Chapter 3: “The Practicality of Spiritual Living”

The Recordings for This Chapter 

This chapter has two consecutive classes as source recordings:  16A and 16B.  In our tape group session, we heard Recording 16A, from the 1952 Honolulu Closed Class, titled “Transcendental.” We offered recording 16B, “Transcendental, continued,” as a study option. Recording 16A was posted through October 17, 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 optional study material for this 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.)

Optional Study Suggestions

To print or download these, click/tap here.

The Second Source Recording for Chapter 3

Two classes were used as source material for Chapter 3, “The Practicality of Spiritual Living”:  Recordings 16A and 16B.  We heard Recording 16A in our sessions on August 1 and August 8. For optional study, we posted the second recording that was used in preparing this chapter.  It is Recording 16B, a continuation of the 1952 Honolulu Closed Class, with the title, “Transcendental, continued.”  This recording was posted through October 17, 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. To purchase this recording or the transcript from The Infinite Way Office, click/tap here.

Practices from Chapter 3

Every Monthly Letter includes practices to use during the month, and this is true for Chapter 3, which was the Monthly Letter for March,1960.  It can be helpful to go through the chapter, find the practices, and use the ones that resonate with you.

Here are a few practices gleaned from Chapter 3.  If you choose to look, you will find others as well.

• “The substance of everything necessary to your experience is already within your own being and ready to unfold naturally as it becomes necessary to you, because the completeness and perfection of your life is already established within you as essence or substance and it appears outwardly as form. Your part is to learn to sit in your quiet moments of meditation, realizing this completeness and understanding that the only barrier to the expression of perfection is the belief in two powers, which constitutes the carnal mind, but which must be recognized as no power since there is only one power, God.”
• “In dealing with any problem of limitation, first recognize it as the carnal mind which is not a power, but a nothingness, the “arm of flesh”; and then, as you contact the Father within, realize your oneness with the Spirit, and feel that answering “click,” you are at-one with your opportunity—with your position, with any capital necessary with which to carry on your business, or for that matter with help of any kind, human or mechanical.”
• “When we hold an individual responsible for his sins, we hold him in bondage; but when we loose him and let him go in forgiveness, if necessary in the realization that he knows not what he is doing, we are fulfilling the law of love. There are those in our experience who humanly owe us an obligation, and we express our love by inwardly releasing them from that obligation, but love does not mean that human obligations can be ignored or responsibility shirked with impunity. In fact, sometimes the highest form of love is to require someone to fulfill his responsibility, thereby helping him to fulfill the law of love and giving him an opportunity to grow and live according to the high ethical standards the spiritual life demands. That does not mean, however, that spiritually we hold him in bondage to his debt or obligation, or in any sense are tempted to believe that our own demonstration can ever be affected by the attitude or actions of anyone else.”
• “The Christ operates freely in proportion to the relaxing of our personal efforts. For example, if I wanted to compose music or write a book or a play, I could best bring the activity of the Christ into my experience, first, by consciously realizing for a few moments that the substance of this new form is already within my own being, that it is mine as the gift of God, and then, by becoming very still, very quiet, and very peaceful in the assurance that this idea will become flesh in the form of notes or words, and thereby, become tangible in my experience. As I am able to cease from all effort, quite suddenly this new idea bursts upon me and unfolds. Whatever it may be—a new plot for a story, a new piece of music, a new poem, a new design for a home—it will come by grace. Our good is not to be earned by the sweat of our brow; it is not to be labored for: it is to come to us gently, peaceably—by grace.”

Joel’s Recommended Reading

In the section Across the Desk in this chapter, Joel recommends additional reading:

“Only by turning thought from the appearance to the realization of God as omnipresence and omnipotence and attaining the actual experience or awareness of the Infinite Invisible, do we find the harmonies of life appearing consistently and abundantly. The visible evidence may well be the health of mind and body, the abundance of supply, and satisfying friendships or marriage. These come as the fruitage of the attained consciousness of God. In Living the Infinite Way, there is a chapter, ‘God Is Omnipresent,’ which deals more fully with this subject.”