This class is one of three classes used as source material for Chapter 11, “His Rain Falls,” 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 will be able to listen to it there. The additional study material for this recording will continue to be available here on the Goldsmith Global site. To purchase this recording or the transcript, click/tap here.
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There is a great secret behind this world that is unknown to religions and philosophies. It is a secret of life that no man can know with his mind, and that is why so few have it. The world has not gone beyond seeking truth through the mind or through books and teachings. But your spiritual journey really begins only when you come to the realization that you are never going to learn the truth, the secret behind this universe, through the mind.
God is Spirit, and since you do not know what the word Spirit means, it seems that God is something that you do not know or understand. This can be discouraging, and you may begin to think, “I am never going to discover God.” But when you reach that point, you may actually be starting on your spiritual journey because then you can say, “Speak Lord, thy servant heareth,” and really mean it. You have come to the end of the hope or belief that the human mind can reveal spiritual truth to you, or that you will find God in a class or a book, and you have realized that the kingdom of God is within you.
The message in the book The Thunder of Silence contradicts the teaching of Christianity that is based on a God that rewards and punishes. To the thinking person, it certainly does not seem that God rewards the good and punishes the sinners. There are loving, charitable people whom God is not rewarding, and there are evil people who seem to go scot-free, and you may wonder about this. But the longer you seek the answer with your mind, the more frustrating it will be, and you will not find the solution to life’s problems.
Joel was in a class when he received the startling unfoldment that God neither rewards nor punishes. It astounded him because it refuted the religious teachings of most of the world. If God neither punishes nor rewards, why is there punishment and reward in this world? The answer that came through was what the Hindus call karmic law, and what Jesus called “as ye sow, so shall ye reap.”[1] That is, reward and punishment have nothing to do with God. They have to do with a law that you set in motion. Paul had the same revelation, and it came to him as: “If you sow to the Spirit, you reap life everlasting. If you sow to the flesh, you reap corruption.”[2] This principle of sowing and reaping is in the original Christian teaching, but unfortunately, it was not incorporated into the Christian church.
When you know the nature of God, you know that there is nothing in that nature that punishes or rewards. God is life—the life of the universe and the life of our own lives. And since the nature of God is eternal and infinite, the life of man must also be eternal and immortal. Yet we have believed that sin, disease, death, and accidents are punishments from God. Some even call such things “God’s will.” But could it be God’s will that an airplane collapse with many people on board, or that a steamship hit an iceberg at sea?
Nothing like that was in the original teaching of Jesus Christ. Nowhere in the gospels do you find God destroying life. Jesus said his mission was to do the work of God, and he raised the dead, healed the sick, and forgave the sinners. There is no rewarding or punishing God in the teaching of Jesus Christ. Jesus taught that it was as you sow that you reap. Your sowing results in your reaping, and your reaping goes on until the sowing changes. Can you come to a conviction within yourself that God has absolutely nothing to do with your rewards and punishments, your health or sickness, or your life or death? Can you grasp the principle that it is as ye sow that ye reap, and then acknowledge that regardless of what experience you may be having now, somewhere there is a sowing in your consciousness that is responsible for that reaping?
If you are hoping for a God to do something or change something, you are still in orthodoxy, waiting for something that is not going to happen. Whatever happens will happen as an activity of your consciousness. If this does not seem startling to you now, it is because you haven’t yet grasped it. While you may not realize it, there is a belief that is operating in the consciousness of most people and unnecessarily causing distress, and that is the belief that some act of commission or omission on your part is responsible for your discords. But that is not true! So you might as well forgive yourself right now, and forget about your past or present sins, because no error of yours caused your discords.
Then what is causing the discords? Paul summed it up: “If you sow to the Spirit, you will reap life everlasting. If you sow to the flesh, you will reap corruption.”[3] You were born into a material sense of life and have been sowing to the flesh all of your human life, putting your hope, faith, and confidence in form or effect. For example, when you are born into the belief that supply is money, investments, or securities, you try to get these things. That cheats you of the demonstration of supply because these things are not supply. Consciousness, Spirit, is supply. I am supply, and I embody the infinity of supply. But until you accept that Consciousness is supply, you will sow to the flesh and reap limitation. Some people reap a million or ten million dollars’ worth of limitation, but it is still limitation, because sometimes after they get it, they can’t spend any of it. They sit and watch it but can’t part with it.
A child born into an ordinary family is born into limitation and the struggle to earn a living. But a child born into a family of spiritual understanding is born into sowing to the Spirit, realizing that love is supply, life is supply, God is supply, I am supply. Such a child would never have to work, struggle, or cheat for supply. They would work for the joy of it, not to make a living. When you do not connect supply with your work, it becomes a joy and you are sowing to the Spirit. Supply may come through your work or through some other avenue.
Similarly, a child born into an ordinary religious family first hears words of caution: “Be careful. Don’t drop the baby.” From then on, the child is sowing to the flesh, being concerned and apprehensive about the body. Upon going to school, the child hears warnings about talking to stranger, and a fear develops in the child. So when we say, “if you sow to the flesh, you reap corruption,” it has nothing to do with your personal sins, which are due only to the fact that we were born into sowing to the flesh. Our attention was never directed to the invisible Spirit that is in us and every other individual. Our personal sins do not cause our discords, but rather the universal beliefs that we have accepted out of ignorance.
“Though your sins were scarlet, you are white as snow.”[4] This means that when your ignorance is overcome, you realize that any wrong you may have done was due only to your ignorance. A spiritually enlightened person can do no wrong, because they realize that the kingdom of God is within them, and everything needed for their fulfillment will unfold from within. The moment a sinner is enlightened, there is no more sin.
Citizens of a country can inherit the karma of the country when it sows to the flesh, but they can also exempt themselves from it by sowing to the Spirit in their individual experience. When the United States hoards its overabundance of food and fails to share it with nations in need, the country is sowing to the flesh and reaping corruption for its people. But in our individual experience we can share freely, and thereby sow to the Spirit.
In 1963, the President of Western Germany made a statement denouncing the persecution of the Jewish citizens under Hitler and calling the people to overcome the past by thinking and acting in the spirit of confidence and charity. That acknowledgment wiped out the karma for the German government and for those Germans who felt that way. It freed them from punishment, but not a punishment from God, because God never punished them for their sins. Sowing in this way brings about the reaping of forgiveness, and a nation is set free.
If you understand the law of karma, you understand why so many Americans are suffering, and why our government is suffering from discords and inharmonies and cannot arrive at solutions to any major problems. Americans individually, and the United States government as a government, must acknowledge guilt in anti-Semitism, in slavery, in the Japanese internment during World War II, and in the use of atomic bombs. As an individual citizen, you are under that karma until you come to an inner agreement that these actions are inexcusable.
As long as warfare continues, we may have to do our duty as citizens and play our part in it. But you will be sowing to the flesh if you accept the rightness of it within your own consciousness. You are also sowing to the flesh if you believe that it is right to protect your property or your life at the expense of someone else’s life or to destroy a civilian population to win a war, and there is no way to escape that karma. But if you as an individual, within yourself, do not accept or approve of those things, you have come out from under that karma, even though your nation remains under it until through its government, it voices disapproval.
So, you will never find God through the human mind, and as you work with this understanding of sowing and reaping, remember that you have to open your consciousness to receive the impartations of the Spirit, and then your spiritual life will truly begin.
[1] Galatians 6:7
[2] Galatians 6:8
[3] Galatians 6:8
[4] Isaiah 1:18
In this class, Joel focuses on the topic of karmic law, or the law of “as ye sow, so shall ye reap.” That is a subject he addresses in several chapters in the writings, and if you would like to read more from Joel about karmic law, these are some excellent chapters that elaborate on that subject in books you may already have:
The Thunder of Silence: Chapter 2, “Karmic Law” (This is the chapter that Joel is referencing in Recording 523B.)
A Parenthesis in Eternity: Chapter 5, “Sowing and Reaping”
Living Now: Chapter 11, “Transcending Karmic Law”
Living by the Word: Chapter 11, “Sowing and Reaping”
Consciousness Transformed: