A: And so let us start right there: “If ye abide in me… let my words abide in you.”2 This means that if you abide in truth; if you know the truth; then the truth will make you free. But this knowing of the truth cannot be just at a moment when you are faced with a discord or disaster. It is folly to believe that we can pick a truth out of the air just in a moment of need and then wait for the next disaster to come before reaching for another one. This is making an aspirin tablet out of truth.
To abide in the truth means to live in the truth, and you don’t live for an hour. Living is a lifetime activity. You live 24 hours of every day. Therefore you must live in the truth; you must abide in the truth and let the truth abide in you 24 hours of every day. Dwell in the truth. You can’t dwell any place for an hour. Dwelling is a lifetime job, just as living is.
Now, the question is: “What is truth and how do we abide in it?” And there, of course, you have certain statements or principles which have been revealed as truth, and these are the principles we abide in when faced with any contrary appearance. Now to understand this, you must understand that we are dealing with a world of lies. For instance, the truth is that God is Spirit, and God is infinite, and God is power. Therefore, God is infinite spiritual power; therefore, there can be no other power. Now this is the truth. But the lie, the appearance, the tempter that we meet every day is that weather is a power; that the stock market index is a power; that the economic level is a power; that infection and contagion is a power; that epidemic is a power; that the evil that exists in the minds of men, tyrants, politicians, whatnot—that this is power.
This is the temptation. This is the tempter. This is the lie. This is the appearance with which every single one of us is faced, including Jesus Christ in his ministry, when he had to face the tempter in the wilderness and had to face the tempter in Gethsemane, and had to face the tempter in the poverty and in the disease and in the deaths of his followers.
Now, granting that these temptations exist—these appearances which we call discords, inharmonies, evils—to know the truth means that wherever these negative or erroneous appearances touch us, whether we see them, hear them, taste them, touch them, or smell them, our immediate realization is: “God is Spirit. God is power. All power is spiritual. There is no physical or mental power.” Then, by this knowing of the truth, you have nullified the appearance. You have nullified the belief in two powers, which is the source of that appearance.
Remember, we can go back, if we like, and discover the original source of all evil in the world. The religious world has ignored this for reasons of which we have no knowledge because it dates back so far. But I’m sure that most of you, especially those of you who have had a church training, have been taught that the source of evil, the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, had to do with sex; that the fall of man had to do with sex.
And I may state to you right now, definitely and positively and absolutely, that there isn’t and never was a word of truth in that. The Bible itself is authority for the fact that the source of evil is accepting the belief of two powers, eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of two powers. And the moment you accept two powers—a good power and an evil power—you are automatically expelled from the Garden of Eden. Therefore, at the moment of your conception, at that very moment, if you had been in Eden before, you were expelled in that moment because the universal belief in two powers, accepted by your parents, operated as your consciousness. So you came into this world accepting the belief in two powers, and from the time you were an infant, you were brought up with “Be careful of this,” and “Watch out for that,” and “This is good for you,” and “This is bad for you,” all based on the original source of evil—the belief in two powers.
Even before you have an inner realization or revelation, in the very instant that you accept—even intellectually—that there cannot be an infinite God and some other power, from that moment on, you are lessening the power of evil in your experience, because it is this universal belief in two powers that appears to you as a desire for sin, or a desire for false appetite, or unemployment, or infection, or contagion. That is why in our work we do not treat effects. To treat an effect would make of us a form of materia medica. Whether on the material or mental level, it would still be materia medica if we treated it from the standpoint of the effect. In our work, we do not concern ourselves with the effect. You may say that it’s heart or liver or lungs or paralysis or insanity, but that is nothing to us because we know where it originated, how it started, and how it can be stopped.
It started in a universal belief in two powers. This belief in two powers is so widespread that it is virtually hypnotic, and it appears in infinite forms. It appears to one as continuous poverty, and to another as continuous disease, and to another as unhappy human relationships. But behind every single bit of it is this belief in two powers.
Now, the very moment that you know this truth that God is Spirit, and therefore the only power is spiritual power, and that which is universally accepted as material or mental power is non-power, you begin the eradication of sin, disease, death, lack and limitation, or old age in your experience, because there isn’t even an aging process in the world. Even the aging process is one of human belief, and you can begin to nullify that when you’re sixteen years of age if you like, or twenty or thirty or fifty or eighty. But at any moment that you begin to realize there cannot be an immortal life and an aging process; there cannot be the power of eternal life and the power of an aging process; you have begun to eliminate the aging process from your mind, the only place that it exists.
Now, in this same way, every one of us every day is confronted with a claim, a belief, an appearance, of law. It may be some law of matter. It may be some mental law just like infection and contagion is a law—or the product of a law—and epidemics are products of law. If you understand God to be the lawgiver, the only law there can be is a spiritual law, and your realization of this immediately begins to nullify what is called material and mental law…
Ah, yes! Let me interrupt myself to remind you that we do not know the truth about man in our work. We do not know the truth about you. We do not know the truth about a human being. Our prayer and treatment work is knowing the truth about Truth; knowing the truth about God. Therefore, if God is Spirit, and if God is the lawgiver, then the only real law must be a spiritual law, and this, of course, must be a law of life, continuity, immortality, eternality; a law of resurrection. As you know this truth, this universal belief of two laws or three laws, material laws and mental laws, is dissolved in your consciousness. A thousand may still fall at your left, and ten thousand at your right. It will not come nigh your dwelling place if you are knowing this truth.
And so it is then, as you go through the entire scope of our writings, you will find how, in every walk of life, in every phase of life, you are being confronted with “twoness” or duality, meaning a belief in two powers, two selves, two lives, two strata of existence. And yet the truth is “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One,”3 and that One is Spirit. That One is infinite. That One is Omnipresence, Omniscience, Omnipotence, and there is none besides this One, God, infinite Good.
Now as I have said, this belief in two powers, because of its universal nature, is so powerful that it acts hypnotically, and Paul, in summing up the nature of the one evil that confronts all of us, called it “the carnal mind.” And we sometimes use that term—“the carnal mind.” And by that term we mean this universal belief in two powers. We don’t mean that there is an actual mind called a carnal mind. There is no such thing. But just to shorten this “universal belief in two powers,” we call it “the carnal mind.” It can be called “mortal mind,” which means the same thing. It means a universal belief in a power which isn’t a power.
In other words, when you see mortal mind or carnal mind, not as an enemy; not as something to be overcome or destroyed; not as something you have to protect yourself from; but when you see carnal mind or mortal mind as a universal belief in two powers, and you don’t believe in two powers, you have already overcome the carnal mind and its effects, at least in the degree of your realization.
1 This excerpt is from Recording400A: 1961 San Diego Special Class, “The Essence of The Infinite Way.” 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.
2 John 15:7.
3 Deuteronomy 6:4.