This class is the basis for Chapter 10, “Incorporeality: God, Man, and Universe,” in Beyond Words and Thoughts. While this recording is no longer available for listening on this website, if you are a subscriber to the Joel S. Goldsmith Streaming Service, you can listen to it there. The additional study material for this recording will continue to be available here on the Goldsmith Global site. To purchase the recording or the transcript, click/tap here.
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The world has not been interested in the mystical consciousness, but in the fruits of it. The world wants peace, prosperity, and health, but not that which produces peace, prosperity, and health. The world has been taught to pray not for that which produces these things, but for the things themselves, and they cannot be attained in that way. All creation comes forth from a source, and if you have the source, you can have the creation. If you want a desk, you must have a piece of wood first. Yet people go from one teaching to another looking for a way to get health, supply, happiness, contentment, and peace, without having to get the fabric of which these are made.
The fabric of life is spiritual consciousness, and if you want the forms of life, you must have the consciousness first. Once you have the consciousness, you can have all the things added, just as if you have a big tree, you can have a desk, a chair, and shelves. Jesus taught: Take no thought for your life; seek the kingdom of God, and the things will be added. But now we pray for everything but the kingdom of God.
In healing work, metaphysicians may recognize the incorporeality of God, but they do not recognize the incorporeality of man. They are dealing with a structural man who has bones, a brain, a liver, a heart, and lungs. Consciously or unconsciously, when they give a treatment, they hope to change the physical picture, and this sets up a barrier because incorporeal God can give birth only to incorporeal man. Incorporeal man has no physical structure. In meditation, prayer, and treatment, those on the mystical path must remove from thought the corporeal man, who has physicality. That is not the man of God’s creating. Prayer, the communion between God and man, can never occur between incorporeal God and corporeal man, for “The natural man receiveth not the things of God.”[1] If you go to God thinking of something physical, you are separated from God, and so is your patient.
Some individuals live completely on a physical level of life. Others live on both the physical and the mental levels. They know the body, but they also know beauty, benevolence, and the mental things of life, and they have a capacity for culture and refinement. But they are still not the whole man, for everyone also has within themselves a spiritual sense. Most people are asleep to this spiritual sense, unaware of it, and they have no access to it. But we are a physical being, a mental being, and an incorporeal spiritual being, and the reality of us is the incorporeal spiritual selfhood, the expression of God. The physical and mental part of us is the second chapter of Genesis, made by the mind of man.
To acknowledge God, I must acknowledge incorporeal God, a God that I cannot embrace in a figure, a name, or even in a mental image. If I call it “Spirit,” or “Mind,” or “Love,” I have made an image of what I think God is. None of the synonyms for God will heal a headache because they are not God. They are mental concepts. The only way to know God is to know that I cannot know God; that I cannot embrace God in my mind.
Then how are we to know God aright? Know that God IS, and then let God define Itself. When you are “not knowing,” suddenly something is saying to you, “I Am God,” “I will never leave thee nor forsake thee,”[2] or “I will be with thee until the end of the world.”[3] All you will ever know about God is the word “I,” which keeps repeating itself. Then you know God aright because you cannot see, hear, taste, touch, smell, or visualize I. When you have reached that state, you are ready for the mystical life, because when you realize that I and my Father are one, you know that I am incorporeal, infinite. You know that all that God is, I am, and wherever God is, I am, and whatever the nature of God is, that is the nature of my being. Anyone who makes contact with that Spirit that I am has contacted their Source. In fact, they have made contact with themselves, because the I that I am is the You that you are.
Because I am incorporeal, I can incarnate as male or female and as any race. If I manifest on another planet, I will manifest in a life form that fits those surroundings. We co-exist with God and have no beginning and no ending, so there is never a time when I was not manifest. I have always been and always will be. You will never do good spiritual healing work until you attain this inner awareness of the incorporeal nature of man’s being. God appears as man, but since God is incorporeal, man is incorporeal. The fact that man has a corporeal body doesn’t make him corporeal. The fact that he has a car or travels in an airplane does not make him a car or an airplane. The fact that he has and uses a body doesn’t make him a body.
Man is the same incorporeality that God is, because they are one. God is living man’s life, and since I and my Father are one, all that the Father hath must be mine. To live mystically, you must live as I and recognize that I am I. Even in teaching, a teacher is actually talking to himself, because the Self of the teacher is the Self of the student. It is all taking place within the I that I am. To think of a student as a student creates the barrier of twoness.
When you spend or give money, realize there is only one Self, and that you are only transferring the money from one of your pockets to another. After you give it away, you still have just as much because you didn’t really give it away. It is always still in your name—I. All that the Father hath is mine, but it is still the Father’s, and so when I give it away, it is still the Father’s. When I can live in that consciousness, I can give and share without lessening my own. But you won’t believe this until you believe in incorporeality. For example, truth is incorporeal, and when I impart truth, I have more, for the very act of imparting it multiplies it within me. Love is incorporeal, too, and the act of loving increases one’s capacity for love.
But what about money? We have accepted a corporeal sense of supply, and so every time we spend or give a dollar, we believe we have a dollar less. This need not be, because supply is incorporeal. Look at a banana tree before the fruit appears. Where are the bananas now? They must have existence; otherwise how will we ever see them? When they appear visibly, we attach a corporeal sense to them. But it doesn’t have to be that way. With spiritual discernment, it is possible to behold the incorporeal form. Once we realize that supply is incorporeal, we know that the more I give, the more I have.
What about health? If you accept a corporeal sense of existence, you are fighting the calendar and getting older and weaker. But when you accept the incorporeality of man, every day we live we get younger and stronger. The more of life we use, the more we have.
You cannot engage in a spiritual ministry while you are living out from a corporeal sense of existence. You must be able to say, “The only image of God I can ever see is man, and man is as incorporeal as God.” Then healing is not difficult because you don’t have bones to set, fevers to reduce, digestive systems to change, or sins to overcome. You are dealing with an incorporeal God manifest as an incorporeal man, and you are living and moving and having your being in the consciousness of this truth. Do not deal with man whose breath is in his nostril, and never try to change any picture presented to you. Work from spiritual discernment, from the soul faculties.
Judging from appearances, it is not true that all men are created equal. So where did this vision of equality come from? It came from spiritual intuition, spiritual vision, spiritual discernment. Without spiritual discernment, you can judge only by appearances, and you will be fooled. Those who do not succeed in healing or bringing forth fruitage fail because they have an incorporeal God, Spirit and are trying to make it manifest corporeally. But there is no corporeal creation. We entertain a corporeal sense of an incorporeal creation.
In my spiritual ministry, I must never deal with corporeality. Then I have attained the mystical consciousness out of which all form appears. You may entertain a corporeal sense of that form, but you will know that it is not corporeal. The fabric of life, consciousness, is incorporeal and appears as incorporeal form. Even if you see it corporeally, you will not be fooled. Even though you handle dollar bills, they won’t fool you. You will know that you are not dealing with limited corporeality, but with a manifestation of infinite supply.
Rising to mystical consciousness in prayer and treatment means rising into incorporeality. You must start with an incorporeal God and then you must have incorporeal man. When you have that man as your ministry, you will have healings. Then, when you have incorporeal supply, you have consciousness as the substance of form. Since there is only one consciousness, my consciousness is the substance of this universe, because God is my consciousness. So out of your own consciousness, bring forth incorporeal man, incorporeal body, and incorporeal supply.
[1] 1 Corinthians 2:14
[2] Hebrews 13:5
[3] Matthew 28:20