The basis for this chapter is Recording 176B, titled “God Is My Dwelling Place, or the Garden of Eden,” from the 1956 New York Laurelton Hotel Closed Class. This recording is no longer available on this website. If you subscribe to the Joel Goldsmith Streaming Service, you can listen to it there. To purchase this recording and/or the transcript from The Infinite Way Office, click/tap here.
Joel’s Suggested Practice
Again and again, Joel reminds us that on the spiritual path, practice produces progress. Sometimes it can be helpful to focus on just one practice for a period of time, so that it really takes root in our life. In this chapter, Joel suggests one practice that can help to establish conscious oneness with God, and he reminds us of the benefit: “My conscious oneness with God constitutes my oneness with all spiritual being and idea.”
That practice is training ourselves to make a conscious contact with God before we do anything:
“There is no circumstance in life so small or insignificant but that it can be made an important one through that conscious contact. If it were nothing more than the routine of merely going out to market, it would not only save time, but what is more important, making that conscious contact even in inconsequential matters would establish in us the habit of making and continuing the contact so that when some more vital decision or problem arose, there would be no possibility of forgetting the principle, because our reaction to it would have become more or less automatic.
“It may not be too important to us whether our marketing costs eight dollars or eight dollars and sixty cents, and it may not be too important whether we buy this cut of meat or that one, or whether we purchase these vegetables or those. The important thing is that we are forming one more link in our chain, because we shall be learning never to make a move without a consciousness of that oneness.”
Joel teaches that before engaging in any activity of our day, we should make it a point to establish that contact with God. At first, this may take time, and the amount of time we are willing to devote to this practice depends on the extent to which we want the experience. But the rewards are great! Joel reminds us that when we have the realization of the presence of God, that Presence is our health, our supply, our dwelling place, our safety and security.
The Other Source Recordings for This Chapter
There are two other source recordings for this chapter. One is recording 248A from the 1959 Maui Advanced Class: “The Reason for Treatment and Its Use.” This recording is no longer available on this website. If you subscribe to the Joel Goldsmith Streaming Service, you can listen to it there. To purchase this recording and/or the transcript, click/tap here.
The second is recording 53B, from the 1953 First New York Closed Class, “IS – Summary.” Some of the material on business issues in Chapter 8 came from the first part of this class. While the second half of the class was not used in Chapter 8, it is a wonderful lesson on the meaning of “IS” and how to apply “IS’ in treatment. We did not post this class, but if you subscribe to the Joel Goldsmith Streaming Service, you can listen to it there.