A: Now, if you are speaking of evolution in accord with Darwin’s theory, I wouldn’t know, because I have never been interested in the changes of material form, and it doesn’t enter my spiritual life. The secret of life is in the word evolution, but that may not necessarily mean rising from a monkey to a man, except that at some time, I guess, we are all monkeys, or we are made a monkey of, or we make monkeys of someone else. If so, there’s a need for evolution to bring us to the point of being a man!
Actually, however, we start out in life—and this that I give you now is the revelation that has been constant and continuous for at least four to five thousand known years and is actually the secret of our life—we began as pure spiritual being, the image and likeness of God. That was our beginning. Our beginning was actually God manifest as individual you and me.
In what way it happened we’re not going to quibble, but it happened that a belief of good and evil arose in consciousness, and this set up a sense of separation from our true identity, until gradually the belief was built up in us that we are human beings separate and apart from God, and that we are living on our own intelligence, on our own strength, and that we live primarily by virtue of food. Wasn’t there a book about “you are what you eat?” Yes. Of course, you know that isn’t true. You are something much finer than that!
Now, what you are is pure, pure spiritual being, the very Christ of God, the very Son of God, the very Buddha. And because of this experience, this acceptance of two powers—good and evil— we became prodigals. We wandered off, and we began to use up our substance, our strength, our health, our mentality, until eventually we ended up almost as an animal man, crawling our way through life, robbing, stealing, murdering, everything else. This is the prodigal state of consciousness.
Now, at some point or other, we are directed in a different direction. It may be because there is an innate hunger for God, or Truth, or ultimate Reality. Or it may be that we’re so sick, or so poverty stricken that we say, “Well, why not try God?” Something points us in the direction of something higher than our animality, our own wisdom, our own strength, and this is the return of the prodigal to the Father’s house. And in this period is our period of evolution.
Now in our low estate, we are material beings; that is, in this state of prodigality. We live by physical strength; we live by physical powers; and the strongest man gets the most of everything. It’s purely a physical universe. Everything we do is by the power of muscle, the power of might, the power of bullets.
As we are directed, all of a sudden, we discover the mental realm. Now this realm surely was discovered back around 7,000 B.C. And here men began to find in their minds great powers. It was those great powers that built pyramids. It was those great powers, those great mental powers, that laid out rivers. It was those great powers that built the temples—Solomon’s Temple and all the rest of them.
The mind of man is so tremendous that if you ever start to plumb the depths of your mind, you’ll find that you are virtually infinite, even in the mind, and the powers of the mind are great. You can do wonderful things with the mind, and out of the mind come great laws—mental laws—and great mental powers, and great secrets of nature.
Man has now evolved to a mental level of life, and when the printing press came into being, this helped men more than anything else, because now they had the world of books open to them—books of literature, of mathematics—not only to a few scholars, but to men and women all over the world. The realm of mind was opened.
And then, throughout these ages a very few people—very, very few—reached the spiritual kingdom. Oh, they are so few! You’d be surprised how few. Because of all the religions that have been founded, and that are supposed to be spiritual and have God as their theme, there isn’t one of them that has ever gone beyond the mental realm. The only people who have ever touched the spiritual realm are the mystics. I don’t mean that there haven’t been some mystics inside the church, but I mean the church itself has never been a spiritual creation, never had a spiritual foundation, and what’s more, never had a true God—not any church that ever existed.
Always they had the powers of the mind, and they built a faith. And once they built the faith, whether that faith was in Buddha, or Jesus, or Moses, or whether that faith was in some other character, or whether the faith was in carrying a crucifix, or whether the faith was in St. Anthony’s bones, it was always a mental projection from within the mind.
But here and there throughout the ages, there have been individuals—one of the first to come to world attention is in the name Krishna. Nobody knows the identity of anybody named Krishna because Krishna antedates all known history. The root word for Krishna, which is identical with Christ, means “spiritual source” or “light.”
And so it is that Krishna, the original, was one of those who actually had touched the kingdom of God. Gautama the Buddha was another. Jesus was another. John was another. There were quite a few others back in those days. Elijah, of course was one. Moses became one at Mount Horeb. And then after the Master, we have had Plotinus, as probably the father of modern mysticism. (end of tape)
1This excerpt is from Recording 303B, from the 1960 Los Angeles Closed Class, “More on Treatment.’” It is posted with kind permission from the Estate of Joel S. 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.