A: Well, it could mean almost anything. It’s like the still, small voice. What do you mean by “the still, small voice?” Or what do you mean by “the Christ?” “I live, yet not I, Christ liveth in me.”2 Or what do you mean by “the Father”? “I can of my own self do nothing.”3 “The Father within me, He doeth the works.”4
Does anybody know what those words mean? And the answer is no. If you think you have any idea at all of what those words mean, you’re entirely incorrect. It isn’t possible for anybody to know what those words mean. Those words mean something to the person who first voiced them. Do you know what Moses meant when he said, “I am that I Am”5? Why, it has puzzled the world from that day to this. Do we know what is meant—why, the Churches are still quarreling about what Jesus meant when he said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.”6Nobody is in agreement on that.
When I speak of guardian angels, I mean a spiritual influence, a protective influence, a Presence. The Master spoke of guardian angels, didn’t he? He said he could call on legions of angels, and they would come to him. What did he mean by that? He meant the same thing—a realization of the presence and power of God.
But there are times when that still, small, voice is really an audible voice. You actually can hear it with your ears. There are times when you’re so conscious of these guardian angels that sometimes you can feel a finger touching you, or hear a voice saying, “I am with you.” Any of these terms that are used in Christian mysticism, and all of these terms—“the Christ,” “the Father within,” “guardian angels,” or “angels,” or “the Presence,” “the still, small voice”—that is all the terminology of Christian mysticism. All it means is the presence of God realized, and each one realizes the presence of God in a different way, and the same person realizes the presence of God in a hundred different ways at different times under different circumstances.
If you will remember, those of you who have read the story of Lindbergh on his first trip to Paris by plane, you will remember that many times he fell asleep, and each time he went way off course. Naturally in those days without mechanical gadgets, you had to be there yourself to keep yourself on course. He fell asleep and would wander way off course. And he said that a voice in the back of the plane, coming out of a man, an old pilot who had been killed years and years before, would tell him the adjustments to make to bring him back on course.
And he [Lindbergh] says—and there’s the miracle—when he left the States, he estimated that he would touch Europe somewhere between one hundred and five hundred miles of his set course. In other words, there would be that much fluctuation in arriving at where he was headed for. When he actually got there, he was within fifty miles, and always because this voice told him how to adjust his bearings when he woke up.
Now, you might ask, “Was it the ghost of that dead pilot?” Who knows? Probably not even Lindbergh himself. We can call it that. We can call it his guardian angel. We can call it the still, small voice. We can call it the presence of God. We can call it the Christ. If we were Oriental, we could call it the Buddha, or Brahm. What difference would it make what we called it? To us, the Master would call it “the Father within.” Paul would call it the Christ. And there you have it. When you read these writings, please remember that you have a wide latitude for interpretation. That’s the answer.
1 This excerpt is from Recording 303B: 1960 Los Angeles Closed Class, “More on Treatment.” 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 the transcripts. The full transcript of this recording is available at www.joelgoldsmith.com or by calling 1-800-922-3195.
2 Galatians 2:20.
3 John 5:30.
4 John 14:10.
5 Exodus 3:14.
6 John 14:6.