A: Well, that is a slight misapprehension of what I have said. I have said that the problem must be met immediately, or else we make it more difficult to meet at a later date. For instance, supposing you say to me now, “I have a headache.” And I instantly, the very same second that you’re talking, realize that since God is the only being, that ends that. God’s being has no headache. I have met that immediately. But supposing I say, “Oh, I’ll give you a treatment before I go to bed tonight”? I have accepted your headache and am permitting you to carry it until I am ready to give you a treatment. Do you see that?
So it is, supposing one person here tells me they’re ill, and someone over here says, “Yes, I feel ill too.” And someone else over here, “Well, I feel ill too.” Now I have stored up for myself three treatments that I will have to give, all the time permitting them to go right on in their suffering. Whereas if, as each one voices their problem, I am instantaneously, immediately translating it within myself, realizing its nothingness, I have no treatment to give later, and the healing can be instantaneous, can be immediate, and often is so.
Now then, if you get to be a busy practitioner, you will find that there is no other way than meeting your problems instantaneously because there never is a later time to give a treatment. I can illustrate that best by telling you that in my last year of practitioner work, before I started the teaching, that I averaged one hundred and thirty-five calls every day of the week, seven days a week, twelve months that year. Now think how a hundred and thirty-five calls could have been handled by saving up to give them treatments later, do you see that? It’s an impossibility.
Each call had to be met at the instant of the call. It’s true that the healing may not always have taken place in that instant, but then the call came back from that person later in the day or the next day, and again, the work was immediately done. They may have called for a year, but at each call, the work was instantaneously done. It wasn’t saved up for tonight. Nor were you permitted to have your headache or other pains without the benefit of instantaneous realization.
Now of course, you can accept the call and then say, “Oh, I’ll give the treatment later” and work on it later, but you’ll find that once the claim has been permitted to lodge in your consciousness it’s much more difficult to get it out than if you had never let it in. And all healing work is based on not letting it in. You will find when you come to these practitioner tapes that the instructions and the work given to our practitioners is this: the secret of healing lies in one word: reaction. The way the practitioner reacts to the claim determines how and when the claim will be met.
In other words, if the practitioner receives the claim and says, “Oh, I’ve got to run inside and do something about this. Oh, this is terrible, somebody is dying!” they’re very apt to die. Whereas if the practitioner instantly realizes the life of God is safe and secure, then that determines what happens with the case. If you do not take the claim into your consciousness, you won’t have to get it out.
Now, I illustrated with the flowers. You and I know that they’re beautiful, clear, distinct, and pure white. And if you should glance over there and see them turn black, the thing to do is not to say, “I think I’ll do something about that later,” that is, turning them back to white again. It would be far better to instantly say, “No, in spite of appearances, I know that they’re perfect.” Then you’ve given your treatment. Because, you see, healing work has nothing to do with turning those flowers from black to white, but from realizing that they’re already white, always were white, and always will be white, because that is the nature of that flower.
Now, it is the nature of the Son of God to be spiritual, whole, harmonious, perfect, and complete. And so if someone says to you, “I am sick,” you have no business making them well. You’re not called on; you’re not a doctor. No, no, no, you are a spiritual light! You are called upon merely to say, “Ah, that may be the appearance, but thank God my spiritual vision shows me man is complete, perfect, harmonious. Why? Because God really constitutes man’s being.
1This copyrighted excerpt is from Recording 703B: 1955 Johannesburg Closed Class, “Spiritual Breakfast.” 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 at The Infinite Way website or by calling 1-800-922-3195.
Goldsmith Global has permission to provide this material to Goldsmith Global participants for educational and study purposes. Please respect the copyright on this material.