Original Iwihub.com Transcript by Zane Maser
1958 Chicago Private “25”
1958 Chicago Private Class for “25”
Joel S. Goldsmith
Tape 215A
So, and, of course, it was the principle upon which Mrs. Eddy worked in the very beginning of her days that all of these things are illusions. She even says that “we must overcome the insanity of good health some day,” and that’s just what we are working at in The Infinite Way—overcoming the insanity of good health. We are not merely knowing the illusion of sin or sickness. We are knowing the illusion of humanhood—good humanhood and bad humanhood.
So, nothing of this is original with us. We can’t claim any credit, any glory. It’s an age-old principle but discovered, rediscovered, lost; and if we have success with it, it’s been because we rediscovered it, began practicing it. That’s all. But, if the day should come that some of our students should—practicing students—should do what some of our other students do, we’ll be lost, too. You’ve probably had the experience of having somebody write you or call up on the phone and say, “Help me get rid of my illusion.” Well, if you know it’s an illusion, it’s already got rid of. That’s the end of it. You don’t get rid of illusions. That’s making a reality of it again.
So, that’s our work in this work. If it’s a hurricane coming at you, if it’s a war, if it’s infection, if it’s contagion, if it’s epidemic, get busy. Get busy and nullify it in the same way that you would if it were an individual telephoning to you, “I’m unemployed, or I’m sick. I’m tempted with this, that, or the other.”
The main thing to watch in this approach is this. The real success can only come when you are completely purged of judgment or criticism in connection with either the persons or the conditions that are coming to you to be met. You can’t be really and truly a successful healer while prejudices, or criticisms, or condemnations exist. Let me illustrate this.
This happens over and over and over again in our work. A wife comes to us and tells us all her troubles and her grievances and all the shortcomings of her husband. And, she’s a very sweet lady and very charming, and you know for a minute you’re tempted to believe her. Some day you meet the husband, and you find out where the shoes fits or vice versa, and then you say, “Oh, what a fool I was to have believed that story.” But you see, believing it is only one side of the picture. You can’t disbelieve it either. You have no right to accept it. That’s where the whole point comes in that I’m making. It isn’t that she’s wrong and her husband’s right. Oh no, that would only be with the shoe on the other foot. That would just be another aspect of humanhood. The point is that regardless if both are right and both are wrong, or neither one is right or neither one is wrong, the point of it is the whole thing is an illusion. The whole thing is the carnal mind or nothingness. And so, you can’t be on one side or the other. You can’t accept one story or the other, for the simple reason that neither story, neither story is true in the spiritual picture.
Now, that’s a very difficult thing to see, and it becomes even more difficult when a mother telephones you that her child is dying, because immediately you’re feeling for the mother; and you want to save her child, and in that moment you probably lost it. All right. You can’t believe mothers when they’re talking about their children. You can’t believe anybody when they’re talking about their problem, and that is the attitude that you have to develop that I call “overcoming your emotions and going into this work objectively.”
Now, you can’t have emotions in this work. You just can’t. The only emotion I think that Jesus displayed was when he was throwing the moneychangers out of the temple, and that’s a legitimate emotion. When you see people wearing a spiritual robe, or a churchly robe, or a Christly robe, or pretending that and then acting contrary to those principles, I think you have pretty good reason to get up on your hind legs and start battling them, throwing them out of the temple, not necessarily actually but at least you’re entitled to a little emotion, because there is a different form of error. That isn’t ignorant error. That is conscious, willful, knowing error. You won’t heal it that way. You’ll still have to get down one of these days and view it in the right light, but at least if some emotion does come in, it is legitimate.
When you see people with a church and claiming it in the name of Christ and all this and that and then acting to keep people in ignorance, keep them in illiteracy even, so forth and so on, you can’t help once in awhile just getting a little bit hot under the collar. But, it doesn’t do any good and eventually you have to even overcome that emotionalism. As you know, Jesus found that when he threw the moneychangers out of the temple, they only stayed out one hour. The next hour they were right back at their old stands again, and so he probably regretted that he had given in to his feelings.
On the whole, remember this. You’re not really dealing with people, and you’re not really dealing with conditions. Therefore, you don’t have to have any emotion about them. What you are dealing with is an impersonal thing called a carnal mind or a mortal mind presenting itself as pictures. That’s all you’re dealing with. You don’t have to be sympathetic about the child that seems to be sick or dying or the alcoholic. You don’t have to be sympathetic with what seems to be going on in the human picture when you yourself have seen that the fabric of that picture is the dream. The fabric of these human pictures are the Adam dream or the hypnotic dream, and once you’ve seen that you can’t emotionalize about any of the pictures that it presents.
I could get emotional sometimes. There is one thing that stirs me and that is seeing these young kids sent out to war. I can’t take it. Very difficult. It’s the one thing I find myself having to control my emotions on, because that isn’t merely the sin of government. That’s the sins of the mothers who permit it. They don’t have to permit it. No, they have PTA associations. They could just as well have other associations that say, “You can’t have my sons. You want any killing, let the enemy come and kill me. But why my son at 18, 19, 20, 21? Let him go and add me and you right up there in the legislature. I don’t mind if they get you. I don’t mind if they get me, but you’re not going to have my son, not voluntarily.” It could be stopped. We’re all responsible for it. We’ve all gone out ourselves, and we’ve sent others out. That’s one thing I still emote about a little bit. But, it’s very foolish on my part, because there again it isn’t the government that does it. It isn’t you that do it. It’s that same old carnal mind again that when it’s dead it won’t have any you or me to work through.
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