Joel Goldsmith on Money, alcohol and tobacco

If you are one who is plagued by lack, it is possible that you may find yourself in such astate of confusion, with your mind so beset with a sense of fear that there may not be asufficiency, that sometimes you find it very hard to quiet your mind enough for a peacefulmeditation. But there is a way in which you can meditate, even with these disturbingthoughts uppermost in your consciousness, and your mind will settle down into such apeace and tranquility that God will be able to speak to you about supply.

Take out a piece of money—it makes no difference what its denomination is, whether acoin or currency—and put it in front of you. Look at it. If you can see what I see, you willagree that it is as dead as a doornail—inanimate and lifeless.

If you continue looking at this piece of money and proceed with your cogitations, your thought will eventually turn to where this money came from and how it came into your possession. Perhaps somebody gave it to you as an expression of love or gratitude; or if you earned it, it represents somebody's payment to you for service of some kind. Then you may think of the use that will be made of it. As a piece of metal or paper, it has no value to you; but it can be used as a medium of exchange for marketing or purchases of one kind or another. You are now beginning to lose sight of this object as money and are gaining the vision of its function as something useful, loving, and generous. Soon yourmind has gone beyond the money itself, and you begin to see why this money belongs toyou.

Once you are able to look at money in this light, you will see that far from its supplyingyou, it is you who supply money with its capacities and power. By that time your mindhas gone from the physical realm into the invisible, and peace descends, quiet comes, anda complete stillness in which you can receive an impartation from God in regard to thetrue interpretation of money.

If you follow this procedure in regard to anything for which you have grave concern or towhich you are unduly attached, you will be given the correct interpretation of it and itsfunction in your experience. For example, whereas the acquisition of money is generally considered desirable, the addiction to alcohol is considered evil, and yet the problem ofalcoholism can be handled in much the same way as the problem of supply. When a person begins to realize that alcohol has power neither for good nor for evil, he loses all taste for it. This is also true of gluttony or the tobacco habit. True, many people would be willing to go so far as to agree that these have no power for evil, but at the same time,they still think that they have power to give pleasure or satisfaction. As long as a person

gives them any power, however, for good or for evil, they hold him in their grasp.

Many alcoholics have been healed through the understanding that there is no power for evil in alcohol, but I have had greater success in dealing with this particular problem by knowing that there is no power for good in alcohol. Several years ago a very interesting case was brought to me by a woman who told me in great tears and self-righteous horror that her husband had reached the place where he refused to work, that she had to support him, and that he lay in bed every day of the week except on her payday when he got up to go out to buy his weekly supply of whisky, using her hard-earned money to pay for it. The entire situation was just a little bit too much for her to take any longer; but she had become interested in spiritual healing and wanted to know what I could do about it spiritually. It was pure inspiration that led me to say:

"Do you know something? It comes to me that your husband is not an alcoholic at all: You are the alcoholic."

"I don't know what you mean."

"Well, you seem to be more afraid of alcohol than your husband is."

She looked at me uncomprehendingly and said:

"Well, perhaps I am. Every day I see what it is doing. My husband doesn't think it is terrible; he likes it."

"There's a difference of opinion there. You really believe that alcohol is bad, don't you?"

"I certainly do."

"And yet the whole basis of our work is that there is neither good nor evil. Now what are we going to do with that? I can put it to you this way: Suppose your husband wanted to use your money to buy ginger ale, would you object?"

"No, I'd gladly go to work, and he could have all the ginger ale he wanted."

"So, ginger ale is good, but alcohol is evil. That is the appearance again, and there we are back with Adam and Eve. Now let's see who is at fault in this, your husband or you. Your husband thinks that alcohol is good and you think it's evil, so you're deadlocked, I guess, and that is where you are going to stay for a while unless you can begin to see what I see and that is that actually ginger ale isn't good, and whisky isn't bad, that there is no power in either one, if all power is in God. That's the vision and the way I see it. God is the infinite all-power, and besides God, there is no power for good or evil."

"Where does that leave me? What am I supposed to do?"

"Suppose we agree that for the next week your husband can have all the whisky he wants, because we know that it has no power for good and that it has no power for evil, so we don't care what he does with it. You go right home and tell him that you've made a serious mistake and that you don't think whisky is so terrible after all, and that from now on, he can have all he wants of it."

That seemed to be going a little too far. She was shocked so she went outside and sat in my outer office for a while, but finally she decided that since nothing else had been effective, she would try this as an experiment, and she said to me when she came back into the office:

"Well, I'm not getting anywhere this way; I can't do worse that way, so I'm going to do it; but it's a pretty hard thing to ask me to do."

"Try it and see."

She went home, waiting for the proper moment, and when her husband wanted whisky,  she said:
"Oh, yes, sure, here it is."

He looked at her in surprise, but made no comment until a few days later, when he came to her complaining:

"You know there is no use drinking this stuff. They're making that wartime whisky again, and it has no punch, no effect—there's no power to the stuff." And that's how he was ultimately freed. He couldn't drink it any more because it no longer gave him the satisfaction he had heretofore received from it.

From my observation, I believe that the majority of alcoholics suffer from alcoholism not so much because they think that its indulgence is evil as because they think they are going to derive some good, that is, some pleasure from it. With the realization that alcohol is not good, their taste for it disappears.

Watch this carefully. Do not make the metaphysical mistake of declaring that evil is not power, but believing that good is. Be quick to recognize that there is no power but God.

“THE THUNDER OF SILENCE”

BY JOEL S. GOLDSMITH

1961