Recording 200B, “No Power,” from the 1958 Sydney and Melbourne Closed Class, is the primary source for Chapter 9, “The Mystic and Healing,” in Awakening Mystical Consciousness. This recording was posted through June 17, 2023, and is no longer available on this website. If you subscribe to the Joel Goldsmith Streaming Service, you can listen to it there. You can also purchase the recording and/or the transcript from The Infinite Way Office here.
To download or print these study suggestions, click/tap here.
Note: If you feel that you need more instruction on healing work, there are many recordings and book chapters that teach how the principles of The Infinite Way apply to healing work. However, if you have a good understanding of the principles, we suggest that rather than listen more or read more, you contemplate and practice.
In this chapter, Joel makes several key points about the healing consciousness that we can contemplate and practice. Here are some of them; you will probably note others as well.
Joel reminds us that mystics can have the awareness of God and have deep spiritual experiences, but that few mystics did healing work. Why? While they may have experienced I as God, they did not know the nature of God. Except for Jesus, most saw God as a great power that could overcome other powers; they had God and error. No one can heal spiritually until he or she has the realization not only that I is God, but that besides that I, there are NO other powers—physical, mental, moral, or financial. Mystics who know this truth do not believe that God heals, or that God works through them to heal. They heal because they have the realization that disease is not a power.
Today’s religious leaders are not doing spiritual healing either, because while they recognize the omnipotence of God, they still give power to sin, disease, death, lack, and limitation. They believe disease is permanent and real, and they accept the premise that they can pray to God to remove it.
Yet Joel contends that it is possible for almost anyone who is willing to become a student of spiritual truth to attain a measure of the spiritual discernment that constitutes the healing consciousness. That discernment enables you to see through “this world” to “My kingdom.” But Joel cautions that you can’t get spiritual discernment for “spare time and spare change.” There must be great devotion, fervent desire of the heart, and the willingness to study and practice.
Are you interested in spiritual healing but do not yet see yourself as a practitioner or even a potential practitioner? Remember that Joel has pointed out that a practitioner is one who practices the principles, even if no one is coming to you directly for help. In the book Consciousness Transformed, in the lesson for September 21, 1963, “The Adjustment Must Be Made Within Your Consciousness – A Lesson in Secrecy,” Joel has some encouraging words about becoming a practitioner:
“As a student of The Infinite Way, you cannot possibly fulfill yourself until what you are taking in is released. . . . Truth, taken in and not expressed and released, goes to seed and rots. Therefore, from the very beginning of a spiritual student’s studies, every principle of truth that he learns must immediately be put into practice and into expression or it cannot grow.
“Every student, no matter how much a beginning student he may be, must find some way within himself to express every statement of truth that he learns. In other words, no Infinite Way student, walking on the street and beholding bad conduct or anything of an erroneous nature, is permitted to pass by on the other side. He must look right at the situation or the condition, and then immediately give the spiritual prayer or treatment within himself.
“Whatever the spiritual student witnesses of a negative nature, an evil nature, a sickly nature, an unjust nature, must be retranslated within his own consciousness. It is that which we have heretofore called ‘knowing the truth.’ You cannot pass by on the other side. . . . Whenever you perceive anything which is spiritually incorrect, the adjustment must be made within your consciousness. Re-translate the appearance!
“We call this ‘giving a treatment’ or ‘knowing the truth,’ but it is a great deal more than that. It is really beholding this universe as it is, and it is by means of this practice that an individual ultimately becomes a practitioner. No one ever becomes a practitioner by deciding that this is what he would like to be, because on this basis he will never be successful. There is only one way in which a person becomes a successful practitioner, and that is by practicing.
“The moment an erroneous picture presents itself to your eyes or to your ears, no matter what the picture is, you must make the adjustment within your consciousness. That is what is meant by ‘praying without ceasing.’ You cannot wait for someone to call and say, ‘I am ill.’ No, at every appearance of discord you must begin your treatment, whether you are asked for help or not. . . . This does not mean you should look for trouble in order to correct it, but it does mean that every time an erroneous picture strikes up against your consciousness, you make the correction within yourself and then go on about your business. Eventually, this practice brings about a change in your consciousness.”
In this chapter, Joel gives us a way to handle a request for help, making these points:
To impersonalize, we must see through the picture, or the appearance. Joel says, “With your finite eyes, you can see male and female; you can see old and young. But in my years in this work, I have learned not to look too much at persons but to look through them, so I am not often really conscious of who is before me or why. . . . I am not interested in the person or his or her particular problem, except as it presents an opportunity to me to reveal again that God is the only selfhood and that there are no laws except God-made laws. . . . My help is only in proportion as I can impersonalize the entire situation. . . . You must recognize the only identity to be I.”
Joel explains that in spiritual healing, you do not address the consciousness of a patient. You do not make a statement of truth to make it come true. You only state what you know to be true and then rest in that truth. Spiritual healing is the realization of what IS. You must have the inner discernment that sees I as the life of individual being and then knows I has no age. You have to behold that I as individual being. We are one in Christ, one in spiritual sonship. There is only one of us, and I am that one. That is the mystical healing consciousness.
Remember that Joel said, “You can’t, by ignoring a thing, change yourself or the thing. You have to be willing to look any form of error right in the eye, any form; I don’t care how ugly its appearance. I don’t care how nasty or how threatening it is – a man with a gun in his hand. Look right straight at them with the conviction, “You have no power. God has the power, the God that directs you, that moves you, the God that is your mind, and the God that is your soul, the God that is your spirit, the God that gave you life, the God that gave you mind, that is where the power is.”
If you want to assess how well and how quickly you can impersonalize, click through the gallery of pictures below and notice how you respond to them.
Just notice your responses, without judging yourself. What did you learn?
You can do this practice whenever you see others—people you meet in your daily life, or see on TV, videos, or in other pictures. Again, notice anything that distracts you from impersonalizing and going straight to the true identity of the individual. Notice what you learn.
[1] To review impersonalization, we recommend Recording 278B, “Impersonalization Illustrated,” which is the basis for Chapter 6, “Living the Principle of Impersonalization,” in Realization of Oneness.
