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Posted on 6/7/25
This copyrighted excerpt is from Recording 222A: 1958 New York Closed Class, “Soul—Mind—Body.” It is posted with kind permission from the Estate of Joel Goldsmith, which holds the copy protection on the recorded classes and the copyright on the transcripts. The full transcript of this recording is available at The Infinite Way website or by calling 1-800-922-3195.
Goldsmith Global has permission to provide this material to Goldsmith Global participants for educational and study purposes. Please respect the copyright on this material.
Q: Have you any special reason for never saying in class that all there is to matter is an illusion of the senses?
A: Well, yes, I do have a very special reason—this isn’t a fact! Matter is an indestructible substance. Matter is as indestructible as God, and that is what has confused metaphysicians. They have been taught that matter is unreal. Matter can’t be unreal because you can’t destroy it. You can make it change forms, but you cannot destroy matter. If you reduce it to molecules, you’ll still get it down below that into atoms, and when you get it into atoms, you break it up, and then what do you have? Energy. You haven’t destroyed matter; you’ve made it change form. There is no way to destroy matter, for matter is indestructible, and the substance of matter is mind. Matter is mind appearing. Mind made visible is matter, and to believe otherwise is to believe that which never could be true.
How did this belief come about that matter was an illusion? Only due to the fact, the same fact that wrecked India. When it was discovered that the objects of sense are illusion, the Indians began to hate their bodies. They refused to save money. They refused to build businesses. “What’s the use? It’s unreal, and when we die, it will all disappear.” Well, you see, none of it died; none of it disappeared. They did, but not it. The land still is there. The water power still is there; the electricity still is there; the sunshine is there—every single thing is there that they thought death was going to dissolve.
Gautama the Buddha had the original revelation that is recorded as to the illusory nature of that which we see, hear, taste, touch, and smell. And on the basis of that, he did miracle healing works, and so did his early disciples. Later on, his students, or their students, misunderstood this word “maya,” or “illusion,” and they thought that the illusion was out here, and that this is illusion. No! The concept we entertain of this is illusion. This isn’t. This is so immortal that you can never destroy it. The water can change to steam, or it can change to ice, but it can’t be destroyed, and it weighs just as much in any form. This glass, this tumbler, can be reduced to splinters, can be dissolved from our human sight, but it cannot be destroyed. You can take it right back into a laboratory and prove that it has existence and that the existence has weight.
So it is that when metaphysics was first given to the world in the last century, the revelation was given that our senses testify erroneously. And instead of staying with that, we said, “Oh, no. It isn’t our senses. It’s this that is the illusion.” But how can an illusion be externalized? How can you get a ghost in your mind to walk this room? How can you get 2 x 2 is 5 to be externalized? How can you get sin, death, and disease to externalize themselves, when they exist only in a disordered thought? And all healing is based on that—that sin, disease, and death have no externalized reality. They exist only as illusory beliefs, concepts. Oh, but don’t go back and make the mistake of the Hindus and say, “My body is unreal.”
One time, my Christian Science teacher sent me to New York to talk with Father Divine, try to find out why it was that so many Christian Scientists were leaving the movement to follow Father Divine. What did he have that was doing this? And in the course of one of these talks, Father Divine said to me, “I wonder if you know that by now, Christian Science should be one of the only two religions left on earth, and a hundred years from now, it should be the only one left.” I said, “That’s quite a recognition on your part.” He said, “Certainly! All you have to do is change one thing in your teaching—stop destroying your bodies. You go look at some of your people if you want to see how they’re drying up. They come in here, and they say to me, ‘I know the body is unreal.’” And he said, “Then I say to them, ‘Why don’t you jump out the window and get rid of it?’ No, they don’t like that! They want this ‘unreal’ body, but they want the unreal body to look pretty and feel pretty.”
Now you see, matter isn’t unreal; body isn’t unreal; this world isn’t unreal. It’s beautiful. It’s immortal; it’s eternal; it never will dissolve. But our concepts of this world will change. Our concepts of body will change. We will outgrow our infant body and have a child’s bodies. We’ll outgrow those and have youth’s bodies. We’ll outgrow those and have mature bodies. And we’ll outgrow those and have a more spiritual sense of body. But never will we have a more spiritual body than we’ve got now. If this weren’t true, spiritual healing would be an impossibility, because how do you ever expect spiritual realization to give you a good material body? You’re saying, “Well then, God can give us a good illusion.” No, no! We entertain illusory concepts of matter and of body.
God made all that was made. Don’t you believe that? God made all that was made, and all that He made is good. Well, maybe He didn’t make matter, but he made this body [spiritual body]. And so instead of calling it matter, let’s call it spirit. It’s still this body. A rose by any other name would be just as sweet. And this body that we have is an immortal body. It is an eternal body, and the more spiritual our vision, the more spiritual our [physical] body becomes.
It is just in the same way as I have spoken here this week about prison experiences. When an ordinary minister goes into a prison, he usually finds a lot of bad men there, and his function is to reform them. And you know by the records what a poor job he’s doing. But when a metaphysician goes in, he absolutely sees no bad men there. [He] absolutely knows that what he beholds there is what he would behold in this room—God expressing Itself in infinite individuality. But just as all around this room, there are people with physical or mental or moral or financial lapses, so in there, we find the same thing. Why, that’s nothing but their misconception of life that’s brought them to a prison, and another misconception of life brings you to a hospital, and another misconception of life brings you to a mental institute, and another misconception of life brings you to lack and limitation.
And the very moment that you begin to understand God in Its real nature, all of a sudden, you don’t find sinners, or sick people, or immoral people, or poor people. You find them responding to your spiritual vision of them. Why, you haven’t changed matter. All you’ve done is, through your spiritual vision, you’ve brought to light [the truth of individual being], just as Peter did in recognizing that Jesus wasn’t Jesus at all; he was the Christ, the son of the living God. And in that recognition, the son of God is revealed to this world.
And so it is that when you begin to look upon each other, not as human beings with human histories, but looking on each other as God—God the Father appearing as God the Son—and unseeing the physical appearances, the mental, the moral, the financial appearances, gradually you bring to light the hidden qualities of every individual, the transcendental qualities, the spiritual qualities, the real qualities which are there all the time. Then, all of a sudden, their physical appearance changes, their finances change, their morals change. Whatever it is that needs correcting begins to change, and the spiritual identity shines forth right through the same individual where the opposite was before. And all of this is brought about how? Not by your denying them their body. Not by your denying them anything, but by your recognizing the invisible Spirit to be the essence and substance of true being.
Now, let me take you a step further with this. In the first chapter of Genesis, you have an invisible God, an incorporeal God, making man and a universe in His own image and likeness. Perhaps you haven’t recognized the fact that that man is incorporeal and spiritual, and that you’ve never seen him and never will with your five senses. … Man is as invisible as God, for God and man is one.
Now, what about us, we who see, hear, taste, touch, and smell each other? What about us? Well, don’t think for a minute that we’re unreal. Don’t think for a moment that we don’t exist, and don’t think for a moment that we’re an illusion. We aren’t. What happened is this: . . . A belief was accepted by us, a belief in two powers, good and evil. And right there and then, we lost our heaven. We lost our Eden, and a new world was created. That world has as its essence and substance, mind. Mind, which was originally intended to be an avenue of awareness, now becomes a creative faculty. And mind forms its own conditions of body; mind forms its own conditions of form. Mind forms itself, governs itself, as matter.
Now, here’s the proof of it. My mind, imbued with truth, is the law of resurrection, renewal, regeneration, restoration, to body, to form. My mind, imbued with truth, is the mind of those who come to me and of those embraced in my consciousness. My mind, imbued with truth, is the mind of individual being. Mind must always form its external appearance. My mind, imbued with spiritual truth, becomes the instrument through which perfect form appears.
Now watch this in your experience. When you are called upon to heal, you have an instrument, which is your mind. But before you come into metaphysics, your mind is not imbued with spiritual truth. Your mind is ignorant of spiritual truth. It is an unillumined mind. It may be an educated one, but spiritually, it’s an unillumined one. Therefore, if someone says to you, “I have a headache,” the best you can do is offer him a pill. But the moment that you are instructed in metaphysical truth, your mind, imbued with this truth, becomes a law of healing to that person’s headache. Later on, when you go far enough, [your mind imbued with truth becomes a law of healing] right to their cancers and consumptions.
Mind, imbued with truth; my mind, imbued with truth, becomes a law of health to your body, or to your business, or to your home, or to your relationships. Your mind, imbued with truth, becomes the law of harmonious form to your family, to your patients. Your mind, ignorant of truth, results in diseased and discordant bodies. Your mind, ignorant of truth, results in poverty, in sin, in false appetites. And you can’t do anything about it, either. Nothing you can do to help yourself. You have to find some medical help of one form or another because your mind has nothing in it of any benefit on this realm of restoration or resurrection. But when you come to any of the truth teachings, and your mind becomes imbued with truth, you are a mental healer. And your mind imbued with truth becomes the substance of the health of your patient, or your student, or your friend, or your relative.
Now, you are functioning in the second chapter of Genesis, a mind-created world—but not a mind that made a material world. There can’t be such a thing. The only world a mind can make is a mental world. Therefore, that which we call your physical body, while in truth it’s a spiritual one, to our sense, is a mental one because we have formed the concept of body with mind. Our mind fashioned this body, and this body was fashioned of mind; therefore, its substance is mind, and it is mind. And that is why you have the statement, “Thoughts are things.”
Now you can understand that what you hold in your mind as conviction later shows forth in body. Why? Because mind is the substance of body. Mind is the substance of the form that we see, hear, taste, touch, or smell, and the way we are seeing it is an illusory picture, because that isn’t the way it is at all. That’s only the way we, in our limited sense, see it. But it, in itself, is perfection. Matter is only matter in a material state of consciousness. Once one rises to a mental state, it is seen that matter isn’t matter at all. It is now mind, and a process of mind changes the product, matter.
Well, of course, you know that’s a Ph.D. subject, and I won’t be a bit surprised if you don’t understand it. But to understand it, you must understand the first chapter of Genesis and the second chapter of Genesis. You must understand that in the first chapter, we are talking about an incorporeal, spiritual God and His incorporeal, spiritual image and likeness, man. And when we talk of the second chapter of Genesis, we are talking about the mind of man, which, instead of continuing to be what it was intended to be—an avenue of awareness—man started to create. And he created a nice world that we are destroying just as rapidly as we can. And if we just can destroy it a little bit more, we may be compelled to retire into our true spiritual being again.
Do you not see that there is nothing illusory about this world? The sun, the moon, the stars, the time, the tides, nature—they are all governed by law, and not any law that man governs. Don’t you see that there is no such thing as a mental activity in this world? It’s only when you decide you want a Cadillac automobile that you start to make the old mind go around and make one for you. It’s only when you decide that you want to create with your mind that you sometimes do and then have it bite you—the very thing you created.
But, if you look out onto this world, can’t you see that man doesn’t pray to have the sun come up in the morning or go down at night? Can’t you see that man doesn’t have to do mental work to bring the tides in or have them go out? Don’t you see that man doesn’t have to do any mental work to put fish in the ocean or birds in the air? That there is a spiritual activity going on that does all this without any help from the mind of man? And it’s only when man starts to personalize that he starts to use this mind, starting it gyrating to make something happen for him. He doesn’t have to. He does it because of the second chapter of Genesis, and he has to create his world.
But the moment that you, in your spiritual, in your mystical teaching, the minute you leave that world and decide, “I wonder. Can God run this universe without my help? I just wonder, could God take care of me without me staying up all night and doing some mentalizing or imaginationing? I just wonder if the sun would come up in the morning if I didn’t visualize it.” Don’t you see that?
There’s a mental universe; it’s that second chapter of Genesis. And you can play around with it, and you can make things in it. We’ve even made the god of Santa Claus at Christmas time. We’ve made lots of things with this mind. We’ve made a god out of money with this mind. We’ve made a god out of crops. They were all given to us for our use, but now we’ve turned and made gods out of them as if they could bless or hate, bless or curse.
Now, look. There is a Spirit in man, and God planted it there in the beginning. It is our Savior. It is the very thing that the Hebrews predicted for centuries and centuries: the coming or the realization of Messiah. The mistake was made in believing that it was going to be a man instead of the spirit of God in man. The Christians went the Hebrew mistake one better. They let the Messiah come and then got rid of Him. And so the Hebrews have no Messiah because they don’t believe He’s come yet. The Christians have no Messiah because they believe he was crucified. They’re waiting for Him to come back.
And so the world is trying to get along without a Messiah, when the whole of religious history teaches there is a Messiah, and Its kingdom is within you. That’s the son of God in you. And the moment you learn to relax and rest in that Word, you’ll find that the armies of the aliens fight among themselves, kill each other off, and disappear, and you just go out and collect the loot. That’s the way it happened in Scripture, just the way it happened. You do not earn your living by the sweat of your brow. That’s the punishment for believing that mind is power, and that you can create something with your mind instead of letting your mind be a beautiful instrument through which your Soul can express Itself.