The Mystical I
Joel S Goldsmith
The responsibility on your
shoulders is not to go out into the world to teach or preach it because that is
not for you to decide but for God. Your responsibility lies in so living it
that you demonstrate it, and that is all. From there on, the ‘I’ which is your
divine consciousness knows your need and will lead you into your rightful
activity. It will lead you in the way you should go.
… Never seek a student. Share
freely with those who come to you.
Universality of ‘I’
… ‘I’ will be
with you because I am in the midst of you. I am closer to you than breathing.
Because of this
truth, you will never have to transfer thoughts to your patients or students or
to the members of your family. You have only to recognize ‘I’ in the midst them
and trust that ‘I’ to perform to its function.
All-Sufficiency of Divine Grace
The Infinite Way
teaches that you can pray for anything you like as long as it is something
spiritual. This may come as a shock to you, because now you cannot pray for
physical health and you cannot pray for material wealth; you cannot pray for
employment; you cannot pray for happiness; and you cannot pray for a home; you
can pray only for Divine Grace.
… There is a
reason for this. In God there is no time; there is only an eternal now.
Something that is constantly now never changes. It never becomes yesterday or
tomorrow. It is always now, and now there is a sufficiency of God’s grace to
meet the need of this moment.
God is not a mental image
… God is not to
be known but to be experienced.
… God is beyond
knowing. … God is incorporeal, spiritual and therefore God cannot be known with
the mind.
… In the moment
that you have no concept of God – nothing to pray to – when your mind is
completely in a listening attitude, a vessel emptied of all its concepts, then
what is revealed to you through the still small voice becomes visible to you as
the harmony of spiritual living.
It is not only
that you must permit yourself to be emptied of all beliefs that you know God’s
plan, God’s law, or God’s way for you. The moment you take thought and the
moment you have a desire, you set up a selfhood apart from God and thereby
erect a barrier to receiving the Grace of God.
… Since you
cannot know God with the mind, but you do know that, the kingdom of God is
within you, then wherever you are – in the prison of the body, in the prison of
sin, in the prison of disease, or in the prison of poverty – right there go
within and adopt this listening attitude. Then you are in a position to receive
the presence and the grace of the God.
As long as you
have an image of God in thought or as long as you have a desire for God to
fulfill, you yourself are setting up the barrier to your demonstration. It is
not as if there were God and you. It is not as if you had to go somewhere to
find God, or even be good to deserve God.
Through Grace, all of which I
shall have need unto eternity. I and my father being one, ‘I’ is that very God;
not the God to whom I pray for things, but rather the God who knows what things
I have need of.
… by not taking thought, by being
still and by letting the omniscience that I am reveal to you whatever wisdom,
guidance or direction is necessary at this moment. You prove this by being
still in the listening attitude, letting omnipotence prove itself to be the
only power. You prove this by taking no thought for your life or anything that
concerns your life, and letting omnipresence prove omnipresence.
This cannot be done
intellectually. It can be done only through unknowing, through silence. Silence
is your resting place. Silence is your abiding place, your living place. Live
and move and have your being in silence and then the still small voice will
utter itself and live your life.
The moment you take thought you
are living your own life, and your life then becomes limited to a certain
measure of education, environment, circumstances and conditions. As long as you
have no graven image of God in your thought , not praying to a far-off or
close-at-hand God, as you are abiding in ‘I’ – ‘I’ omniscience, ‘I’
omnipresence, ‘I’ omnipotence – then by the grace of God your needs are met.
To pray and have in mind anything
or any condition that you want from God is to create the barrier separating you
from it, because there is no God separate and apart from you, and that ‘you’
has no problems.
… You have come to know God, but
you will not be able to tell your neighbor about it, or your child, your
husband, your wife, or your parents, because that would be trying to bring ‘I’
down to the intellect again, down to the mind.
Perhaps all of us in the past
have loved mother, brother or child more than ‘Me’, more than ‘Truth’. This has
been a barrier. Why? Because that mother, brother, sister or child to whom we
were clinging was not mother, brother, sister or child but an image that we
were carrying in our mind which we believed needed us.
Once you recognize ‘I’ as the
identity of yourself, you will recognize ‘It’ as the identity of mother,
brother, sister, and child and then you can have no fear of releasing them into
their God-identity. The Master never meant that you should abandon your family,
but merely urged you to go up higher in your awareness of what constitutes your
family, and ultimately to realize that God is your only family.
When you realize that God is your
mother, brother, sister or father, that God is your husband, your wife, your
child, the one ‘I’, the one life, then all your fears of them goes, and when
fear goes you have released them into their true identity, into God. Your love
for them is greater; their love for you is greater; the bond is greater; and
the need is less because each finds fulfillment from the divine center within.
Close your eyes, turn within with a listening
ear, and God will reveal itself/ God will reveal His presence in the midst of
you, but you must open out a way: you must empty the vessels already full; you
must enter into the silence with no concepts.
It is as if you were asked to
draw a picture of Mars and you would have to say, “How can I? I’ve never seen
Mars.” Good then turn within, because you be assured that Omniscience, the mind
of God, knows what Mars is like and will reveal it to you if there should be
any occasion for you to know about it.
Nothing is hidden from the mind
of God, which is the mind of man. Any legitimate need of any nature that ever
appears in your experience can be immediately fulfilled as long as you do not
think of it as a material form. Think of it as the grace of God … and then let
that take whatever form it will.
Only when you have come into this
agreement within yourself do you become the child of God. Then you no longer
live by effort, but by Grace. You then inherit your good. You do not labour for
it, strive for it: you inherit it.
This in wise means that you enter
a life of indolence, because once the Spirit of God is upon you, you are called
upon the fulfill God’s mission for you, and that entails more work than you may
have dreamed of. But now it no longer involves striving or struggling and no
longer is there a seeking for things. This is the miracle that changes your
entire concept of prayer, for you no longer pray for the things of this world.
You no longer pray for happiness, for security, or for peace on earth. Your
prayer now is a continuous inner communion with that Spirit which you have
acknowledged.
I dare not pray for success, for
any success separate and apart from the presence of God would be for me
failure. Only in the realization of the presence of God can I find success.
True, when that success appears, it appears outwardly in tangible form as
students, messages, books or whatever it is that is intended for this
experience.
Take all the thought you wish in
doing your work correctly, perfectly, with timeliness and lovingly. Take much
thought about being neighbourly to your friends and to your enemies and take
thought about praying for those enemies. Take thought forgiving seventy times
seven, but take no thought for your own life, for this is the function of the I
that dwells in you.
… It is in meditation that this
glimpse of the spiritual kingdom is given to you, because in meditation you are
not seeking things. You are not seeking health, prosperity, or companionship:
you are seeking the kingdom of God… It might be a momentary glimpse which
leaves you for days and does not return, but if you are really determined to
follow this path you will keep at it until that awareness does return, not once
but again and again. The more often you seek it and the more often you attain
it, the closer you are to that place where you are living more in the kingdom
of God than in the world.
As a matter of fact, my own
experience has been that the further I go, the less use I have of all this good
that has come to me because I am so busy with the work, and so I know that this
has not been given to me to give me leisure which has never come, but rather to
make me light that ma illumine those still in darkness and those who are still
seeking.
As long as there are two states
of consciousness – the material and the spiritual – you will find that there
will be a division or separation from those of your relatives who prefer to
remain in material consciousness even if they are your own children or parents.
You may not move out of their or put them out of your home, but there will be a
wall between you – a wall that means a lack of understanding. And you will
really find that your companionship, your wholeness and oneness, will be with
those of your spiritual household rather than with those of your family
household. To that extent, there will be a separation or division. Such
experiences often take people from the spiritual path. As the Master said, “Few
there be that find it.” Scripture also says, “For many are called, but few are
chosen.”
If, when you close your eyes in
prayer or meditation, you are thinking of people, please remember that you may
be transferring good or evil to them – sometimes evil under the name of good.
But if you really want to be a blessing to this world, to your family, to your
neighbours, or to your students, do not allow human thinking to enter your
mind, because that is the thinking of the little ‘I’, and sometimes with even
the best of intentions it could be wrong. Be still and know that ‘I’ in the
midst of you and God and let that ‘I’ do the work. Then the message or the help
your friend, relative, patient, or student gets will be directly from God. It
will be the Spirit Itself bearing witness with your spirit and there will be
harmony and peace.
… Therefore, even to think or say
that some thing, person or condition is ‘good’ is to permit the carnal mind to
control us. There is only one Being, one Essence, one Power and that is
Consciousness – God. Consciousness is neither good nor evil: It just Is.
For consciousness to be good or
evil, It would have to have an opposite and It would have to have degrees.
There are no opposite in God; there are no degrees in God: God is infinite’ God
is omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient and that leaves no room for opposition,
limitation or finiteness. As we permit limitation and finiteness to operate in
our consciousness, we bring the carnal mind into our experience. The carnal
mind is not overcome by fighting it, but by recognizing that it is made up of
the belief in good and evil.
… So while it is true that
humanly we seem compelled to acknowledge the limitations of good and evil, we
must recognize that consciousness does not embody within Itself quantities or
qualities of good or evil, or of limitation.
Do not try to destroy evil in a
person. Realize the universal nature of the carnal mind and then ‘nothingize’
it. This can be done because God never created evil, and therefore as you
impersonalize and ‘nothingize’ you bring your power, treatment or realization
to a conclusion.
The evil that comes nigh your
dwelling place always personalizes itself. It comes as a sin, as a temptation,
or as false appetite in you or in some other person. It always impersonalize in
‘him’, ‘her’ or ‘you’. Watch it, and you will notice that you never think about
alcoholism: you just think about alcoholic. You never think about
drug-addiction: you think about drug-addict. You never think about the
universal carnal mind: you think about evil man in person, because evil always
comes in a personalized form. It came to Jesus in the form of a devil. It
always personalizes itself, but when Jesus turned on the devil, there was no
devil. It was just a temptation in his mind, and it had to be met in his mind.
When you learn to impersonalize
evil, you do not have to call upon a God-power. You can accept God as
omnipotence, but only if you can see so-called evil appearances as ‘maya’ or
illusion, and thus not try to get God to do something to them. When you can do
this, you are in spiritual wisdom. Then you can say to the blind man, “Open
thine eyes.” The moment you try to get a God-power to do something for the
blind, however you have lost the demonstration.
… The spirituality illumined know
that there is need to call on God for anything because God is always about His
business. He does not have to be reminded, directed, or pleaded with.
The minute you have an image of
God in your thought, you are personalizing, and you are expecting that concept
to be God, and a concept cannot be God… Once this truth has been unveiled for
you, it will never be veiled for you again. You will never be able to go back
to making concepts of God or looking for God to do something to the nothingness
and non-power of this world of effect.
You must learn to live as if
there were no yesterdays, as if there had been no mistakes yesterday and no
sins yesterday. You have to live as if yesterday had passed. Just as you mark
off the date on your calendar or pull off the sheet of the month gone by and
throw it into the waste basket, so do you have to tear up your entire past
consciously and actively and live as if today were the only day given you to
live. If you try to relive yesterday, you will be reliving its mistakes and
errors, so you might as well make up your mind to let bygones be bygones. Let
yesterday go, and live as if this were the day the Lord had made, and no other.
A branch cannot bear fruit of
itself. A branch can bear fruit only by virtue of its oneness with its source.
I of my own self can do nothing: but my turning within, the Father instructs,
feeds, guides, directs and protects me, goes before me, walks beside me and
behind me, above and beneath, for this I that is within me is omnipresence.
Whenever a problem arises in your
experience or the experience of others who turn to you for help, do not try to
search in your mind for a solution to the problem, because then you are looking
for a human solution or a human working out of the problem. Instantly turn away
from the problem in the realization that this ‘I’ within is Spirit and it is
this Spirit that is the solution to all problems.
Wait in your meditation until you
have the feeling of this presence and then release the problem to ‘It’ and let
it go. Do not dwell in the problem. Instead see in what way ‘I’, the Spirit
within you, will solve the problem. ‘I’ will go out and do whatever work is
necessary for you to do, work which you could not outline, which you could
never conceive of, and which you could never believe.
As we release sinners from the responsibilities
for their sins, the sinners that we ourselves are, are released from our sins
of omissions and commission.
On the spiritual, the goal is the
attaining of conscious union with that self. This requires a ‘dying daily’ to
human part of us, the outer part and being reborn as this true identity;
‘dying’ to the limited sense of self and being reborn into or as our perfected
Self, the Christ-Self.
If I go into meditation thinking
of myself or of a human being whom I would like to heal, enrich or make happy,
then I am back in the metaphysical world and even in the psychological or
psychiatric world that has as its goal improving a human being , which
improvement usually is not permanent. But if I am on the spiritual path, I go
within and drop that human self, that human sense of ‘I’, and refuse to make
any attempt to improve it, heal it, correct it, purify it, or enrich it. I
ignore the appearances and abide in this ‘I’.
Throughout this meditation, I
have let that other ‘I’ with its problems die, drop out of my consciousness,
and if I persist in this, one day it will not come back again.
We are not attempting to improve our
neighbours; we are not attempting to make them better persons. That is why we
do not proselyte and try to give them what we may think is a better religion.
When anything goes wrong in our experience,
it is because we are out of tune with its rhythm.
Illumination carries a price:
leave the world, leave mother, brother, sister and father if necessary for ‘my’
sake.
As long as we continue to live as
human beings, there is no setting aside of karmic law, even if we were to wait
ten generations. Karmic law, however is set aside in any given moment when we
return to the rhythm of the universe by bringing ourselves into attunement
with, and by obedience to, the two great commandments: “Love the lord thy God
with all thy heart and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind,” and “Love thy
neighbour as thyself”. Loving God and loving our neighbour have nothing
whatsoever to do with any emotion.
Learn to refrain from asking or
telling God or demanding anything of God. It means to observe silence in the
presence of God. The only form of prayer acceptable to God is absolute silence,
a relaxing and a resting in the conviction of God as Omniscience, Omnipotence
and Omnipresence. To bring forth the grace of God, the glory and the perfection
of God, it is necessary to be still, so that in that stillness the rhythm of
the universe can flow forth as harmony.
We are not going to receive God’s
grace for any personal purpose or use, but that it is for the benefit of all.
No one can channel God’s love to this nation or that nation, to this family or
that family, to this person or that person. God’s love cannot be channeled:
God’s love is for the unjust as well as the just.
There must be a ‘you’ and ‘me’
sitting at the feet of the Master, but sitting where at the feet of the Master?
Sitting inside our own consciousness , in silence, in secrecy, telling no man
what we are doing, and there receiving the bread, the wine, the meat, the
water, the word. Silently, sacredly, secretly, not to be seen of men, not to
act outwardly as if we were other than all men, but inwardly always sitting at
the feet of the Master, let our prayer be, “Speak Lord; for thy servant
heareth.” The effect of this prayer is that the Lord does not tell us our
faults, but the Lord dissolves them.
The ‘unveiling’ comes in that
moment of your decision to awaken in the morning with God, to fall asleep at
night with God, and to determine that every minute of every day you will walk
with God and let God walk in you and through you.
That is the goal, and the means
of attaining this goal is the attentive ear, the listening ear. You are walking
with God and living with and in God only as you learn to keep an open ear
throughout your waking and sleeping hours. For a while it may be necessary to
open your ears, the very last thing at night and say, “Speak Lord, for thy
servant heareth,” and then sleep when you fall asleep this way, your body and
mind are at rest, but you yourself are awake. You will then be receiving
thoughts throughout the night just as consciously as you do throughout the day.
It is not that you do anything.
You do not have to go out on any good-will missions or save-the-world missions,
but wherever you are and whomever you meet, there will be the flicker of an
eyelash, a second of recognition, and you will have lifted up the son of God in
man.
Name of the Book: The Mystical I
Author: Joel S. Goldsmith
Publisher: Acropolis Books
