The Path of Ignoring the World

After the last post I had a few after-thoughts about the path of ignoring the world. Some yogis believe that participating in the world is very important and full of benefits. Other yogis see the world as nothing but a shadow, a reflected light of the self that is inert and a product of ignorance.

One yogi who advocated ignoring the world is Joel Goldsmith the founder of The Infinite Way. His approach to spiritual development was to always turn away from the world and to rest in awareness – taking no action but instead yielding to the Christ consciousness.

His view was that the world as it appears is “error” – a mistaken perception and not having any reality, substance or power. He said that there is no man made of matter, but only Spirit appearing as matter.

For example, we might think about our neighbour as an old man with arthritis, but according to Joel this is just a suggestion and that we are not seeing the reality correctly – instead we are mistakenly taking our own concepts and interpretations as reality.

Joel would say that there is no sin, sickness or death in God. Thus the neighbour is not sick or old, but merely appears to be this way. In many of the cases that Joel treated people had remarkable healings – simply through his recognition of the sinless, stainless, perfect, eternal reality.

Joel taught that we never fight error. Engaging with error is error itself. Instead he advised us to turn away from the appearance, turn within and tabernacle with the Christ within us in silence.

The Infinite Way has similarities to Vedanta and differences too (Joel studied post-graduate Sanskrit at Harvard University so he could better understand Hindu scriptures.) Whilst they are both contemplative paths, Vedanta doesn’t talk about healing or making demonstrations. These are considered small-time miracles and not really important. The big-time miracle is life itself.

However, both Vedanta and The Infinite Way agree that God knows your problems better than you do and so you should release your problems to this higher power within you.

Update: Some very reasonable views about Christian Science, The Infinite Way and New Thought teachings are written in the Notebooks of Paul Brunton. There a quite a number of volumes and they are all online.