Herb Fitch · The Infinite Way

Your Daily Rebirth: Herb Fitch's 13 Acts of Truth for Living Without Fear

Herb Fitch, La Jolla Class Recordings — presented by Mike Spirit Ademola

What did Herb Fitch teach about living without fear through daily spiritual rebirth? In this class recording from La Jolla, Fitch opens with letters from students who had spent two months practicing the Infinite Way and found, in their own words, that "something is missing." His answer is direct and uncompromising: as long as you remain Mary Jones or Bill Smith — the person born of a woman — you can read every spiritual book ever written and still stand outside the kingdom of God, looking in.

The teaching that follows is one of the clearest, most practical statements Fitch ever gave of Joel Goldsmith's Infinite Way: that every one of us lives two lives, a human birth and a divine birth, and that fear dissolves permanently only when we stop identifying with the self that was born to die. To make this real rather than theoretical, Fitch hands his class thirteen "acts of truth" — one theme per day — meant to carry a seeker out of a part-time relationship with God and into what he calls full-time sonship.

The Person You Love Can Never Enter the Kingdom of God

Fitch begins with a exercise designed to shock his students out of comfortable assumption. Say your own name out loud, he tells them, and face the fact that the person carrying that name can never live in the kingdom of God. Say the name of someone you love, and face the same fact about them. This is not cruelty — it is Goldsmith's teaching, stated as plainly as Fitch ever states anything: "the creature, the person, receiveth not the things of God." Even a dedicated, well-read, generous student of the Infinite Way remains what Fitch calls a "part-time son of God" until this is faced.

"A part-time son of God can only have a part-time God — and there simply is no such God. God is full-time, and the son of God must also be full-time."

The "thin veil" between a sincere seeker and the ultimate truth, Fitch says, is exactly this half-measure: playing it safe, a little human and a little spiritual, depending on the situation. The way through is not more effort in the same direction — it is a wholesale turning from the personal sense of life altogether.

Born of a Woman, Born of a Virgin: The Two Births

Fitch grounds the entire teaching in the story of the virgin birth — not as a doctrine about the historical Jesus alone, but as a map of every person's inner life. Every one of us, he teaches, has two births. The first birth is of a woman, with a human father: this is the mortal self, the self with a life span that ends in death. The second is birth of a virgin, without a human father: this is the spiritual self, the son of God, that was never born and cannot die.

"Rebirth is the realization that my true father is God. I am the son of God, I am the living spirit of God — and when this understanding is brought into actual realization, that is the meaning of being born of a virgin."

The human birth, Fitch says, is a veil concealing this first birth. It is a concept of mind, not a spiritual fact. Christ's instruction to "deny thyself, pick up thy cross, follow me" is, in this reading, an instruction to deny the second self daily — not once, in a single conversion experience, but as an ongoing, moment-by-moment practice. "Your virgin birth must become your daily assignment," Fitch tells his class, tying the teaching directly to Matthew 7:14: strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, that leadeth unto life.

Thirteen Acts of Truth: A Program for Daily Rebirth

Rather than leave the teaching as an idea to admire, Fitch gives his students a systematic, day-by-day contemplative program — thirteen short, unchanging statements of truth, one to be lived fully for an entire day before moving to the next. He is explicit that this is not a matter of memorising words: each is meant to become "an act of truth in your consciousness," carried into the whole day's activity rather than confined to a morning meditation.

The first four themes build directly on each other: only God is here, only spirit is here, God is running a perfect universe, and I am the son of God. Fitch is careful to show what each looks like in ordinary life — not a mystical abstraction, but something to hold while the postman arrives, while bad news comes in the mail, while a bookkeeper adds figures at a desk.

"If a person walks into the room where you are, does that mean God leaves the room? No — nothing changes. If a person walks out of the room, same thing. Nothing changes."

The days that follow move deeper: I am not man or woman (day five), before Abraham was, I am (day six), a day of rest resting in God's presence (day seven), and — Fitch's own favourite — love day (day eight), where the entire practice becomes giving, serving, and seeing God in every person met. "There's no me," he says of that day. "Me becomes a nothing, where I am — only love is flowing out."

This World Is Not My Father's Kingdom

Days nine and ten turn to Goldsmith's teaching that the visible world of forms is not, in itself, the kingdom of God — a claim Fitch is careful to distinguish from denying that anything is happening at the level of appearance. Rather, he teaches that the cosmic mind and the local human mind are one and the same, so that a flood, a fire, or an ordinary disappointment is a picture in mind rather than a fact about God's changeless, perfect universe.

"Only the kingdom of God is here... where physical bodies seem to be, only bodies of light are. You are looking at bodies of light, and through the density of your thought you are seeing them as bodies of matter."

By day eleven, this becomes an ethical practice as much as a metaphysical one: because there are no human qualities in people — only God expressing — Fitch tells his students they can no longer indulge ordinary human judgment. "You do not pin labels on people," he says, "because you are the son of God."

Time Is Not Passing: Living as the Eternal Self

The final movement of the program — days twelve and thirteen — takes up Goldsmith's teaching on time directly, quoting from Goldsmith's own diary entry of January 7, 1954: "the miracle of overcoming time and space." Fitch's twelfth theme, time is not passing, is offered not as a philosophical curiosity but as the direct antidote to fear, since he locates death, ageing, and loss entirely within the illusion of passing time.

"I existed before time was invented. I, the spirit, am independent of time. Nothing happens in time. Perfect life is all that is present, veiled by the time illusion."

The thirteenth day is deliberately left open — Fitch gives his class only a single phrase, "two thousand years ago is now," and invites them to sit with it without further explanation, promising that it leads into "a realm of no thought," where the illusion of a threatening world simply has nothing left to attach to. He closes by instructing his students to cycle back through all thirteen truths once the month is finished, so that the practice becomes, in his words, "a world rebirth" — each person's individual rebirth in spirit contributing to something far larger than any one life.