Herb Fitch · The Infinite Way · Joel Goldsmith, "Thunder of Silence" (1970)

The Ultimate Power of Consciousness: Your Divine Inheritance

Herb Fitch opens Joel Goldsmith's 1970 "Thunder of Silence" series — presented by Mike Spirit Ademola

What if the only thing standing between you and a life free of sickness, lack, and fear wasn't a technique to master, but a self you needed to stop defending? In this opening talk of Joel Goldsmith's 1970 "Thunder of Silence" series, Herb Fitch lays out a teaching so direct it can feel almost severe: you are already the substance of God, already immortal, already whole — and the only thing preventing you from living that reality is your continued identification with a self that was never meant to last.

This is not a lesson in positive thinking. It is an invitation to a specific, repeatable inner practice — one Fitch insists takes real dedication, but which he says is available to anyone willing to stop, in his words, "hunting ducks that aren't there."

The Two Covenants: Ishmael and Isaac

Fitch grounds the entire teaching in an Old Testament story: Abraham fathers Ishmael by the bondwoman Hagar, and later Isaac by his free wife Sarah. Drawing on the Apostle Paul, Fitch reads this not as history but as allegory — two births available to every person.

"Ishmael represents this world — each of us born of the flesh... striving to find ourselves, believing the things we see, only what we can touch. And yet the second birth is not of the bond woman... the second birth is the birth of Christ in us — the realization that I am not a material being... I am a substance that never dies."

The first birth, Fitch teaches, is the natural, mortal self we take ourselves to be. The second birth — Isaac, "freeborn" — is the discovery that your true identity was never flesh at all, but the very substance of God. Every person, he insists, carries this same choice: Ishmael can become Isaac, and both, ultimately, become Christ.

You Cannot Live in This World — Only Appear In It

Perhaps the most startling claim in the talk is Fitch's insistence that the visible world was never a place anyone could actually live.

"It is impossible to live in this world. You cannot do it. There is no life in this world... You can only live in the invisible kingdom of spirit... The world is the appearance of world thought; life is not in it."

This isn't a call to withdraw from daily life. Fitch describes the visible world instead as a kind of instrument — "your vast television set" — that shows you, in appearances, what you are actually doing in consciousness. The fruits of a life lived in spirit still show up as a happy, healthy, wholesome person in the world; the world is the readout, never the source.

Dying Daily: The Death of "Me"

Fitch teaches that the practice of stepping into reality requires something more demanding than belief — it requires what he calls the death of "me," the small self that experiences itself as separate from God.

"As long as there's a 'me' sitting down there meditating, you're wasting time. God can never come into the consciousness of me... The minute you step out of time, there's no me anymore. Me must die."

This "death," he clarifies, is not physical — it is the surrender of the sense of self that lives "in time," aging, fearing, and reacting, so that what remains is the self that was never born and cannot die. He ties this directly to Galatians' teaching of sowing to the flesh versus sowing to the spirit: whichever self you feed is the one whose fruits you will reap.

Only God Is Everywhere Now

The core practice Fitch offers is a five-word statement to be lived, not merely repeated: only God is everywhere now. He is careful to distinguish this from ordinary belief in God.

"This becomes your yardstick... God is everywhere, only God is everywhere, only God is everywhere now. And when this is all you believe... it makes no difference if you see imperfection or inharmony, because your yardstick is only God is everywhere now."

Applied to any problem — illness, lack, a dying loved one — the practice is the same: to recognize that whatever appears to contradict God's presence is a "shadow," a false consciousness announcing itself, not a second power operating alongside God. Fitch describes this as "no mental reaction" — not suppressing feeling, but refusing to accept that the appearance is as real as it claims to be.

From Karmic Law to Grace

Fitch closes this opening talk by distinguishing two "coverings" of law: the karmic law of cause and effect, which he says was mistaken by the ancient world for the will of God, and the grace revealed through Christ, in which there is no cause and effect because all cause is God, and God cannot act against itself.

"My spirit is God, and there is no other God on this earth or anywhere else... this is the god of Jesus, this is the god of Moses, this is the god of the prophets... each of these individuals is the spirit which is that God which you and I are but have not known ourselves to be."

The invitation, Fitch says, is not to earn this identity but simply to stop denying it — to let the qualities already inherent in divine consciousness (harmony, wholeness, abundance, peace) externalize as your visible experience, once the false self standing in the way has been surrendered.