Recording 316B, “Consciousness of Truth – The Healer,” from the 1960 Denver Closed Class, was used as source material for Chapter 10, “The Consciousness of Truth Is the Healer,” in Consciousness Is What I Am.
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Each chapter in our study book, Consciousness Is What I Am, has addressed an aspect of consciousness. We have advanced our understanding that we are not body or mind; we are consciousness. We have learned about evolving states of consciousness, the indicators of evolving consciousness, and how to develop our own consciousness. We have learned that consciousness outpictures as form and that all the issues of life are in consciousness.
In this chapter, Joel presents another dimension of consciousness and teaches that a developed spiritual consciousness is a healing consciousness, and that we can heal in proportion to the degree of our spiritual development. While the object of Infinite Way work is not healing or supplying, healing and supplying are evidence that the principles are true. The object of The Infinite Way is to bring your consciousness to the place where you have the experience of God and attain the fullness of spiritual consciousness, or Christ-consciousness.
For this optional study, we have prepared a summary in question-and-answer format of the blended content of Chapter 10 and the source recording 316B. It might be helpful as you review and reinforce the lessons.
How do I develop the healing spiritual consciousness?
You develop the healing spiritual consciousness by practicing and working with specific principles. Although you learn these principles through the written or spoken word, you will not make spiritual progress just by reading books and hearing truth. What you DO with truth after it has touched your consciousness determines the degree of your spiritual realization.
At first, you must work specifically and often with the principles. Live with them, ponder them, meditate upon them, and keep them alive in your consciousness. Be willing to work with them religiously until you prove their truth; until practicing them results in fruitage. Working with the principles in this way will develop some measure of Christ-consciousness.
As you continue practicing and working faithfully with the principles, they will be incorporated into your consciousness. You will declare them less and less until eventually, the principles “fall from the head to the heart.” Then, they are always present as a realized state of consciousness. You do not have to voice them or even think them anymore.
We do not develop spiritual consciousness through orthodox church teachings, rites, rituals, or ceremonies. Remember that the Master did not originate any rites, rituals, or ceremonies. He was a Hebrew rabbi and did not even approve of the rituals of the Hebrew church. He preached that “Ye need not worship in this holy mountain or this holy temple in Jerusalem,” “Man was not made for the Sabbath; Sabbath was made for man,” and “God has no pleasure in your sacrifices.” He taught praying in secret, doing alms in secret, praying without ceasing, forgiving seventy times seven, praying for the enemy, and praying for those who use you and persecute you. What you do or don’t do with ceremonies, rites, or rituals is of no avail. What you do in your consciousness brings you into the kingdom of God or keeps you out. Inner prayer, communion, and spiritual realization are the keys.
If you abide in the Word and let the Word abide in you, you will bear fruit richly. But you must do it; you must pray without ceasing and work diligently with the principles. Do not believe you are an advanced Infinite Way student with a healing consciousness simply because you have been through a class on advanced healing work. The purpose of such a class is to give you the principles so you can practice, study, and work with them until you become advanced.
What are the principles that we must realize and practice?
These principles are the four major principles of The Infinite Way.
The Nature of God
God is life. God is allness. God is Omnipresence, the only Presence. God is Immanuel, God with us. Where I am, God is. God is Omnipotence, the only Power. Therefore, there is no reason to fear anyone or anything. God is Omniscience, infinite Intelligence, so we need not outline an outcome or inform God of any need.
God is the lawgiver, and because of the infinity of God, all law is spiritual law. There is no other law. In the allness of spiritual law, material or mental laws are not power and cannot operate in the presence of realized spiritual consciousness. Spiritual law nullifies laws of infection and contagion, laws of heredity, laws of food, climate, and weather, and the law of threescore years and ten.
God is the same from everlasting to everlasting. God does not change, and no one can change God, so we never go to God to influence God or get God to do something.
The Nature of Individual Being
Because of Omnipresence, God constitutes individual being. No individual has a life, a mind, a soul, or a being other than God. It makes no difference if we are white, black, Jew, Gentile, bond, or free. Omnipresence is a universal truth, and to know that is to love thy neighbor as thyself.
All that God is, I am, for I and the Father are one. All that God has, I have. Within me is bread, meat, wine, water, resurrection, and life eternal. Wherever I go, God goes with me. This invisible Presence goes before me to make the crooked places straight, prepare mansions for me, and reveal truth in the outer plane.
God alone is the entity and identity of all being, regardless of appearances, regardless of the degree of mortality that is presenting itself—the criminal, the insane, the dying, or the dead. God alone is.
The Nature of Error
Every appearance presented to you is but a shadow, an image in mind. It is mirage, illusion, maya, resulting from a mesmeric belief in two powers called “mortal mind” or “carnal mind.” It is an erroneous picture of a selfhood, a law, and a life apart from God.
Evil is not personal; it is impersonal. While the carnal mind operates mesmerically to appear as person and condition, it has no person in whom, on whom, or through whom to operate except those who accept the mesmeric belief. Evil has no power and no real existence.
God did not ordain evil, nor did God ever make anything that could be destructive to Its creation. God is infinite intelligence and divine love, and the infinity of God makes God the only creative Principle of the universe. There is no other creator; thus, evil has no law of God to sustain it. Since God is the only law, cause, and creative principle, evil can exist only in the same way that the mirage exists on the desert or that the railroad tracks come together in the distance—as a false sense of what is perceived.
The Nature of Prayer
Prayer is listening in silent receptivity for “the still small voice.” It has nothing to do with pleading with God to do something, telling God of some need, or trying to bribe or influence God.
In healing work, when you go to God in prayer, never have a desire you want fulfilled. Seeking God for a purpose sets up a barrier between you and God. Go to God for the joy of contemplation and communion. Be sure that you are not thinking of God as a power that can overcome another power but as a spiritual Presence. Let your awareness be “God alone is, and God alone is power. I seek no other power, and I need no other power.”
What happens when we realize the spiritual principles?
There is no mental effort in spiritual healing itself. The effort comes in developing consciousness to the point where you have realized the principles. The degree of help you can give anyone depends on the degree of your realized consciousness of truth.
Fear Drops Away
When you abide in God as Omnipresence, Omniscience, and Omnipotence, you realize that if God is the only power, sin, disease, and death have no power. You know that any evil that appears to you is the projection of the belief in two powers. Then fear drops away because you see that error is not a person or a condition. You become quiet inside, and in that stillness, you come to a state of calm. That calm is the presence of the transcendental Something that dissolves erroneous pictures and assures you that error has no power. It does not heal disease; there is none. It does not reform sinners; there are none. It dissolves the belief in good and evil, and then you no longer see “through a glass, darkly.” You see “face to face.”
When you have reached the place where you no longer hate, fear, or love the so-called evil powers of the world and can respond without fear to epidemics, storms, depressions, or diseases, and you can prove that these are not, never were, and never will be power, you have touched the divine Consciousness which is within you.
Healing Christ-Consciousness and Mystical Awareness Develop
As you work with the spiritual principles, you develop a greater and greater degree of the healing Christ-consciousness, that mind that was also in Christ Jesus, which has no fear of any appearance. Then, when some appearance touches you, you do not reach out to God for anything. You brush aside any manifestation of sin, disease, lack, limitation, and death like an experienced desert traveler brushes aside the mirage. You become receptive to the Presence within, and where that Presence, the “Spirit of the Lord,” is, there is liberty for you and those who bring themselves to your consciousness.
When you no longer seek a God-power for anything but realize that the nature of God is love and that it is His good pleasure to give you the kingdom, and when you are living in the realization of the non-power of appearances, you are in the mystical awareness. Eventually, you can say, “I live, yet not I, Christ liveth my life.”
What is the Infinite Way method of spiritual healing?
Infinite Way spiritual healing is based on the four principles and the practices that embody those principles.
Step 1: Treatment
At first, spiritual healing work begins with treatment. A treatment is a contemplative meditation you do in response to a request for help. Its purpose is for you to bring to mind the spiritual principles and reassure yourself of the truth of these principles. The treatment is never given to the person requesting help; you give the treatment to yourself. Treatment has no effect on God or the person requesting help; it affects you. In a treatment, you are using truth to remind you of the spiritual principles; you are not using truth to overcome anything.
In treatment, you can remind yourself of the nature of God; that God is the substance and law of all being and that God constitutes all being. God is always performing Its function without your help or intercession. You do not have to pray to God for health or healing. God already knows our needs, and it is His good pleasure to give us the kingdom.
You do not have to tell the All-knowing anything. You do not have to “use” the All-power because there isn’t anything to use It on. There is no other power or presence. And if God is law, God must be the only law, so you don’t have to be concerned with so-called laws of matter or mind. These are not laws. They are beliefs that act as laws in the consciousness of those who believe them.
In treatment, you can remind yourself of the nature of individual being; that since God is life, your patient has no life other than God, no other mind, no other Soul, no other being. Therefore, whatever the appearance, it is not and cannot be in or of your patient. It is separate and apart from the patient; it is impersonal. With this recognition, you “impersonalize” the claim; you separate it from the individual, who is a perfect expression of the Divine. Never hold the individual responsible for the discord, which has its cause in the mesmeric, universal belief in two powers. You need not try to improve, correct, or analyze your patient or try to make your patient a better human being. If the patient could be a better human being, he would be, without your help.
Once you have impersonalized the appearance, you can remind yourself of the nature of error. Because the nature of God is omnipotence, the error or appearance must be nothingness. God never created sin, disease, or death, and if God did not create them, they can have no existence or power. All evil is a shadow, an image in mind that has its source in a universal belief in two powers and a selfhood apart from God. Evil is impersonal, having nothing to do with the patient. Evil has no person in whom, on whom, or through whom to operate, apart from the one accepting erroneous beliefs. In bringing these principles to mind, you “nothingize” the claim.
In treatment, you stay entirely in the realm of God. You never take a person or a claim into your contemplation. As Joel said, “Drop the name and drop the claim.” You are not dealing with a person. You are dealing with an effect, not an effect of wrong thinking, sin, heredity, or something in the body, but an effect of the carnal mind, the belief in two powers.
Treatment does not heal anybody. It elevates you above any fear of the picture presenting itself to you. Treatment does not act on your patient because it isn’t directed at your patient. You may not even know the patient.
In the beginning, your treatment may last fifteen or twenty minutes. Later, it may take only three or four minutes. Eventually, thirty seconds will be all that is needed for an average treatment. The degree of help you can give depends upon the truth embodied in your treatments. No outer expression of harmony can be greater than the degree of truth entertained in consciousness. While many practitioners may work with the same principles, some have a higher degree of realization than others and will do better work.
Step 2: Silent Receptivity to the Presence
Once you have completed your treatment and are so elevated in consciousness that you can settle back and say, “Father, it’s your turn,” you are at the second and most important step in healing work. You wait quietly in silence and receptivity until you feel a response—a deep breath, a release, a message, or some other signal that God is on the field. Then, your healing work is complete.
Your treatment did not bring God onto the field. It elevated you to the point where you could be receptive to the presence of God, which was always there, but which you could not receive through the human mind.
You Cannot Meet a Problem on the Level of the Problem
One of the first insights that was revealed to Joel was that you cannot meet a problem on the level of the problem. For example, do not believe that a cold is a cold. A cold is a belief in two powers, a belief that there is God and some other power. A fever is not a fever. A fever is another temptation to believe in two powers, to believe that God is not the substance of all form, that God is not omnipotent, and that you have to call on some power to do something about it.
When you have realized the principles, you can simply say, “Oh. This is carnal mind, the arm of flesh, nothingness.” You do not wonder how to get rid of the appearance, the illusion. You do what you would do in the desert after realizing that the water you see on the road is a mirage. You drive forward because you know the mirage is not real, and you are not afraid of it.
When a claim is presented to you, and you are not even tempted to look for a God-power to do something about it, you are approaching the Christ-consciousness, which is rooted in the realization of God as omnipresence, omniscience, and omnipotence. Christ-consciousness does not fear or react to problems. It says, “What did hinder you?” “Open your eyes.” “Lazarus, come forth.” You may attain Christ-consciousness in only a small measure, but even that can do great works, and once the first grain has unfolded, a greater measure will follow. Don’t ever be discouraged.
How to Work with Patients
When doing healing work, do not tell your patient to stop fearing. Human beings cannot stop fearing. There is only one way to stop fear: to sit in silence until the spirit of the Lord God is upon you.
Do not talk truth to your patients when you are healing them. Often, patients resist truth when they are in pain or distress, so it is better to assure them that you will give them immediate help and continue the help until they are free. As you realize the Presence within and touch the spirit of God, they are released from their claim.
When the patient is no longer in pain or distress and is seeking something more than healing, you can gently impart the spiritual principles. But never try to impart any truth you haven’t realized in some measure. Spiritual words only have power when spoken by someone who has the consciousness of what is being said.
How does the patient receive the benefit from the practitioner’s help?
A patient receives the benefit because he has made contact with the practitioner, and the truth the practitioner knows in his consciousness becomes the law unto the patient. Since the patient contacted the practitioner, the patient is receptive, and the truth in the practitioner’s consciousness is also in the patient’s consciousness. Then, the patient’s consciousness of truth is revealed outwardly as harmony in his experience.
What issues can arise in spiritual healing?
The patient might not experience healing until they have a change of consciousness, which produces the outer effect of healing. Many healings can be quick because the claim is so universal that it has nothing to do with the patient personally, except that he is momentarily the victim of it. But sometimes, the patient will cling to a belief that has become personalized to him, and before healing can take place, he must be released from that belief.
Some claims might continue to maintain the appearance of reality despite your recognition of their unreality. In such cases, continue to work with the principles until you are elevated so high in consciousness that the Spirit of God takes over.
Practice, practice, practice!
As with anything, practice is the key to mastery. Even if you do not have people coming to you and asking for spiritual help, you can still practice healing work. Joel says we are responsible for applying the healing principles whenever we see an appearance of discord, and there is no shortage of these in the world. Read a newspaper, turn on the TV, or look at a social media feed, and you will find plenty of opportunities. You may also see discord in your own family, among your friends or neighbors, or in your community. So everyone has some occasion every day to do healing work. If others are receptive in some measure, they will benefit, but in any case, you will benefit. You may never know whom you helped, and they may never know that you helped them. But it doesn’t matter because you are not the healing agent. God is.
Supplementary Recording
Recording 271A is another source for Chapter 10 and is worth listening to. We have posted it on the same page as Recording 316B. To listen to the recording by telephone, call 1-641-715-3900 and enter 571646#.