Herb Fitch · The Infinite Way

Are You Spirit, or Are You Flesh?: The Second Birth That Ends the Fear of Death

Herb Fitch, 1978 Mystical Tape Series, Lesson 4 — presented by Mike Spirit Ademola

One hundred and fifty-six thousand human bodies will die today. Herb Fitch opens this lesson with that fact not to frighten his students, but to ask the question underneath it: are you Spirit, or are you flesh? Recorded on the island of Kauai as part of the legendary 1978 Mystical Tape Series, this lesson unfolds Joel Goldsmith's teaching of the "second birth" - a transformation in consciousness that Herb says removes even the possibility of experiencing human death.

It is a bold claim, and Herb does not soften it. He builds it from Paul's letter to the Romans, from Joel Goldsmith's Spiritual Interpretation of Scripture, and from three of the Bible's most famous stories, read not as history but as mystical instruction in finding the invisible, deathless body that Herb calls your true self.

The Excess Baggage of Flesh

Herb begins with what he calls the "excess baggage" every human being carries without question: the belief that we are, at root, physical organisms. "Flesh is excess baggage," he tells his students. "If you live as a fleshly organism, think as flesh, act as flesh, believe you and the world around you is made of flesh, you have accepted a temporary sense of life." Every pleasure bought in flesh comes mingled with sorrow, he says, and every possession is eventually surrendered to the probate court - "even the dear human body that you thought you were living in will be taken away."

This is where Herb turns to Paul's statement in Romans 8:15, a verse he says the world has spent nineteen centuries refusing to hear:

"If you live in human flesh, you must die."

Herb reads this not as condemnation but as diagnosis. Paul is not saying human bodies are sinful; he is saying they are, by nature, separated from the life of God - and that this separation, not moral failing, is the true cause behind sickness and death. "The natural man receiveth not the things of God," Herb quotes, and from there draws the lesson's central move: healing and immortality are not found by improving the human body, but by discovering the mystical body that was never born and therefore can never die.

God Is Life: The Secret Joel Goldsmith Revealed

Turning to Joel Goldsmith's Spiritual Interpretation of Scripture, Herb reads a passage he calls the secret "so rarely understood":

"The life which you behold in man, tree or animal is not the life which is God... The life of material man or flower is mortal sense objectified. It is a false sense of life, a false sense of the life which is real."

Herb illustrates this with the image of a rose bush. You do not throw away the bush when one rose dies, he says, because you know the life of the bush continues, forming new roses. In the same way, when the human form dies, "your life remains alive" - and that life, Herb insists, is nothing less than the life of God itself. "The life of God is the life of you," he teaches, urging students to stop trying to live on the borrowed, temporary life of the body - what he compares to trying to run blood through your veins using only water.

This is not a promise for some future heaven. Herb is explicit that the mystical body is available now: an "invisible building of God, not made with hands, eternal in the heavens" - where, he clarifies, "the heavens are your Christ consciousness."

The Fiery Furnace: The Mystical Body of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego

Herb then turns to the story of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, cast into Nebuchadnezzar's furnace and found walking unharmed beside a mysterious fourth man. Read mystically, Herb says, the fourth man is not a supernatural visitor but "the one invisible body in which Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego were living" - the same mystical body available to every person who finds it. "As we find that one mystical body," he teaches, "we walk the fiery furnace... we are not disturbed by the appearances of death that come upon us or seem to come upon our children."

Herb treats every biblical healing this way - not as isolated miracles, but as instruction in the same transformation: from mortal body to mystical body, from visible life to invisible life.

The Mount of Transfiguration: Living as the Invisible You

The lesson's final teaching centers on the mount of transfiguration, where Jesus took Peter, James and John to witness his countenance changed and his clothing "whiter than white." Herb offers a reason for choosing these three disciples that goes beyond seniority: John represents Love, Peter represents Faith, and James represents total Commitment - the three qualities Herb says are required to move out of a dying body of flesh into "your immortal mystical body of eternal Spirit."

On the mountain, Herb teaches, the disciples were lifted into Soul consciousness and shown Moses and Elijah alive, along with Jesus himself no longer contained in bodily form but revealed as "the light of Spirit... the very atmosphere itself without boundaries." The instruction to "tell no man" until the resurrection, Herb explains, was not secrecy for its own sake - it meant that this realization cannot be spoken until it has actually risen within the one who experienced it: "Then with that experience you can go forth living in your mystical body, trusting your invisible mystical life to go before you everywhere."

Herb closes the lesson turning to practical meditation - guiding his students to know the truth of the one invisible life wherever transportation appears to carry risk: in planes, cars, and ships at sea. "There is only one life," he says, "and you are the one who knows it... that body can never be in an accident. That life can never smash up."