Hawaii Hotel Talk February 10, 1963

Original Unedited Hawaii Hotel Talk, Corrected From Edited Consciousness Transformed

February 10, 1963 The Halekulani Hotel Honolulu, Hawaii

Are there any questions from the tape that you heard this morning? Are there any points that need clarifying? I know it was a very important tape. (1960 Denver Closed Class: Advanced Spiritual Healing Class: Protective Work.)

Question: I am interested in what you said about the Christian attitude towards business. You said that John Wanamaker of Philadelphia started pricing at a set price and that this was a Christian way of doing business. Can you explain?

Answer: There isn’t anyone in the world who is not affected by business. When we speak of the right way of doing business, we speak of business on the basis of the Golden Rule, on the Christian-conducted basis.

Before Wanamaker, no store ever had a set price. Everything was bargaining ability, so at first he very nearly went bankrupt. People saw the price tags and then started to bargain. At first, when they were told there was to be no bargaining, they walked out.

The closer you get to a spiritual way of conducting business, the more just and equitable a type of business would be conducted. In this present era, business is about as un-Christian as it could be; we have reverted to cutthroat business. Once you start humanly manipulating prices, you will find a hundred ways of manipulating them. Very few people are paying a fair price for the merchandise they buy; they are either paying too much or too little. The same thing is true in the stock market where some stocks are too high or too low.

It all also comes down to this: that individually we may attempt to live our lives in accord with a principle but not be permitted to while we are in an era like this where prices are determined by outside factors. If it is the law, then we have to conform to it. That is unfortunate for those who would like to live by principles. However, it would not prevent an individual’s spiritual development. Everything takes place in consciousness, not what you do externally.

A person on the spiritual path has no right to be in military service. But if he refuses he commits a worse crime, for in so doing he is asking someone else to do it for him. That is the point that is overlooked. A conscientious objector, by his very attitude, is harming two people-himself and the person who has to replace him. The Bhagavad Gita has a good passage on that: “He who shall say, ‘Lo! I have slain a man!’ He who shall think, ‘Lo, I am slain,’ those both know naught. Life cannot slay. Life is not slain.”

So it is that in our business lives very often we have to do things outwardly which are the custom, things which in our inner hearts we do not agree to. But we are judged not by what we may have to do outwardly, but what we feel in our hearts. In our business life just as in our home life, we are always facing the situation of doing that which comes nearest right, and that would certainly not include shifting the burdens to the shoulders of others. We are having the same situation in international relationships. A certain attitude would be the Christian one, but we cannot take that course. However, anything done externally is the “suffer it to be so now.” In fact, most of our home conduct is on the basis of “suffer it to be so now.” But the important question is, how do we take it inwardly? We cannot judge by what is right or wrong, but by our attitude.

If you heard this morning’s tape aright, it must have been indelibly impressing itself upon you that whatever value there is to the message of The Infinite Way, whatever power is in it, is in this point: that there is only One – that you are never using one power over another, nor are you protecting yourself from a power. Your protection is the realization of your Self as the only power. However, there are points in that that could fool the select. We make the statement that God is the only power, and that could fool us unless we realize that the God we are talking about is the I or our own being. There is no such thing as a God protecting us. The I of us is the power and there is nothing to be protected from. That is why I go back so often to the 1955 Letters, Chapter 3. It is very important.

There is no God protecting us because there is nothing to be protected from. If you want to be free, you have to leave this world and get into God’s kingdom. Only in proportion as you can recognize the impersonal, universal nature of error and then realize it as a nonpower, only then are you protected and only then actually can you do healing work. There is no God and a disease. There is only God, and everything that happens to us as sin, disease, lack or limitation represents an appearance, and the recognition destroys the appearance. “Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.” In the presence of God there is liberty. In the presence of light there is no darkness. Darkness is merely the absence of light. There is no entity called darkness. In the same way there is no entity called disease or sin. So it is you don’t heal sin or disease or false appetite – they are illusory concepts. The illusory concept is always in mind; there is no such thing as an externalized illusion. When you know the truth, the illusory concept is gone, but nothing is really gone with it. Sin or lack don’t go anywhere, you have merely proved they were not there.

It is on this point that many metaphysicians go off the beam, and this is the point they go off on, that God is a power they are going to use over error. God-power in an individual is in direct proportion to the individual’s realization that God constitutes individual being and that it is always functioning and never has to be used, never has to be sent to Mrs. Brown or Mrs. Smith. The truth always has to be is-ness, I-ness, divine being as being individual being, and all else is an illusion of sense. The moment we start to do battle with it we lose the case. “Not by might nor by power but by the truth. Resist not evil.” This statement alone would be enough to transform your life.

The Master must have discerned that evil had no power, that nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so. It is not your thinking, however. The wrong thinking is the universal belief, but you have the power individually to correct it. It is individually met. The moment you accuse your patient of wrong thinking, you are a malpractitioner. In spite of appearances, the individual is constituted of God and whatever inharmony is evident is due to the belief in two powers. “Knowing of the truth,” it is necessary to realize, “The place whereon I stand is holy ground,” and this is in spite of appearances, because God constitutes my being. This is the truth that constitutes the light, and in the light there is no darkness.

When facing each new day we should realize that we are facing the universal beliefs of the world and nullify them in the realization that “God constitutes individual being. Beside God there is no other, and any belief in a power apart from God is a mental illusion. The place whereon I stand is holy ground.”

In ancient days they had God and devil, and as you know, that never saved anybody. Then the philosophers, refusing to accept God and the devil, impersonalized it and then they had good and evil. And even when the metaphysicians came up with mortal and immortal, they still had God and devil, just substituting names. There is only God, and what appears as Satan or devil is the illusory sense. When you know this, you are grounded on a rock. See devil or evil or mortal as terms denoting nothingness, as Mrs. Eddy called them, and then drop it. If you keep on arguing with the appearance, you are involved in it.

Not only is one power of major importance, but that power must not be something external to you. That power must be the Self of you, the identity of you. Otherwise you again have duality: God and you. No, we have God expressing as you, God manifesting himself as you, God expressing himself as you, not you expressing yourself as God. And this is always universal in spite of any appearances to the contrary.

The same thing is true if you have a duality based on spirit and matter. When you see that spirit is the substance of all being, then you do not have one power acting on another, you have spirit appearing as what the world calls matter. Matter is indestructible; even if you burn it up you have the same amount of matter as you had before. Nothing is indestructible but God. Therefore, all that constitutes matter is indestructible and indivisible.

If you catch this point, you will realize why health is not in the body or of the body. Health is in spirit manifested as body. The body is a form and there is no health in it. The health of the body is the health of spirit. So until we look to spirit for health, harmony, intelligence, we are looking amiss. Intelligence is omnipresence, so is health omnipresence because intelligence and health are qualities or activities of spirit. The spirit is the creative principle of man and his body.

Many of the Eastern teachings miss the mark because they all look on the body as matter and themselves as spirit. Once you separate spirit from body in your mind, it is like separating yourself from God. God must function in every avenue of life. “Acknowledge him in all thy ways.” If we leave God out of any of our ways, we separate ourselves in belief from God and then this belief governs us. The body may be matter as a name, but body is not worthless because it had its origin in God. The body is not an illusion; the mortal concept of body is the illusion. The body itself is “temple of the living God.”

You see how it is that the word consciousness sums up everything in our work. It is what you are conscious of that operates in your experience as a law. “Ye shall know the truth,” and then the truth functions as a law. Come out and be separate – give up ignorance and superstitions. “I and my Father are one,” but I am taking my body right along with me. Whatever my body is, and remember I cannot see my body, I want to take it with me wherever I go. Never permit yourself to become separated from God in any way. Have God as omnipresence. Realize, “God constitutes my being and my body. God constitutes my business for I and my Father are one. The body of God is the body of me, for there is but one body.”

The law of God that governs the universe must govern our business and our bodies, or there would be something outside the jurisdiction of God’s law. As long as we hold to the consciousness that the law of God is the law of my business, whatever is erroneous will be corrected. This same principle applies to the body and health, but if we do not consciously bring the body and business under the law of God, so it will be unto us. Everything must be consciously realized. You must consciously know that the law of God is the law of your business, intelligence, health, household. What you take into your consciousness becomes the law unto your experience. Salvation is individual. To get free of universal law you must embrace truth and this means dying daily. Every day we have to make truth a part of our consciousness.

This path is not a lazy man’s work because we are continually faced with appearances and the appearance of universal belief, and every day we are called upon to reject them as illusion and replace them with: “Spirit is the law unto me and in spirit I find completeness. I find my wholeness in spirit and the wholeness of spirit constitutes the wholeness of my body and business.”

Humanly we are man of earth, made up of all the universal beliefs; but from the moment of our first metaphysical experience, we are making a transition from the man of earth to being “that man who has his being in Christ.” In my Sonship I find my abundance. In my Sonship I am heir of God. But the transition has to be a conscious experience. “Consciously I know that I and my Father are one, that the quantities and qualities of God constitute my individual being. Consciously I know that I have my good in Christ.”

You see, there are these major points in The Infinite Way and their importance is not in the fact that they are in a book, but that they may become active and alive in you. The degree in which you embody these truths in your consciousness makes you free. “Ye shall know the truth,” and the truth you do not know is not going to make you free.

Joel S. Goldsmith