A: I’d love to! Nothing I love more than the subject of life eternal and the subject of death, except the words “God” and “prayer.”
If you look out onto this world, the subject of death is very easy. Everyone who is born must die. Everything that is born must die. Everything that has a beginning must have an ending.
How do we know that? By the evidence of our senses; the same way we know the tracks come together in the distance; the same way we know that the sky sits on a mountain; the same way that we know that there’s water on a dry desert. That’s how we know that everything that lives must die—through the same senses that delude us; through the same senses that fool us in every way; the same senses that make us trust, put our faith in princes; and consider man whose breath is in his nostril.
Those five physical senses testify to a beginning and to an ending. They testify to birth and to death. And, if you can believe them in one way, you might as well make up your mind to believe them in all ways. As you live long enough to get a few gray hairs, you’ll find out that you can’t believe those five physical senses. And so, the idea now comes: How do you approach the subject of life and the understanding of death? The answer is this: You begin with the word God. And since the letters G – o – d in and of themselves will not give you the unfoldment, you turn to one of the synonyms for God that meets the situation.
One synonym for God is life. God is life. Now, when does God begin? And when does God end? There you have the story of life eternal. Since God is life, life has no beginning, and life has no ending. And where, in that entire word “life,” would you find death? Where in the entire understanding of God as immortality could you find mortal life? Are you following that? Do you see that point? If God is Life, if God is immortal, is life mortal? No! On the other hand, is there more than one life? Since we have accepted God as life and God as immortality and God as infinity, if God is infinite life, is there a life beside that? No. God being Life, and God being infinite Life, there can be no life that has beginning or ending.
Now we come to the point of realization in our individual experience: Why were we born and why will we die? Because of the acceptance of a life other than God. That’s all. It’s as simple as that. Declare, realize, that God is our only life, and you’ve dropped all possibility of dying. You will even drop the possibility of old age or weakness. All of the discords of human experience can be summed up in this: a sense of separation from God. I don’t care whether it’s financial lack, moral lack, physical lack, or mental lack. It is summed up in a sense of separation from God. The understanding of God as one’s life reveals immortality, eternality, infinity. … And so, you find that there is one way to eliminate death, and that way is to come to the realization that only God is life, and that life is the life of individual being.
But do not declare or believe that God is the only life, and say, “Therefore, I’m not living.” Yes, I am life eternal, but that I that declares it, declares it as Joel or as Bill or as Mary or as whatever your name may be. So, we are not wiping ourselves out. What we are doing is perpetuating our identity. However, even the identity of Joel wishes to progress year by year by year. It will still be Joel a thousand years from now, but it will look out from a higher unfoldment, just as it looks out now from a higher unfoldment than five or ten years ago. But it is Joel, and it is Joel of fifty years ago. No, no—forty—excuse me. Do you follow that? Never wipe out individuality or identity. Let God be your individuality; let God be your identity; but be individual, since God does not repeat Itself even in fingerprints. So, God does not repeat Itself in your abilities or mine. …
Now, let us understand this: To every one of us comes a period or point of transition. If we live our daily lives minute by minute in whatever way it is presented to us, always maintaining the realization of God as individual being, we will continue to unfold and unfold, always reaching higher levels of consciousness. One day, we will find ourselves removed from this scene of activity—not kicked out of our body by disease—just gently moved on in a transitional experience to the next higher unfoldment. There is no provision in the divine economy for anyone walking around on the earth forever in this form.
Why? Well, this form that you see is not the form that sits here. This is our concept of the divine body. But this concept of body has been changing every few years. This concept of body has been changing, just as this concept of life has been changing, and this concept of love has been changing, and this concept of supply has been changing. This concept of body has been changing progressively, and this concept will continue to progress. The body itself will not change. The body is the temple of God, but you can’t see this body except in your higher moments of meditation.
When I am in my depth of meditation, more especially if I have a very difficult case, and I am forced to go deep, deep down within my being to bring out healing, then I catch glimpses of the spiritual life and the spiritual form. I catch glimpses even of the spiritual form behind the flower. Ever since I’ve been in this work, I have always caught glimpses of spiritual man—that is, spiritual identity. And the further my work goes, the more I see of the spiritual nature of this universe, but not through my eyes. Through my eyes, I still see men and women and trees and flowers and oceans. It is true that even what I see with my eyes is much better than it formally was, because I see more of the good and less of the other. But still, that is not beholding the real. The real is beheld in the glimpse that one gets in the depth of meditation or treatment when we “behold Him as He is.” Then “we are satisfied with that likeness.”
We will have the body that is our real body forever. We won’t leave it anyplace. It won’t be buried; it won’t be burned. Never believe that for a single moment. The only thing that we ever drop is a concept of body. Just as we stepped out of our infant body and our youth body into maturity, so we step out of a mortal sense of body into the spiritual demonstration and realization of body. We can do that, and we can do it here on this plane. It is not necessary to die or make a transition to experience it. …
The Master says, “I can lay down my life, I can pick up my life.”2 And I will tell you that there are others who can step in or out of the mortal concept of body and life at will, here and now. It all comes about through attaining the revelation or realization within of true being. That is the first thing. That was what Mrs. Eddy had in mind when she wrote, “Jesus beheld in Science the perfect man, where sick and sinning mortal man appeared to mortals.” She did not mean that Jesus visualized a human being in a perfectly healthy body. Never did she have such a thing in her mind. She meant what she said—that Jesus, through his spiritual wisdom, through his spiritual mind, his soul faculties, beheld man as he really is, described later by John as a “temple not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.”3
Now, the whole of John is a revelation of the world invisible to human eyesight—not invisible. Believe me, the spiritual world is a visible world, but it is visible only to illumined consciousness. Now our dear lady, Mrs. Eddy, saw that also in a passage in Science and Health where she says, “To what sense did this vision come to St. John?” Through what sense? The visual organs for seeing, hearing? No, no.” And then she said, “He saw that which the unillumined couldn’t see. Only the illumined could see.” And I say that to you. The practitioner who is doing good healing work is one who has seen that which is invisible, heard that which is inaudible, and knows that which is unknowable. And that is not an impossibility. That is a fact.
There comes a period in the development of every spiritual seer when they behold that which is invisible to the unillumined human mind. It is visible to the illumined human consciousness.
Now, everyone who has approached that in spiritual healing work has in some measure or other, caught momentary glimpses, and later, can at will live in that consciousness where they behold this universe as it really is. From that moment on, they can step in or step out; be here or be there. That is all within the realm of the spiritual faculties, once the human consciousness is illumined to the degree of inner vision.
Now, we have a few experiences in modern times of people who stepped out at a certain period of their experience and, to our sense, left human bodies to be buried or disposed of, but actually, not to their sense. One is that of Bicknell Young, and the other that of Brown Landone.
They knew what they were doing. They approached that period when they knew that their work was complete, and that there was a greater work ahead, and they stepped out. To our sense, they left bodies, but they knew that they had long since outgrown mortal concepts of body, and so they didn’t see them or know they had them anymore. Only the fellow out here, still looking through mortal eyes, saw mortal body. But they themselves had dropped them long before that period that we call transition.
In the same way, the practitioner sometimes gets a vision of the healing of their patient while the disease is still apparent in the body. The practitioner has dropped the disease; the practitioner has dropped the diseased body. The practitioner no longer knows of such things. But the patient, to their sense, still maintains a diseased body, and it may take a day, a week, or a month before they say, “Oh, I’m healed!” To which the practitioner replies, “Yes, I knew that a month ago!”
There are those who are above and beyond the mortal concept of body, and you can know them by their healing work. In the degree that they are enabled to see through the appearance to real being and real body, their healing works are beautiful and without prolonged time. They can, and sometimes do, approach states and stages of consciousness where they have shed their mortal concept of body. They can’t shed it for you, because you are looking out through the same mortal sense with which they formerly beheld their mortal body and yours. But in the degree that they have risen above the mortal sense of their body and yours, they are no longer bound or in bondage to that physical concept of form. It can be laid down and picked up according to the need of the moment.
1This excerpt is from Recording 28B, from the 1953 Los Angeles Practitioner Class, “The Spiritual View, Part 2.” 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 www.joelgoldsmith.com or by calling 1-800-922-3195.
2 John 10:18
3 2 Corinthians 5:1