A: Well actually, there are psychological ways of overcoming it, but I don’t know anything about them. The spiritual way is to develop a faith that there is a God. Now, whether or not you believe it, all fear is atheism. It means a state of mind that has no God.
You see, we can face any problem of life, regardless of how severe, and work along with it and succeed or fail. The amount of problems we have is unimportant, and ultimately whether we succeed or fail is unimportant, because we really have a million—a billion—years in which to work out our salvation. It doesn’t all have to be worked out here in one lifetime. If it did, all of these boys that we have sent out to be killed in the war, well, they would just have a hopeless outlook, wouldn’t they? Because before they ever had a chance to get started in life, we sent them out and mowed them down.
But as you come into a spiritual vision, if you discern the fact that it’s relatively unimportant whether a child dies at birth, or whether it dies at eighteen or twenty, or whether we live to be fifty or sixty. Some sad cases go on to ninety or one hundred or become doddering parasites on others. Death isn’t a tragedy. Very often death is a release, and always, death is progressive, at least where there is not a definite, shall we say, “backwards” state of consciousness, where one is living entirely in the negative. …
But ordinarily speaking, death is not the end of life. Death is the beginningof life, of another life. And so it is that we can face any problems of existence—physical, mental, moral, financial, human relationships—and make up our mind that it is part of our demonstration to work them out, and to do it sometimes with a sense of elation when we win and a sense of dejection when we fail. But that is no excuse to face them with fear. The person who faces them with fear has no God. They’re still in an atheistic state of consciousness.
Ifyou have a God, you know that regardless of what problems you have, you’re working them out and eventually you are going to come through. You have the awareness that there is a something—a God, a Principle, a Christ—which, even if it is invisible at the moment or is not on the scene, you still have no fear because you know in the back of your mind that eventuallyyou are going to work through the problem, because you are never alone. You know there is a God.
When you recognize fear, recognize the fact that you are entertaining a belief of atheism—that there isn’t a God—and then you’ll meet it quickly. You will overcome it because you will laugh. You will laugh at yourself for believing there is no God, because you are not an atheist. Whoever you are, you are not an atheist. You wouldn’t be in this room if you were an atheist. But you are allowing an atheistic belief to handle you and to try to convince you that there is no God.
And that’s where you have to have a little backbone and be willing to talk right up to your error; talk right up to your fear and say, “Here, you’re never going to convince me that there is no God. You’re never going to convince me that the sun, moon, and stars happened by accident. You’re never going to convince me that apples coming from apple trees, and pineapples from pineapple bushes, and peaches from peach trees, is just an accident! You’re never going to convince me that there isn’t a law governing that. You’re never going to convince me that there isn’t a law of tides that says they shall come in at this hour, and go out at that hour, ant that they can chart it to the very second for a thousandyears ahead.”
Why? Because there is a principle. There is a law operating behind these oceans, and there couldn’t be such a law if there weren’t a God, because manhas never solved the idea of time and tides. Manhas never solved the sun, the moon, the stars, the planets. Man can’t govern any of those things, and if man can’t govern them, there must be something that is governing them.
And so if you’ve only come far enough along the spiritual life to have grown away from orthodoxy, which would fool you into believing there is a God of good and a God of evil; a God who rewards and a God who punishes; a God whose favor you can gain, and a God whose disfavor you can gain; if you’ve only come along enough to know that all orthodox religion is a humbug, and you have started on the spiritual path, you’ve come far enough to know that there is a God, and that God is love. God never punishes; God never holds anybody in condemnation; and God never gives one person control over another person. God never gives anyone, at any time, or under any circumstance, a control over God’s perfect likeness, which I am and which you are.
Now, just as you sometimes have to have courage to talk back to your employer when you know you’re in the right, you’ll have to talk back to members of your family and stand up to them when you know you’re in the right. You have to stand up to your government when you know you’re in the right. You can’t afford, ever, to let your family, your community, your government, your church, or anybody else talk you down when you know you’re in the right. The world wouldn’t be in halfthe trouble it is if people had the courage to talk up to their superiors, as it were—I mean “superior” in the sense of place or position.
So it is, there is such a thing called fear. We fear to be dominated by a tyrant in Russia. We have had to fight what was called “domination” in the Kaiser, “domination” in Hitler. Now we’re fighting domination in the leaders of Russia, and you’re well aware of enough history to know that these that we now call “Commonwealths” have had to do some very tough talking to the government in England, in order to win their complete independence and status as Commonwealth instead of “colony” or “possession.”
Now you are a commonwealth—a “common wealth,” a “wealth-in-common”—partners with England; not colonies, not under England. You are a commonwealth, but you had to fight for it. Every single one of these commonwealth countries had to fight for their status of equality, and that’s why you have a Prime Minister here now, and that’s why you have a Queen Mother coming now, because you have won the status of equality and respect. And you have done it by standing right up and talking for it, not fearing because they had a Navy that ruled the waves; not fearing because they were the mother country; but actually standing up and realizing your true identity as men and women of equality with all people.
The colonies in the United States had to do it, long, long years ago with England. The northern states had to do it with the southern states on the subject of slavery. We all had to get together and do it with the Kaiser. We all had to get together and do it with Hitler.
Everyone has to stand up sooner or later and assert their true identity. You’ll see that when I read these passages that I’ve mapped out tonight in the Bible. You’ll know who you are, and you’ll stand up to it, and then you will not permit yourself to be dominated because, in the last analysis, you are not being dominated by a man, or a woman, or a country. You are merely dominated by the belief that you haven’t had a God to hold you up and support you and carry you through everything.
And so, spiritually, my answer to everybody that has fear is: Talk back to it. Assert your true identity as equal with anybody, with anything. Only be sure you’re in the right, and then do it! And understand this: The trials are nothing; problems are nothing. We all have to face them. We don’t only face them when we have a little understanding. The more understanding we get, the deeper the problems we have to face. Or have you forgotten that with all of Jesus’ understanding, he had to face Gethsemane and the crucifix?
Have you forgotten the trials that Peter and John and Paul went through—even with their high understanding? Of course, they didn’t go through those for themselves; they did it for us. Had they been willing to retire from the world and enjoy their God-realization, they would have had no such problems. But they set themselves up against constituted authority for our sakes.
They violated laws of the land—temporal laws. Wherever they went, they were in violation of the laws. To begin with, they were in violation of the laws of the Hebrew church. They were all members of that, but they were in violation. And then they were in violation of Rome. They didn’t care how many laws they broke. They were going to give us our spiritual freedom, and they broke the laws and went to jail. They broke laws and were burned and were crucified upside down. That didn’t bother them. They knew what the problems were; they had no fear. They had problems—plenty of them—but they had no fear. Ah no! Not fear, because regardless of anything else, whatever problem we go through, we go through so that in the end, we attain the realization of our divine sonship.
Who cares if they go to war and get killed? Who cares if they go to war and get imprisoned? Who cares if they go to war and starve, if they have the feeling that they’re doing it, not for themselves, but for you, for the world? They don’t have fear when they go out there. They have problems, but they don’t have fear. …
Well, let’s not fear. Above all things, face our problems. Suffer them through, ask our friends to help us with them, but don’t fear, because that is just accepting an atheistic belief that there is no God. And that’s that.
1This excerpt is from Recording 201A, from the 1958 Sydney & Melbourne Closed Class, “The Message of the Bible—Jeremiah 1:1-10, Philippians 2:13-16, Isaiah 42, 43, 44.” It is posted with kind permission from the Estate of Joel S. 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.