This class was not used as source material for the book Beyond Words and Thoughts. However, both Side 1 and Side 2 of Recording #520 are the basis for Chapter 10, “Educating the Human Mind Out of Itself,” in A Message For the Ages. That chapter, together with five other chapters from A Message for the Ages, comprise a section of the book that focuses on teaching The Infinite Way message. 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.
This summary is provided simply to remind you of the content of the class. To download or print this summary, click/tap here.
Spiritual truth is the opposite of all that is intelligent in the human world, so imparting spiritual wisdom is difficult. It can never be taught by the human mind or received by the human mind. Only an individual who has attained some measure of that mind that was in Christ Jesus, the ability to spiritually discern, can teach spiritually and raise up the Son of God in an individual.
In spiritual teaching, you are educating the human mind out of itself. The human mind is formed of laws, theories, and convictions that have been accepted for ages and that are inherited at birth. One of these is the belief in good and evil. What is good to one person or in one place is evil to another person or in another place, and vice versa. Roses may be God’s perfect image to you but may be a source of irritation to someone else. Something that might be called evil in your society may not be evil in another. What you accept as good or evil depends on your reaction, where you were born, and how you were brought up.
The spiritual teacher or practitioner must have the consciousness that nothing is good or evil in and of itself, regardless of appearances, and that it is the reaction to it that makes it so. For example, when someone asks for help for an illness, the human mind says, “Oh, this is evil; quickly, give it this medicine.” The spiritual teacher must have the consciousness—not just the book knowledge—that nothing is good or evil. Then the teacher can bring students to that same state of consciousness. Teaching spiritually is not merely imparting wisdom or knowledge to students, it is also lifting them into a consciousness where they too can be faced with so-called evil appearances and bring about a demonstration of harmony.
The human mind of the student must also be educated out of its natural tendency to judge. One cannot attain Christ consciousness until the human mind has relinquished the judgment of good and evil, moral and immoral, and given up holding others in bondage to its own sense of right and wrong. Students must learn to withhold judgment and take the attitude, “Father reveal the nature of this.” When the human mind begins to disappear and you no longer judge by appearances, you can enjoy the “IS”. You do not label anything good or evil. You say “IS,” and let the Father, or spiritual discernment, reveal the truth of it to you.
The human mind also has a belief in two powers that must be relinquished. Otherwise the student will seek a God-power to do something to evil. There is no God-power to do anything to evil; in the presence of God-power there is no evil. It is not enough to say, “There is no evil,” or “There is no sin, death, or lack.” That is only a half truth. In the human or three-dimensional mind, there is good and evil. So you cannot say, “Disease has no power.” But you can say, “In the presence of the Christ consciousness, disease has no power. In the illumined consciousness, evil does not exist.” Likewise, we do not simply say, “There is fulfillment.” We say, “In the presence of My consciousness, there is fulfillment.”
Finally, the last-ditch fight of the human mind is the law of self-preservation. This is the law that compels us to save our lives at someone else’s expense. It is not you, but the human mind that is built around “I,” “me,” and “mine” that accepts the law of self-preservation. In proportion as you relinquish this belief in self-preservation, you live by “love thy neighbor as thyself,” and you contribute to the well-being of your neighbors who may temporarily be in in need. The human mind is interested only in me and mine, whereas the Christ mind lives by “love thy neighbor as thy self,” and “Pray for your enemies.”
You can see why the human mind cannot accept spiritual truth, and why every student must be educated in some measure out of three aspects of the human mind before there is enough of the Christ mind revealed to enable them to receive, understand, and know the things of God. Those three aspects are the belief in good and evil, which produces judgment; the belief in two powers; and the acceptance of the law of self-preservation, which inhibits the ability to truly “love thy neighbor.” The spiritual teacher must have risen above those aspects in order to be without judgment and able to lift others into that consciousness.
Teachers have relied principally on the books, classes, and tapes for teaching students, and this is a helpful and necessary step. But for students who wish to go higher, there is another way of teaching that comes from the ancient wisdom schools. A teacher gave a student a principle to practice and live with until the student had the realization of that principle. For example, one might take “Thy grace is my sufficiency in all things, and there is a sufficiency of thy grace omnipresent for the need of this moment.” This is not true in the human picture, because to the human, God’s grace is not a sufficiency. It is true only to the illumined consciousness. So the teacher would give this to the student, who would then live with it and practice it until some measure of fruitage appeared.
This type of teaching can still be done with students who are sufficiently dedicated. For example, today we believe that we should embody charity and benevolence for the sake of the poor and the downtrodden. But humans find it difficult to give up something of their own, even for the poor and the downtrodden. Again, the human mind is clinging to itself and its own. But the real purpose of being charitable or benevolent has nothing to do with the poor. The purpose is to practice “Inasmuch as you have done it unto the least of these my brethren, you have done it unto me”—to myself. In other words, the Self of me is the Self of you, and whatever I do unto you, I do unto myself. Whatever I do unto you is not out of pity or love for you, but out of love for my Self, the one Self, the Christ Self, God. So just as I would feed, educate, clothe, or house myself, I must do this for “myself” in many forms, because all are not yet awakened to their true identity. In this method of teaching, the student accepts the principle and puts it into practice until they have the actual feeling that I am thy Self and thou art my Self.
Words and thoughts are meaningless unless you can embody them as consciousness. So words and thoughts simply become reminders to rise into the consciousness of them. For example, suppose a married couple asked for help in resolving intolerable living conditions between them. Nothing that you could think or do of a human nature would be of any value, so you sit down, get at peace, and see what is revealed to you within. The thought might come, “God’s grace meets every need, and there is a sufficiency of God’s grace.” Then you would just be still and listen. Since you are convinced that words and thoughts are of no power, you simply listen, even if you can only listen for twenty or thirty seconds. You might have to do that several times during the day and continue during the next day. Even then, you may get worse reports from the couple. But nothing can change the fact that God’s grace alone is the sufficiency and that there is a sufficiency of God’s grace now, so there is nothing to do other than sit down until God’s grace is realized.
God’s grace is an actual transcendental essence, which you can’t think, hear, taste, touch, or smell, but you can be aware of—not through the mind or through knowledge, but through spiritual discernment. If the situation is to be met at all, it will be met by that grace. It may be met by restoring harmony between the parties or by bringing about a separation. The activity of the presence of the Christ can unify where there is love, or it can separate where that is the way of demonstration. So we cannot judge as to whether our work was successful by the outcome.
Even if a blind person asked you to restore their sight, you can’t say “Yes.” You can only say, “I can’t work for your sight. I can only work for the realization that God’s grace is your sufficiency, and you will have to be satisfied with God’s grace.” But that is a very difficult thing to do, just as it is difficult to tell those seeking supply that you can only realize God’s grace for them but can’t ask God to give them something they already have.
The spiritual teacher cannot teach this unless they have reached the state of consciousness that realizes it, and even then, they must know that they are educating the human mind out of itself. They are educating the student to the truth that there is no God power to do anything to evil, and that they can only abide in non-power. In the measure that the human mind yields, the student attains the powers of discernment.
Secrecy is one of the Master’s greatest principles, but you don’t hear about it in most religions. Since I and my Father are one, I look to God alone for my experience, my supply, my happiness, my home, and my health. These things have only to do with me and my relationship to God, so why should I talk about them? The kingdom of God is within me, so I go into the inner sanctuary of my own being and tabernacle with God. Then “What the Father seeth in secret, he rewardeth openly”[1]—by demonstration. The world may say that you are happy, successful, or joyous, but that is how God proclaims it to the world. You do not proclaim it. You keep it secret until someone comes hungering for what you have. Then you can teach, but the teaching is done secretly, and what the student learns must not be the affair of the outside world. You can’t go out and tell this to the world because the world does not have spiritual discernment, and they wouldn’t believe it. In the secrecy and silence of my inner being, I and my Father become consciously one. Then that which is taking place within becomes tangible in the outer world as effect, as fulfillment.
[1] Matthew 6:4
Since this recording (520A) and the next one (520B) were not used as source material for Beyond Words and Thoughts, we have an opportunity to work with the class material in ways other than reading the corresponding chapters. Certainly, you might enjoy reading Chapter 10 in A Message for the Ages, which drew its source material from these two classes. But you might also enjoy and benefit from working with the message of this class in other ways.
We offer three possibilities, and you may well be inspired with other ways that come to you.
In recording #520A, Joel says that the human mind must be educated out of several aspects, one of which is the belief in good and evil, which produces a tendency to judge. He advocates practicing the attitude of “is” to help us move beyond this belief in good and evil and beyond judgment. We have collected a few excerpts from Joel’s writings that elaborate on how we can practice this attitude of “is.” To view, download, or print this document, click/tap here.
In several classes, Joel mentions the method of teaching used in the ancient wisdom schools, in which the student is given a principle to work with, practice, and live until realization dawns. You might want to practice that method and see how it resonates with you. In this class (#520A), Joel suggested working with “Thy grace is my sufficiency in all things, and there is a sufficiency of Thy grace omnipresent for the need of this moment.” Joel used additional Scripture verses in this class, too, that could be used, such as:
Other Bible verses or statements of truth might come to you that are particularly appropriate for your life situation. Choose one, and work exclusively with that one. In undertaking this practice, reminders can be very helpful. Writing the quotation on small cards and putting them around your living space and in your car can help you keep your focus, as can programming reminders into your smartphone. Other ideas will probably come to you as well. The key is to keep the statement in the forefront of your awareness, contemplating it as often as possible.
It might also be helpful to listen to the 18-minute audio excerpt provided below from one of Joel’s classes. Here he describes in detail how to work with the principle “Thy grace is my sufficiency in all things” in contemplative meditations. The excerpt is from recording #65A, from the 1954 Honolulu Lecture Series, titled “Beginning of Meditation.”
We are now exactly halfway through the 1963 Kailua Private Class. This is a good time to review the class thus far and clarify for ourselves what themes are coming through, asking questions such as: “What are the key messages Joel is giving?” “What practices does he recommend?” “How would I summarize the class thus far?” If you choose to do such a review, the summaries provided for each class can be quite helpful.