The Mystical I

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

The Mystical I