A: Oh, no. No. We should go from glory to glory. We should give up nothing. We should adopt nothing. We should go from one state of consciousness to another, and here is an opportunity to explain previous meditations and aphorisms.
We have referred to this before—that our entire existence represents states and stages of consciousness. There is nothing right or wrong in our experience. There are states and stages of consciousness, and in one state of consciousness, we do one thing one way, and in another state of consciousness, we do it in another way, but one is of growth, of development from one into another.
Now, you will notice in my writings that every book and every manuscript has a chapter on treatment and on meditation, and if you read them hurriedly, you may think that there are too many treatments, and how can you learn all of them? And some of them even seem to say to give up what is in another one. That’s true. That is true. These treatments are for us at our level of consciousness, and it may well be that there are treatments that you will find, or methods of treatment, modes of treatment, in the writings that fit exactly where you are in consciousness now and will make an ideal idea of treatment. And others may seem completely out of line with your thought or your ability. But that doesn’t mean that next week or next year, you will not discard the treatment that is so important to you now and see the wisdom of another one further on in the book.
But in the same way, we have had this week a form of treatment and a form of meditation, and both of them make use of words, thoughts, ideas. Both of them bring into being statements from Scripture or from metaphysical writings, and then lead to a period of listening when we do not use words or thoughts, but rather listen. It is explained in this wise: Our lives tomorrow will be the same as today, and next year will only be a repetition of this year, unless there is a change of consciousness, and the chances are there will not be a change of consciousness unless we, individually and specifically, do something about it.
Now then, if we accept truth teaching, we must understand that just reading books of truth or hearing lectures of truth will have only a slight effect upon our experience. It is the practice of these truths that begins to change our consciousness. And so, let us assume, for a moment, that we have just learned that “Thy grace is sufficient for me.” Now up to this moment, we haven’t known that. We have thought that we had to labor; we had to plot and plan for our future; we had to worry and fear and doubt and be anxious. Perhaps we have had all kinds of human anxieties and thoughts and fears about ourselves and our families and our future, and here comes an idea that is presented to us that “Thy grace is sufficient for me.” And we stop short and say, “Is that true? Does that mean that? Does that really mean that God’s grace is enough without my doing all this worrying and planning and thinking and scheming? Is that really true? Have I been wasting a lot of time and energy in useless taking thought, when all of the time there was a divine Grace at hand that could provide my sufficiency?” And you do a lot of thinking about this, and finally you come to the conclusion, “Well, I will have to prove it to myself.”
And then you begin to have some problems—probably more than yesterday even, and with each one, you bring to conscious remembrance this truth: “Oh. Oh. Thy grace, God’s grace, is sufficient for me. I better lay off worrying for a while. I think I better stop being anxious for a while. I’ve just been trying to know that God’s grace is sufficient, so I’ll leave that worry for tomorrow. I’ll put off that taking thought for tonight, but right now I’ll rest in the truth that God’s grace is sufficient.”
And you relax, and you rest, and you feel at peace. But that doesn’t mean that tonight, tomorrow, or the day after, you aren’t going to have more anxious moments, and more concern, and more lack, and more fear, or more pain. And there again you come right back to your treatment: God’s grace is sufficient. I must rest in God’s grace—no anxiety, no fear, no doubt, no thought.
And so you’ll find that you may go along that way for three months, four months, five months, six months, and all of this while you are meeting every appearance of discord with that treatment, that remembrance, that divine truth that God’s grace is sufficient. And lo and behold, just a few days or weeks or months, and you begin to feel God’s grace coming into expression. You find good coming to you that you hadn’t humanly planned for. You find harmonies, health, coming to you that at the moment, you may not be able to explain, but with the passage of time, it settles, it dawns in your consciousness, “Why, that is true. God’s grace was sufficient for me.”
And by that time, you have come to a place where you no longer need as many affirmations or denials, or as many of the truth statements. You rest more in that sense of peace. Ah, but then perhaps there comes another problem, and let us say that this time it is a great responsibility that comes to you, and you have the feeling that you cannot perform it. You cannot do it. It’s beyond your means, or beyond your strength, or it’s beyond your time, or beyond your powers, and along with that comes the remembrance of a passage of Scripture, and we hear that “He performeth that which is given me to do.” And that startles you for a minute. “What? He performeth. I’ve been given this job to do. I have been given this work, or I have been given this responsibility, and here Scripture says He performeth it.”
And there again, you see, while you go about the performing of your task, you have these occasional reminders, “All right, I can do it, because actually He is performing it through me.” And again that responsibility drops away; that rest comes. And soon you find, actually it is true—there is a “He” at the center of your being. “He” that is within me is greater than any responsibility or duty or demand that can come upon me from the world.
And so again, while at first you have been diligent in the use of your statement of truth, you have brought it to your awareness over and over and over again, now you find that only occasionally do you have to remind yourself of it, because now the words have given way to the actual awareness itself, and when you have the awareness, you don’t need the words.
Well, so with our form of meditation or treatment. I have said to you this week that when we go into our meditation or treatment, we have these statements of Scripture, or statements of truth, and then we come to a place where we rest and listen for the still, small voice. Now, it may be that when you first undertake this form of meditation or treatment, you may be calling to conscious remembrance every statement of truth you know. It may take you a half an hour, three-quarters, or a whole hour to give your part of the treatment that is your voicing of the truth. Then you sit back, and “Speak Father, thy servant heareth. Take over.” And you listen.
That part of the treatment may be one minute or two or three or five. Ah yes, but as you continue this form of treatment, you will gradually get to the place where your part of the treatment only takes five minutes, and God’s part takes a half hour. It just reverses itself. God keeps filling you with Its truth. God keeps filling you with the realization of Its presence, but you have made way for that by your preparation in—let us call it “the letter of the truth.” We call this the letter of the truth and the spirit of truth; the letter of the truth and the consciousness of the truth, so do not hesitate to bring to your conscious remembrance every statement of truth you know. Do not hesitate to repeat often the statements of truth as against the appearances of discord that come, until you have built your consciousness to where that is no longer necessary.
And so you see, you do not discard. You just evolve. You grow gradually from one form of treatment to another, one form of meditation to another, and we hope, in time, that you come to the place where only occasionally are we required to remember some truth. For the most part, truth is imparting Itself to us from the infinity of our being, sometimes in the form of quotations we already know, and very often in forms that we never heard of before.
You see, there come always two parts to our spiritual life. There is the part that we develop through the reading of truth, through classes of truth, through hearing truth, through treatments with truth, through conscious remembrance of truth. That is the activity of truth in our consciousness for which we are responsible. That is the activity of truth that we bring to this work, and if we do not do it, we will not develop a higher consciousness than we have at this moment. And that is why if you give one hour a day to the reading or study of statements of truth, you are increasing your consciousness in some degree. But if you give an hour twice a day, you may be assured that you are increasing your consciousness of truth measurably and immeasurably. But when the time comes that you are giving three hours and four hours, then you’re really growing into a new and higher state of consciousness, and eventually this passes, and you learn how it is to pray without ceasing.
When that time comes, here’s what happens. Every time you hear a news broadcast, every time you see a headline, every time somebody brings you a story of bad news, automatically you just turn it off with “In God’s kingdom, harmony reigns,” and that’s how you pass off bad news. When you witness sin, disease, lack, limitation, death, on the street, in the bus, wherever you may be, you automatically turn it around and realize, “No, that can exist only as a picture in the human mind, not as any part of God’s kingdom. God’s kingdom could never be responsible. God’s kingdom could never hold any such pictures as that.”
And so you are praying without ceasing, and yet you are doing it without consciously going around declaring truth, except as the pictures of sense touch you, and you automatically learn to re-interpret them—turn them back into their spiritual values. And then, it is possible to reach the height that is described in Scripture when a woman pressed through the throng and touched the hem of Jesus’ robe, and without him even knowing that she was there, she was healed. In other words, he was living in such a highly exalted state of spiritual consciousness that he wasn’t even aware of a sick woman around, and in that exalted state, she was healed without any conscious thought from his mind, without any conscious statement of truth, but without question, because of the years of training in which he had lifted himself, because of the forty days spent in the wilderness so often, in which he lifted himself into that exalted state so that he didn’t see any error around to deny.
When you get to that state of consciousness where you never see, hear, taste, touch, or smell any form of error to deny, you are then in a state of consciousness where your treatments and your prayers are wordless, but believe me, you are treating and praying all the time. Is that clear?
1This excerpt is from Recording 39B: 1953 First Portland Class, “Grace, Part 2.” 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 from The Infinite Way website or by calling 1-800-922-3195.
Please remember that this excerpt is copyrighted. Goldsmith Global has permission to provide this material to Goldsmith Global participants for educational and study purposes. Please respect the copyright on this material.