. If we cut off the electricity, the bulbs are dead. If we cut off carnal mind, there are no instruments for carnal mind that can operate. They’re dead. So, we don’t go around murdering dictators that we don’t like or fighting ideologies that we don’t like, because as fast as you cut their head off, another one will spring up, in fact two will spring up in their place. But, we go behind it and cut off the electricity and then watch what happens to these ideologies and the people who propound them, and that’s the only way harmony can be restored.
That is the purpose that was behind the formation of the very first group of “25,” and that was the purpose that carried it around the world. Every single day we are supposed to have, at the very least, one period, whenever possible two or three in which we forget ourselves, and our patients, and our own demonstrations or theirs, and just see if we can’t look at the entire world. In doing that, we come up against specific forms of error. It may be a storm that’s going to hit your city, or it may be an infection or contagion that’s about to strike, or it has already struck, or it may be some false form of government that is forming. It may be some other form of error, and you yourself not fighting it. Go behind it to the realization that this is that carnal mind, that mortal mind or nothingness; and you wipe it out. It makes no difference whether you use terms of Christian Science, or terms of Infinite Way, or any other teaching, or literature, or scripture, as long as you get the meaning from it. As you know, I have openly acknowledged always the debt that I owe to Christian Science and to Mrs. Eddy, and I hope that those of you who have a similar debt will never forget it. And, I’m sure Mrs. Eddy would be the last one to object to our using the term “mortal mind” as nothingness.
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