A: How could they be bad if there is only one power? There could be no such thing as a bad demonstration. And as a matter of fact, there is no such thing as bad; there is no such thing as evil. There is only good. It is our misconception of that good, which to finite sense, at times, makes us call it evil.
There couldn’t any more be an entity or identity called evil than there could be such an actual thing as darkness. There is no such thing as darkness. Nobody could ever put darkness under a microscope and examine it. Darkness is nothing but an absence of light. There is no such thing as ignorance. You can’t get hold of a piece of ignorance and examine it. Ignorance is just the absence or seeming absence of intelligence.
And so, there is no such thing as evil. There is only a suppositional absence of the good. All evil may be summed up as a false sense—all evil as a false sense. There is only good, but we can either entertain the true knowledge of it, or we can have a false sense of it.
It’s just as if there were a magnificent oil painting over here by a great master, and I, who know nothing about oil paintings, were to look at it and say, “I wouldn’t give you a dime a dozen.” That would not be because of its lack of value. That would be because of my false sense of it.
Or it would be as if somebody was playing a marvelous piece of music and my saying, “I don’t want to hear it.” It wouldn’t be because the music isn’t good. It would be because I am entertaining a false sense of music. When that false sense is corrected in me, I see the painting as it is or hear the music as it is, and then say, “Why it was good all the time.”
1 This excerpt is from Recording 612A2: 1951 Second Portland Series, “Confidential Material, continued.” 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 Office website or by calling 1-800-922-3195.