Recording 113B, “The Secret of the Healing Principle,” from the 1955 Kailua Group, is the basis for Chapter 6, “The Secret of the Healing Principle,” in The Heart of Mysticism, Volume IV, The 1957 Infinite Way Letters.
To download or print these study suggestions, click/tap here.
For our two-week interlude between study programs, we are returning to the chapter “The New Horizon” from The Infinite Way.
Throughout his ministry, Joel repeatedly emphasized the primary importance of this chapter to all students. He told us to “Never let this chapter get stale. Never neglect this chapter.” In keeping with that counsel, we are focusing on this chapter for the two weeks before beginning our next study program on spiritual healing. You might enjoy reviewing the document we prepared with quotes from Joel about “The New Horizon.”[1]
A New Way to Study the Chapter
It is easy to forget that Joel himself produced one audiobook: The Infinite Way. That’s right! The four recordings—0001A, 0001B, 0002A, and 0002B—are recordings of Joel himself reading The Infinite Way.
For reasons unknown, in this recording, he omitted the chapter “Soul,” and the edition he read from was published before the “Wisdoms” were added, so those are not included. Aside from those omissions, Joel reads the entire book, including “The New Horizon.”
You may recall that in 2023, we revisited the “eight important chapters” that Joel identified. The first of these is “The New Horizon.” In the optional study suggestions for that session, we proposed taking this short chapter (only about forty sentences) one sentence at a time, writing the first sentence, contemplating it, and then rewriting it in your own words, together with any insights that arose from your contemplation. Working with just a few sentences a day, students could complete the chapter over the two-week study period.
As we consider this important chapter again, we are offering another approach, which considers the chapter paragraph by paragraph. There are just ten paragraphs in the chapter, and for each paragraph, we have provided the excerpt of Joel reading that paragraph. There are nine excerpts—not ten—because one very short paragraph in the chapter blended naturally with the previous one.
Each excerpt follows this format:
We have found that this format—considering the paragraph three times—encourages deep contemplation, which can result in more profound understanding and new insights. Building silent periods right into the recording allows you to relax and simply listen and contemplate; you don’t have to interrupt the flow to stop or start the recording.
If you use these recorded contemplations, you might want to include these questions as part of your contemplations:
Click/tap here to access the recorded excerpts.
For this study period, you may want to try this new “contemplation with Joel” approach, or return to the sentence-by-sentence writing method, or use a different method of your own. The essential thing is that you refresh and deepen your experience of this chapter over the two-week study period.
(Added on August 23, 2025) As we worked with the paragraph excerpts, it became clear that a final recording of Joel reading the entire chapter would be valuable. We realized that after hearing and contemplating the chapter paragraph by paragraph, listening to it as a whole would open the way to a more profound experience of this essential chapter than we might ever have had. We have added the recording of Joel reading the entire chapter as the tenth recording in the series.
[1] The “New Horizon” section is on recording 0002B at approximately minute 36.