Joel taught that rising in consciousness to realized Christhood is not ultimately for our own benefit, but the means to uplift the consciousness of mankind universally and dispel the ignorance of truth that is at the root of all human trouble. He spoke often about how we as individuals can be an influence in bringing that freedom to the world.
The following excerpt is from Recording 180A, from the 1957 Kailua Advanced Class, titled “Individual Identity and Responsibility.” It is posted with kind permission from the Estate of Joel S. Goldsmith.
Now, part of this prophetic work of The Infinite Way came to fruition in New York in March where we formed our first group of twenty-five students who undertook a spiritual prayer activity—secretly, sacredly—not for themselves, not for their patients, and not for their students, but for the world.
And then I made a trip to England, Holland, Sweden, Germany, Switzerland, Africa and Australia, and in every one of those places left groups like the one that started in New York. That one in New York, incidentally, is not a New York group. Those twenty-five students are spread across the entire United States and Canada. And now they are spread around the globe, and their work is in this wise: They devote three periods of meditation every day to the realization of the Christ, not for themselves, nor their families, nor their community, nor their patients, nor their students, but merely for a realization of the activity of the Christ in human consciousness dispelling the mesmerism of human sense and revealing the activity of spiritual power.
You see there is no limit, no confine, no personal gain, no selfishness in those three periods of meditation that are being conducted by these groups. Not one of them seeking a thing for themselves or even for their communities or nations, but a complete realization of the Christ in its function of dispelling these mesmeric influences of hate, envy, greed, jealousy, malice, sin, disease, death, and lack, and revealing the activity of the Spirit and its harmonies in human consciousness.
Now it would be presumptuous at this time to tell you that this program has had a measure of success because you might have the right to ask for proof. And the proof that I could offer you might well be just circumstantial and not proof at all. But I would like to say this to you: That when one of these students was in this activity of prayer at three o’clock one afternoon—impersonal, universal Christ realization—the next day the newspapers reported that a man who had been blind ten years, totally blind for ten years, was walking from his office to his home, and in that hour he saw something red and opened his eyes and had his perfect vision and still has perfect vision, and complete vision. He can’t account for it. He has no way of knowing why because he was not under any treatment for it. There he was.
And in another city where this activity was taking place, a five-year old child was dying with leukemia, and one hour later, the doctor found the child completely restored to health with its complete blood count, and has asked the newspapers in that vicinity to please state that he did not cure that child. Otherwise people would be under the impression that he had found a cure, and he would be receiving demands from all over the country, and he has no cure. He was treating the child the same as he had been treating all other children that came to him with the same claim, and all of them had died under the treatment.
Now, I say to you frankly, you might call these coincidences, except that there are other instances, not quite as dramatic, but just as clearly evident as a direct response to that activity. Only this morning I have a letter from a mother … saying that on visiting the hospital where her child is confined as a mongoloid baby, she found it awake and wanting to know about the twenty-third Psalm! More coincidence probably, except that that mother had contacted us for that child and the work that had been done was not specific treatment work, but that very impersonal realization, and it had only been done once. There were no continued treatments or anything of that kind.
Now, I bring you through a long, long story to lead you up to this basic, and I might say foundation principle of The Infinite Way, which is that God is individual consciousness. God is the mind of you, the consciousness of you and of every individual. And wherever that truth is realized, God is on the scene to perform Its healing ministry, Its reforming and rejuvenating ministry.