A: Yes, indeed, it is possible. Many have been healed that way. It isn’t always the right thing to do—I mean as a conscious act. It is always the right thing when any form of discord touches your consciousness. In that very instant, you must give the treatment; you must give up the appearance for the understanding of the reality. That you do not do for their sake; you do that for your own sake because you cannot ever afford to accept an erroneous appearance.
But in this way, and this is what I mean by my answer, “that it isn’t always the right thing to do.” There is hardly a day that I do not receive one or more letters from someone asking, “Will you help my brother-in-law, or my mother-in-law, or my wife’s nephew, who is very ill, or dying, or needs an operation, and won’t you save them from it?”
Now, as a matter of fact, you understand that everybody in spiritual work is sufficiently busy with those who really want help without giving their time and attention to those who do not even remotely care about it and wouldn’t acknowledge it if they were healed. Therefore, just from that standpoint, it becomes an impossibility to take on one’s shoulders the responsibility of healing those who in no wise desire it.
But there is another factor. We are individuals. Now, it just so happens that in your country and in my country, if we can refer to England and the United States that way, that we live under a system of free government that guarantees to us the right of religious worship and the right to choose our own methods of healing—spiritual, medical, material, surgical—and I’m sure that you and I would not wish anyone to inflict upon us their method or their wish, since we have chosen this way.
How would it seem to us if, when we were asleep or unconscious, some of our relatives stole up on us and filled us full of medicine or permitted surgery? We would rebel, and rightly so, for we are free citizens entitled to live or die in accord with our own light.
Now, we have no right to deprive our relatives or friends who have chosen materia medica. We have no right to infringe upon them and insist that they be healed our way or that they be healed in spite of themselves. Actually, some of them, you know, don’t want to be healed. Some would rather go on as invalids, and others would really like to pass away. And here you are determining for them that you’re just going to thwart their will, and all of this in a free country. Let us, please, have respect for each other, and let us respect the desires of everyone with whom we come in contact. And if our friends and relatives are relying on materia medica and wish to continue to do so, let us grant them that right, even if they die in the process, because we want that right to live on spiritual principles even if we pass on in that process.
This does not take from us the responsibility, when we behold an erroneous condition, of making the adjustment within ourselves; in other words, realizing the non-power of the carnal mind in any of its forms or activities. But let us not intrude that upon anyone; let us keep that as a secret ritual. Is that clear?
1This copyrighted excerpt is from Recording 276B: 1959 London Closed Class, “A Meditation on I.” 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 website or by calling 1-800-922-3195.
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