The Infinite Way

“There is a way whereby we are able to rid ourselves of sin, sickness, poverty, and the results of wars and economic changes. This way is the exchanging of our material sense of existence for the understanding and consciousness of life as spiritual.

Down the centuries, the sense of man and the universe as being material has resulted in the development of fear for the personal self and national existence. This will continue and become even more intensified as more destructive material forces are discovered. The latest of these forces to be announced is a chemical, one ounce of which, it is claimed, would be sufficient to destroy the entire population of the United States and Canada, and even this is probably not the ultimate of material force. There is no material power to overcome either this or the atomic bomb. There is no hope in matter or material sense. The way of security, harmony, and health is through attaining some measure of spiritual consciousness.

The great secret is that despite all belief to the contrary real power, either for good or evil, does not reside in matter or in the material sense of man and the universe. Those who have acquired some degree of spiritual consciousness have proved in that measure the reality of Spirit.

The necessity for giving up the material sense of existence for the attainment of the spiritual consciousness of life and its activities is the secret of the seers, prophets, and saints of all ages.”

Stop trying to improve your material circumstances or petitioning God to do so – the first step to peace is to see through the material sense of existence.

What if sickness, poverty, and war were not conditions to be fixed, but symptoms of a single mistaken belief? Joel S. Goldsmith arrived at this insight by way of two brushes with death: first as a young man given three months to live with tuberculosis, and later a sudden illness cured almost overnight – both times through Christian Science healing rather than medicine. Those recoveries turned him, over the next thirty years, into a student of the world's major religions and, in 1947, into the author of the method he called The Infinite Way. Goldsmith's teaching is total: nothing exists but Spirit, and every appearance of lack or disease is a misperception awaiting correction, not a problem awaiting a cure. In contrast to some spiritual approaches, Goldsmith doesn’t suggest complex techniques or formulas for meditation and prayer, rather he frames these practices as a turning within and listening. His central message is that it is only by turning away from the material sense and towards spiritual consciousness that true healing and inner peace will follow. Let the ‘I’ you mistook for a separate self reveal itself as the one universal ‘I AM’ and experience the change within and without.

In The Infinite Way, everything begins with what you understand yourself to be. “God is the mind and the life of the individual. Any mental hedging or inner reservation on this subject will result in ultimate failure. There is but one universal I whether it is being spoken by Jesus Christ or John Smith.” Once this ‘I’ is read not as a private self but as universal Selfhood, every practice that follows becomes a way of living from that recognition rather than working toward it.

Two practices that Goldsmith addresses are meditation and prayer. He teaches that meditation is not concentration on an idea but receptivity to a Presence already there. “Be a beholder, a witness. Watch the unveiling of the Christ in your consciousness.” He clarifies the approach: “Meditation is the door to the realm of the Soul, and inspiration is the way. As we learn to take five or ten minutes each morning, noon, and night to sit quietly with a ‘listening’ ear, as we turn within ourselves and learn to wait for the ‘still small voice,’ we acquire the habit of meditation.” Prayer, correspondingly, stops being treated as a petition and becomes “conscious oneness with God.” Flowing from this perspective, it is understood that “prayer is not a process, a combination of words or thoughts, nor statements, declarations, affirmations, or denials. Prayer is a state of consciousness in which we experience the realization of harmony, perfection, oneness, joy, peace, and dominion.”

A key shift in perception is a reframe of what Goldsmith calls ‘supply.’ Taking the example of financial security/money, he separates it from the law that produces it: “money is not supply, but is the result or effect of supply… Within you and within me, there is a law in operation—a law of life—and our awareness of the presence of this law is our supply.” The change is moving from an anxious striving for material security (ever illusory) to “living by Grace,” trusting consciousness itself, not effort, to meet the need. Even the appearance of good fortune, not only misfortune, belongs to what Goldsmith calls “universal mesmerism” – a dream of both harmony and inharmony he asks you to let go of entirely: “the understanding or awareness of God breaks the dream.”

At just over a hundred pages, The Infinite Way packs the depth of Goldsmith’s teaching into a concise structure. The first part lays out the shift in identity from mortal to spiritual, while the second part applies that shift to the specific pressures of ordinary life, such as illness, unanswered prayer, and money. The work then offers the ‘Wisdoms of the Infinite Way,’ over a hundred single-sentence distillations meant to be studied one at a time and lived with day in and day out to perceive their true nature. To close are two chapters that Goldsmith described as some of the most important in all his teaching: ‘The New Horizon’ and ‘The New Jerusalem.’ It is here that he describes the world not as it should become, but as he says it already is.

Goldsmith wrote the Author's Note in 1947, and it invokes the atomic bomb as proof that no material power can secure us. Swap the bomb for anything that generates the same dread today – financial precarity, a health scare, climate change – and the teaching still lands in the same place. It isn't that your circumstances will improve if you think differently about them, but that the entire frame of ‘circumstances needing improvement’ has to go.

The Infinite Way teaching continues through Goldsmith Global, which hosts Saturday tape-study meditations built from his original recordings, and through the Infinite Way Student Contact Center, which connects readers with local and online study groups. The Joel S. Goldsmith Book Foundation also provides resources and has kindly made it possible for the Library of Light community to freely access The Infinite Way via the link above.