'The Contemplative Life' Unofficial Study Guide



Thoughts on "The Contemplative Life"

Introduction

This post is intended as a study guide, an aid offering points for contemplation as you read through Joel'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 "The Contemplative Life":

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.



ONE - CONSCIOUS AWARENESS

1.  Nothing can come into your experience except through your own Consciousness.

2. All that emanates from the Infinite Source is pouring Itself into, through, and from our individual Consciousness.

3. We must 'consciously' realize that we are one with our Source and that all It's qualities and activities are pouring themselves through us.

4. The responsibility for bringing it into active expression in our lives rests with us.

5. The Infinite Way bears witness to the divine Spirit in man, the divine Spark, which is without race, religion, nationality, creed or political affiliation, yet is the one animating Principle, Life, Soul and Spirit of all.


TWO - ERASING OUR CONCEPTS OF GOD, PRAYER, AND GRACE

1.  Understand that unless you realize and feel the Presence, or unless you actually feel the nothingness of that which is presenting itself as the appearance, the healing will not take place.

2. When you have acknowledged that this universe has a Creative Principle, a Cause, a Something that sent it into expression and form and that maintains that expression, this relieves you, individually, of all responsibility.

3. This assurance must come welling up in us from within ourselves.

4. There is but one Power, and this Power is within us.


THREE - BEGINNING THE CONTEMPLATIVE LIFE

1. Supply is demonstrated, not in the getting, but in opening out a way for the supply already within you to flow out from it's Source.

2. Before love can flow to us, we first must put it out here 

3. The whole goodness and infinity of this universe flows back to us as we let it flow out from us.

4. Through this constant pondering, meditating, and cogitating, you bring yourself to the place where you are completely still, and into that stillness and up from that still needs comes the very light that we are seeking.

5. By your thoughts and actions of today, you determine your reaping of tomorrow.

6. When you are able to be still, you have opened the way in your Consciousness for the Omnipresence which is already there to make Itself manifest and evident in your experience.

7. Then you make of yourself a transparency through which the light that is already present within you can shine.

8. When fear is gone, the final cause of our discords is gone.


FOUR - THE ESOTERIC MEANING OF THE EASTER WEEK

1. It created me as an individual entity in the beginning. It formed for me this body, this mind, and this life; and It functions as my intelligence, It functions as my relationships with everyone on Earth.

2. We must 'die' to the belief that of our own limited selves we are something, that we have lives of our own, a mind, a soul, a way, and a will of our own.

3. There is no limit to the spiritual demonstration that we can make, except such limitation as we bring upon ourselves by not thoroughly crucifying that personal sense of self.

4. I am not living in a material world of time and space. I live and move and have my being in Consciousness.

5. Abide in me, and I in you.

6. Dwell, live, move, and have your being in the 'secret place of the most High'.

7. Realize that our goal is the conscious awareness of the spiritual Presence, the attainment of 'My peace', the remembrance of 'Thy' grace as our sufficiency.

8. 'Resist not evil' because you understand the illusory nature of appearances.


FIVE - STEPS ON THE PATH OF ILLUMINATION

1. Resist not evil in the realization of Omnipotence.

2. There is only one Power, and the secret of harmonious living is the acknowledgement and recognition of one Power.

3. Nothing in the world of effect, nothing in the world of concepts, nothing in the world of persons is power for good or evil; and therefore, you need nothing with which to overcome it.

4. Watch what happens when you give up your mental weapons and stop fighting it.

5. Spiritual power is self-maintained, a self-created and a self-surrender power, and you have only to let yourself be clothed with this spiritual armour of truth and then to stand in it's name and nature.

6. In this world, you will continually be faced with the appearance of two powers, and the higher you go in spiritual realization, the more you will be faced with it.


SIX - CONTEMPLATIVE MEDITATION

1. Once you realize that what you are seeking is within, you will give your entire attention, thought, and activity to that point within you: not within your body, but within your Consciousness.

2. There must be an actual experience of oneness.

3. Your oneness has always existed, but now you have taken the further and all important step of attaining conscious oneness or a conscious realization of your oneness.

4. There is a price tag on the life of the Spirit, and the price is the setting aside of sufficient periods in the day and night for inner communion.

5. This in time leads to a further step in which we go from a communion to an actual, realized oneness, and in this there are no longer words or thoughts, but only a divine state of Being in which one realizes oneself as the life of all that exists.


SEVEN - THE DICE OF GOD ARE LOADED

1. • What you do to another, so it shall be done unto you.
• Whatever you bind will bind you.
• Whatever you set free will set you free.

2. • You come to see that the things, the conditions, and the persons whom you have feared had power in your experience only as long as you have permitted them to be power.
• You could bring an end to that any time that any time that you recognized the Invisible by bearing witness and being a beholder.

3. Always when fear goes, the object of fear goes, because the object of fear is only fear itself externalized.


EIGHT - CONTEMPLATION DEVELOPS THE BEHOLDER

1. How can I bear witness to this power except by being still?

2. As a beholder, we are always in the absolute centre of our own being.

3. • The only way that Spirit can be consciously expressed through us is when we are withholding human judgement and letting ourselves be beholders.
• And then Consciousness lives in and through us, changing the picture from what it seems to be, and revealing what was always there, even though finite senses could not discern it 

4. We are not seeing the world as it is: we are seeing this world as our mind interprets it.


NINE - DAILY PREPARATION FOR SPIRITUAL LIVING

1. You must attain the awareness, the actual feeling, the actual realization of a divine presence within you.

2. The universal belief in two powers constitutes every form of lack of whatever name or nature.

3. Whatever problems I meet this day are appearing to me only as mesmeric suggestion based on the universal belief in two powers.


TEN - MEDITATION ON LIFE BY GRACE

1. The major point that everyone on the spiritual path must constantly remember is that he is not seeking a power to do anything for him or anyone else.

2. Employer and employee are not two beings separate and apart from one another. Consciousness is both employer and employee, one not two, inseparable and indivisible.

3. It is your conscious remembrance of that Presence which brings it into manifestation.

4. The moment you stop chasing something, it begins chasing you; the moment you stop desiring something, it comes into your experience.

5. • Whatever transpires in your experience comes as an activity of your own consciousness.
• Power is not in person or effect, but 'only' in the invisible consciousness of the individual.


ELEVEN - SUPPLY AND SECRECY

1. Supply finds it's way out from within us; supply is something that we express.

2. The bread that we cast  upon the waters is the only bread that comes back to us.

3. • There are many ways of casting bread upon the waters, but the greatest of them all is gratitude.
• Such as in the form of benevolence, forgiveness or praying for our enemies.

4. One illumined consciousness becomes the consciousness of those it touches.


TWELVE - THE SPIRITUAL CHRISTMAS

1. • No change takes place in our outer life except in proportion to our awareness of the inner Presence and Power.
• As we awaken to this Spirit within us, It becomes the very substance, life, law, and activity of our experience in the without.

2. Always our salvation lies in the ability to impersonalize, to live spiritually instead of personally.