A: Indeed, I’ll be glad to. Regardless of what you may be doing—housework, stenography, machinist, printer; regardless of what you may be doing—physical work or mental, bookkeeping, auditing; if you are doing it with your educated knowledge, that is, with your education, with your mind that has studied, you are far from expressing all of your capacities. You are only doing whatever you’re doing in a very limited way.
Now, once you have learned through meditation to open yourself to an inner inspiration, you bring an entirely different capacity to the same work that you did before. And you will find that whatever you have done before, you now not only do better, more quickly, more efficiently, but eventually you are led to where “you” don’t do it at all, because something higher has revealed itself for you. In other words, it makes no difference what we’re doing; we are not yet fulfilling the fullness of the Christ.
Even a practitioner is only a part way on the journey. A practitioner has not reached the end of the road. A practitioner must later become a teacher, but a teacher must later outgrow that to be a revelator in one way or another, whether it’s through writing or recording, radio, television. And then eventually they must rise still higher to where as pure consciousness, they are reaching the consciousness of the world without any physical contact.
Now, let’s not get too far into that, but remain at this level. If you are driving an automobile, and you’re merely doing it by what you know of handling gearshifts and gas pedals, and if you are doing it only by remembering the laws of the road, you are only getting a certain degree of rightness into your driving.
Once you are open to the spiritual impulse, you will find that driving an automobile is so automatic that it’s almost impossible to make a mistake, even if your attention is taken from the road. You will find that even where there are opportunities for accidents, this higher awareness, this spiritual consciousness, somehow takes the wheel right out of your hand and guides you away from the accident, or in some way manipulates the car for you and gets you out of trouble.
You see, there is a higher faculty than our human intellect. The object of meditation is contact with that higher faculty. It’s a faculty of the soul; it’s not a reasoning faculty. It operates like the first chapter of Genesis: “Let there be light, and there was light.”2 But it doesn’t bother to invent a light, and it doesn’t bother to seek out laws. It just says, “Let there be light,” and there is light. It is a state of consciousness that knows what it’s doing without having to sit down to think it out, reason it out, and have reasons why. It goes straight to the point and does it.
Now regardless of the nature of our work, there is a way of doing it that transcends the way we have been taught through the mind. That way is through this other faculty, this higher faculty. Now the moment you get above purely mechanical work into the mental realms, you will find that this is even more true, because contact with this higher faculty brings ideas to us that the intellect never knew existed.
For instance, when was it that there was no airplane in existence? Right within our own life span, most of us. And yet, with no previous experience, with no knowledge of any laws of flying, somebody, sometime, all of a sudden perceived these laws and began to experiment and hooked them up. Now we have modern flying and wonderful flying.
In the same way, you remember in The Infinite Way I told the story of Marconi, who even as a youngster, had discovered what none of the college professors had discovered—that there is no resistance in the air to messages that are sent through the air. How did he learn it? Not out of books, because nobody had discovered it. No books to teach it to him; no teachers to teach it to him. Yet out of something, out of somewhere, he had, and he was the only one who had, that knowledge—there is no resistance in the air to messages sent through. So with that, he was able to go right on to his other experiments and come forth with the radio.
And so it has been. As you watch the ages go by and see how music has changed, how art has changed—paintings, sculpture—you wonder how someone came along all of a sudden and changed the entire trend. Everything up to that moment was considered the most modern art, and now all of a sudden, it begins to be passé. And so it is.
Those who are attuned to this higher faculty find these ideas flowing in—ideas of new creations. And as I said, they have greater capacities for doing what they’re already doing. I have told classes of the experience of Mr. Landone, who slept on average only fifty-two minutes out of every twenty-four hours. That’s all, by actual timing by his secretary. He averaged fifty-two minutes, but he didn’t take the fifty-two minutes every day. Oh no! He didn’t bother to go to bed for three or four days, and then he took two or three hours and made up for lost time. And he was able to turn out an entire magazine every month, and a newspaper article every week, and never less than 20 books in a year, and he carried a metaphysical healing practice always of around three thousand patients.
Now you see, he must have tapped a source far beyond the physical powers of man to endure. Of course, he died a comparatively young man of ninety-seven years and nine months. And remember, he never stopped until the moment of his passing. He never stopped even one day before to go to bed to do his dying. No, no. He did it right while he was at work.
So you see, there are capacities, capacities that flow to us from an inner source. And as you perceive that, you perceive what the Master meant when he said, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.”3 And as you are filled with this Word and let this word fill you; as you live in it and let it live in you; you will find these other capacities opening. And then, whatever work you’re doing will be done better, more quickly, with greater inspiration, and then to lead to greater things.
1This excerpt is from Recording 160B, 1956 Chicago Closed Class, “Starting the Sermon on the Mount.” 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.
2 Genesis 1:3
3 Matthew 4:4