Original Iwihub.com transcript by Patricia Phillips

Meditation On I   

Tape 626A  

1954 3rd New York Closed Class

By  Joel S. Goldsmith DOWNLOAD PDF

Good Evening.

Someone wrote me a letter …I mean I received a letter today that someone had written, saying they were going to pray that the walls be pushed back and that there be overflowing crowds to hear the Word.  I think that the prayer has been answered somewhat, in that several walls have been pushed back. This is the first evening of our third New York Closed Class. And it is really an inspiration to meet so many of our friends from so many different places in the United States and Canada.  Especially to know that each one who has come here has come in the knowledge that there is only one thing that they can carry away with them and that is not a person or a thing, but a greater degree of God-awareness. The only thing we have here is a measure of God-consciousness, of God-awareness, of God-realization.  Not many people on the face of the globe dispute the fact of God today, but they may well dispute God’s presence and God’s power in human affairs. Because looking out upon this world, there is surely very little evidence of this. And it is only as individuals come in their own experience to an actual God-realization, that they are enabled to know without doubt that God does operate in human affairs.  

In starting our work, I would like to say at the very beginning that there is one part of it, one piece of it, that must be thoroughly understood before you undertake in any way to bring God into active expression in your affairs.  Now watch this carefully, for the simple reason that you will not meet very often with this principle in the teachings of this world. Ordinarily, we think of the evils of the world and then, if we think of God, we think of God as overcoming those evils, as God destroying the errors of the world, or God reforming the evil ones of the world.  And I give it to you as a principle, that this is incorrect. There is no such thing in all the world, as God overcoming or destroying evil. There’s no such in all the world as good overcoming error. There is no such thing in all the world as God being a power over evil: evil persons, or evil conditions or evil circumstances. In other words, God is not a power that can be used over other powers.  God is not a power of good overcoming powers of evil; and the reason is, God is Infinite. Good is infinite. And that which the world has been calling powers, really are not powers at all. And the only reason that we have had occasion to fight and battle these discords, is that we ourselves have made enemies of that which in and of itself, has no power. I can only illustrate that in this instance, that the healing of disease, infection and contagion is considered a power in the world.  Left to itself, infection and contagion will spread. As a matter of fact, no one knows when infection begins or contagion, where it will end. Yet, we have made this discovery in the metaphysical and spiritual world, that as a matter of fact, infection and contagion are not powers and they do not spread. When brought into the realization of God as the only Power, infection and contagion are absolutely dead. They stand still and can’t move! In and of themselves, germs have no power of infection or contagion.  Only by power of universal exceptions, do we find these epidemic conditions in the world.  

But wherever a student of spiritual wisdom is brought into the picture, or wherever a really knowing metaphysician is brought into the picture – I mean by that, one who works from the basis of God as the Only Power – right there and then your infection and your contagion stop dead.  It can go no further. I have seen this, not only in individual cases, I’ve seen it in communities. I have witnessed it in the flu epidemics in the war; that wherever a knowing metaphysician, or wherever a student of spiritual wisdom was brought in; and by that, I mean, one who knew God, not as a Power overcoming powers, but as the Only Power, the Only Presence, the Only Law; the so-called laws of infection and contagion could not operate.  

Now it is in the same way that this principle is being brought into capital/labor relations, even into politics.  Wherever a knowing metaphysician, I don’t mean the type metaphysician that’s battling around with good and evil, and using truth and slinging right thoughts around the world; I’m not speaking of those as knowing metaphysicians.  I’m speaking of a knowing metaphysician or a student of spiritual wisdom as one who has caught the glimpse of God as the only Power.  

Now once you enter that state of consciousness and when you recognize God as the only Power, you no longer battle evil men and women.  You no longer battle evil causes. You no longer battle the so-called errors of the world. You learn to stand still and see the salvation of the Lord, of the law, of the One Law.  You stand still and watch the One Law in operation. You can stand as defenseless as Daniel before the lions, or you can stand as defenseless as Jesus Christ before Pilate, saying, “Thou couldst have no power over Me.”  Pilate, the greatest temporal power in the world – and Jesus says, “Thou couldst have no power over Me unless it came from the Father in Heaven.” Or you could be out there with young David, young David going out to Goliath and finding that his friends wanted to weigh him down with armor: armor, steel armor, iron armor, whatever it was they used for heavy armor in those days.   And he says, “No, no no, take that off me. I require no armor. I am going out there in the Name of the Lord God Almighty.” In other words, ‘I’m going out there in the understanding of God as the only might.’ Now, if God is the only might, what power has Goliath? What power has the sword of Goliath? What power has infection or contagion? What power has the evil plots and plans of men in the face of an individual who is alert to the real nature of God?  

The secret of the world’s failure for these thousands of years has been that it has not known the nature of God.  And therefore it has prayed to God to do something to my enemy; to remove them, to overcome them, to destroy them.  And there’s no God to listen to such prayers. There’s no God to answer such prayers. Why? Because in the entire realm of the real, there has never been a power endowed with power against God.  Since God is supreme, infinite, omnipresent, final, what would empower a devil? What would empower a power apart from God? When would this power be derived? If you posit God as infinity, as infinite Being, as one, “Hear Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One”.  One, One Power, only One. Now if God is One, what has endowed either man or beast or germ with a power apart from God?  

Well, you learn ultimately, in this work, that we can endow anything with power and make it a power unto us. We can take a rabbit’s foot and make it a power.  We can take a crucifix, we can take a six-pointed star, we can take some old bones of saints; we can make unto ourselves any kind of power that we wish. We can bow down to them and worship them and in some measure, we can get some benefit from it, in proportion to how much of a hypnotic state we can get ourselves into, of faith or belief.  On the other hand, we can frighten ourselves to death with supposed powers of evil that have no such powers and then we can die from them.