Recording 498A provided source material for Chapter 5, “God-endowed Dominion,” in Living Now. 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 in the part of the “About Body” study program that deals with so-called disease and spiritual healing. In this class, Joel focuses on impersonalization and nothingization in healing work. Impersonalization and nothingization played a key role in Joel’s important 1959 work, and he said that these “constitute the secret of spiritual healing.”
In this class, Joel addresses:
This summary is provided simply as a reminder of the content of the class. To download or print this summary, click/tap here.
The healing principles in The Infinite Way differ radically from those in other teachings. To be successful with Infinite Way healing, you must work from these principles. In some teachings, the practitioner looks for the error in the patient. But Joel discovered that error does not originate in the thought of an individual. An individual may let himself become an outlet for error, but error does not originate in him and cannot be healed in him. The origin of evil of any nature is the universal human mind—not the individual human mind. When a practitioner realizes that, the patient is set free, for no error is attached to him.
When Joel looks out at his students and silently realizes their spiritual nature and origin, they begin to like him. They don’t know why, but they can’t help it. The reason is that he is seeing their real nature, their real Self, behind the human masquerade. They feel that and respond to it. But if Joel was criticizing, judging, resenting, or minimizing them, they would feel uncomfortable. They would not know consciously what he was doing, but they would feel the result. The same thing happens in the healing practice. If a practitioner tries to find an error in you, you feel that malpractice and instead of being free and happy, you are uncomfortable.
So when you do healing work, remember to remove the “original sin” from mankind—the belief that man was created in sin and brought forth in iniquity. That is not the truth. The Infinite Way recognizes that every individual has a spiritual origin. Science may trace a human form back to a seed, but where did the seed come from? Man did not create you, nor have you created anyone else. God is the creator, and you are just the instrument through which the creation appears. Everything visible comes from the invisible.
When a practitioner recognizes that God constitutes you; that there is no evil in you; and that any evil manifesting through you originates in the universal human mind of man, the practitioner separates you from the evil and keeps you as you originally are—God Itself in expression—and puts the evil outside of you in the universal mind. For example, in winter, there are many claims of colds, flu, and grippe. But these claims do not originate in an individual. They are beliefs that have been picked up because of ignorance and accepted, consciously or unconsciously. So it is not necessary to treat each individual because there is only one claim, and it has nothing to do with any individual. It is a universal claim, and if that universal claim is handled, everyone is healed. Only one treatment is needed because there is only one belief: the universal belief in a selfhood, power, or presence apart from God.
When you see that no individual is the cause of their cold or flu, you will see the same thing with other claims. You will recognize that the origin of the claim is not in the individual, and you cannot find the error in them because it isn’t there. The error is in a universal belief that there is a mortal man, or that there is a selfhood, a power, a condition, or a creation apart from God. That is a universal belief—not mine or yours. We call this “impersonalizing,” and it is the first step in Infinite Way healing. Impersonalization is the realization that you are God made manifest, the very life of God; that you breathe the breath of God; that you are God’s Selfhood; and that there is no evil or sin in you at all.
Now, once we have impersonalized and are holding the patient in his divine perfection, there is a second step called “nothingizing,” or “making nothing.” We ask, “Did God create this evil condition?” No. God is too pure to behold iniquity. So this claim could not be of God, and if it is not of the omnipotent God, it cannot have real existence or be a power. God is the only power.
People say they believe that God is omnipotence, but many do not really accept omnipotence as an absolute principle. They accept a good power and an evil power. They see germs, dictators, disease, and sin as evil powers, and so they have both omnipotence and evil. But to practice spiritual healing, you must accept God as omnipotence, the only power. You must look at sin, disease, or any condition without fear or horror, realizing that it exists only in man’s belief. We only experience evil because there is a universal belief in the reality and power of evil. But in proportion as you can accept God as omnipotence, evil loses its seeming power.
Disease has no law to support it. If it did, you couldn’t cure it because you can’t break a law. If a disease had a law, it would be an immortal disease, perpetuated by its law. But disease has no law of God to support it, and if you can grasp that disease has no law, it will fall by the very fact that you have recognized its nothingness. If you recognize that God is not responsible for disease or death, you will destroy them because you will have known the truth that makes you free. Disease, sin, fear, and lack all have their basis in the belief in two powers—good and evil. Accepting two powers sent Adam and Eve out of the garden of Eden, and when you accept two powers, you keep yourself out of Eden. But you can return to Eden in the moment that you realize that God is Omnipotence, the only power, and there is no other power. God is Spirit, and spiritual power is the only power. Then you find yourself doing healing work because you do not have to fight beliefs. Once you recognize that a claim is not truth and that evil is not personal, you have victory over the error. But—you must be firm and unwavering in impersonalizing, and you must be absolutely universal in accepting the principle of one power.
The Master was not horrified by the woman taken in adultery or the thief on the cross. He said, “Neither do I condemn thee.” “I will take thee into paradise this very night.” In other words, these sins do not have their origin in you. You are not responsible, and now that you have reached out to the Christ, you are absolved. When you work in this way, you take the burden of malpractice off of the individual. So in your healing work, do not ask your patient to be more spiritual, or to read more books, or to be more loving or generous. Just get quiet and know the truth of God as individual life, as the only power and the only presence. Know that any evil has no real existence and does not belong to the individual. Evil is part of a universal mortal belief and exists only as an illusory appearance that can be dismissed. You do not even have to know the name of the person seeking help or the name of the claim. Since every individual is the offspring of God, a name does not matter. We do not treat conditions, diseases, or diseased people. Rather, we know the truth of man’s identity and the illusory nature of the appearance.
You can start your healing work with any claim if you can impersonalize and nothingize. Every individual has a spiritual, divine origin, and there can be no error in him. Whatever error seems to exist, exists only as an illusory appearance like the sky that sits on the ocean. When you impersonalize and nothingize, you begin the destruction of any error. Healing may or may not be instantaneous, but healing is certain if you stand fast in the truth that you are not dealing with a condition to be healed or removed, but only with an illusory appearance that must be recognized and dismissed. You can dismiss it because it isn’t of God; it doesn’t belong to any person; and it doesn’t exist as a condition. It exists only as an illusory appearance.
Mind is not a power; mind is an instrument that we use for whatever purpose we want. You can fill your mind with truth or you can accept evil into your mind. Evil has no power, but you give it power by your acceptance of it. Like your body, your mind is neither good nor evil. The body is only an instrument, and if you want to use it in a harmful way, you can. But when you keep your mind filled with spiritual truth, there is no possibility of using the body for evil purposes. It is only when you open your mind to evil that it can have evil effects in the body. You have control over your mind and can choose what you are going to entertain in your mind. You can keep your mind attuned to truth morning, noon and night and to keep your mind filled with the awareness of God’s presence and the non-power of anything other than God. But you can also open your mind to watch a TV program.
So there is “I”, “my mind,” and “my body.” Mind and body are really one. Mind is the substance or essence of which this body is formed. Whatever I accept in my mind, my body manifests. The mind itself is pure, and the body itself is pure, but the food I take into my mind determines the nature of mind and body. The more I feed truth into my mind, the more harmonious my body becomes, and the more harmonious your body becomes, because when you ask for help, what is in my mind becomes the law unto your body. So if we can disregard the appearance and inwardly say, “I know that you are the offspring of God; that God constitutes your soul, mind, being, and body, and that any evil appearance belongs out here in that vast mental illusion of nothingness,” we change the nature of everything that comes within range of our consciousness.
The responsibility is on your shoulders, not on the teaching. The teaching can’t do anything for you except as you embody it in your living. Reading and saying how beautiful it is will not do it. This is a life practice. You have to stop malpracticing and accept the truth that God constitutes man. Then you have to separate the illusory appearance from the individual, recognizing that God did not make it; that it belongs to the vast mental illusion, the belief in two powers. This is the way it has been revealed to Joel, and there are more than thirty years of practice behind it. Practitioners do well with it in proportion as they do not fight people and conditions or try to change them, but go within and realize, “In proportion as I can loose them and let them go are they made free.”
Joel’s important 1959 work, which was devoted to the healing principles, included extensive instruction on impersonalization and nothingization, and he said these constitute the “secret of spiritual healing.” Impersonalization and nothingization are the focus of Recording 498A as well. With permission from Acropolis Books and The Infinite Way Office, we have prepared a document that includes excerpts from Joel’s books and recordings that reinforce and expand on this topic. To view, download, or print this document, click/tap here.