Teachings of Christ Mind

^6.1 Joining rests on forgiveness. This you have heard before without understanding what it is you would forgive. You must forgive reality for being what it is. Reality, the truly real, is relationship. You must forgive God for creating a world in which you cannot be alone. You must forgive God for creating a shared reality before you can understand it is the only one you would want to have. You have to forgive this reality for being different than you have always imagined it to be. You have to forgive yourself for not being able to make it on your own, because you have realized the impossibility of doing so. You have to forgive yourself for being what you are, a being who exists only in relationship. You have to forgive all others for being as you are. They too cannot be separate, no matter how hard they try. Forgive them. Forgive yourself. Forgive God. Then you will be ready to begin learning just how different it really is to live in the reality of relationship.

^6.2 Your brother does not exist apart from you, nor you from your brother. This is reality. Your mind is not contained within your body but is one with God and shared equally with all alike. This is reality. The heart that is the center of your being is the center of everything that exists. This is reality. None of these things make you less than what you have perceived yourself to be, but they do make it impossible for you to be separate. You can desire what is impossible until the end of your days but you cannot make it possible. Why not forgive the world for being other than what you have thought it to be and begin to learn what it really is? This is what the world is here for. And when you have learned what it would teach you, you will have need of it no more, and you will gently let it go and find heaven in its place.

^6.3 This is all that the words and symbols and forms and structures of your world have come to teach you, stated as simply and directly as is possible. You are neither separate nor alone and never were and never can be. All your illusions were created in order to obscure this fact of your existence because you would rather it not be so. Only when you quit wishing for what cannot be, can you begin to see what is.

^6.4 I was least accepted as prophet and savior by those who were most like me, those who watched me grow, worked alongside my parents, and lived in the same town. This was because they knew I was not different from them, and they could not accept that they were the same as me. They were then, and you are now, no different than I. We are all the same because we are not separate. God created the universe as an interrelated whole. That the universe is an interrelated whole is no longer disputed even by science. What you have made to hide your reality has been, with the help of the Holy Spirit, turned into that which will help you learn what your reality really is. Yet you still refuse to listen and to learn. You still prefer things to be other than what they are and, through your preference, choose to keep it so.

^6.5 Make a new choice! The choice that your heart yearns to make for you and that your mind is finding increasingly difficult to deny. When you choose unity over separation, you choose reality over illusion. You end opposition by choosing harmony. You end conflict by choosing peace.

^6.6 All this forgiveness can do for you. Forgiveness of the original error—the choice to believe that you are separate despite the fact that this is not so and cannot ever be. What loving creator would create a universe in which such a thing could be? A thing alone would be a thing created without love, for love creates like itself and is forever one with everything that has been created. This simple realization will start you on the path to learning what your heart would have you learn.

^6.7 The fact that you are not alone in the world shows you that you are not meant to be alone. Everything here is to help you learn to perceive correctly, and from there to go beyond perception to the truth.

^6.8 What is the opposite of separation but being joined in relationship? Everything joined with you in relationship is holy because of what you are. Every contrast that you see here but points to this truth. Evil is only seen in relation to good. Chaos is only seen in relation to peace. While you see these as separate things you do not see what the relationship would show you. Contrast demonstrates, which is why it is a favorite teaching device of the Holy Spirit. Contrast demonstrates only to reveal the relationship that exists between truth and illusion. When you chose to deny relationship, you chose a thought system based on the opposite of your reality. Thus each choice to deny union reveals its opposite. What is separate from peace is chaos. What is separate from good is evil. What is separate from the truth is insane. Since you cannot be separate, all these factors that oppose your reality exist only in opposition to it. This is what you chose to create when you chose to pretend you can be what you cannot be. You chose to live in opposition to the truth, and the opposition is of your making.

^6.9 Choose again! And let go your fear of what the truth will bring. What could be more insane than that which you now call sanity? What loss can there be in joining with what is so like yourself? It is only a small step away from where you currently stand, so helpless and alone.

^6.10 Yet fear you do, and the maintenance of your fear keeps you very busy. You stoke its fire lest it go out and leave you to a warmth not of this world. This is the warmth that you would have, warmth so all-pervasive no chill of winter need ever arise again. And yet, still you choose the fire. You choose the fires of hell to the light of heaven. Only you can stoke those fires, and this is what makes them desirable to you. A warmth not of this world, given freely, with no work involved, causes you to shake your head. How can it be for you if you cannot put in effort to attain it? And even if it were so, what then? Some, you think, might choose to live near the equator, to have the sun shine every day and the need to stoke the fire put behind them. But not you. You, you think, prefer the seasons, the cold as well as the warmth, the snow as well as the rain, the dark of night and the clouds that block the sun. Without all of these, what would life be? Perpetual sunshine would be too easy, too lacking in imagination, too sterile. To have every day the same would be uninteresting now. Perhaps later. Maybe when you are old and have grown weary of the world. Then perhaps you will sit in the sun.

^6.11 This is the heaven of your mind, the meaning you give to joining, the face you put on eternal peace. With such a vision in your mind it is no wonder that you choose it not, or that you put it off until the end of your days. A heaven such as this would be for the old and the infirm, the ones ready to leave the world, those who have already grown worn out from it. What fun would such a heaven be for those of you still young and full of vigor? Those still willing to face another battle? Those who have not yet faced every challenge? If there is a mountain left to climb, why choose heaven? Surely it can be chosen later when disease has taken your limbs’ use from your control and your mind no longer races forward to what is next.

^6.12 Eagerness for life and eagerness for heaven are seen to be in opposition. Heaven and its milieu of eternal peace is rightly kept, you think, for the end of life, and so you scream at the unfairness when a young one leaves the world. Heaven is not for the young, you say. How unfair that those who die young have not had a chance at life, a chance to face the struggle and the challenge, the coming of the new day and the dying of the old. How sad they have not had the opportunity to stand separate and alone and to become what they would become. What they are is no more valued than what you are. What is still to come is what you live for, with the undying hope that it will not be that which came before. For every challenge faced is but a call to face the next. And each one comes to replace the old with hope that this one will be the one—and equal hope that it will not.

^6.13 To succeed is but a little death from which you must hurry on to where the challenge of a new success and new reason to exist awaits. The carrot of fulfillment you hold before yourself when grasped is quickly eaten and life feeds on itself once again. Just as you eat to still your hunger only to become hungry again, so does the rest of your life need this constant maintenance to retain the reality you have given it. “Struggle to succeed and succeed to struggle yet another day” is the life you have made, and the life you fear heaven would replace. To give up the idea that this is where meaning is found, fulfillment attained, happiness birthed amongst sorrow, is seen as giving up. Heaven’s help is most called upon for just this time, this time when giving up is close, for never do you feel more in need of help than when all your plans have failed and giving up becomes an alternative more attractive than carrying on.

^6.14 Few ask for the grace to give up what has been for what could be. For giving up is seen as failure, and here is what you fear the most. To not succeed at life would indeed be a failure if it were possible for it to be so. Yet even this possibility you would cling to, for with no chance of failure is no chance of success, or so you reason. The contrast that you have come to see in your separated state makes only either/or situations possible. While a choice for heaven is indeed a choice to renounce hell, while truth is indeed a choice to renounce illusion, these are the only real choices that exist, and they do not extend into your illusions but only into truth. For in truth are all illusions gone, in heaven is all thought of hell forever vanquished.

^6.15 How can I convince you that peace is what you want when you do not know what peace is? Those who once worshiped golden calves did so because they knew of no other choice. A god of love was as foreign a concept to them as is a life of peace to you. What is foreign to the world has changed, but the world has not. Those who live with war seek peace. Those who live with failure seek success. Put another way, both are saying this: you seek to make sense of an insane world, to find meaning within meaninglessness, purpose among the purposeless.

^6.16 How can I make peace attractive to you who know it not? The Bible says, “The sun shines and the rain falls on the good and evil alike.” Why then do you think that peace is endless sunshine? Peace is merely enjoyment of the rain and sun, night as well as day. Without judgment cast upon it, peace shines on all that you would look upon, as well as every situation you would face.

^6.17 Situations too are relationships. When peace enters your relationships, situations, too, are what they are meant to be and seen in heaven’s holy light. No longer do situations pit one against another, making it impossible for anyone to achieve what they would achieve. The challenge now is in creation rather than accomplishment. With peace, accomplishment is achieved in the only place where it makes any sense to desire it. With your accomplishment comes the freedom and the challenge of creation. Creation becomes the new frontier, the occupation of those too young to rest, too interested in living still to welcome the peace of dying. Those who could not change the world one iota through their constant effort, in peace create the world anew.

^6.18 Here they find the loveliest of answers to their questions. It takes not time nor money nor the sweat of their brow to change the world: it takes only love. A forgiven world is whole, and in its wholeness one with you. It is here, in wholeness, that peace abides and heaven is. It is from wholeness that heaven waits for you.

^6.19 Think about this now—for how could heaven be a separate place? A piece of geography distinct from all the rest? How could it not encompass everything and still be what it is: home to God’s beloved son and dwelling place of God Himself? It is because God is not separate from anything that you cannot be. It is because God is not separate from anything that heaven is where you are. It is because God is love that all your relationships are holy, and from them you can find the way to Him and to your holy Self.

^6.20 Are your relationships with those you love severed when they leave this world? Do you not still think of them? And do you not still think of them as who they were in life? What is the difference, in your mind, between who they were and who they are after death? In honesty will you admit an envy, an awareness that they still exist, but without the pain and burden of the body, without the limits placed upon those who remain? You imagine them still in bodily form, perhaps, yet you imagine them happy and at peace. Even those who claim not to believe in God or an afterlife of any sort will, when prompted to be truthful, admit this is an image that lights their mind with peace and hope. This image is as ancient as the earth and sky and all that lies beyond it. It did not arise from fantasy, nor did it pass from one mind to the next as stories often will. It is but part of your awareness of who you are, an awareness you would deny in favor of thoughts of death so grim they make of life a nightmare.

^6.21 It is your denial of all your happy thoughts that has led you to a life of such unhappiness. Thoughts of terror and of sin you will embrace, but thoughts of resurrection and new life you still before they have a chance at birth and call them wishful thinking. What harm do you expect happy thoughts to do to you? At best you see them as delusional. But what you fear is disappointment. All that you have wished for and have not acquired within your life is the evidence you would use to deny yourself hope of any kind. You do not understand the difference between wishing for what can never be and accepting what is.

^6.22 The world cannot fail to disappoint you, for your conception of it is based upon deception. You have deceived only yourself, and your deception has not changed what is nor will it ever succeed in doing so. Only God and His appointed helpers can lead you from this self-deception to the truth. You have been so successful at deception that you no longer can see the light unaided. But join your brother and the light begins to shine, for all are here to aid you. This is the purpose of the world and of love most kind: to end your self-deception and return you to the light.