Joel taught that rising in consciousness to realized Christhood is not ultimately for our own benefit, but the means to uplift the consciousness of mankind universally and dispel the ignorance of truth that is at the root of all human trouble. He spoke often about how we as individuals can be an influence in bringing that freedom to the world.
On the first of each month, we post an excerpt from Joel’s writings on this topic. The following excerpt is from the July 1959 Infinite Way Letter.
The Wider Activity of The Infinite Way
The vast majority of those who come to The Infinite Way come for the solution of their individual problems, but if they go far enough in this work, they become a part of the few who are engaged in the wider activity of dealing with world problems. Never should we forget that we are engaged in an activity that concerns greater problems than our individual health or supply, and that wider aspect is the next phase of the work of The Infinite Way.
As has been pointed out, whatever light has been given to the world has come through individual consciousness; but by reviewing the religious experience of the world, you will observe that, in spite of all the light that has come to us through the illumined souls down through the ages, the world is still in spiritual darkness. From that, it can be deduced that no amount of light coming from any one individual is sufficient to save the world, regardless of how bright it may be.
The light must come through a greater number of individuals, more and more of them at one time, until, ultimately, it permeates all individual consciousness and becomes collective consciousness. We have passed the day when any single individual, regardless of how illumined he may be, or may become, can be looked upon as anything more than a guide, pointing the way to what every individual may and must attain. Your goal, and mine, is the attainment of the greatest light of which we are capable, and then the acceptance of the responsibility for teaching it and making it available to others, so that in their turn they may be inspired to seek or become that same light. In no other way will spiritual freedom come to the world.
It will not come through one revelator, nor will it come through six revelators. True, the secret may come through one person, as it has a dozen times, but it will have to be lived by those who no longer are merely followers of that one, but who have become inspired by that one and are thereby encouraged to go and do likewise. There is no other way.
If, by our example or by our works, we could overcome all the disease and all the sin in any one city today, tomorrow there would be another crop of sick people and sinners. If we could walk through the hospitals today and heal every person there and walk through the prisons and release every prisoner, tomorrow those same rooms would be filled with other people. No matter how high we may go, individually, we are only an infinitesimal part of a story with an unhappy ending, unless through our life others become illumined.
It sounds like a very difficult task—and it is. It would seem that the amazing things we have been witnessing in this work for so many years should be awakening the world. But the world sleeps on—except for one here and one there, and another one here and another one there. And so it is that our function is not merely to receive this light and to bring about a few healings, but so to live that our lives inspire others to go and do likewise.
As the Spirit of the Lord, the Christ, finds outlet through your consciousness, It touches the lives of all those you meet on life’s highway. In opening your consciousness to the activity of the Christ and by not restricting It or attempting to direct It, you permit It to escape into human consciousness and bring God’s grace to those persons who open themselves to that Grace. You become an instrument through which the activity of the Christ can reach others in the world.
One person cannot do it for the world; one person cannot do it even for a community. It is only insofar as entire groups are spiritually prepared and willing to go out and continue to do the work which some one individual here or there has heretofore been doing and thereby multiply that work—not one by one, but a hundred times a hundred—that the light will penetrate the darkness of human consciousness, the dense materiality which resists everything in the nature of spiritual freedom.