A: I am incorporeal. I am spiritual. My body is the temple of the living God. My body is formed of God’s Spirit, God-substance. In the beginning, God made all that was made. Out of what? God being infinite, it must have been made out of Itself. Therefore, I and my Father are one. I and all God-substance is one and the same, and even my body is made of that same pure substance. I am incorporeal. I have form, but it is not a dense form, and it has no thickness and it has no weight. It is really a light-form, and light is vibration.
But somewhere along the line is that which is called “the fall of man”—in other words, his acceptance of good and evil—and along with that came a sense of corporeality. The result is that human sense sees, hears, tastes, touches and smells corporeally. Human sense is corporeality—physical body, physical presence—so that as long as you are totally in human sense, all that you can see is physical body, material body. Whether it is this body or whether it is the body of the building or the body of the animal or the body of a potato, you can only see it as dense form, as corporeality, as physical, finite form, and you never will, in human sense, see it in any other way.
Now, you have come to a spiritual awareness, or some measure of it, and you’re on your way to a greater measure of it, and as you unfold spiritually, you will find that you are not quite as cognizant of physical form as you were before. In other words, in meeting people, you do not quickly note their bodies or their clothing. Oh, eventually, because there’s enough human sense left in all of us, we do, but your first thing is—I believe I’m right in saying this—the first thing is, you note the eyes. That’s about the first thing. As you are elevated on the spiritual plane, you note a person’s eyes, because they themselves are behind those eyes. You’ll never find a person in their body. You’ll never find a person in their feet or in their legs or in their head. So there’s no use of looking there if you’re looking for person.
In dense materiality, you would look at the physical form for a thrill, and the more dense the material world you’re living in, the greater thrill you would get out of whatever your idea of physical beauty is. But as you leave that level, which is really the animal level, and you come higher, you are not so much aware of a person’s body or clothing. You are more aware of something that shines out from their eyes, and it is in that meeting of the eyes that you meet the person, and that is where you begin your likes or your dislikes, depending on what you see there.
Now, the further you go in spiritual development, the less awareness you have of outlined physical form, and you begin to perceive other forms of beauty. You begin to perceive beauty, intelligence, even love and life shining out of a person’s eyes or around their lips. You hear something in their voice and you catch glimpses of something.
As you continue your spiritual development, you even rise above that, and you are aware of something that is called an aura—not necessarily a color aura. There are those who see color auras, but I am not one of those. To me, the aura is better understood as atmosphere. I receive an atmosphere of a person, and I know them pretty well, pretty soon, regardless of whether or not they do much speaking, and regardless of what their physical appearance may be. There’s no way to hide. Everyone has an atmosphere, and you’re drawn to it, or you’re repelled from it, or you’re indifferent to it, and you wonder why. You are feeling the atmosphere of that individual.
Now, as a matter of fact—and of course you know this from personal experience—that when you go into the presence of a person who is cheerful and bright and free of worries and cares, that you can feel a lift just from being around them. On the other hand, you know right well that when you come in contact with someone who is worried, fearful, or sick, you feel a depression. You are let down.
In much this same way, when you come in contact with people, you can feel whether they’re just good humans or whether there is spiritual development. You can just feel that. There is something there that tells you. They can’t tell you, because if they do, that’s a denial of it. But you can tell it; you can feel it. You’re attracted to it; you’re drawn to it. If you yourself are on the spiritual path, you can feel spirituality a hundred miles away. You don’t have to meet the person. All you have to do is receive a letter from them and feel it.
Now, keep carrying that further, and you will find that you will reach a height at certain times—only in times of high elevation—when, if you are brought into the presence of a spiritually illumined person, their entire body will disappear and nothing will be left in that place but a light. It will either be a light around their body with the body invisible, or the entire body will be a body of light. It’s a momentary thing; it doesn’t last too long; but it happens. Nobody can say to you, “I am spiritual, and my body is light,” and then you look and see it so. No. Even when an individual has attained the place where they are a body of light, you cannot see it until you yourself have attained that degree that makes it possible for you to witness what is there.
That is the story of the transfiguration. Jesus, at this stage of which we’re speaking, was no longer a man. He had been a man, but his spiritual development continued and continued and continued until he became the way, the truth, the life, and that is not corporeal. That is incorporeal and wholly spiritual. He was the bread of life, the wine, the water, the meat. He was the substance of being. He was the truth. But of course, for the people out here, he was still walking around in that which the universal human mind interprets as human form.
Now, in a moment of illumination, when he was probably trying to awaken the disciples to what was going on, he couldn’t come out and say, “Can’t you see that I’m not a man, I’m a Spirit? Can’t you see I’m not a messenger any longer, I’m a message?” He couldn’t say that, but evidently something was taking place between them, and he was trying to dig it out of them to make them say it. So finally he said, “Whom do men say that I am?”
“Well, so and so and so and so—a reincarnation of this one or that one.”
“Whom do ye say that I am?”
Think of the difference in those two questions. When he said, “Whom do men say that I am?” he was beginning to tell them that they weren’t men; they were disciples. When he said, “Whom do ye say that I am?” Peter wakes up and replies, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of God.” Well, it took a long time to drag that out of him, but now it’s out in the open. I suppose some of the disciples fought about that. Probably that is why Judas decided, “This fellow is getting too big. We’ll have to do away with him. He’s getting too important.” because Judas couldn’t see him as he is.
So at the experience of the transfiguration, Jesus has with him the highest of his disciples, the most developed spiritually, and he is probably not talking to them. He is probably meditating. He doesn’t go up there for conversation, and they are too far advanced to be taught more of the letter of truth. So they go up there only for inspiration. They go up there for meditation. They go up there for illumination, and as Jesus meditates, he goes deeper and deeper and deeper within himself until he is so far in the Spirit that the fullness of his light body, spiritual body, is made evident. But by that time through his meditation, he has raised his disciples that extra notch that was necessary so that human sense was dead. They had died daily to their final death. Now they look out and they behold him as he is. Now they are satisfied with that likeness. Now they behold him as he is.
Now, every practitioner who has ever worked spiritually, or who has even used mental argument but been lifted up to a place just above mental argument where mental argument stops and quietness begins, every such practitioner has witnessed something like this, even though they may not have known it. In other words, they may have been declaring truth to themselves about someone or some situation, and all of a sudden, they lost track of the person and the condition in their declaration of truth about God and law, spiritual man, the son of God, and then all of a sudden, they came to the end of the mental argument, the mental statements, and for just a flicker, a flash, one tiny bit of a second, something happened, and it was as if they had seen spiritual man, and they said, “Oh, it’s all right. Everything’s all right.”
Why? Why is everything all right? Well, it went so quickly that they didn’t realize it, but they had lost all sense of corporeality, and in that blinding flash they saw man as he is. They didn’t really see him with their eyes; they perceived with their inner discernment. “Do you have eyes and do not see? Do you have ears and do not hear?”2 I’m talking about your inner spiritual discernment, and with that inner spiritual discernment, there was that tiny flash of the real man, and then a healing takes place.
Well, so you can continue with your spiritual development and your spiritual unfoldment, and eventually you get to the place where it is quite a common experience—almost a daily experience—to see someone or other in their spiritual identity, usually a patient or a student. Not everyone all the time, because they’re not presenting that picture. But every once in a while, you do catch a glimpse of spiritual man and sometimes even spiritual form, and it even comes to some people in their sleep. They just become momentarily aware of that flash of light and recognize that they have seen man as he is.
So it is, there are two parts to the transfiguration; and the transfiguration is not an experience of two thousand years ago. It is a continuing experience that began before the world began and will continue unto the end of the world. It is the experience in which individuals so lift themselves above the animal state that they get into their mental state, where they live more in the mind than they do in the body. They live more with thoughts than they do with sensation. They live more with music, art, and literature than they do with corporeality. And even with music, art, and literature, they are less aware of the corporeal form and more aware of what’s shining through that form.
And so you go step-by-step into the spiritual awareness until everything about you becomes refined. You are at that stage where you cannot indulge nasty stories, jokes, or sights. You are at that stage where the grosser things of life are unpleasant. Alcohol drops away. Tobacco drops away. Card playing drops away, or gambling. All of these things that humanly were pastimes or harmless things in and of themselves now just become of no consideration or concern. They drop away entirely and you’re living up here. And you keep on living up here until you are way out above the top of your head, and by that time, you have attained some measure of your spiritual body. Then it only remains for somebody spiritually illumined to come along and see it, and they don’t see it as a continuing thing or continuous thing, but they see it occasionally. They see it when they themselves are lifted in the light. Thus we have transfiguration, and we have it here and we have it now. It’s available for all to see who have eyes.
1This excerpt is from Recording #208, 1958 First Chicago Closed Class, Side 2: “Mysticism.” 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 Mark 8:18