A: Well, you are looking at the manifest realm again. The population doesn’t increase. Never has increased, and it never will increase. Why? Strangely enough, because you can’t multiply God—and God is the only life there is; the only mind there is. God is one, and one is the only number there is in the world, and that means life is one, soul is one, spirit is one, law is one, body is one. “Know ye not, ye are the temple of the living God?”2 How many temples can God have? There is only one God and one temple, and the tabernacle of God is with men. It’s not plural. No. It’s just one—one tabernacle.
Again, every time you look out at this world from the appearance angle, you will find sin, disease, death, lack, and limitation and wonder what to do with it. But the remedy lies in treatment. Turn away and start with the word God and then how many people do you find? Only one, and that one God. God—infinitely expressed but still one. Now the mere fact that to human sense we’re a billion on Earth or four billion on Earth has not changed the spiritual relationship that God has only one begotten son—only one. And I am that one. And where does that leave you? I am that one. It doesn’t make any difference who says it or how many say it. I am still that one. And none of this makes sense from the human standpoint.
But you see, the things of God are foolishness with man, and until you can get behind the scenes and see that I AM is just one God, and one God can only have one son. One God can only manifest Itself as one—even unto infinity—and it still is that one. And again I say, you know as well as I do that doesn’t make sense to hear me say it. It can’t make sense to the human mind, and so it takes that spiritual intuition to perceive that God is one.
In the material realm, that is why we have religions with lots of gods. Every religion, more or less, has many gods. They speak of one God, but oh heavens! The number of things that they pray to is evidence enough that they have more than one god.
But the point is that there is only one God, and that must be understood from the standpoint of Spirit. That is why the Hebrews, when they were the only people in the Occident or Near East who had one God, were ridiculed. Nobody could understand such a thing, because you had a god for the weather, and one for the body, and one for war, and all the rest of it, and how could you go to one God for all those different things? …
God can only be understood though the Spirit. It takes a degree of spiritual consciousness to know God, but in the same way then, if you know God, you know spiritual creation and spiritual man, and when you do, you do not have any such thing as multitudes of people, nor do you have them dying and being reborn. There is no such type of reincarnation from the spiritual standpoint. As a matter of fact, there is no reincarnation from the spiritual standpoint since God is one and its creation is one.
Reincarnation is on this human level, where we go from one state of consciousness to another. We die to our former self and are reborn to a new one, and we do it again and again and again until we achieve ascension. Then, even according to those who teach reincarnation, there is no more reincarnation. Understanding God from the spiritual standpoint, there are not multitudes of people, nor are there multiplicities of lives and deaths and rebirths. That’s only looking at life from the appearance world, not from the spiritual world.
1This excerpt is from Recording #36A, from the 1953 Second Seattle Class, “Wholeness and Completeness in Christ.” It is posted with kind permission from the Estate of Joel Goldsmith, which holds the copy protection on the recorded classes and the copyright on all transcripts. The full transcript of this recording is available at www.joelgoldsmith.com or by calling 1-800-922-3195.
2 1 Corinthians 3:16