"A Parenthesis in Eternity" by Joel S. Goldsmith

"A Parenthesis in Eternity" pdf file

Chapter 10 - Reality and Illusion

To recognize that we live in two worlds, the world created by five physical senses and the world of Consciousness, is to bring ourselves closer and closer to illumination.

In the first chapter of Genesis, God made man in His own image and likeness, without any help from anyone. This pure spirit birth, this immaculate conception, is God manifesting and expressing Himself and His qualities, Consciousness revealing Itself as form. This is pure, unadulterated, spiritual creation, the immaculate conception of man and the universe, God, the infinite Life express Itself individually without any material forms, processes, or system.

In the second chapter of Genesis, God not only creates but miscreates, and because of His mistakes, He has to do it over and over again. First, He "formed man of the dust of the ground," then He brought woman forth from man's rib, and finally He decided to bring man and woman together for the purpose of creation. Is it reasonable to believe that the infinite Intelligence of this universe needed to make two attempts at creation? This man of earth, "natural man" who is not under the law of God, "neither indeed can be," is not a man at all: he is a mythical creation of the human mind, of the five physical senses.

To make clear how this mind creates, let us examine how it created a man-made God. Close your eyes for a moment, and take the word God into your consciousness. Do you believe that this is God, or is this not a projection of your mind? Has this God any power? Is there really such a Presence, or is this just a self-created image of vour own thinking?

Let us go further afield and let us attempt to decide what God is. Instantly to our thought comes an answer, but the answer is not truth, and the answer is not God because the answer is a projection of our background. Anyone who has been an orthodox Christian almost immediately thinks of Jesus Christ. If one's background is Hebrew, he probably thinks of a dear old Gentleman up on a cloud with a long beard, looking down and wondering whom He is going to smite or reward next; if one's background is metaphysical, he probably thinks of God as Mind, Principle, or Law.

Regardless of what comes to our thought when the question "What is God?" is presented, is it not clear that it is a picture projected into our thought, usually by someone we recognize and accept as an authority. Perhaps the truest words ever spoken in reference to God are: "If you can name It, It is not That." If we can think God, It could not possibly be That because how can we encompass an infinite God in our thought processes? The harder we pray to this God that we have in our mind, the more barren will we become. All we have is a man-made projection of God, an image in thought. We cannot pray to that — yes, we can, but we know what kind of an answer we will get.

Now let us dig a little deeper into this subject. Suppose you ask yourself: "Who am I? What am I? What am I like?" Would any answer you gave to those questions be correct? Would not you or your dearest friend answer those questions in one way and a person who does not like you answer them in another? Could they come to any agreement on the kind of person you are? Whatever opinion they may have, they are merely projecting their own thought about you, their own prejudice or concept, or an opinion based on something that someone has told them. They do not know the real you: they entertain beliefs and concepts, many of them good, but all of them subject to change tomorrow.

The very ones who pledged their undying allegiance to the Master were the ones who ran away while he was being crucified. Some those who were sitting at his feet adoring him when he healed them of their ills were among the loudest shouters of "Crucify him, crucify him." They never knew him. They had a picture in the mind, an image in thought, but it never revealed the Master in fullness of his spiritual identity.

If we would know anyone, we have to discard everything that we now believe, everything we have heard, and everyone's opinion about him. We have to clear out and rid ourselves of all our concepts of him. We first have to acknowledge that all we know about him is some concept that has become crystallized in our mind. To know a person, we would have to empty our mind of all opinions concepts, theories, and beliefs, and train ourselves to shut out every opinion we have ever heard or formed because these opinions have been formed only as the result of some personal experience which pleased or displeased us.

If we could erase from our thought everything that we have heard or read about a person — everything, every opinion that we ourselves have formed — and say, "Father, wipe all this away. I am willing to start all over. Show me this man as he is. Show me his name, his nature. Reveal him to me," we would find that by turning within with a listening ear, the truth would be revealed to us. In this way we would know him aright. The I of him would be born in us immaculately.

Are you beginning to see how much we all have accepted about God and about one another without any real knowledge? Those of our friends and relatives whom we like have in some way pleased us, and when they do not, very often we do not like them any more which should prove to us that we are accepting others, not as they are, but because of the concepts we entertain.

Is this not also true in politics? One President is a hero to some and a devil to others. Another President is a devil to one, and a hero to another, and this country has never yet had a President who was not both a devil and a hero, depending on to whom we went for information. Could anyone be a hero and a devil at the same time. No; these opinions are not the truth about the man: they are concepts of him formed by the five physical senses.

The world that we see, hear, taste, touch, and smell is the world the Master overcame, but it is not a real world: it is a world formed by our sense impressions, by what we like or dislike at the moment. So it is that this world of the second chapter of Genesis, the world of a man created out of dust, of a woman created out of a rib, and of children created from the union of man and woman—this is not a world, this is a dream. This is the world of sense impressions, beliefs, and theories which exists only as a mental concept, just as our manmade God exists as a mental concept, and not as God.

This world of sense impressions is not under the law of God. All kinds of fanciful ideas can whirl around up here in our mind, all kinds of fanciful pictures, but they are not under the law of God, thev are not an expression of divine Intelligence. We can have opinions about God, opinions about man, and we can have opinions about one another, but they are not the truth, and they do not come forth from God. The world that we can see, hear, taste, touch, and smell is not under the law of God, and yet this veiy world that we are living in is under the grace of God when we see through the appearance to Reality.

In this world created by the senses, this unreal world of mental images, we are deceived by appearances because in "this world," unlike in "My kingdom," we are faced always with the pairs of opposites. Everything has its opposite: up, down; health, sickness; life, death; wealth, poverty; good, evil; purity, sin; white, black; gain, loss.

There is nothing in the world of sense that does not have its opposite, and if we analyze human experience, we will see that life is just a continuous effort to change one of the pairs of opposites into the other. We are always try ing to change sickness into health, lack into abundance, sin into purity, or evil into good, knowing that even if we attain it, tomorrow it can be reversed again, with a continuation of the same merry-go-round. The reason for this is clear: there is no law of God in human activity. If there were, good would be maintained and sustained. But in the kingdom of God where the law of God operates, we not only do not have all these pairs of opposites: we do not have even one of them. We do not have life any more than we have death; we do not have health any more than we have disease; we do not have abundance any more than we have lack; we do not have good any more than we have evil. None of these things exists in the kingdom of God.

The kingdom of God is a spiritual universe, and it has no qualities and it has no quantities. The kingdom of God is the realm of being, but that being is divine being—not good being because good has its opposite, evil; not live being because life has its opposite, death; but being—possessing no degrees, amounts, quantities, or qualities. "The darkness and the light are both alike to thee."

Now close your eyes again, and as you look into the darkness, if you see anything that looks good, it looks good or desirable only because it is a mental image in your thought, and its goodness is based on your concept of good. Someone else might look at that very same thing and find it valueless because nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so: it is the concept of it that a person entertains that makes it good or bad to him.

In this world of the senses, there is good and evil, and there is the centering of attention on changing the evil into good. In "My kingdom," the spiritual kingdom, we ignore the appearances and seek to realize spiritual truth, to realize God's grace, God's presence, and God's power. The moment that we feel a conscious oneness with God, the appearance changes. To our human sense, the evil appearance now has a good appearance, the appearance of lack has an abundant appearance, the sick appearance has a well appearance, sometimes even the dead appearance has a live appearance. But we are not fooled by the changed appearance. We know that in seeking the kingdom of God within, we are merely beholding Reality appearing, the grace of God appearing. We come face to face with God; we see Him as He is, and we are satisfied with that likeness.

To understand the illusory nature of the finite world is to grasp the kernel of all mystical teaching, but if it is misunderstood, it can act as a deterrent to progress as it has in India which has one of the noblest spiritual heritages of any nation on earth.

Perhaps the greatest of all the Indian seers was Gautama the Buddha whose revelation of absolute truth was so profound that while there are other revelations equal to it, there are none which have surpassed it. Gautama had the full realization of the one Ego, the one I which constitutes the Consciousness of the universe, and he himself understood and proved that the appearance-world is maya, or illusion. Because of its fruitage, his message spread like wildfire across all of India, but his teaching of maya was misinterpreted. The belief that the world is an illusion led to a do-nothing attitude, a passive acceptance of the evil conditions in the world. His followers failed to see that it is not the world that is illusory. The world is real: the illusion is in the misperception of the eternal, divine, spiritual universe which is the only universe there is, and which is here and now.

Because of an illusory sense of the universe, however, the mortal scene appears as mortality with all its errors, whereas it is in reality a divine universe. This world is God's world; it is the temple of the Jiving God; but when we see it with finite eyes and ears, what we see and hear is but the illusory picture of the reality that is there. 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 it.

With our human eyesight we see a world constantly changing: a world made up of young, middle-aged, and old people, of the sick and the well, of the poor and the rich, of the unhappy and the happy. All this is an illusory picture in the human mind, but because there is only one human mind, it is an illusory picture in your mind and mine. Such a world has no externalized existence.

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. To be able to understand and grasp this idea, therefore, is also to be able to grasp the idea that this illusion cannot be corrected in the outer picture. That is why so much prayer fails. Through prayer, people are trying to improve the illusion which, if they succeeded in doing, would still be an illusion except that it would be a good illusion instead of a bad one.

God is not in "this world," contrary to the doctrine of pantheism which teaches that this world is a manifestation of God, that God transforms Himself into the world, so that God and the world are of the same substance though the form is different. If this were true and if the world really were a manifestation of God and made of the substance of God, it would be eternal, and there would be no changing process going on: no aging, no dying, and no decaying of either animate or inanimate objects. There would be no seasons if this world were of the substance of God because it would then be of the substance of etemality and changelessness. God changes not: God is the same yesterday, today, and forever; God is from everlasting to everlasting; and if this world were made of God-substance, it would be as immortal and as eternal as God, but it is not. It is changing moment by moment, dying every minute and every day.

The erroneous assumption in the teaching of pantheism and of much of modem metaphysics is that man is spiritual, that his physical body is spiritual, that trees and flowers are spiritual. This is true of the reality of these, but it is not true of the physical manifestation as it is appearing to us through the senses. If the world were spiritual, we could eat our food and have it too, we could drive automobiles that would never wear out, and we could have trees that would grow forever.

But the substance of the forms we behold is not of that substance which is God, and once we perceive that, we shall understand the true meaning of the word "illusion," which is that our perception of what we behold constitutes the illusion. It is not that there is an externalized illusion: it is only that what we behold is not the real substance of which it is made: it is of the substance of mind, the substance of universal mind.

Theism goes to the opposite extreme. Theism regards God and the world as two distinct substances, each having its own independent existence as a creation of God, yet not made of the same substance as God. How impossible it would be for God, the creative Principle, to create anything unlike Itself, anything different in nature and character from Itself, anything other than Consciousness! If Consciousness is infinite, there is no other substance beyond Consciousness, and the world of God's creating must therefore be Consciousness formed.

The next question then is: What about this physical universe? The answer to that is the Master's statement: "My kingdom is not of this world." "This world" is the world of the Adamic dream; this is the world of mortal conception; this is the world of mental projection. When we recognize this and are able to close our eyes and realize the I in the midst of us, this body loses its sense of mortality; even the material universe loses its mortal sense and becomes what God's world really is — harmonious and perfect.

The truth is that God is Spirit, Consciousness, and therefore all that really exists is God formed, God in manifestation. The world that we cognize with the five physical senses, however, is not the world of God's creating: it is the finite sense of the world which universal mind has created. With our mind, we cannot discern the world of God's creating. We do not see God's kingdom: we see only the human, limited, finite concept, or mental image, only the physical concept of the spiritual universe. That is why it is changeable and changing, sometimes good and sometimes bad, sometimes sick and sometimes well, sometimes alive and sometimes dead, all these conditions existing only as concepts and not as reality. It takes spiritual discernment to know the things of God.

Let us not look at this visible world and call it spiritual, but on the other hand let us not look at it and call it a creation separate from God. Let us rather cleave to the Middle Path which leads to our inner spiritual center where we are the Christ of God, and where we can see that we are one with the Father.

Some of the people we see on the street, on television, and even those around us certainly do not appear to be one with the Father, and surely many of us must wonder how this can be. Of course, we know it cannot be because a person who is one with God would look different and act differently.

To call a human being the Christ is an indication that we either have been endowed with interior vision and are able to see the person as he really is, OT that we are lying to him and to ourselves. No human being can look upon physicality and with his mentality detect anything Christlike. All the human mind can be aware of is a physical body, and with it probably a personality, a personality that he may or may not like, or one that he may like today and not tomorrow. Only inner discernment, inner light, only an inner vision that beholds something the eye does not see and the ear does not hear can discern the Christ in any person.

To go into a prison, look at the assortment of men and women there, and say, "You are spiritual; you are the Christ," would be ridiculous, but if we went there clad in the Spirit, the Christ is what we would see. We would never make the mistake, however, of voicing such a statement to them or to anyone in charge.

When the Master asked, "Having eyes, see ye not? and having ears, hear ye not?" he was referring to an inner vision, an inner hearing, which we call spiritual discernment or Christ-consciousness. Only the Christ can recognize the Christ, and when we understand this, we will never look at a human form and declare, "You are well! You are healthy! You are youngl You are spiritual." We would never do that, but if we could look through the appearance to the Christ of God, the Christ ever-present, although not apparent to our human eyesight, we would be able to break the mesmerism that looks at the body with the mind and believes the evidence of what it sees, hears, tastes, touches, and smells; and in breaking the mesmerism, we would be able, through our inner discernment, to behold the spiritual nature even of a dying or a sinful person.

This is the difference between The Infinite Way and such teachings as pantheism and theism, and that is what makes it possible for healing work to be carried on in this teaching. In our spiritual work we are not deluding ourselves with the idea that this physicality that is wasting away with sin, disease, and death is spiritual, nor are we trying to spiritualize it and make it perfect: we are looking through the appearance with inner discernment and there beholding the invisible, spiritual child of God who was never born and will never die, eternal right here on earth.

Miracles can be performed by the person who does not try to heal disease and who understands that he is but the instrument of God, that God constitutes individual being, and that any appearance to the contrary is illusory, a picture in the mind, without spiritual substance, spiritual cause, spiritual law, and without spiritual entity or identity — maya, illusion.

On the spiritual path, we do not try to change the external world; we do not try to change our friends and relatives—their temperaments, their dispositions, or their health—but we recognize that the very omnipresence, omnipotence, and omniscience of God within our own being make it impossible for sin, disease, death, lack, and limitation to exist as externalized reality. These can exist only in the mortal dream which consists of the belief in two powers. As that belief in two powers is surrendered, so is the dream punctured.

Living in the fourth-dimensional consciousness, we seek nothing from the dream. To seek supply, companionship, a home, or employment is to seek an improved dream, an improved illusion. It is seeking our own concept of good which, after we get it, may not prove to be the thing we wanted. We seek nothing of this world: we seek only the realization of our oneness with God.

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. When we see fruit on the trees, we are seeing the fruitage of an invisible life, an invisible activity, an invisible unfoldment appearing visibly. As we lead the spiritual life, looking to no man, seeking nothing in the outer plane, but living in continual rapport with the Life-stream, our experience will unfold as the fruit appears on the tree, as an externalization of an inward Grace.

When enlightenment has been attained, the temporal picture is recognized for what it is: maya or illusion. Then when we are faced with evil people, evil or erroneous conditions, we will not fight them or try to get God to do something to them or for them: we will relax, knowing that this is the illusion or hypnotism of the five senses. When we awaken from beholding this mortal dream as if it were reality, we will see one another as we are, and then we will love our neighbor as ourselves because we will discover that our neighbor is our Self.

All this is apparent to us, not through knowledge, not because we have learned a little more truth, but because we have developed a deeper inner spiritual awareness and are able now to perceive the Christ. The object of The Infinite Way is to develop spiritual consciousness, not primarily to produce health out of sickness or wealth out of lack. Those are the added things, and those who catch even a grain of spiritual perception are showing forth health, prosperity, and happiness, and thus they are living more useful lives.

But this is not the goal. The goal is attaining the spiritual vision, so that we can behold God's universe and can commune with Him, walk and talk with Him, live with Him, and learn to live with one another, not merely humanly because our most joyous human companionships are much more worthwhile when we have attained a measure of spiritual companionship.

Spiritual companionship is achieved, not because we are studying the same books, not because we belong to the same church, not because we owe allegiance to the same flag. None of these things ensures harmonious companionship. Only through our being united in a spiritual bond, owing to our having attained some measure of spiritual light, do we find companionship with people of any country or of any religious conviction. There are no barriers once we have perceived the nature of true being. Being has no nationality, no race, and no religion. The reality of our being is God; the nature of our being is Christ; and when we are able to discern that Being through inner spiritual vision, we have a relationship that is eternal, eternal on earth and eternal forever afterward.

Looking at life through the materialist's eyes, we would have to grant that God has never overcome evil and that He never will overcome evil, but if we look out at life through spiritual discernment, we are convinced that God is infinite and that there never has been an evil power, a negative power, or a mortal power. That heightened vision heals sickness, changes sin to purity, insanity to sanity, and death to life.

The attaining of some measure of this spiritual vision is enough. It is an awareness that reveals that God is Spirit, that all that really is must be spiritual, and that all the power there is, all the law there is, and all the life there is must be spiritual. There will never be any confirmation of this through our eyes because Spirit cannot be seen with the eyes. The eyes must be closed to the objects of sense so that we can inwardly behold God's creation.

The development of spiritual consciousness is the greatest attainment there is. Only in the degree of this attained consciousness are we able to see the spiritual forms of God's creating. This has nothing to do with the development of the mind or with any intellectual powers; it is not attaining the feeling of knowing more than we knew before: it is a matter of attaining a depth of inner awareness, an awareness that expresses itself not so much in words as in feelings.

Return to the "A Parenthesis in Eternity" homepage