Recording 350B, “Treatment – Meditation ‘Be Not Afraid,'” from the 1960 Second London Closed Class, was used as source material for “Introduction” in A Parenthesis in Eternity, and Chapter 5, “Resting in Oneness,” in Realization of Oneness.
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In previous sessions, we learned that “treatment” in healing work is a form of contemplative meditation done in response to a claim involving oneself, a request for help from another, or whenever we perceive any discord.
In treatment, the first step is to bring to conscious remembrance and contemplate every truth that will establish that Spirit, divine Consciousness, is the only power; there is no power in effect; all power is spiritual, and all law is spiritual. When the mental activity of contemplation ends, we take the second step. We sit in silent receptivity, awaiting some sign of the presence of God.
The lesson in this class illustrates treatment as a form of contemplative meditation. Joel says:
So you see that whether you are meditating, or whether you are giving a treatment, it is really all the same thing. In a meditation, you do exactly as you do in a treatment. You start with a contemplative form of meditation in which you contemplate truth, but you see there is no truth about man whose breath is in his nostrils, so there’s no use of pondering, or contemplating anything about your patient or his condition. And of course, if you’re not to take your patient, or his condition into your treatment, or your meditation, there’s nothing left [to contemplate] but God.
As with previous sessions, if you find a summary of the class helpful for review, you can create one of your own or use the one below. If you would like to have the full transcript, you can order it here. Either way, as Joel says, “Pick out the pearls.” Annotate the summary or the transcript with insights or additional key points that resonate with you.
Joel begins this class by answering two interesting questions.
Q: What is the nature of mind? Could you explain the difference between mind and intellect?”
A: The intellect represents our degree of awareness, understanding, intelligence, and knowledge. On the other hand, mind is not a personal quality, substance, or activity. Mind is universal, an instrument of God; therefore, mind as an avenue of awareness is infinite. There is nothing we cannot know through the activity of mind. Our finite sense of mind might be a limiting influence, but mind itself, as an instrument of God, is unlimited.
Q: Kindly give us some help on how to counteract the fear of thunderstorms.
A: This deals with the very foundation of our work. Fear in any form is atheism—no one fears who has ever known God. Yes, you might have some sense of fear if you are at the battlefront or in a sinking ship or airplane. But that isn’t fear; it is just a momentary sense of separation from your Source and is quickly overcome.
But a continuing experience of fear, such as the fear of thunderstorms, disease, poverty, or accident, is a form of atheism, because it says that an individual has not found or made contact with their Source. When we make contact with God, the first thing we learn is that God is all power. Therefore, there is no power in any effect, whether a thunderstorm, a runaway horse, or a sinking ship. Indeed, no power could destroy our life, because our life is God, and it is indestructible. So, fear is based on our ignorance of truth.
Neither life nor death can separate me from the life of God, the presence of God, the love of God, or the power of God. It cannot affect my relationship to God. Therefore, if I am fearing, it is probably because I am fearing death. Why do we fear disease? Possibly because it could lead to death. But what difference can that make if death cannot separate me from God?
When you realize that in death, you will leave your friends or relatives, you might notice that that happens even in this life. People are sometimes separated by thousands of miles, yet they survive. But even if we are separated from our loved ones in death, we are not separated from God, or Love, or Life. So, while we might rather be with our friends or relatives and stay in our homes, the idea of leaving them isn’t going to fill us with fear. We may have a sense of regret, but not fear, because neither life nor death shall separate us from God. In that realization, fear goes.
Once you have overcome the fear of death, you have overcome the fear of disease. And when you overcome the fear of disease, the disease disappears, because nothing perpetuates disease but the fear of it. It isn’t necessarily your fear or my fear; it’s a universal fear we individually entertain. However, we, individually, must overcome the fear of disease or accidents by the realization that the only reason we fear them is that they may lead to death. You can come under any claim as a universal belief, but it can only remain with you through your fear of it.
You cannot enter or attain Christ consciousness while you are in fear of effects, whether the effect is a disease, a thunderstorm, or a closed room. If you fear an effect, you will never be able to say, “What did hinder you? Pick up your bed and walk,” or “Open your eyes.” The fear of the condition constitutes your humanhood; the lack of fear constitutes your Christhood. To the degree that you lose your fear, hate, or love of error in any form, you will have made progress toward attaining Christ consciousness.
Regardless of the name or nature of a claim presented to you for healing, the healing will take place in proportion to your lack of fear of it. If you don’t fear it, you won’t resist it or try to overcome it. So, in not resisting evil, you are actually doing healing work. Any thought brought forward in your mind to refute, resist, or deny a claim is fighting it, and if you are fighting, there can be no healing.
At this point in the class, Joel discusses treatment in the practice of spiritual healing.
Spiritual Treatment
What is a treatment? How long should a treatment last? The answer is simple: The treatment should last as long as you have any fear of the condition that has been brought to you for healing.
Of what should the treatment consist? Every truth you can remember that has to do with the truth that Spirit is the only power—not matter and not mind. Spirit, divine Consciousness, Invisible Cause, is the only power. No effect is power. Bring to conscious remembrance every truth that will establish in you that all power and all law is spiritual, and that there is no power in effect. That is what treatment consists of. You continue with it until you have that inner release, click, or feeling that tells you this effect is only the arm of flesh, temporal power, or nothingness. Since it is not of God, it has no power, life, continuity, substance, being, or externalized form. When you come to that realization, your treatment is at an end.
That doesn’t mean that your patient will be instantaneously healed. They can be, but their own receptivity may not enable them to accept a healing in one treatment, or two, or a hundred. Each time you are called upon to treat again, your treatment has to embody whatever truth will bring you the realization of God as all, of the nothingness of the condition, and the nothingness of material or mental law.
If you are called upon again, try to forget the previous treatments. There is no such thing as a formula by which you can heal. Every treatment must be spontaneous, and there must be a spontaneous realization, in one way or another, of God as Omnipotence, Omnipresence, or Omniscience. Repeating those words is not a treatment; you have to ponder them. For example, if you take Omnipresence, you ponder what it means.
God must be the presence of this patient. There can be no presence of a patient other than the presence of God. There can be no presence of a disease, since God alone is omnipresent, and God is Spirit. God is the presence of this person, the presence of all that is, the only presence. God is Spirit and does not have to be removed, healed, corrected, reformed, or improved.
God must be recognized as Omnipresence, and because of Omnipresence, I know there is no such presence as a patient, a sin, a disease, a false appetite, or even a material or mental law.
In the next treatment for the same person or condition, you might use the word Omnipotence—all power.
If God or Spirit is all power, what am I dealing with? Is there any power in this so-called patient, even a power to resist this treatment? Is there a power in this patient to resist truth? Does a patient have the power to resist truth if God is the presence of the patient? If God is the only power operating as the consciousness of this person, is there any other power? Is there any power in what the world calls a disease or an enemy?
So, you think and remember along the lines of what constitutes power until material power or mental power has lost all significance for you, and you are left with the realization and the assurance: I, in the midst of you, am mighty, and I am the only power.
If that treatment does not do it, you might work with the word Omniscience, which means all knowledge, all science, all wisdom.
God is Omniscience. I do not have to tell God anything about this patient or condition. If God doesn’t know it now, God never will. Surely, there can’t be anything I know that God does not know. Therefore, I do not have to tell God anything about my patient, or what my patient needs or would like. I simply sit here and know: God is Omniscience, the all-knowing intelligence, and the Master says, “God knoweth your need, and it is His good pleasure to give you the kingdom.” God already knows all that is to be known, and God already knows what to do, when to do it, and how to do it. It is God’s good pleasure to give us the kingdom.
You continue along that line of thought, remembering every passage of Scripture or metaphysical or spiritual literature that assures you God already knows our needs and it is His good pleasure to give us the kingdom. Rest in that until you have the inner feeling of, “Ah, God knows; all is well.”
A treatment is only a treatment if it embodies the truth about God, God’s law, God’s omnipotence, God’s omniscience, and God’s omnipresence until everything of a fearful nature has been eradicated from your thought. Even though the patient may have a high fever or be in pain, distress, or poverty, an inner feeling of assurance comes to you: “This is God’s beloved child. What have I to fear?” Is there any child of God outside the kingdom of God, or am I being fooled by appearances?
Will we believe our eyes, after the Master said, ”Judge not after appearances?” Will we judge what we see, hear, taste, touch, and smell and try to believe God is in that picture? No! If you’re going to perceive “this world” with your eyes or your hearing, you will never be able to believe in God, because all we can see, hear, taste, touch, and smell is finiteness—limitation, sin, disease, death, stupidity.
Once you close your eyes to the appearances and ask yourself, “What is the kingdom of God like?” soon you will hear the still, small voice, and even while you are looking right at sick, sinning, or dying man, that voice will say to you: “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. Fear not, it is I.”
Then you will know it is true: I am you. I, God, constitute your being. Despite all appearances to the contrary, whenever you speak of yourself, you speak of yourself as “I,” and there is only one I. It is spelled with a capital “I” because I is always deity. Be not afraid, it is I—but don’t look with your eyes because you will be deceived. I is in thou and in me, and I am in I and thou art in I, for we are one. There is nothing but the kingdom of God. There is only the I that I am.
So, meditating and giving a treatment are really the same thing. In a treatment, you do exactly as you do in a meditation. You start with a contemplative form of meditation, in which you contemplate truth. Since there is no truth about man, whose breath is in his nostrils, there is no use pondering or contemplating anything about your patient or his condition. And if you do not take your patient or his condition into your treatment, there’s nothing left but God, so you start with God.
[Here Joel gives an example of contemplative treatment meditation.]
You continue in this treatment until fear departs. Then sit in quietness and confidence and let God’s grace flow; let the voice of God speak to you in some way. You are still and quiet, and from deep down within you comes a release, a feeling, an awareness, a sensing, and you have no more fear. Then you have that mind that was in Christ Jesus because there is no fear in that mind.
So, meditation and treatment have the same nature. The only difference is the function. Most often, we engage in meditation for communion or union with God. We think only in terms of our relationship with God, not in terms of sickness, sin, or lack. Treatment is meditation done in response to a request for help or a perceived discord, but we do not take the patient, the claim, the disease, or the condition into the treatment. We are not trying to patch up an illusion. When your treatment consists of knowing all the truth about God and spiritual creation, you are in the mystical way of life and spiritual healing.
In treatment, never project your thought into your patient. That is healing by suggestion, and suggestion is a mild form of hypnotism. Neither of these has anything to do with spiritual healing. Never address your patient by name, or say “you” to your patient, because your treatment has nothing to do with your patient. It only concerns you, your relationship to God, and your awareness of God. Because your patient has reached out to you for help, they will get the benefit of the treatment.
[At the end of the class, Joel recommends The Art of Spiritual Healing and The Infinite Way Letters of 1954 through 1960, saying that those letters contain all the principles and were explicitly made to help the most advanced students in their healing work. The Letters of 1954 through 1959 are available as The Heart of Mysticism, Volumes 1 through 6. The 1960 Letters constitute the book Our Spiritual Resources.]
Recording 253B, titled “Specific Truth for Treatments,” from the 1959 Halekou Special Work, goes deeper into the topic of treatment. Joel gives many examples of treatment contemplations, and for each example, he focuses on the nature of the content for the contemplation. We highly recommend that you include this recording in your study of treatment. It is posted on the same page as Recording 350B. This recording is the basis for Chapter 6, “Specific Truth for Treatment,” in The Heart of Mysticism, Volume 6. To listen to this recording by telephone, call 1-641-715-3900 and enter 211784#.
Even if no one is asking you for help, you can practice treatment with every discord that appears to you. Indeed, if you listen to the world work recording for March, you will hear Joel say that we may not “pass by on the other side” when we see a troubling appearance.
There are many opportunities for practice. You can practice treatment whenever you see news about a war, a disaster, a political conflict, a social injustice, or human suffering. You can practice if you have a personal financial or health concern. Instead of reacting to these, pause and engage in treatment—not to “fix” the situation, but to recognize God as the only Presence and Power. This helps shift consciousness from fear to peace, which is the real work of healing. As you practice, you develop your facility with treatment and prepare for when someone might come to you for help.
Let’s review the basics of practicing treatment:
Remember that treatment is not just for emergencies. It is a way of engaging with the world all the time. The more we live in truth, the less we need to “treat,” because we will naturally perceive the world correctly through our developed spiritual discernment.
If you want to delve further into the topic of treatment, we recommend:
The Art of Spiritual Healing, Part 2: Spiritual Healing: The Role of Treatment
Chapter 6: Developing a Healing Consciousness
Chapter 7: Practical Instructions to Workers
Chapter 8: Treatment Is a Realization of Omnipresence
However, it is important to remember that while reading can clarify treatment as taught in The Infinite Way—and you should be sure you understand it—it is practice that will develop the healing consciousness.