A: No. No, fear is not basis of all disease. God is the basis of all disease. God is the basis of all that exists, and if there is any disease, God must be the basis of it because there isn’t any other basis. There is only one cause, only one causative principle, only one God, only one Life, and as a matter of actual fact, there is no disease and there is no inflammation. Such things have no externalized existence. They exist only in the same place that ghosts exist—in our own thought about them. They do not exist as externalized being; they exist in our thought about them.
In the same way, there is no such thing as sin in all the world. There never has been. There never has been a sinner, and there never has been a disease. Perhaps in view of this question I ought to hesitate about saying to you that there has never been a death in the entire history of the world. No person in the history of the world has ever died. If one had ever died, God is a myth, since God is eternal life, and that means infinite life, omnipresent life. How then could it be absent? How could it be anywhere other than where it is, here and now?
Now of course, I know that the testimony of the senses will not bear that out. I’ve had people say, “Oh, is that so? Let me take you down the street to the cemetery and the hospital.” Ah, but is not the whole messianic teaching based on the principle of “Judge not after appearances; judge righteous judgment” (John 7:24); that you must not judge after the seeing of the eyes? Is not that in both the premise in Isaiah and in the statement of the Master in the New Testament? Is that not what is given to us as a basic premise: “Judge not after the seeing of the eyes” and “Do you have eyes and see not? Do you have ears and hear not?” (Mark 8:18) What do you think those things mean?
He knew right well you had eyes and were seeing, and you had ears and were hearing, but he wasn’t speaking of those eyes or those ears. He was talking about that inner faculty of awareness: “Have you this inner perception and yet do not know that God is life, that God is love, that God is Spirit, that God is Soul, and that all of these are infinite, eternal, harmonious, and omnipresent, and that ‘beside Me there is none other,’ (Isaiah 45:5)—beside this one Life?”
Now then, if you are going to insist—mark this now—if you are going to insist on looking out from your eyes and seeing sickness, sin, disease, and death, that is what you’re going to behold forever and forever and forever until you stop looking out from your eyes and begin looking out from your eye—the inner eye, the true eye, the inner vision. That’s what it should be called: “inner vision,” not “inner eyes.” They’re not eyes at all. It is vision, the inner vision, the spiritual vision.
Now, you know any materialist can tell you that he sees what he believes, and he believes what he sees. That has nothing to do with spiritual living. Let me ask you, “What is the difference between the Hebrews and the Christians of two thousand years ago?” The Hebrews were those people who saw Jesus crucified, buried in a tomb, and said, “That’s that.” The Christians are those few, the five hundred, who said, “We also saw him crucified, buried in the tomb, but we have seen him walk the earth, talk with us, eat with us, and even tell us how to fish and find fish.”
Yes, your Hebrew thought is that materialistic thought. Your Christian thought is the spiritual thought, and that is why I’ve said that among the Christian churches, we have mostly Hebrew people. They are looking out, not from the vision of Christ that sees with inner vision, but they also have “ears that have become waxed and eyes that have become gross.” (Matthew 13:15) Now, this is not a reflection on any race or religion of people, heaven knows, but on the states of thought. The “Hebrew people” are not people who belong to a Hebrew synagogue any more than “Christian people” are those who belong to a Christian church. By “Hebrew people” we mean that materialistic state of thought, whether a Hebrew has it, a Christian has it, or a Mohammedan has it. By a “Christian” we mean a person who can see with spiritual vision, whether he’s of the Hebrew faith, the Christian faith, or the Mohammedan or Hindu faith. Do you see that point? It is a state of consciousness.
Now, to be a Christian has nothing to do with your church or the nation of your birth. One very unthinking man, in rebuking me publicly for not knowing that the banner of light goes with Christianity but the banner of darkness and superstition and ignorance with Orientalism, was reminded that it was the banner of the atomic bomb that also went with the banner of Christianity, and there was nothing light or Christian about it, either. Now, let’s not forget this: Never must we judge or criticize or condemn a people as a race or as a religion, but as a state of thought of individual being. So it may be that you are a materialist, and in that degree could be said to be a materialist; or you have inner spiritual vision, and you could be judged on that basis, but what church you belong to, or no church, has nothing to do with it.
Now, remember, one of the reasons that we do not believe in these metaphysical clichés is that just to walk around saying, “There is no disease; there is no cause of disease” is nonsense, unless you have caught a glimpse of God’s allness, and because you have glimpsed with your spiritual vision God’s allness, you know right well there can be no foundation or basis to disease.
In the Islands, I witnessed a very nice healing because at the moment of talking with the patient on the telephone, God put these words in my mouth: “Disease has no law,” and my friend was shocked at the statement because he happened to know a lot about the laws of disease. But it was repeated: “Disease has no law.” Well now, when you stop to think of the meaning of “law” as being everywhere equally present, you can see that disease would have no law or we’d all be diseased and all have the same diseases, which would be all of the diseases, and disease would be perpetual; and being perpetual, who could ever heal it?
Now, nobody can change the fact of like begetting like, can they? Nobody can get anything but apples from apple seeds, white from white, or black from black, because the law of like begetting like is a law, and it can never be violated. No one can change the order or value of “one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ought,” or “do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, si, do.” These are based on law. Now, try to violate those laws, and you know it can’t be done. There is no such thing as a violation of law, not even an exception to prove the rule. There is no exception to a law. Then anything that has an exception or anything that can be violated is not law. So if a person can be ill, certainly it’s because there is no law that he can be saved or healed.
Again, I cannot get away from that subject. With your eyes and ears you may always see, hear, taste, touch and smell sin, disease and death. Be careful that you are not judging by that testimony. Develop your inner capacities through the reading of spiritual literature and meditation until, with your inner eye, you can look at a person and see their integrity. Now, you can’t see it physically that they haven’t got a physical integrity. There’s something that you discern with an inner vision that tells you of their integrity, loyalty, faithfulness—an intuitive faculty that enables you to do that. So it is, there is an intuitive faculty, a spiritual faculty, that enables you to know, in spite of these appearances, that since God is, disease can’t be.
Now, the basis for treatment is that very statement that disease has no law, no cause, no foundation. If you were to say that disease has its basis in fear, how are you going to heal a disease without healing the fear, and how are you going to go about healing a fear? Here is a person who fears old age, and every day the calendar is pointing to a greater degree of that fear. Now, how are you going to remove that fear, unless you take all the calendars away from him, give him some old ones to look at, kind of fool him into believing that it’s twenty years ago? Then you might overcome that particular fear. How are you going to overcome a person’s fear of being in closed places? How are you going to do it? No way has ever been discovered of doing that, because it’s a nonsensical fear, but it has something to do with an inner misplacement of nerves or something, and no one has ever found how to overcome that. How do you overcome the fear of high places? And if those things are going to cause disease or death, you’re lost.
Now, one thing that stands out in my individual practice is this: that whatever little measure of success has come to me is all based on the one fact that I do not accept any cause but God, and I do not give error any cause whatsoever. I do not believe or accept that if you hate and envy and are jealous that you’ll get cancer, and if you’re resentful that you’ll get rheumatism or that you have deep resentment you’ll have piles. I do not go along with that type of what is now known to be mental healing, even though it was originally the basis of Christian Science healing. With the better, more experienced practitioners, those things no longer hold water. There are still some of a certain old school who believe that. They also believe that if you’re married and haven’t risen above sex, that terrible things are in store for you. I don’t know, the world’s been going on that way for thousands of years, but all of a sudden, a fear developed and then this repression and suppression, which is all out of order because it’s worse than the condition itself.
Now then, from our standpoint in The Infinite Way, please work from the standpoint of God as the only cause; and if you have a disease to meet with, have it only as an appearance, a suggestion, a temptation to believe in a selfhood apart from God, but never give it a foundation to stand on or you’ll have it there forever. It is just the same as having a desire for something. If you have a desire for something, no matter how good it is, you’ll demonstrate that desire eternally and eternally and eternally. You’ll never have fulfillment. You’ll demonstrate what you have, and that’s desire. Whatever you have will be added to, so the more desires you have, the more desires you’ll get. But fulfillment? No. The way to demonstrate fulfillment is to begin by having fulfillment. Recognize, “I already am.” That comes in Spiritual Interpretation of Scripture. I believe it is the chapter, “Cleansing the Temple.”
Now then, some people have taken that to mean that they must sit down and find all their impurities and evil traits and nasty habits and get rid of those in order to make way for the Christ. It has no such connotation at all—none! The only cleansing we can do in that regard is to clear out the belief of a selfhood apart from God, a power or presence or cause or foundation apart from God. Cleanse out all of these psychological beliefs, mental-logical beliefs, psychiatric beliefs—all of this nonsense based on the belief that man is a mortal and in some miraculous way we’re going to make him immortal—maybe pray him into it or treat him into it. Ah, no! The basis is fulfillment. I and the Father are one. All that the Father hath is mine now— now, here. Now are we the children of God.
Now, cleanse this temple out of all suggestions, temptations and beliefs in a selfhood apart from God and stand on the Christ as your true being. That’s what we’ve been doing here all this week. Not once have we touched on a cause for a disease or a sin or anything else. People will ask why this one sins in this way, why this one sins in that way. There is no “why”. There is only—if you’re looking with spiritual vision—there is only the Christ.
1 This excerpt is from Recording #624A, 1953 Second New York Closed Class, “Questions and Answers.” 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.