Q: Since the healer must not think about the patient, why or how is the patient benefited, and not somebody else? (4-1-23)1

A:  It is in this wise. When the centurion brought his servant to the Master for healing, remember the servant was a far way off, and the centurion, with spiritual vision, said that it wasn’t necessary for the Master to go to the servant, but merely to send his word. And the servant was healed in that self-same hour.

When you ask a practitioner for help, you have brought yourself to that practitioner’s consciousness, and whatever takes place in that practitioner’s consciousness becomes the law unto your being and your body and your affairs. In effect, it is as if you gave yourself over to the consciousness of the practitioner, and now his or her consciousness becomes the law unto your experience.

This is why in our work I have cautioned our students not to go into the work of the practice until they are absolutely certain that their consciousness has been made ready for the experience, because when you invite someone into your consciousness, be sure that your consciousness is the light of truth, and then they are blessed. It has been discovered that you can enter the consciousness of the mind and find that that mind can be used for you for good or for evil. But you cannot enter the consciousness of one who is not using the mind in the spiritual practice without benefiting. But then, the individual acting as practitioner must have risen above personal sense to the degree that they want nothing of you; that there is nothing personal in their ministry; that they are not being influenced by any personal motives or reasons, but that they are living and moving and having their own being in this spiritual light.

And then, as you enter their consciousness, that light, which is their knowledge of one power, their knowledge of one presence, their awareness of spiritual reality, this becomes the law unto you, and you have brought it to yourself by reaching out to their consciousness, whereas the person sitting next to you or standing next to you, who has not reached out, is not in contact with it.

And of course, the illustration of that is your radio. If your radio is tuned in to a station, you get what is on that station, but if you have a radio sitting right next to it that is not tuned in to that station, it may be just as good a radio, but it will not receive the program. The tuning in is the secret. Therefore, you go to the practitioner, make yourself a part of that practitioner’s consciousness, and receive the light of wisdom, of spiritual truth, from that practitioner, and it becomes the law unto your affairs.

If you bring your child, or your parent, your husband, your wife, your dog or cat or bird to the practitioner, that makes them at one with the practitioner’s consciousness, and therefore they benefit. The reason that children and animals and birds respond better than adults is—I’m speaking of an adult who has not themselves asked for help—the adult has, of course, the prerogative of tuning out, of keeping himself out of attunement, by refusing inwardly the benefits of spiritual help. And so it is that for the best results, there must be a yielding of oneself to the practitioner, to spiritual help.

1 This excerpt is from Recording 400A: 1961 San Diego Special Class, “The Essence of The Infinite Way, Part 1.” 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.