A: Now that is an answer to all of the metaphysical teachings based on uncovering the error in your patient. We work from the opposite standpoint. As a matter of fact, all of our Infinite Way work is the very opposite of that which is taught in all of the metaphysical movements. We do not agree with any one of the metaphysical movements in our major premises. We do not agree that mind is God. We do not agree that there is any error in the thought of your patient that has to be uncovered.
We work entirely from the standpoint that all evil, regardless of its name or nature, is impersonal. It has its source in what we might term “the carnal mind” or “mortal mind,” which is not mind, but a belief, a universal belief in two powers. It isn’t even your belief or mine. It is a universal belief in two powers. In this way, we remove the malpractice from you. The moment anyone starts to look for error in you, they are malpracticing you because you are the temple of God, and your body is the temple of God, and there is nothing in you that defileth or maketh a lie. Whatever appears to be erroneous is merely your acceptance of the universal belief in two powers.
The question continues, seeming to imply a contradiction:
Now, the May Letter (1962) says: “It must be plain therefore, that if you are not free, it is because of your lack of knowing the truth. Ignorance is responsible for your ills.”
There you have the confirmation. It’s not a contradiction. The error that produced your ill isn’t in you. Ignorance of truth is responsible. In other words, no one told us from the time we were born that evil doesn’t belong to us. We have been blamed for everything from the time we were six months old and bumped our knees on the chair. It was our fault. Everything has been our fault almost from the time we were born, so that by now we actually believe that we’re a lot of sinners. We haven’t ever committed a sin that was our fault; that wasn’t the result of the ignorance of its source.
Watch what happens to you; watch what happens to your members of your family and patients and students the moment you stop malpracticing them and accusing them, openly or silently, of sin, disease, death, lack, or limitation, and begin to realize, “Father, forgive me for entertaining such thoughts about Thy children. All that I’ve been beholding is really a universal belief in two powers, and they’re not to blame for that. Father forgive them; they know not what they do. They weren’t taught.” And we weren’t.
So this is not a contradiction. This is a confirmation. There is no responsibility on your part for your particular ills, and those references were aimed especially at the belief that resentment causes rheumatism, or jealousy causes cancer, or fear causes something else. There never was any truth in that, except as a medical belief. Watch how healings take place the moment you deny that disease has any mental cause and place it where it belongs, in the realm of illusion based on this universal belief in two powers.
To be able to heal through the message of The Infinite Way, you must first of all understand God, and understand that God appearsas men and women. God is individually expressed as you and me, and therefore, we are the image and likeness; we are the very manifestation of all that God is. We are God in expression. This is the truth of our being, and any appearance to the contrary is based on the universal belief in two powers. It is entirely impersonal and because it was not created by God, it is not power and has no law to sustain it.
You are now impersonalizing and nothingizing. If you will study any of the 1959 classes, you will find that I spent the entire year of 1959 teaching these two points so that we would develop more healers and have more healings. Actually, we have had more of both ever since 1959 when it became clearer to our students what specific principles we are working with.
Always remember, it is not you or this world that is an illusion. It is the concept that we entertain of you and of this world that is the illusion. If I could illustrate it, I would do it this way. An illusion cannot be objectified. Now take that into your thought for a minute and see if you could prove me wrong. See if you can objectify an illusion, and you will find that all you can do is have a mental image in thought, but you cannot objectify it. Take the belief that two times two is five and try to objectify that for me. Try to take the sky that sits on a mountain and objectify that. Try to take the ocean out in the desert and objectify that, or that great big city off in the distance in the desert and objectify that.
You never will make them other than what they are—mental images in thought, illusory in nature, therefore having no substance, cause, law, or reality. The moment you begin to perceive that the evils of this world are mental concepts, which have their basis in the belief that there are two powers, you begin to see the dissolving of these false appearances, firstly because you are not battling them. Try to go in and battle that water on the desert. Try to go in and fight your way through that city on the desert, tear down its walls. You’ll drive yourself mad fighting with something that doesn’t exist. And when you try to fight disease, sin, lack and limitation, believe me, you are fighting an illusion, and as long as you’re in the third dimensional mind, the mind that has two powers, you just can’t help resisting evil.
It is only when you come up higher, come up into this higher attitude and altitude of consciousness and begin to perceive the illusory nature of appearances that you will not fight; you will not battle. You will sit back in meditation and say, “Speak Lord, thy servant heareth.” Then you will receive impartations from within. Sometimes the very voice says: “Knowest thou not, this is my Son in whom I am well pleased?”—and here you would think you’re sitting beside a dying person.
The Master revealed that My kingdom is not of this world. He said, “My peace I give unto you, not as the world giveth.”2 In other words, you must come up higher in consciousness. You must attain some measure of spiritual light, and you can only do this if you can recognize that the only evil there is anywhere on earth is a universal belief in two powers. This is the only evil there is, and this is the only reason we fight error—we believe it to be a power. But there is only one power. You cannot have omnipotence and another power. I don’t know how theology takes the word “omnipotence” and then makes it a power to fight evil. I don’t know how it does that. Certainly it is not through logic or semantics, because omnipotence must mean what it says—all power—and omnipotence refers to Spirit, and once you have Spirit as your only power and your only law, you begin to lose your fear of material and mental powers.
You do not battle. You do not struggle. You sit back peaceably in the realization: “Thy kingdom is come on earth as it is in heaven.”3 Of course it is. The moment you stop battling evil, heaven has come on earth, because there are not two places—heaven and earth. The earth is heaven when you have overcome the belief in two powers. You will find that this is the grandest world to live in. You’ll never want to die out of it once you have overcome the belief in two powers. This is really, really a magnificent place. The only thing that spoils it is when that belief in two powers comes in. That’s what spoiled it for Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Good and evil came along, and that wrecked it.
But you restore yourself to Eden in proportion as you grasp the omnipotence of God, the omniscience of God, the omnipresence of God, and then realize there can be nothing but God’s presence, God’s being, God’s life, God’s law. Then you’ll find that wherever there is a receptive thought, they respond to it and healing takes place. Now it doesn’t mean that if we don’t respond the first day or the first month that we are not receptive. It doesn’t mean that at all. It means that we need a transformation of consciousness, and it is strange that we may yield on many different points and still find one or more points remaining obstinate within us. I have witnessed in my own experience that there are times when a particular error remains until I have come to see some specific truth. In other words, just generalizing doesn’t move everything.
Let me go back a bit. When it was first revealed to me that the metaphysical world was working upside down in personalizing evil, I very soon discovered that about eighty percent of all the claims that were brought to me were quickly met. I had to work hard with the remaining twenty percent, and some of those, of course, never did yield. Then I caught the light of why. For instance, let us take the flu season when a lot of people catch colds, or have grippe or flu. I have no need to tell you that nobody committed any crime to catch cold. They were merely victims of that universal belief in infection and contagion. It had nothing to do with them whatsoever. Therefore, healings of any of those seasonal ills, in most cases, should be instantaneous. Why? Because even in a metaphysical world, it must be recognized that nobody has to do anything to catch a cold or get the flu; that it’s absolutely an impersonal affliction.
Now, in my work, I carried this further and discovered that about eighty percent of all of the ills that afflict us are equally impersonal in their nature. They’re due either to some universal belief of food, or universal belief of climate, or universal belief of weather. And you watch, with almost all of the ills of mankind, you will find that this work will bring forth very close to eighty percent of very quick healings for this reason: It recognizes the impersonal source, the impersonal nature, and then quickly dispels it.
But these other claims that last longer have been absorbed into our consciousness personally. For instance, there has risen such a world fear of cancer and consumption, and now heart disease; there has risen such a world fear that long before we get them, we’re fearing them. Long before we get them, we are being horrified that we might get them, and what we’re really doing is preparing soil for them to take root in. Then, after they do take root, it’s a little more difficult to get them out because of our own fears and disbelief, really. We don’t really believe we’re going to get rid of them because they have been considered so incurable. So we just hang on to them, and they’re a little more difficult to move. Now, there are other things that, because of our human experience, we have hugged to ourselves and made more personal. They never can be personal, but we have made them more personal, and by clinging to them, we make it a little more difficult to heal.
But except for those that we do hug to ourselves in some way or those we fear so tremendously, healing should be a very simple thing in The Infinite Way. It involves entirely the ability not to react to appearances; the ability to realize, “I’m not dealing with a condition that has to be fought. I’m dealing with that illusory sense of two powers, and since it isn’t of God, it isn’t. All that God made is good.” That doesn’t mean there is any evil because it also says that what God didn’t make wasn’t made. So evil was never made, and therefore, evil does not exist, and we continue in the evils of “this world” only because we are being fooled by the illusory appearance.
Let us see now where we are. I am the practitioner, and you are presenting to me an appearance—sin, disease, death, age, lack, limitation, infection, contagion, wars, accidents, call it what you will. Now what happens in my consciousness determines what happens in your experience. If I am alert and refuse to accept the appearance and refuse to fight it; if I recognize that any appearance has its source in the universal belief of two powers, but because such a belief is not of God and it has no substance, no cause, no law, reality; you can be made free quickly, unless you yourself are hugging your fears to yourself and consciously or unconsciously battling the practitioner.
You know, Mrs. Eddy must have had a tremendous vision when she wrote, “Treat a belief in disease as you would sin, with sudden dismissal.” She must have had a tremendous vision at that moment and had that been the principle of healing in her writings, you’d have the greatest healing mission in the world on earth. It was only when they began to battle mortal mind and look to uncover the error in your thought that it wasn’t possible to treat a belief in disease with sudden dismissal. If you can treat a belief in disease, or sin, with sudden dismissal in the realization that it is not of God, you’ll see how quickly you’ll have healings.
1 The 1962 Letters are collected in the book Man Was Not Born to Cry. This excerpt is from Recording #464B, 1962 Los Angeles Closed Class, “Healing Ministry.” 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 calling1-800-922-3195.
2 John 14:27
3 See Matthew 6:10