Recording 17B provided source material for Chapter 5, “Love Thy Neighbor,” in Practicing the Presence. 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 the recording or the transcript, click/tap here.
We are now in the part of the “About Body” study program that deals with spiritual healing. This is another class that will help us learn more about how to handle physical claims for ourselves or others. In this class, Joel answers questions about the body. The questions are not directly asked by students, but are simply questions we might have about the body and healing.
This summary is provided simply as a reminder of the content of the class. To download or print this summary, click here.
Healing is not difficult, regardless of the name or nature of the disease. But to have results, disease, sin, and death must become unreal in our consciousness. As we progress in that direction, we may succeed in some cases and not in others. In Joel’s first year of practice, he worked constantly for thirteen weeks to successfully handle a difficult case of tuberculosis. That work so impressed Joel that for more than twenty years afterward, he healed every case of tuberculosis that came to him, except one. Yet for years, he had little success with leukemia. One day the tide turned, and he was able to meet every case of leukemia. So, the unreality of those diseases registered with him. Yet, he says, other forms of disease still gave him trouble. The world of disease has become so deeply rooted in human consciousness as a “real” world that even when we give our time and attention exclusively to healing, we find some difficulties.
The secret is that healing does not take place through the intervention of some God. Healing comes about through a state of consciousness in which the spiritual becomes the only reality, and sin, disease, and death have no reality. We do not battle them or try to get rid of them. Our attitude toward them is the same as our attitude toward the water on the desert road after we have discovered that it isn’t water, but an illusion. As long as disease is a reality to you, or you believe that diseases must run their course, or that a tumor must be reduced, you are not in spiritual healing. Spiritual healing is a recognition of the unreality of the appearance. It is the result of a state of consciousness in which the works of God, the word of God, the universe of God, and the man of God are so real that one cannot believe that sin, disease, death, lack and limitation could possibly exist. So-called evil is overcome by not resisting it.
We would all be miracle healers if we refused to accept the belief that there is a law of God establishing sin, disease, death, lack, or limitation; if we knew that what we see, hear, taste, touch, or smell is like the water on the desert road; if we could see that destruction is no part of God’s Kingdom, and that God has never provided for the death of a single individual. The Master never gave any evidence that he believed that somebody was sick or dying because they deserved it, or because God thought it was time for them to die, or that it was natural. There is no excuse for death at any age. There is a natural transition, and there are progressive steps for us, but we do not have to be kicked out of our body by disease. We can walk out of our own accord, at the time of our own choosing, without giving power to anything else.
The successful healing ministry is based on the reality of God and God’s creations and the unreal nature of what presents itself as a sick or sinning person, a disease, or a bad habit. God’s law is a law of life eternal, and that law does not provide for death or disease. “I am life eternal” means what it says—that the law of God is for life. “God has no pleasure in your dying. Turn ye and live.” Death is the last enemy that shall be overcome because it has the deepest belief attached to it. Heart problems and cancer, too, have given much trouble in the healing work because of the depth of belief in them. But they do not present difficulties to the one who looks through and beholds the very living Christ as the life of an individual and says, “I—My life is eternal, immortal, God-maintained and God-sustained forever and forever.”
It is important to understand the terms “real,” “unreal,” “illusion,” “mirage,” “belief,” and “appearance.” Learn to see whatever you see, hear, taste, touch, or smell as the water on the desert road; as a mirage, an unreality. Then you will immediately translate illness into health. Later you will also see that behind even the beauties of this world—the beautiful scenery, beautiful sunsets, beautiful clouds—there is a reality greater than that which you witness with your eyes. When you can discern spiritually, you will see something in flowers, clouds, stars, sunsets, and sunrises that you have never seen before; something greater than the human mind can grasp. These things are evidence of the law of God, and the law itself is greater than the effects of the law—that which we see as sun, moon, stars, planets, oceans, and mountains. There is more there than meets the eye, just as there is more to you than meets the eye.
The ability to discern the reality of an individual, to behold their soul, to know them as they are in God, is what brings out healings. That recognition lifts them up in consciousness, out of their human selfhood. Then they act like angels. If you practice this recognition wherever you go, eventually you will find that impatient or uncivil people have disappeared from your world because people are responding to your vision of the Christ in them, and they rise up to meet some measure of what you are beholding. That is the healing ministry.
That is the secret; it is that simple. A few weeks of practice will make anybody a healer—maybe not for the deeper healing works, but they will start to heal once they learn the lesson of not looking at a person but looking through them. Joel did this by looking just behind the left ear of the person, thinking that was the place where the invisible God becomes visible as man. Or, he would glance into the eyes of the individual because the soul, that which is identified as “I,” sits in back of the eyes. In proportion as you find that I, the individual will find their health and wholeness. Behold the Christ in every individual. Look through them, not at them.
The Infinite Way healing ministry differs radically from all other systems of healing. Early healing practice, including Christian Science, was based on the premise that there was a mental cause for every physical disease, and that by removing the mental cause, you would remove the physical disease. Saying that there is a mental cause for a physical disease is like saying that germs or infection or contagion cause disease.
On the physical level of life, infection and contagion do seem to operate. In the early days of metaphysical healing, materia medica claimed that if contagious diseases were not taken care of medically, the entire population of the world would be wiped out in one generation. But this was disproved. Many metaphysicians have quickly healed diseases supposedly brought about by infection or contagion, because as real as infectious and contagious diseases may seem on the physical plane, once they are touched by a consciousness that realizes their unreality, they disappear. It is the same thing with a mental cause for physical disease. No disease, whether believed to have a physical or mental cause, can stand in the face of the realization of the unreal nature of the disease. In The Infinite Way, we take all diseases and false appetites, regardless of their name or nature, and treat them like the water on the desert road. The water does not have a cause or an effect. Why? Because there is no water there! It is an illusion.
Another illustration of illusion is the man who went into his bathroom in the semidarkness and saw a coiled snake on the floor. But it was not a snake; it was a coil of rope. What was the cause of that snake? There was no snake there! That is our attitude toward all forms of discord. Regardless of what form of error you see, hear, taste, touch, or smell, instantly recognize that since God is the only creative principle of the universe, nothing has created that error. It exists only as a false sense, an illusion, a misperception. Never try to establish a cause for the appearance and never try to remove it. That is how healings take place. Nothing created the water on the desert road or the snake in the rope. They were illusions and never had real existence. So it would be foolish to give a testimony about being healed of water on the desert road or a snake in your bathroom. Likewise, it is foolish to give testimony to the healing of a disease, as if there were actually a disease to be healed. When we give testimony of healing, it is only with the understanding that the illusory appearance was dispelled.
As sin, disease, death, lack, and limitation become less and less real to you, eventually they fade completely out of your consciousness. Then you can begin to practice healing work in some way. It doesn’t matter whether the appearance is a corn or a cancer. An illusion is an illusion, and the sooner you get used to the idea that corns and cancers are both nothing, the sooner will you bring forth healing works. Healing has nothing to do with you or your abilities. It has nothing to do with going to a church, or having ministers, priests, or rabbis going to a God on your behalf. Healing has only to do with your realizing God as infinite Spirit, realizing the universe and man as infinitely and eternally spiritual, and knowing that what appears to this world as sin, disease, lack, and limitation is not real in that it has no law, cause, effect, substance, or reality. In proportion as that truth becomes active in your consciousness, you will heal. The activity of truth in your individual consciousness is the healing agency.
In your healing work, do not take human beings into your thought. Recognize that if you see, hear, taste, touch, or smell it, it is not maintained or sustained by God. Turn your attention to God, to reality, until you receive that inner divine impulse that assures you of God’s presence, and then trust It to do what we call healing work. You will not heal anybody; the illusion will be dispelled, just like the water on the desert, or the snake in the rope. We only heal in the degree of our God realization, and that God realization is more than a healing agency. It is a presence that goes before us to make the crooked places straight, to prepare mansions for us, and to make our whole human existence harmonious, joyous, and fruitful, even in a world that seems to be in turmoil. You will see that the world has to wake up and recognize that spiritual living is the key to harmonious living, and that spiritual living is a life of giving and sharing, not getting. But we cannot go out on a street corner and tell this truth; we would be ignored. Only those who are touched by the Spirit are prepared for spiritual living. Some will receive what you have to give, and for the rest we pray, “Awake thou that sleepest, and let Christ give thee light.”
When we previewed recordings for this study program on the body, we found several classes in which Joel teaches some wonderful lessons about the body, but covers other topics as well. We chose not to use these for our weekly sessions, but to post the best of them from time to time as “Additional Offerings for Study.” We offered another of these recordings as a complement to this study session. This was recording 46A, from the 1953 First New York Practitioner Class, titled “Treatment and the Middle Path.” It is a very interesting and practical lesson on healing work. This recording was used as source material for Chapter 5, “Judge Not According to the Appearance,” and Chapter 6, “The Middle Path,” in Spiritual Discernment. The recording is no longer available for listening on this website, but if you are a subscriber to the Joel S. Goldsmith Streaming Service, you will be able to listen to it there. To purchase the recording or the transcript, click/tap here.