A: And that’s what I’ve just been doing. That is contemplative meditation. When I sit with some facet of truth in my mind, I do just what I have done, only I do it silently, reassuring myself:
God is. Life is eternal. I and my Father are one. There is no discord in God’s creation, God is the substance of all form; God’s world is perfect, and if there is a “this world,” then this world is perfect because it must be God’s world. Ah, yes, but I’m being faced now with a dying person, or a poor person, a sinful person, an imprisoned person. Surely, surely that’s the world-hypnotism; that’s the mesmeric activity of this carnal mind presenting these pictures to me. And how grateful I am to have learned there is no law in this picture to sustain it, so it must dissolve. There’s no substance, no form, no activity–it must dissolve.
Then I rest. That’s contemplative meditation.
So it is, if I’m faced with a storm I realize:
God made all that was made. God is the activity of the sun, the moon, the stars, the planets. God is the activity of this earth. If it weren’t for the activity of God, there wouldn’t be cattle on a thousand hills; there wouldn’t be crops in the ground, or oil, or iron, or steel. There wouldn’t be fish in the sea and birds in the air. All of these things testify to the fact that the activity of God is infinite and omnipresent, always going on. Ah, but I’ve just been told about this storm. Yes, indeed, I don’t doubt it either. I don’t doubt it. Another form of mesmeric suggestion, another activity of the carnal mind that would claim to operate as a condition when it is only a mental image in thought, without life, without law, without being.
And that’s contemplative meditation. But you can also call it treatment; you can also call it prayer; you can also call it inner communion. We use all of those terms interchangeably. Contemplative meditation means we are contemplating truth, we are contemplating God, or we are contemplating the nature of God, or we are contemplating the nature of error. We are contemplating it inwardly, silently, peacefully, understandingly. Contemplative meditation is our prayer, our treatment.
There is another form of meditation, which is beyond contemplative meditation. Usually after you have spent some time in contemplative meditation, as I have just done, you come to a place where thought stops, and you just sit there at peace. There are no words and no thoughts. I’m sure you’ve all had the experience sometime of sitting this way with your mother, neither of you talking, neither of you thinking anything, just at peace. I know that husbands and wives often have the experience. They don’t have to talk, they don’t have to think, they just sit together in a peaceful communion. So it is, after the contemplative meditation or the treatment, there usually follows a few moments of this silence, this peace. No words, no thoughts, just complete stillness. Usually it will last for a few minutes and then end with a deep breath, or a feeling, sometimes a message. Oh, it has an infinite variety of ways of ending. But the whole idea is that this latter meditation is your actual communion with God. The contemplative meditation is really your conscious knowing of the truth, or treatment. But when you’ve gone beyond words and thoughts, then you are in the stage of complete meditation, silence and stillness.
There is another stage beyond that. Often, after you come to the place where you can meditate almost at will, and remain for quite a while in meditation, you pass automatically from meditation to communion–and that is when the Spirit, the Presence itself, comes alive in you. There is a presence, called God or the Christ, and there is you. And it is as if there were something going back and forth between you and that presence—not necessarily words, although sometimes there are words; not necessarily thoughts, although sometimes there are thoughts—but something, a feeling as if there were a motion going back and forth between you and this presence. That’s communion. There is a me and there is this presence of God.
And then there is the final stage. After communion has become a part of your everyday living, it gradually deepens into the experience where there’s no longer a communion because there’s no longer two. I somehow disappear, you disappear, and there’s nothing left but God. And for as long as you are in that conscious union there is no you, there is only God. When you come back to yourself, you realize that you’ve been away somewhere and that this other being is the only being that exists. That is the mystical experience. That is the complete marriage. That is what is described in the Song of Solomon. It is the complete mystical marriage where God the Father and God the Son become one, and there is no more Son, there is only God the Father. These are the experiences you read about, where mystics have transcended the human sense of life and are living in the complete awareness of spiritual reality.
1This excerpt is from Recording 264B: 1959 Hawaiian Village Closed Class, “Living the Principles of Mysticism and Healing by Knowing the Truth, 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 at www.joelgoldsmith.com or by calling 1-800-922-3195. This question and answer is also transcribed in Chapter 14, “Overcoming Mesmeric Sense,” in The Foundation of Mysticism.