A: I don’t know who said so, but I’m sure it isn’t true. You never can start a statement of truth with the word man, and that’s certain. Every word of truth must be started with the word “God”! Man is not an individuation of God; man is not an individualization of God; man is not a spark of God; man is not a divine spark. None of those things are true. God is the life of man. I presume the word “man” here means individual being. God is the life of individual being. God is the soul and God is the mind, God is the consciousness. God is the spirit of individual being, but since God is indivisible, all that God is, individual being is. He is not a spark of it. He’s not a little bit of it. If man was a little bit of God, it would take all the men on Earth to make a complete God, and then God would be made up of a lot of men. Oh no! We can’t have that!
“Man is an individuation of God” is one of those statements that has evolved through looking at appearances and trying to trace them back to God. Now you can’t trace an individual back to God by looking at appearances, because in looking at appearances, the individual seems to be a separate being. He seems to be a male or a female, when there is no such thing in God at all! God is infinite, indivisible Being, and God is individual being, and all that the Father hath is mine. So there is no “spark” about that. There is completeness.
Now then, every time you look at a mortal, or every time you look at a human being and try to trace them back to God, you’re going to make the same mistake that religion has been making for seven thousand years. You cannot look at an individual and trace them back to God without having God as Superman. No wonder the Hebrews of old had God sitting on a cloud with a white beard!
Don’t you know that when Moses communed with God, he took Aaron with him? Aaron stood watch to see that the people wouldn’t come nigh. Now why do you think that would be? When I commune with God, I don’t mind if you are sitting here. So why do you think Moses objected to his people looking on? Well, only for one reason: they hadn’t learned anything about an invisible God or any other kind of a God. They did not know what God was, and if they had seen Moses standing or sitting with his eyes closed, talking to himself, they would have said, “Here is a faker! He is not our leader! He claims he’s talking with God, and he’s up there all alone!” That’s why Moses couldn’t let the people of that time see him. Probably that’s why Jesus could not either. He went away for forty days to the mountaintops and communed. The people were not ready for the realization; they had not been taught that God is invisible and that the kingdom of God is within you. So communing or praying “within you” would have been a strange thing to them.
But when I sit here and commune and say to you, “This is an inner communion with God,” you are not horrified or shocked because you have had three quarters of a century in which you have been taught that the kingdom of God is within you, and that God is invisible. So you know
that God is not a great big man sitting on a cloud. You’re not even shocked when Jesus says, “God is the Father within me,” because you don’t think of a great big man sitting inside of me. You don’t think of “Father” as man. Why? Because your consciousness has been lifted above such finite, mortal concepts of God, and you are ready to accept a God that cannot be defined; a God that cannot be seen with the eyes.
Now, remember this. In our teaching of The Infinite Way we carry you one step further and say to you not only that God is infinite and invisible, but that individual being—you—is infinite and invisible. No one in the world has ever seen you. I can sit up here and look at a lot of bodies, but I cannot see you. You are somewhere behind those eyes looking up at me. And you are not seeing me unless you’re looking way in back of my eyes. You may see my body, my form here, my outline, but you can’t see me. The methat is talking to you is way back here looking out at you, and you are way back there looking up at me. If I look down here at your body expecting to see you, I would be disappointed.
You are infinite. All that the Father hath is yours. God is your life. Therefore your life can’t be a “spark” of God. God must be your life. The fullness of God must be the fullness of your life. You haven’t got a “spark” of intelligence. Heavens no! The great music of this world, the great art, the great literature, the great inventions – brought through with a “spark” of God? No, no, no! It was God functioning as individual being.
Now, lift up your concept of yourself! Just as this last three-quarters of a century has lifted up our concept of God so that now we can accept an infinite, omnipresent, omniscient, all-powerful being—and all that right within our own being—now we have to lift up our concept of our being and say, “All that God is, I am. All that the Father hath is mine, for I and the Father are one. Thou seest me, thou seest the Father that sent me.” When you lift yourself up into that estate, you will begin to understand the teaching of the Master.
I’ll admit this: it was a teaching that caused him to be crucified. It’s a teaching that if we were to shout from the housetops and talk about from the streets, would cause us either to be crucified or locked up in the insane asylum. That is one of the reasons that we don’t advertise. We allow those to be drawn who are of our own household; those who are already capable of receiving and responding to the message. Don’t ever think for a moment that we could go down to the municipal auditorium or out to the baseball field and tell this to the whole crowd. Oh no, you can’t do that! You can go out to a crowd in a baseball field and tell them they’re worms in the dust, because if they look in the mirror that confirms it. (Laughter)
But when you say to an individual, “Thou art the Christ, the son of the living God!” you are not talking to his mentality, and you are not talking to his intellect. You are not talking to anybody’s previous opinions about God or man. Jesus said to Peter, “Flesh and blood hath not told you this, but my Father, which art in heaven, my Father within you.”2 In other words, “How do you know I am the Christ? Not because the brain tells it to you; not because the intellect says so; but because the spiritual consciousness within you has revealed it to you.” And that’s the essence of this message: Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God. All that the Father hath is thine. All that God is, thou art. Thou art one with God. Thou art heir of God, joint-heir with Christ to all the heavenly riches—all the heavenly riches. It’s all up to you. How wide can you open your consciousness to let the infinite Godhead flow? How much spiritual discernment have you? And how much will you develop through meditation and so forth?
1 This excerpt is from Recording 62B: 1954 Chicago Closed Class, “Spiritual Unfoldment.” 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 from The Infinite Way Office website or by calling 1-800-922-3195.
2 Matthew 16:17.