The following excerpts are taken from the book Spiritual Discernment: the Healing Consciousness by Joel S. Goldsmith.
You can find God through the study of the letter of truth combined with meditation, prayer, and a very humble desire to know God. But you will not gain eternal life merely by following a religious teaching. You will gain eternal life only by knowing God aright. There have been Catholic and Protestant mystics who knew God — Christian Science, Unity, New Thought, and Infinite Way students. All you have to do is to be concerned with your goal of knowing God and then stay with it through the trials and tribulations that come until those onion skins fall off, enough of them to bring you to the spiritual experience of knowing God. (Chapter: “Peeling Off the Onion Skins” 10-11)
And what is the most important thing we have to give up? What, but our concepts of God and man. We have to sacrifice everything we believe about each other; we must be willing to give up some of our most cherished beliefs including the belief that Jesus of himself was good. That is a hard sacrifice. So, too, we must give up the belief that some dictator is bad, that our friends are good and enemies bad. In short, we have to give up the thing that is hardest for us to give up, and that is our concept of God and man.
… There is no way to please God except to give up our judgments of each other, our hates and loves until we come to the place where we can say, “There is but one good, the Father in heaven. God is the soul of every individual.” … God is the soul of every individual being. See no exception to that no matter what you see the person doing. Stand on God as the soul of every individual. Judge not. (Chapter: “Judge Not According to the Appearance” 78)
… If a volcano or the atomic bomb came and wiped us all out, that would not change one single thing in heaven. God’s kingdom would still be intact on earth as it is in heaven. Why? Because this that we behold as humanhood represents a mental concept in human thought, not so much individual human thought but universal belief which we individually accept by virtue of having been born. Human concepts arise from the fact that we were physically conceived and born, and that was our entrance into the whole world of misconception. Now we have to die to that humanhood or misconception.
We have to die so that we can be reborn, but it will not do us any more good to die physically than it has done us any good to be born physically. The death must take place within our consciousness so that we may be reborn of the Spirit. It is a birth that takes place as a transformation in consciousness. A term I like to use is transition, the transition from one state of being to another, from one state of consciousness to another. (Chapter: “Is” 109)
When someone tells us he is ill, and our response is that that is illusion, we have given the treatment because we cannot do anything to an illusion. If we were to see the leaves on a flowerpot as green snakes and then realized that they are not snakes but illusion, would we sit down and give ourselves a treatment? The treatment is the recognition that what we thought was evil has only an illusory existence. The moment we recognize that the problem exists only as temptation, our treatment is over.
Let us come to the realization that since Is, is, all else is not, even if we have to sit down for an hour and remind ourselves of all the statements of truth we know. We are not removing or changing something out here; we are not saving a person’s life, we are not reducing a fever. We are coming to a point of conviction within ourselves that Is, is. (Chapter: “Is” 114-115)
The healing principle is not bringing God-power into the world; it is not the power given to one person only who has been especially chosen to heal the sick. Whatever God does for one, God does for all. It is a question of whether a person is willing to pay the price, and in spiritual healing one price is the ability to control the emotions so that he does not react to appearances, so that he does not become shocked at the most horrible appearances and does not glory too much in the health that he sees restored. (Chapter: “Rejecting Appearances and Concepts” 165)
Assume Control over Your Mind
In the material sense of life, matter and material power in its many forms, down to and even beyond the atom, can be used. As we advance, we come to a place in consciousness where we can use mental powers and can control what goes into our mind and what comes out of our mind if we so desire.
Most persons are not only at the mercy of material powers and forces, however, but unfortunately they have not learned how to control what goes into the mind and what goes out from it. When they find one of the metaphysical movements, they learn that they have jurisdiction over the mind. They can choose not only to read spiritual or metaphysical literature, but they can also choose to refuse to entertain the fear-thoughts of this world. By accepting their dominion they can refuse admittance to anything undesirable.
It is you, individually, who must, at some time or other, refuse any longer to be a victim of universal beliefs, of the malpractice of the world or the domination of the minds of men, refuse to be taken in by false advertising or by the millions of unseen and unheard thoughts that travel through the air. In other words, you must assume responsibility for your own mind, both as to what goes into it and what comes out from it. In this way you determine the nature of your entire experience because you learn how to avoid accepting universal beliefs and how to avoid the pitfall of coming under the domination of the thinking of others, individually or collectively. Thus, you can learn how to go through life in control of your own experience. (Chapter: “The Infinite Way of Life” 177-178)
