A: No, there is no contradiction there. When the Infinite Way teaches us that the healer alone must accept responsibility for healing, it doesn’t mean that the practitioner should give you a written guarantee that you’re going to be healed in spite of anything you may do to stop it. What it means is this: If you ask me for help, I must assume the responsibility of bringing out that healing, because I am the one who has the spiritual understanding, not the patient. If the patient had it, they wouldn’t have asked me for help. Therefore, it is my responsibility to take over the claim and to do the work.
Now, because I have taken that responsibility doesn’t mean that the healing is going to take place. It doesn’t mean that you can’t stop the healing from taking place. It doesn’t mean for a minute that every healing is going to take place. It only means that I am not going to say to you, “Now, if you were just a little more loving, or if you were more grateful, or if you read four more pages every day in my books …” I am not going to put that responsibility on you.
I am going to take the same responsibility when you call on me that I would have to take if you called on me to help your pet dog. I couldn’t ask the dog to go to church regularly or to read so many pages of Scripture or to hold the right thoughts or to be more moral or more grateful. No, no. None of those things must be permitted to enter the question of spiritual healing. If you asked for help for one who is unconscious or dying, how can I turn to them and ask them to cooperate? It’s impossible. I must accept the responsibility for doing the work, but I cannot be responsible if the healing does not take place. I am only responsible for giving my utmost to it in all faithfulness and with all integrity.
There may be many reasons why healings do not take place. You only need turn to Jesus and his disciples to wonder what prevented Jesus healing Judas from whatever greed or lust was handling him, or what prevented Jesus from healing Peter, and you’ll know that nobody can be responsible for healing everybody. That is one of the joys of all spiritual teaching – it acknowledges you are an individual. You couldn’t get away with that in Communism, but you can in a spiritual teaching. You are an individual, and if you decide that you want to cling to your materialism – lust, greed, animality – you have that right, and nobody can break through. But that’s your part of it.
The practitioner’s part is to accept the responsibility for doing the work and not evade it by saying, “Well, of course, you’re not a member of our group, and that makes it more difficult,” or, “You’re not grateful” or “Well, I heard that you’re immoral.” All of that goes for nothing, and no one should indulge that in The Infinite Way. Accept the responsibility to take over the work and do it, and stand on your work.
If something happens that looks like failure, don’t believe that either, because actually, that which the world calls death itself is not failure. If it were so, then Jesus failed, and Paul, and John, and all of the great spiritual lights, for they have all left this plane of consciousness. No, death is not always a failure. Sometimes the passing from this scene is a part of our very demonstration. You cannot believe that until you begin to catch a vision of what eternal life means and what God unfolding as individual consciousness means. Then you will realize how we rise step by step from infancy to youth, and youth to young manhood and womanhood and maturity and so on, and keep right on and keep right on and keep right on until we keep right on walking out of this plane.
Do not judge after appearances. Do not be too quick. Stephen was stoned to death. That apparently would be considered as a failure. Who is to say that that was a failure for Stephen? … Don’t judge that way. Judge righteous judgment and you may be given to perceive how we evolve from one state of consciousness to another
1 This excerpt is from Recording 225B: 1958 London Closed Class, “Protective Work As It Should Be.” It is posted with kind permission from the Estate of Joel Goldsmith, which holds the copy protection on the recorded classes and the copyright on the transcripts. The full transcript of this recording is available from The Infinite Way Office website or by calling 1-800-922-3195.