Herb Fitch · The Infinite Way
You Never Had a Physical Body: The Mystical Body That Never Dies
What if the body you have spent your whole life defending, feeding, healing, and fearing for was never created by God at all? In this lesson from his 1978 Kauai seminar, Herb Fitch takes up one of Joel Goldsmith's most radical claims: that there is no truth about a physical body because it is only a concept. Not a flawed body. Not a temporary body. A concept — a mental image mistaken for reality.
Fitch traces this teaching back through Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Paul, showing that the "new heart" and "heart of flesh" promised in the old covenant were never about anatomy. They were about waking up to the one mystical body that has been your only body all along — the body that cannot be sick, cannot age, and cannot die, because God, and only God, created it.
The Temple Paul Discovered Was Never Made of Flesh
Fitch opens with Paul's threefold declaration in Corinthians: "Know ye not that ye are the temple of God?" Paul, Fitch explains, had discovered something the human mind resists to this day — that the separation between God and man is illusion. There is no God "up there" and man "down here." There is only God, everywhere, and the body that houses that presence was never assembled in a womb.
"There is no truth about a physical body because it is only a concept... There are no human beings... My body has neither youth nor age. It is as ancient as God and as young as each new day."
To worship God while insisting on living in a body not created by God, Fitch says, is not devotion — it is a quiet denial of the very presence being worshipped. We cannot hold two bodies, one mortal and one divine, any more than we can hold two selves.
Saul's Blindness on the Road to Damascus
The lesson's turning point is Fitch's retelling of Saul becoming Paul. Saul, a zealous defender of the law, believed entirely in matter — material good, material evil, a body born of his mother's womb. Then, on the road to Damascus, his mind universe collapsed. His hatred disappeared. His physical world disappeared. Even his own body, as he had known it, disappeared.
"He had been lifted out of humanhood, reborn into a spiritual being with a spiritual body and a life not dependent upon human form."
Fitch calls this transformation the "second baptism" — not a ritual, but the direct soul-experience of discovering you were never the flesh you thought you were. Without it, he says, religion becomes ceremony without substance: "a charade of ceremonies, rituals, rules, regulations."
There Is Only One Mystical Body
Perhaps the most practical — and most startling — principle in the lesson is this: your mystical body and my mystical body are the same body. It is infinite, Fitch teaches, which is why Jesus could heal at a distance and why one person's realization can meet another's need. When you see your neighbor, your neighbor's spouse, your neighbor's child, you are seeing apparent divisions in what is, in truth, a single divine body with no space between any of its expressions.
Fitch offers a five-day exercise directly from this lesson: whenever you find yourself among a group of people, consciously dissolve the sense of space and separation between their bodies and yours, recognizing the one body of God appearing as many. He testifies that within days, this practice begins to dissolve the belief in isolated, vulnerable, physical selves.
Practicing the Presence of Your Divine Body
The lesson closes with a sustained meditation, resting in statements such as "I do not have two bodies, one that dies and another that lives. I have one body. It is divine." Fitch is careful to note that feeling nothing at first is not failure — "forget your feelings," he says, "and forget everything except doing it." The practice, repeated daily, is what he calls entering the secret place of the most high: the place where the world's weather, wars, and worries have no jurisdiction, because they were never occurring in the one body that God created.
"You can never get out of your physical body because you never had one."
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Continue the Path
Begin with the free guide The Awakening Within, sit with us in the Sunday Virtual Silence Meditation, or book a one-to-one session at the same link. Continue this thread of teaching with Your Problems Are Not Real and Transcending the Mind. New lessons post weekly on YouTube.
Frequently Asked Questions
What did Joel Goldsmith mean by "there is no truth about a physical body"?
Joel Goldsmith taught that the physical body is a mental concept, not the creation of God. The real body — what Herb Fitch calls the mystical body — is spiritual, ageless, and identical with the one body of God, while the physical form we perceive with the five senses is simply a false sense of that body.
Who was Herb Fitch and how is he connected to Joel Goldsmith?
Herb Fitch was a close student and colleague of Joel S. Goldsmith, founder of the Infinite Way. Fitch recorded and taught extensively from Goldsmith's works, and his 1978 Kauai seminar tapes — restored and shared here — unfold Goldsmith's teaching on non-dual, Christian mysticism in Fitch's own voice.
How do I begin practicing the presence of my mystical body?
Start with a daily meditation resting in the truth that you have one body, divine and indestructible, rather than two. Herb Fitch suggests a five-day practice of consciously recognizing there is no separation between your body and others', returning to this awareness whenever fear or a sense of physical vulnerability arises.