If you are fighting a problem right now — a diagnosis, a broken relationship, a financial hole, a habit you can't shake — Herb Fitch has a sentence in this class that will stop you: don't try to remove it. Not "don't worry about it." Not "have faith it'll pass." Don't try to remove the condition at all, because the condition was never the thing you were actually dealing with in the first place.
This teaching, drawn from Joel Goldsmith's Thunder of Silence, is built on a single, precise claim that Fitch calls "the secret of the Infinite Way" and "the secret of healing": henceforth know we no man after the flesh. Everything that follows in this class is Fitch unpacking what that sentence actually asks of you — and it is far more radical than most people expect from a teaching about staying positive.
You Never Remove a Condition — You Remove a Belief
Here is the center of the entire teaching, stated as plainly as Fitch ever states anything:
"It has been given to us that you do never remove a condition — you're only wasting your time. Never do you remove a condition; instead you learn the mystical secret that you remove a belief. As you remove a belief, you discover that the condition dissolves."
This reframes the entire project of healing. Most approaches to a problem — spiritual or otherwise — aim directly at the condition: fix the body, fix the finances, fix the relationship. Fitch is teaching something upstream of that. The condition, he insists, is never itself the object you're facing. It is a belief that has become "frozen" into visible form. He puts it in the plainest possible image: "Ice is nothing but water frozen. So the conditions are nothing but beliefs frozen to appear visible." Melt the belief, and the visible form it took has nothing left to sustain it.
The World Is Not Made of Things — It Is Made of Cosmic Thought
Fitch takes this further than simple positive thinking. He is not saying "change your attitude about the problem." He is saying the problem, the person, the condition — none of it is actually made of matter at all:
"The world we walk in is not made of things, is not made of persons, is not made of conditions, but it's made of thought — all of it completely cosmic thought, individually received, individually accepted, individually reacted to. And it is your reaction to the cosmic thought that creates the person's form and the condition."
The practical instruction that follows is startlingly physical for such an abstract idea: sit still, and let these "cosmic thought waves" move past you the way a shoreline lets water arrive and recede — "unblinking, unmoving, feeling cosmic thought waves move toward you and you permitting them to flow by." You are not fighting the wave. You are not analyzing the wave. You are simply declining to react to it, and in that non-reaction, Fitch says, it has nothing to attach to.
Why Judgment Is the Real Obstacle
A large portion of this class is devoted to something most spiritual teaching treats as a minor character flaw: judging people by appearances. Fitch treats it as the entire mechanism that keeps healing from happening. He is exacting about how automatic and how universal this habit is — "there is some instinct in us that automatically sees, accepts, and treats that individual as the same human form we have always known," no matter how sincerely we've studied the teaching.
The remedy he offers is not effort — it's abstention. "In the vacuum of non-judgment we are letting the spirit define" what a person or situation actually is. He's explicit that this isn't moral positivity: "Any opinion that I entertain is a judgment, and every judgment is a sword pointed directly at me." The discipline is to see the form — "flesh is flesh is flesh" — without appending a verdict to it, the same way you'd look at a rose and simply call it a rose rather than rank it against another flower.
The Story That Makes the Teaching Concrete
Fitch illustrates the entire principle with a real case from his own practice: a woman calling for help for her son, one of several young men facing sentencing in a politically charged Chicago trial. Fitch describes doing no visible "work" on the case beyond holding to the teaching — refusing to accept the belief that the young man was, in truth, what the charge against him claimed:
"I was led to write her in this vein: your boy may be indicted as a revolutionary, but I can assure you he is not that in God's eyes."
When sentencing came, every other young man in the case received a five-year term. The one whose mother had done this spiritual work was acquitted. Fitch is careful about the claim he's making here — not that prayer manipulates outcomes, but that the belief entertained about a person is not neutral. "There is a power. It wasn't a coincidental power. There is an invisible power of truth."
What This Means for the Problem You're Actually Facing
Fitch closes by bringing the teaching back down to whatever is in front of you right now — an illness, a broken relationship, a fear about the future. His instruction is not to suppress the problem or pretend it isn't there. It's to stop granting it status as a real, independent thing that must be defeated:
"I'd like you to apply some of these daily problems with a realization that you don't get rid of the problem — you overcome the belief that the problem exists. And then you will find you have a new weapon which was ordained by the spirit."
This is why the class opens with a warning against effort aimed at the wrong target. Fighting a condition, resisting it, strategizing against it — all of this keeps your attention locked onto the very belief that is holding the condition in place. The alternative Fitch offers is patience with a different kind of practice: sitting in the silence, letting the cosmic images pass without reaction, and trusting that the belief — not the condition — is the only thing that was ever actually there to change.