Recording 466A, “Discernment of Christ – Dispelling Anti-Christ,” is from the 1962 Pacific Palisades Special Class. It was not used as source material for any book.
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In the first session, recording 465A, Joel focused on the idea that The Infinite Way is not just a teaching to be studied, but a way of life. He taught that by living this way of life, we can come to the realization: “That which I am seeking, I already am” and “My conscious oneness with God constitutes my oneness with all spiritual being and idea.”
In the second session, recording 465B, Joel continued with the theme of The Infinite Way as a way of life, describing it as a life of prayer or meditation—not an occasional practice but the central function of daily living. Through this way of life, harmony, peace, and fruitage appear in our experience as the natural expression of living in conscious oneness with God.
In this class, Joel takes us more deeply into the meaning of a spiritual, mystical way of life and shows how it differs from the human way of living. He emphasizes the importance of recognizing the oneness of all mankind and explains what that means for how we must regard and treat others, including what to do in the face of appearances. Throughout the lesson, Joel repeats the theme that the harmony of our own experience is determined not by how others act toward us, but by how we act toward them.
Because this recording was not used as source material for a book, you may wish to support your review of the class by ordering the transcript, preparing your own summary, or using the summary below as a starting point and adding any points that spoke to you personally.
In providing these summaries, our intention is not to replace the transcript. It is to provide a kind of “guided map” of the recording that can help you remember, revisit, and practice what Joel emphasized.
The Difference Between the Material and the Spiritual Way of Life
We are seeing the meaning of a spiritual, infinite, mystical way of life, and how it is the opposite of the material, or human, way of life. In the material way of life, I am acted upon. I may have a good experience because somebody is good to me, or a bad experience because somebody is bad to me. I may be healthy because the climate suits me, or unhealthy because it does not. I may be prosperous because I live in a prosperous country or work in a prosperous industry, or I may lack prosperity because my industry is no longer thriving or there is a recession.
In the human way of life, we are not in control; someone or something is acting upon us. The spiritual way of life is the opposite. You are not under the control of people, circumstances, or conditions. You set the stage for your own experience and are in control at all times.
The Secret of the Law of Supply
For example, once you understand the spiritual way of life, it would be impossible to lack, because infinity is the measure of your supply. No one can give supply to you or take it away. You set it in motion through your attunement to the spiritual law of supply. Of course, you must first understand that law. Its secret lies in the passage “What have you in your house?” You begin to search your own consciousness for what you have and begin to pour, just as the poor widow in the Bible poured the few drops of oil she had and found that the cruse never ran dry.
When you withdraw your attention from the outward source of supply and ask, “What do I have in my house?”—meaning “What do I have in my consciousness?”—you remember, “I and my Father are one. Son, thou art ever with me; all that I have is thine.” Therefore, you have something in your consciousness given you of God, and you can ask, “What is it? What am I withholding? What do I have that I do not recognize? What am I not pouring out?”
Your consciousness is infinite because it is one with God. Because you are one with God, all that the Father hath is yours. You have infinity, but you are not pouring forth all that you should. Somewhere, somehow, you are holding back your supply rather than letting it flow. God is the source of your being and the source and measure of your supply; therefore, its measure is infinite. You may find that you have clothing, food, or service to share. Then you realize that the greatest meaning of the experience of supply is spiritual.
Living As a Son of God
If you have become a Son of God, you are an heir—a joint-heir—to all of the riches. But have you become a Son of God, or are you still the “natural man that receiveth not the things of God?” How do you know? The best guide we have is the teaching of Christ Jesus. Are you fulfilling the law of Sonship, which says that you must pray for your enemies and for those who despitefully use you; forgive seventy times seven, and serve? “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these, my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”
You must serve not only your family, friends, and those of your own religious family, but impartially. You must find a way not only to educate and clothe your own children but also to help educate and clothe the children of those who cannot afford to do so, who have not yet awakened to their true identity. You must pour forth both the material things of life and the spiritual things—forgiveness and prayers for the enemy.
You must pray without ceasing; abide in the word and let the word abide in you. You must fulfill what the Master revealed about being the Son of God, the Christ of God. If you declare yourself to be the Son of God or Christ of God, you must live accordingly. You must set aside time to practice forgiveness, pray for the enemy, refrain from resisting evil, refuse to take up the sword, and not retaliate. This is how we become the Son of God.
Then look at whether you are sufficiently expressing supply and allowing it to flow through you. When you know that the law of supply is outpouring, you govern your own supply by your own degree of givingness. Then supply is no longer a problem. I am always in control, and if you wish to increase your supply, you must increase the measure of your outflow of prayer and service.
There Is Only One Spiritual Family
Your entire experience on the spiritual path depends not on anyone or anything outside yourself, but on your relationship with everyone in the world. Your demonstration of harmony does not depend on someone else’s attitude toward you. It depends on what you are seeing out there and your attitude toward them, your realization of oneness with the source of all being, and your obedience to spiritual law.
It all has its foundation in “Ye shall know the truth and the truth will make you free.” The truth is that every individual is spiritual—the Christ, or Son of God. To have harmony in your life, you must acknowledge that there is but one Father and that no man on earth is your father. This Father is Spirit, and we are the offspring of Spirit, not of man. God is the creative Principle of all life, the source of all life. Since God is the only Father, we are brethren—brothers and sisters, whether Jew or Gentile, Protestant or Catholic, white or black, Oriental or Occidental. This is the truth that makes you free. By acknowledging it, you eliminate any nationalism, bigotry, or prejudice that you might have.
When you acknowledge that God is the Father of us all and that we are brothers and sisters of one spiritual household, the family of God, you love every other individual because each is the offspring of the same Parent. There is only one family. This love is neither personal nor sensual; it is the spiritual recognition and agreement that we are all brothers and sisters. We are one, and all that the Father has is ours.
Then there is a bond between us all. God established that bond, and when you recognize it, you bring yourself into obedience to it and oneness with it. Then this law of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man operates in your life. As you perceive this, your attitude toward others changes, and so does their attitude toward you.
Even when you go out among strangers—in hotels, airports, stores, the business world, or anywhere else—when you recognize everyone you meet as the offspring of God, as your brothers and sisters, the feeling you have toward them returns to you. Love that is poured out must come back. It is like casting bread on the waters: it goes out, but the next tide brings it back. The truth you pour out by recognizing others as your brothers and sisters, children of the one Father, compels you to treat them honorably. You act toward them in the same way you would act toward a member of your own household, because they are of your household. The fact that you live under different roofs does not change the relationship.
There Is Only One Mind
There is only one mind, and whatever of truth is taking place in your mind is felt by others. That is how healing can occur through a practitioner. Whatever truth the practitioner knows, the patient responds to; the practitioner does not have to project that thought to the patient.
As long as you know that you are one with the Father and that all that the Father has is yours, anyone who reaches out to you for help receives the power of that truth because it took place in the one mind. We are not separate minds. There is only one mind, and every bit of truth that permeates your being is permeating the being of all who are receptive. Therefore, the love you pour out is poured back to you.
Joel relates two stories that illustrate this principle. In one, a student is on a bus with an intoxicated man. She peacefully holds the truth in her consciousness, and the man quiets down and acknowledges her help and says he will never drink again. In the second, a similar situation occurs in a coffee shop. The student quietly holds the truth, and the man asks her to talk to him about God. He left sober.
These stories show that whatever of spiritual truth is operating in your consciousness is felt by others because there is only one mind. We are all in one consciousness.
The Truth You Know Is What Will Return to You
Your attitude toward the world is the attitude the world returns to you. This does not mean, “Be good to others, and they will be good to you.” It means that the truth you know is what will return to you—the truth. If you know that God is the only Father, the only cause and creative Principle, and that we are all brothers and sisters, that truth compels you to act toward the world with justice, kindness, benevolence, and integrity. Others then respond to the truth you are knowing about them. There will be an exception now and then, but broadly speaking, over the course of your life, that will be your experience.
It is commonly believed that people do both good and evil, but that has never been true. Yes, if a man believes what he has created in his dream, that will happen to him. “In accordance with your faith, so be it unto you.” As long as you believe that some men are good and some are evil, or that everyone is both good and evil, that belief will return to you. Your own belief will come back to you. But if you awaken to the truth that there is no evil in anyone because each individual is the Christ of God, and that all evil is an activity of the carnal mind and not of man, that truth will come back to you.
Break the Malpractice
There is only one Father, and you are the child of that Father—an heir of God, a joint-heir. You are the very Christ of God, and this is true of every individual. Therefore, whatever of evil, sin, disease, death, lack, old age, or any other discord appears to be in someone, you recognize as a delusion of the senses, an illusory picture presented by the carnal mind. Appearances do not fool you because you know the truth of identity.
Whenever an appearance of discord presents itself, you must know the truth. God is not the author of sin, disease, or death, nor is God in the evils of the human world. God is in the still small voice in the midst of you. By knowing this truth, you stop malpracticing others. As a human being, you see an individual as sick, sinful, old, or dead, but that is mental malpractice, and we are all guilty of it to some degree. What frees us from the effects of malpractice is to stop malpracticing. There is no other way.
Therefore, when you loose another and say, “Neither do I judge thee, thy sins be forgiven thee;” and when you understand that God is the only Father, and every individual is as pure as the Father because each is of the same life, mind, and substance, you release that person from malpractice and yourself from being a malpractitioner. Since you are no longer pouring out malpractice, none can return to you because my experience depends on what I pour out.
If you know the truth, the truth must make you free. If you know the truth about others, that truth makes you free because there is only one of us. There is only one Life, one Mind, one Soul, and the truth that you know about others is the truth that makes you free. The moment you stop malpracticing, you stop drawing malpractice to yourself. In other words, to be free, you must free others.
You can never be free while you are holding anyone in bondage—never. Spiritual law requires that you “loose him and let him go,” forgive seventy times seven, and behold God as the life of individual man. You must have the same spiritual discernment that Peter had when he recognized the Master as the Christ, the Son of the living God. You must look out at the world, recognizing that any evil you see is of the carnal mind, and say, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God. Then the measure of your outpouring is the measure of your incoming. It is like the law of supply: to receive, you must give.
If you have the experience of doing healing work, you will quickly understand this. An individual comes to a practitioner of a spiritual teaching and asks for help. That person has brought themself to the practitioner’s consciousness, and the practitioner immediately contemplates God: God is Spirit; God is the spirit in man. God is Life; God is the life of man. God is Soul; God is the soul of man. God is the source of all supply. God constitutes man’s being, and even the body is the temple of the living God. All that God is, man is. All that the Father hath man has. “Thou seest man, thou seest the creative Principle,” because the creative Principle, which is God, is expressed as man.
Suddenly, the person begins to feel their burden lift. There is a release because the universal malpractice imposed upon every human being has been stopped—the malpractice that says that you are a mortal, conceived in sin and brought forth in iniquity, a mortal who is sinning and has guilt.
There Is No Fallen Man
Many people feel unworthy. But no one is unworthy. It could not be. God would not let you live if you were unworthy. No one has any iniquity in them. Paul said, “I know that I’m not perfect, but on the other hand, I know I’m not sinning, and yet, I feel in me a sense of sin.” So it is with us. There is a universal sense of sin in all of us because we know that, in our humanhood, we have never lived up to the full measure of our Christhood. No one ever has or ever can. No human being is or ever was perfect. But the truth is that you are perfect and have never been a fallen man. There never was a fall of man. How could God let His man fall? The so-called fall is the dream of mortal existence, brought about by ascribing to yourself the sins of the carnal mind, which are not your sins at all. When the practitioner recognizes this, they break the universal malpractice.
In the message of The Infinite Way, we do not take up the sword in healing work. We do not use truth over error or try to have God heal a disease. Healing comes through recognizing the truth: anything not of God has no law to sustain it, so you do not have to fight it. You have only to recognize it. If God didn’t empower it, it has no power.
Others Are Ourselves
When you know the truth of your identity and look out at mankind, you realize that you are looking at yourself—at your divine Selfhood made manifest as billions of others. Then you act accordingly, without condemning them for their human faults. They cannot do anything about those faults until they awaken to their true identity, any more than you or I could.
Psychologically, we can try to be better. For a time, we may succeed, until we have repressed our human faults enough to make them explode, and then we are worse off than before. Joel says he knows this from experience. Before his first spiritual experience, he knew all his faults and wanted to be rid of them, yet he had never succeeded in overcoming them. However, when the experience came, the major faults disappeared on their own, by virtue of the nature of the Christ.
You cannot be more loving, just, merciful, or philanthropic than your present nature permits; you cannot violate your own nature. But when you begin to know the truth, you break the human malpractice—the anti-Christ—and your nature changes. It changes in proportion as you perceive the true nature of others. When you see them not as human beings with a past, present, or future, but as children of the same Father, God, as perfect, immortal spiritual beings, with an infinite supply of good, for whom truth is the law of life, you break the malpractice that has been upon you by breaking the malpractice imposed on others.
On the spiritual path, human life will not affect you. People will not determine whether you are happy or unhappy, prosperous or not. You will determine that, and you do not have to forsake your family. All of this takes place in consciousness. If you live in an atmosphere that opposes truth, you do not have to talk about truth or let anyone know you are thinking about it. Outwardly, you can conform. What you say is not important; what takes place in your consciousness is.
The Truth You Know About Another Can Set You Free
Joel relates a story from when he was First Reader at a Christian Science church. He had a bad cold and rose to speak holding two handkerchiefs, but he was healed during that service. When people marveled at the healing, he said, “If there are two hundred of you out there seeing me this way and giving me treatments, it has to work. And if you weren’t giving me treatments, what were you doing out there?”
The cold was a malpractice, and if one with God is a majority, two hundred ought to constitute an overwhelming majority. Knowing the truth that the cold was merely malpractice, and not the presence or power of God, freed Joel. Yet in freeing Joel, those in the congregation were also freed because “Ye shall know the truth and the truth will make you free,” even if the truth you are knowing concerns another. Any truth that you know will free you.
When we pray for others, we no longer have to pray for ourselves. In the spiritual life, you reach a point at which it does not occur to you to pray, meditate, or do spiritual work for yourself. Why? Because the truth you know about another is the same truth you would know about yourself. All that is necessary is to know the truth, whether about another person or even an animal. Ultimately, you receive the benefit because knowing the truth lifts you in consciousness above the picture.
Break the malpractice; break the anti-Christ that holds man in bondage. Man is not held in bondage by people, poverty, or disease; these are effects of malpractice. Rather than trying to heal people of disease, remove from them the malpractice of the universal belief in two powers and the belief that they are merely human beings. “Lay the axe at the root of the tree.”
It is all up to us. The degree to which I know the truth sets me free, even when it is the truth about you. It breaks the malpractice. If I hold someone in bondage, I cannot be free. “As ye sow, so shall ye reap,” and the only way to stop erroneous reaping is to stop erroneous sowing. Such sowing takes place only in consciousness, in thought. Therefore, ask yourself: What am I willing to see? Am I willing to discern spiritually the Christhood of others, or do I judge by appearances? At any moment, you can choose spiritual wisdom and, when looking at the world, say, “Thank God, I know thee who thou art. Thou art the very Christ of God, the Son of God, offspring of God, heir of God, joint-heir with all of us to the spiritual kingdom.”
Keep the Truth Sacred and Secret
Begin to break the malpractice, the anti-Christ, and behold the Christ. Know the truth. Do not say there is no evil. All evil is an activity of the carnal mind, a malpractice, the anti-Christ. But you do not have to fight it because it is not of God. Do not fight or try to overcome error. Don’t battle “two times two is five.” Quietly know the truth that all evil is impersonal, a universal belief in two powers, a universal malpractice, or anti-Christ. Hold to this truth, abide in it, and prove it. Keep it locked up within you as a sacred secret until you can demonstrate it.
Truth is not subject to discussion. Certain laws of truth have been laid down by mystics who were God-inspired and God-endowed. When you hear or read these truths, either you recognize that they are truth or you are not ready for them. If you are not ready, keep searching. But if you feel the rightness of what you hear or read, keep it sacred and secret. Hold it within yourself and practice it, because it is taking place in your consciousness. When you begin to witness its fruitage, you can explain to others what you have learned and are demonstrating, but do not permit them to discuss it with you.
As we understand more about the spiritual way of life, we are called to renew and deepen our awareness of the oneness of all mankind. We are called to stop the malpractice that says that we are mortals and see through any human picture to the spiritual identity, the Christ of being.
These practices are derived from the suggestions that Joel gave in the class. As always, it is helpful to choose just one or two that appeal to you and practice those for a while, rather than trying to practice all of them.
Begin the day quietly with:
“God is the only Father. Every person I meet today is the offspring of Spirit, the Christ of God, just as I am. We are all brothers and sisters of the same spiritual household.”
Rest with this until you feel its rightness.
In so doing, you are not ignoring or condoning wrongdoing. You are simply refusing to attach the activity of the carnal mind to the individual. In other words, you are impersonalizing error.
“This is a universal belief in two powers. It is not personal, not God-created, and has no divine law sustaining it.”
Then drop it. Do not “take up the sword” to fight it or attempt to overpower it with truth.
Joel teaches that we cannot be free if we are mentally holding another in bondage.
Set aside some time to “loose and let go” someone you may be holding in resentment or condemnation. Quietly acknowledge, “Neither do I judge thee. I release you from every concept I have formed of you.” Then listen.
Joel says, “When we pray for others, we no longer have to pray for ourselves.”
If you are not already doing so, practice praying for others by bringing to mind a person, a community, or a difficult situation. Then, refrain from thinking about the appearance or battling it, and choose spiritual wisdom. Contemplate only God—God as Life, Soul, Spirit, and the substance of individual being. Do not seek to change the person or condition. Know the truth that all evil is impersonal, a universal belief in two powers, a universal malpractice. Then rest in stillness.
Joel teaches that we bring supply into expression by outpouring, not by seeking to receive.
Ask yourself, “What do I have in my house? What is present in my consciousness that I can pour forth?” This might be material help, silent prayer, encouragement, forgiveness, service, or gratitude. Then take action.