Always remember that to know God aright is to know that God is closer to you than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet. There’s nothing closer to you than breathing and nearer than hands and feet than yourself. Your Self, spelled with a capital S-E-L-F. That Self, which is the self of you and the self of me, it isn’t personal, it’s spiritual and universal, that Self is God and it is where you are, and that is why Scripture says:
The place whereon thou standest is holy ground.
Is there any other God but Me? … I know not any.
I and the Father are one.
Son, thou art ever with Me and all that I have is thine.

I is that magic word, and “I” is within you. The moment we begin to know that, we begin to understand why meditation is the important step in life. You see, “I” is at the center of your being, but as a human being trained to keep your thoughts out here, to be thinking always of person and place and thing and circumstance and condition, you cannot get back inside and tabernacle with God; you cannot get back inside and commune with God. God is hidden under a thousand generations of mortality.

God is hidden under hundreds of generations of people steeped in spiritual ignorance. God is hidden under orthodox religion. God is hidden under all the layers of human-ness, of self-righteousness, self-protection, all the self’s that we build around our selves so that we can’t reach It.

And if we are to reach it, it’s going to be in quietness and in confidence. It’s going to be in stillness. It’s going to be in silence. And when we learn then to abide in quietness within … in quietness and in confidence shall be your strength.

When we learn to be so still that we can get into where the poet told us to, “closer than breathing, nearer than hands and feet,” we are going to contact “I”, the divine Selfhood of each of us, which is within our own being. And when we contact It we will be as the Master was: in communion with the Father within me.
Joel Goldsmith
176A – The Letter and the Spirit