Many of us enjoy the classes in which Joel answers questions from students. Sometimes the question is one that we ourselves might have asked. Other times it is one that might not have occurred to us, but which we find interesting, and we are curious about how Joel will answer it.
On this page of our website, on the first and third Saturdays of the month, we will post a new question and answer from one of Joel’s classes or books. We trust that you will find these interesting, helpful, and sometimes an answer to just what is on your mind.
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Posted on 4/20/24:
This copyrighted excerpt is from Recording 53A: First New York Closed Class, “Questions and Answers.” 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 from 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.
Q: Will you please explain pre-existent consciousness that one brings forth with them?
A: There again, we ought to have a class sometime for very, very advanced students, and that would be interesting. There is only one consciousness, and that one is God. And God never had a beginning. And since that consciousness is my consciousness, I never had a beginning. Since that consciousness is your consciousness, you never had a beginning. So you have been living since even before time began.
Now living, unfolding, must mean an unfolding consciousness of good. And so we live forever and forever and forever. How? On one plane of consciousness? No. It is an unfolding consciousness. We began as God, and we end as God. Somewhere in between, this sense of separation developed, called the “prodigal experience” or “the fall of man.” And so we go through countless births and deaths. Do we really ever get born or die? No. No, no. One day we will rise so high above the human sense of things that we will see it as if we were looking down at a theater or motion picture, watching things happen that never happened.
Do you not see that when Nostradamus can see actual events hundreds of years ahead, that he must have been seeing with a consciousness looking down upon what we call time and space—a consciousness yet independent of time and space? Was it Tennyson who wrote [about] the argosies in the sky, the cargos in the sky, speaking of the airplanes when they weren’t dreamed of; tells us even of carrying commerce in the skies; tells us of destruction being rained down from the skies in vehicles run by men? How do you think that could possibly have happened all those decades before the airplane was dreamed of? Why, he was seeing out of a consciousness not limited to time or space, and yet he was looking down on time and space, and he was seeing the past as well as the future. He was seeing the future as well as the past. That is the nature of prophecy. The individual who has a state of consciousness unlimited by time and space that just doesn’t look out through two eyes, but rather closes those eyes, and then consciousness sees into the past and into the future, and it looks upon this scene as if it were all happening now.
Isn’t that how we get the stories of Forty Leagues Under the Sea, the story of the submarine? Eighty days around the world, in a time when such a thing could have only been a part of a fairy story? Eighty days around the world? Now it’s eighty hours. But don’t you see that anyone who could at that time have said, “Eighty days around the world” must have been looking out of a state of consciousness unlimited by time and space and seeing that which was past and that which was future.
Now then, just for a minute of practicality, supposing any of us at this moment of our advancing and progressive spiritual life should pass on tonight or tomorrow. Do you think that we could awaken in the same spiritual darkness in which we found ourselves before we heard of truth? Oh, no! How could you lose that which now is a part of your consciousness?
And so you would find that if there is such an experience as life beyond the grave, that it would be a progressive life, and that you would pick up just about where you are now and continue forward. And so you would come into what would be called that experience on a more elevated spiritual stage than when you came into this.
And so there is no question that we must have been on the spiritual path before we came into this, or we would not be this far along, since so many others who came into this existence the same day, the same week, the same month, the same year that we did, and under the same horoscope, aren’t here at all where we are. Even those born on the same day and in the same minute that we were born, with all the same influences of the sky, they are still out there finding hiding places from the next atomic bomb, sitting up at night worrying what is going to happen “in case,” and so forth and so on.
Now then, to me it is evident that we came into this experience on a higher level of consciousness than many who have not yet come to a truth study. My conviction is that everyone who has come to truth study—and I mean remained in it for the unfoldment of God, rather than merely for the demonstration of things—has come because of a divine grace that had prepared them for it; had prepared them for it even before they heard of it; so that when they heard of it, they all agree, “Oh yes! I know that. Oh! That I know is true!” How do they know it is true? These people out here don’t know it’s true. Even if the book were presented to them, they wouldn’t know it’s true, but you do. Something within you responds to it. That something is your readiness, your state of preparedness for the experience.
And so, there must be that within us which responds and corresponds to spiritual truth, and I am sure of this: In the end, “every knee must bend.” Every individual on the face of the globe, past, present, or future, must ultimately come to their awakening. The question is just when do they leave the material sense of existence for the beginning of spiritual wisdom? And then note their progress from generation to generation, and you will see that they will bring with them into each experience something from before, just as our child prodigies bring music and mathematics and all these other things with them. They certainly do not acquire them between birth and ten years of age. Oh, no. We know that they are already a part of their consciousness when they come here. That shows the degree of their development, which they bring with them.