Thoughts on "A Parenthesis In Eternity"
Introduction
This post is intended as a study guide, an aid offering points for contemplation as you read through Joel Goldsmith's work.
As we read through each chapter of this book it maybe helpful to consider:
1. What is the main message of this chapter?
2. What are the spiritual principles Joel is pointing to?
3. How does this chapter speak to me?
Suggested keys to "A Parenthesis In Eternity":
1. The need to live consciously and continuously in the realization of Presence.
2. Living without an awareness of Presence, we are living in the delusory mind of this world.
3. By keeping an awareness of Spirit alive in Consciousness, you are practising the principles of spiritual living. This is how to restore the "lost years of the locusts".
Each section of this guide is not intended to replace a full reading of the original work of Joel Goldsmith. It is simply intended as pointers for contemplation.
The Circle Of Eternity
The Basis Of Mysticism
I. THE TWO WORLDS
1. It is not that Spirit is going to do something for mortal, material man: it is that mortal, material man is to put off his materiality so that his spirituality may be revealed.
2. The price to pay is to 'resist not evil'; the price is to learn to pray for our enemies, to forgive seventy times seven; the price is to dwell in the realization that we of our own selves are nothing.
3. • Consciousness must be opened to receive the invisible things, of which all things that are visible are made.
• This requires dwelling consciously in the realization of an invisible Presence that is the guiding and sustaining principle of our life.
4. We do not prepare for the acceptance of our spiritual identity merely by trying to change ourselves into good human beings.
5. Grace comes through an evolutionary progressive unfoldment of consciousness.
6. We cannot see spiritual identity with physical eyes or hear the still small voice and it's impartations with physical ears.
7. Every individual has a Soul-faculty which has no relationship to the physical sense of sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell, nor even to the intuitive sense which is the seventh sense.
II. RELEASE GOD
1. The mind struggles to 'get' Consciousness instead of to 'let' Consciousness, while all the time the gentle Presence envelops and enfolds us.
2. There is only one Life, infinite Life; there is only one Consciousness, infinite Consciousness; there is only one Soul, infinite Soul
3. We do not have to do or think anything to release Light into the world: we only have to know that it 'is', and be still. It will do it's own work.
4. • The fetters that bind us are in the mind.
• There is no struggle except in the mind.
• When the mind is still, there is no strain, and Consciousness becomes a living Presence and we feel It.
III. THE SPIRITUAL ADVENTURE
1. The real mission is to turn back within and commune with the Presence within us. When this begins, the problems disappear, the discordant appearances are resolved and dissolved - not by any wisdom that we have, but by the thunder of that silence which is within us.
IV. THE JOURNEY WITHIN
1. Meditation is the connecting link between our outer life and our inner Self.
2. When we sit down to meditate, we must seek to hear only the Inner Word, desire only the feeling of the presence of Awareness, only the re-establishment of ourselves with our inner Source. When we feel the assurance of the Presence, our meditation is complete: the Word becomes flesh, and the Spirit felt within us becomes tangible as individual experience.
3. With each meditation there must be this surrender of ourselves to the Spirit within, together with the realization that Grace is our sufficiency and that we are in meditation for the express purpose of receiving the comfort of His Presence.
4. Exercise: Let Omnipresence pour Itself through you.
5. Contemplative meditation leads to a moment of silence in which all words and thoughts are stilled, a silence so deep that we become a transparency for the still small voice to speak to us.
6. The third stage, that of conscious union, is the ultimate, and in this state the personal or separate selfhood disappears. It is as if one we're not aware of himself as a person, but as if only Consciousness Itself were there.
7. • Once we are united with our Source, we discover that our life is really the life of the Life-Stream, the life of the Source of life which is now flowing as our life.
• The same life that flows in one of us is flowing in all of us because there is only one Life-Stream.
V. SOWING AND REAPING
1. Whatever law we set in operation today will return to us tomorrow.
2. • Because there is only one Self, that which we do to another we are really doing unti ourselves.
• We do not always reap what we sow immediately or quickly.
3. Sowing to the Spirit, the karmic law ceases to operate in our experience because of the recognition that we are never the actor or the doer.
VI. GOD, THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF THE INDIVIDUAL
1. Were it not for Consciousness, there would be nothing expressed as form.
2. Consciousness is all-knowing, and it molds your body in conformity with it's needs.
3. The issues of life are invisible in Consciousness.
4. Let us begin with the realization that we are not form: we are Consciousness.
5. Everything that appears or is expressed by us first has to be in our consciousness, or we could not be aware of it.
6. On the spiritual path, we are seeking to 'die' to our human life, a life made up of both good and evil, and be reborn in our original Essence.
7. Our good unfolds from within us.
VII. THE SACRED WORD
1. I must be greater than any thought I can entertain.
2. The invisible part of us is greater than the visible, and 'I' is greater than we are because we are fed by the 'I' that we already are.
3. When we are in prayer and feel that stirring within, a healing or an improvement takes place because nothing can stand in the way of that I.
4. Whenever a need appears, we create what seems like a vacuum within us, a listening attitude.
VIII. THE MYSTICAL I
1. You and I can see the forms as which we appear, but we cannot see the reality because that is invisible.
2. I must have existed before conception and I will continue to exist after I relinquish this form.
3. We must learn to live with this I in the midst of us, learn to look to It for all inspiration.
4. • My true identity was never born, and it will never die.
• That I is looking out through my eyes.
5. Look unto Me, the I of your being, and be saved.
6. Exercise: Go into the inner sanctuary of your being and be quiet. If you dwell in Me, and if you let Me dwell in you, if you live in the recognition that I in the midst of you am your true identity, your eternal life, 'I' will draw unto you whatever is necessary for your harmonious unfoldment, be it person, place, or thing.
7. • The evil pictures that you see and hear and touch and taste and smell are made of the fabric of nothingness, the fabric of hypnotism, the fabric of suggestion, the fabric of mental illusion - they have no real being.
• I in the midst of you am the only power and the only Presence.
8. Anything you have withheld from anyone, you have withheld from yourself.
IX. AN INTERVAL IN ETERNITY
1. We are under a divine destiny, and nobody, no thing, and no condition can push us out of this body until our time has come.
2. The Infinite Way teaches that in an awakening to the realization that sin is no part of us, in that second, karma is wiped out.
X. REALITY AND ILLUSION
1. • The illusion is in the mind that is falsely seeing the world: the illusion is never out in the world.
• An illusion cannot be externalized.
• An illusion is a deceptive state of thought, and it can take place only within a person's mind, not outside of it.
• The illusory picture we see in the one human mind has no externalized existence.
2. We are aware of the world through our senses, but what the senses cognize is illusion, an illusion not outside the mind but in it.
3. All that really exists is Consciousness.
4. In our spiritual work we are not deluding ourselves with the idea that physicality can be made perfect: we are looking through the appearance with inner discernment and there Beholding the Invisible Presence.
5. Whatever is to come forth into expression must come forth from deep within, even though it still comes in ways that appear to be external.
XI. THE NATURE OF SPIRITUAL POWER
1. To perceive Omnipotence prevents the universal belief in two powers from functioning in our experience, and also begins to destroy it for the whole world.
2. Spiritual power cannot be used, and yet it can manifest Itself as our life and being.
3. Consciousness is not a power over sin, disease, or death, any more than light is a power over darkness.
4. Spiritual law is the only power.
5. We will not judge by appearances and believe what our eyes see.
6. We do not have Consciousness and us. Consciousness is manifested 'as' us. We have no life of our own.
7. There is but one power, the power of the Invisible.
XII. THE DISCOVERY OF THE SELF
1. Consciousness seems to be absent because of our ignorance of It's Presence, but when we become aware of this invisible, transcendental Presence as our Self, in that moment does It begin to function in our experience.
2. • Your Selfhood is the unconditioned Self.
• I remain always as the Self.
3. There is but one Self.
I am that Self.
I am that Self even if I am appearing s you.
I forgive, knowing I am forgiving myself.
4. All that we are doing is always done unto the Self that we are.
