Hawaii Hotel Talk March 17, 1963

Original Unedited Hawaii Hotel Talk, Corrected From Edited Consciousness Transformed

March 17, 1963

Halekulani Hotel

You may have noticed that it takes several years after you receive a spiritual idea or principle before it is yours, and before you can demonstrate it. This is normal, this is natural, and it would be folly to expect anything different. It has been so with every one of us. We hear a spiritual principle and we read it. In fact we read it over and over again, and we hear it on tapes or in lectures or classes, and therefore we think that we know it and wonder why we cannot demonstrate it. But remember that this is normal and natural and true of each of us.

Even principles that have come through my own lips have really not become mine until several years later. Even though they come through my own consciousness, they did not register at the time in a demonstrable degree. It was years later before I could say, “Whereas I was blind, now I see. Whereas before I could voice it, now it is an incorporated part of me. Now I can live it.”

One of these principles is one that you heard this morning and one that you will find in most of my writings, and that is the tree of life . Usually I have used this example: Imagine a tree in the middle of this room, and then visualize each one of us attached to that tree as a branch. Then you will notice that we are all being fed from the same Source. The sap that comes up through the trunk of the tree, the life that is flowing up through the trunk, this feeds and sustains and nourishes us and each of us draws from the same Source. Now the meaning of this is that there is actually an invisible Tree in this room. There is actually an invisible Thread connecting us to the trunk of that Tree. That Tree is the spiritual Tree of Life and each one of us, by an invisible Thread or Bond is united to this Tree of Life. We are maintained, sustained, guided, directed, illumined from the same Source, the life or sap that flows up through the roots into the trunk and out into each branch.

Now, if you were to use this as the subject of a meditation, you would note first of all that this life is not in the tree or the roots. It flows first from the surrounding soil, and actually it is the sunshine and the rain and the snow and the winds that pour into and over the earth that forms that sap that runs up and out through the branches. And so it is this invisible Tree, through its roots, draws from God the substance of God, the laws of God, the life of God. All of this flows through the roots of this invisible Tree, up through the branches, and out into you and me.

As you continue your meditation, you will say, “What about my employment? What about my parents? What about my husband? What about my inheritance? Am I not drawing from them?” No, they are branches on the same tree, and one branch does not draw from another branch. Every branch is drawing through the trunk, through the roots, from God. It does not take too many such meditations to give you a clear picture of this relationship to God by virtue of being a branch of the Tree, and it takes only a little while longer to realize our relationship to each other, because of our relationship to the Tree.

But the disappointing thing is that, even after you realize it and live with it for awhile, you do not seem to demonstrate it. That is normal and that is natural. There is another step and that is called realization. That is when this illustration strikes you so forcibly, usually at some time when you are not thinking about it, that it registers in your spiritual Center and from then on you begin to live it. You can observe now the forms of good that are coming to you from other sources – new activities and new talents.

I have told the experience of a mother and daughter who attended my work in a city and who, after I left town, began to write songs. One wrote the words and the other wrote the music, and before the year was over, they had four songs being played on radio throughout the nation. This was the fruitage of their becoming consciously one with their source. Then some talent they had and knew nothing about, came alive. Aside from being a new activity, it also proved to be a source of income.

When we have the realization of this relationship to God and to each other, we find that there are people beginning to play parts in our lives who not only never had before, but probably there was no human reason for them to do so. Humanly we may have no relationship with each other, but spiritually there is this bond. When you see it in this way, you never receive anything from anyone without heartfelt thanks to them as an instrument, but neither do you forget to look further and see that it came to you by virtue of the spiritual Bond.

Your individual contact with God makes me an instrument of bringing Truth to you. It is not my will – I have only received instruction to speak or write It – but do you know who hears It? Those who have a longing to know God, those who have a longing to know Truth, those who even unconsciously have made some contact with their Source. They are then drawn to me and I am but the instrument or transparency. You must know this, that It is coming to you only because of your oneness with your Source.

One of the greatest causes of unhappiness in the human world is that we have human obligations and usually those who receive from us, and I am speaking humanly, begin to resent it. And sometimes, because of an obligation, whose who are doing the giving also begin to resent it. This is natural for the human race.

All of this changes when you realize that you are no longer the giver or the receiver, and that whatever you are pouring forth is really coming forth from the Father and you are only the transfer agent or transparency. This brings about the greatest release in the entire human experience. The moment we release everybody, including our family, from obligations and realize, “You owe me nothing but love, for I and my Father are one,” and then we come to a realization in which we never give for human reason. We give only for the joy of sharing. In turn the other receives, not because of an obligation, but because of their awareness that it is a mutual flow and not the result of a human obligation. It is literally true that we are to owe no man anything but love, nor are we to hold anyone in obligation to us except through love – freewill sharing.

Now all of this is dependent on your ability to realize the nature of the Tree of Life, and your oneness with It. Therefore, since you know this with your mind at least meditate on it as often as may be necessary for you. Make it the subject of a conscious meditation until the light breaks and you can say, “Ah, before I heard it with my ears, but now I know it in my Soul. Now I can live it.” You see, this example of the Tree of Life and our oneness with It has undoubtedly been a part of my Consciousness for a longer time than I can remember, but it was only in 1947 or 1948 when the words came out of my Consciousness, “My conscious oneness with God constitutes my oneness with all spiritual being and idea.” Only then did it actually register, because then I saw that the only tie I have to anyone, and the only bond there is between me and anyone else, is that Bond that has arisen because all of us are one with the Source. It makes no difference whether the relationship is man and wife, parent and child, next door neighbor or neighbor in its universal sense, every one of us has a spiritual Bond with each other. Therefore, we owe it to each other to share with each other such as we have. With some our sharing will be silver and gold, with some our sharing will be other kindnesses, bestowings, cooperation; but with every one with whom we come in contact in life, and those we never meet, we have a spiritual Bond.

Since each of us is individual in our expression of God, I draw unto me men and women throughout the world who are also interested in the spiritual Path. Some are beginners on the Path and some are already Masters, but they come within my orbit, because that is my particular way of showing forth God. Another may be a musician, and he will draw unto himself whatever is necessary for his musical welfare, whether it be teachers or students or opportunities. Regardless of what your particular nature may be, lawyer, doctor, teacher, architect, designer, the realization of your oneness with your Source and the realization that, thereby, you are one with all spiritual being and idea, will draw unto you everyone and everything necessary to your particular unfoldment.

In the human way, they go about demonstrating this differently. They advertise, or they go around looking up this person or that person, this thing or that thing. There is always effort and struggle, but in the spiritual way, harmony is accomplished without might and without power – just by knowing  this Truth.

There are, in The Infinite Way writings, many, many principles of life. No one of us can demonstrate all of them, but if we live with them and take them into meditation, those necessary for our experience will reveal themselves to us. If you should wonder why time is an element, let me show you this. Suppose you had been brought up in some church and taught that if you were good, God would reward you, and if you were not good according to some particular standard of the church, you would be punished. Then you open an Infinite Way book, and you read that “God is too pure to behold iniquity.” Do you think for a moment that this would mean anything to you? No. No, it would take years and years of study before the realization would dawn that God does not reward or punish. That is why time is an element. How many years we read metaphysical literature and still reach out to God to do something for us or for someone else, as if God were not the all knowing mind and we had to direct God where to carry His blessings. No, it takes years of reading Infinite Way books before that image would get out of our mind and you could accept the higher concept.

You have seen how many years it has taken before you could pray without words and without thoughts. Why? Because it has been grounded in you that you had to have words and thoughts in order to go to God. Nothing could be further from the truth, and everyone must eventually learn this. Otherwise, you are not “knowing God aright.”

Perhaps you have noticed in The Infinite Way literature how many times we repeat Omniscience, Omnipotence, Omnipresence. And probably by now, when you see those words, you hurry past them because you think you know them – but of course, you really do not know them at all – you know only the words without the inner meaning. But when the meaning dawns, then you can close your eyes because, by the time you know those three words, you have become a receptivity or transparency for God, and you then play no more a part in prayer than a pane of glass plays in letting sunshine into the room. In its nothingness, the pane of glass is a clear transparency.

Supposing there was a threat of danger to us here and now from any direction – an epidemic, a threatened war or any threatened danger, and we were to select someone to lead the prayer for us. Would that someone know what we needed or how God could save us? Of course not. No one could possibly know in what way God would answer our prayer to be saved. Therefore, do you not see that the effective prayer would be to close the eyes, open the ears, and just “let God in.” Then God, in his Mysterious way, would provide the cloud by day, or light by night, or open the Red Sea, or throw an invisible concrete shelter over this room. Do you see that prayer in its highest sense is not possible to a person who does not know the nature of God and the nature of man’s relationship to God. Do you see that the effect of prayer can only be if I know that “Where God is I am,” and it makes no difference if it is on a battlefield or in the midst of disease? I am one with God and therefore, by opening Consciousness, God can come through. In the Master’s revelation, He speaks of God as “the Father” and as “the Father within.” The reason is that Hebrew scripture looked on God as Father, and evidently Jesus knew what this meant. None of us in this modern world knows what Jesus meant in speaking of God as Father. None of us has any idea what Father means because Father means nothing like a human father. And so we merely pay lip service when we speak of God as Father.

In the Orient, more especially in India, God is thought of as the Self of us, and always with a capital “S.” And, since there is only one Self, that Self is the Self of each of us. It is very difficult to understand that, because the moment we say “self,” we think of our human identity and Self has no relationship to that. It is for this reason that it would be well if we would take into meditation the word “God,” and see if we do not receive a revelation of what God is. Not all of us will arrive at the same meaning, but we will all arrive at the same Identity of nature. When Jesus received his higher revelation, it was shared only with his disciples, not with his followers. He spoke of God as "I"  or "I Am,"  and he said “I am the way,” meaning God is the way, “I am the bread,” meaning God is the bread. Many people have decided they were God and have written books to this effect. But Jesus did not mean this. He meant that I  am God, and this is quite different.

It can be that you may receive a revelation within yourself that would absolutely clarify the “Self” or “The Father within” or the "I Am."    If not, you would receive another revelation. You might not be able to reveal it, but you would have had the experience yourself, and you would then know .

The point of all this is this: Never forget that God is , and meditate and meditate on some relative subject until you discern your relationship to God, and thereby, your relationship to everybody and everything of a spiritual nature. This must be the basis for your spiritual development, because without this, the subject of prayer and the livingness of spiritual principles cannot be made plain to you.

It is only now that some people in the world are beginning to agree that the life revealed by Christ Jesus is the most practical way of living. Once a minister wrote a series of sermons on living according to the principles revealed by the Master. The book you all perhaps know, In His Steps  by the Reverend Sheldon. Possibly more copies of that book have been sold outside of Shakespeare or the Bible, but it has never been tried. People love to read it, but say that it is so impractical. But we are beginning to see how practical it is if the intellectual reading or knowledge is followed by realization.

Yes, we must have the spiritual revelation or realization of oneness with God and all spiritual being and idea, but it cannot be made demonstrable by those who merely know it with their mind. Yet it becomes the most practical thing in the world when the truth of it has been spiritually discerned. Once you have an actual revelation or realization that “I and the Father are one. All that the Father hath is mine, and by reason of my oneness with God, I am one with everybody who is one with God,” at that moment of realization you never again have an anxious thought about the future. Then you are actually living such passages as “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every Word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.” From then on the only thought you take is to hear the next Word of God, and then the next Word of God, and then the next Word of God, because every Word of God is the Bread and the Meat and the Wine and the Water of Life.

But do you not see that having faith in God will not do it for you? No, no, no. It has to be a realization or revelation within you. One such revelation opens up the whole Bible to you, opens up all spiritual Truth to you, and then you find one Truth after another coming into Consciousness. Therefore, do not get impatient with yourself if you read or hear statements of spiritual Truth and cannot demonstrate them. That is natural. It takes time for them to register in our Consciousness, and it takes time to wipe out the past images of God and prayer with which we were brought up.

But be sure that at least one of your daily meditations will have something to do with the nature of God and the nature of prayer. Or take the passage, “Man shall not live by bread alone but by every Word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.” In your meditation you will ask your inner Self, “What does it mean – bread  ?” You will soon perceive that it means you do not live by any effect, you do not live by any outer things. No, they are the added things when once you hear that still small Voice, the Word of God. Then you will discover, and this is the great secret the world does not know, that it is literally a fact that when you begin to receive the Word of God within you, that It becomes the substance of every outer experience. It is a literal fact that every individual who comes to where the still small Voice is heard, where the Word of God comes in, from then on you live by That – not by the outer forms. It is the still small Voice, or the Word of God, that produces all these nice outer experiences. Intellectually you can agree that we live by the Word of God or by the still small Voice, but you cannot demonstrate it intellectually. No, It takes you to that point where there is an inner response that says, “This is It,” or it makes you feel that, “This is It.”

Just remember that both the Christian faith and the Buddhist faith have for their foundation the loving of God and the loving of your neighbor as your self, and remember that one-half of the world believes this. Now look around the world and see how little it is lived. The reason is that the intellectual acceptance is not the answer. There must be this inner experience, this inner click or light or Something that lets you feel that you have made the contact. From then on you cannot violate any brotherly edict or relationship. It would be impossible, because the Spirit has taken over and is determining your life. There must be spiritual realization. Once you have made your contact with this inner Being which is our Real Being, it governs our conduct and our relationships in the outer world.

Someday you will go higher in realization than what we have brought out today. Someday, through your meditations, you will realize the true meaning of I . Then you will know yourself as “I ,” and another new life will open to you. Jesus reserved that revelation for his disciples and none of them ever grasped it. Therefore, none of them ever lived it. Only John later received it in full, and then revealed it in full. Yes, we must realize our relationship to God and our relationship to each other.

Joel S. Goldsmith