The basis for this chapter is Recording 243A, from the 1959 Maui Advanced Work, titled “Not Power – But Grace.” This recording was posted through September 18, 2020, and is no longer available on this website.If you subscribe to the Joel S. Goldsmith Streaming Service, you can listen to the recording there. The additional study material for each chapter will continue to be available here on the Goldsmith Global site. To purchase this recording or the transcript from The Infinite Way Office, click/tap here. (Remember that all Goldsmith classes are available for purchase on iTunes as well. If you use iTunes, this may be a more convenient ordering option for you.)
Please note that while the Chapter 1 is essentially a transcript of the class, the content of the transcript may have been re-arranged in some places during the editing process for the chapter. Consequently, if you are following the chapter as you listen to the recording, from time to time you may have to skip ahead or go back in the chapter to find the corresponding text. Even so, overall, the chapter covers virtually everything that is in the recording.
Joel’s Thoughts about The Infinite Way Monthly Letter
Like many of Joel’s books, Our Spiritual Resources is a collection of his Monthly Infinite Way Letters. This book is the collection of the Monthly Letters he sent during 1960, and Chapter 1 would be the Letter for January, 1960.
Joel said that the Monthly Letter was one of the most sacred parts of his entire ministry because it was his point of contact, a “sacred bond,” with Infinite Way students. The Letter was a way for him to give students the benefit of whatever was taking place currently in his own unfoldment:
“If I had to give up all of The Infinite Way activities but one, the one that I would keep is our Monthly Letter. That Monthly Letter is a precious, precious activity, and for this reason: It is to keep us with a fresh message every month, large enough message to last a whole month, but with specific principles for use and application in our daily experience.”[1]
Once Joel said that the Monthly Letter was “my way of having a correspondence course.” But he did not believe in correspondence courses that were static.
“My correspondence course has to be written fresh every month. … When I want to touch you spiritually; I want to do it spontaneously. I want to do it with something that comes through. I want to do it with something that is alive. And I’m telling you that that spontaneity alone is the real light.”[2]
The Monthly Letter was sent only to those who specifically requested it, and they had to renew their request every year. Joel felt that those who chose to receive the Letter were the serious students.
Joel considered each Letter to be a “freshly evolved” outline for study and practice. He believed that it was important for students to learn how “pick out the pearls” in the Letter, apply them, use them, and live with them, so that they could make the message practical. In other words, students had to use the Letter, not simply read it.
“Too many people have received the letter and said, ‘Oh, how beautiful,’ or written me a letter, ‘I think this is the best one you ever did.’ All of which really means nothing, because unless they were able to find what was in that Letter and apply it in the practical experiences of their lives, the fact that it was beautiful, and the fact that it sounded wonderful and even sometimes poetic, really has no meaning. It is only when we catch a principle from the Letter, or two principles, and begin to apply them in our experience that the Letter becomes of value.”[3]
Think of the Chapter As a Monthly Letter from Joel
The spiritual principles that Joel revealed are timeless, so we can think of Chapter 1 in Our Spiritual Resources as a current Monthly Letter from Joel. We can renew our efforts to follow his direction about how to use a Monthly Letter, and really work to “pick out the pearls” in this chapter (Letter)—the principles and the practices—and apply them in our daily experience. Joel said that doing so for this particular chapter would bear real fruitage:
“In the first chapter, ‘A New Life by Grace,’ I found a treasure which is really the essence of all spiritual living. To grasp the principle set forth in that chapter is to live in the ever-presence of God’s grace, operating and functioning now. It is not that anything we do makes this Grace operative in our experience, but that, as we surrender our will and desires and become inwardly still, we become aware of that Grace which is forever in operation. Any student who would live with that first chapter for a month or a year would find the new life by Grace his own experience.”[4]
[1] Recording 237A: 1958 Manchester Closed Class, “Spirit, Grace, and Meditation”
[2] Recording 207A: 1958 First Chicago Closed Class, “Specific Principles of Healing, Including Forgiveness”
[3] Recording 504A: 1962 Cape Town Class, “First and Second Meditations”
[4] Living by the Word: Chapter 2, “Spiritual Discernment of the Bible”