Teachings of Christ Mind

^19.1 There was no evil intent in the creation of the body as a learning device, and as a learning device it was perfectly created. The problem lies in what you have, in your forgetfulness, made of the body. Only from thinking of the body as yourself did ideas of glorifying the body arise. To glorify a learning device makes no sense. And yet in creating the perfect device from which you could experience separation, all such problems were anticipated and corrective devices created alongside them. You could not fully experience separation without a sense of self as separate, and you could not fully experience anything without your free will. A separate self with a free will operating in an external world, as well as a spirit self desiring the experience of separation, would naturally lead to a situation where the whole range of experiences available to a separate being would exist.

^19.2 The complex set of criteria needed to create a world of separation was, in the instant of creation, anticipated and provided in a form consistent with creation’s laws. While this world was created with love, as all of creation was, it was also created to provide the desired experience. Thus was fear born, for a separate self is a fearful self by its nature. How could it not be?

^19.3 You who have grown weary of this experience rejoice, for you can choose a new experience. Your free will has not been taken from you, nor has the power of creation abandoned you. Within creation’s own laws does the solution rest.

^19.4 The solution lies in transformation, and that is why you are still needed here. Beneath the world of illusion that you have made to glorify the separated self lies the world that was created for your learning, and that so exists in truth. It is not the only world by any means, but it is still heaven because heaven must be where you are. A wholehearted choice to abandon all ideas of glorifying the separated self and to let the world be what it is will begin the transformation. This requires the first unification, the unification of mind and heart, after which unification with God is naturally returned to your awareness, for this unification returns you to the Christ in you and the one mind united with God which you have never left. Creation’s power then returns to you to help all the separated ones remember union.

^19.5 Although this all may sound like science fiction to you, realize that you accept much in all areas of your life, from that of religion to science itself, that sounds like fiction. You are not, however, expected to believe all I have told you on faith alone. Experience is needed to change your beliefs and to place your faith securely in them. The first step in leading you to experience of another kind is your willingness to accept that you are here to learn, and that your body can provide the means.

^19.6 Your saving grace is that even a separated self yearns for union and knowledge of its Creator. Thus along with this yearning was a means provided for its fulfillment, and with this fulfillment lies the end of the separation.

^19.7 I was part of this means, but only part. Fulfillment can be provided by each and every one of your brothers and sisters, for in each is the Christ available to be seen and experienced as it was from me. It is in your holy relationships that union can be found and experienced, and thus from these that you fuel your desire for union with all and for knowledge of your Creator. This yearning must but be a pure yearning—untainted by fear and judgment and approached with wholeheartedness—for it to be fulfilled. It is not the means that are lacking but the wholehearted desire.

^19.8 Let me speak briefly of the role I played so that you can better understand the role that waits for you. I came in the fulfillment of scripture. All this really means is that a certain community had been led to expect my arrival. They awaited me with expectation and so found in me what they hoped to find. What my brothers and sisters saw in me allowed me to be who I was, even while in human form. I tell you truly if you were to see any of your brothers and sisters today as those who awaited my birth saw me, they too would remember who they are. This is the role I ask you to accept so that you can provide for others what was provided for me.

^19.9 Each one of your brothers and sisters is as holy as I and as beloved to God. Can you not witness to their belovedness as those long ago witnessed to mine? You have not been able to do this thus far because you have desired specialness for yourself and a few others rather than belovedness for all. But now, perhaps, you are ready.

^19.10 The separated self cannot relearn unity except through union. Here, union is achieved in relationship. To see your brothers and sisters as those of long ago saw me is the way to achieve relationship of the highest order and relearn communion, the language of the heart. This is why you have been asked to experience the spirit of your brothers and sisters rather than simply relating to their bodies as you always have. I was not seen as a body by those who believed in me, although I had a body to help me learn just as you do.

^19.11 My testimony witnessed to your arrival just as the scriptures witnessed to mine. Even while some of my words were distorted or misinterpreted, you can still revisit them and see that this is so. I did not proclaim myself to be above or different from the rest, but called each of you brother and sister and reminded you of our Father’s love and of our union with Him.

^19.12 Your belief in your brothers and sisters will not be total, however, without the reunion of mind and heart that produces the state of wholeheartedness. This state was not achieved at all times by all those who believed in me—and perfection is not asked of you. As can be clearly seen from the records left to you, the apostles did not, in fact, achieve this state during my lifetime, for they looked at me as different and looked to me for power. Only after my resurrection did the Holy Spirit come upon them and reveal their own power to them by uniting mind and heart with belief. They were then reunited with me as they were united with the Christ. You thus must learn to see yourself as you see your brothers and sisters, and to place your belief not in differences but in sameness.

^19.13 In order to do this there is still one more layer to the unification of thought, and this brings up another reason for our reliance on the heart. Thought, as you know it, is an aspect of duality. It cannot be otherwise in your separated state. You must think in terms of “I” and “them,” “death and life,” “good and evil.” This is thought. Thought occurs in words, and words separate. It is only in combining mind and heart with a focus on letting the heart lead that love can be combined with thought in such a way as to actually transcend thought as you know it. This transcendence is a function of wholeheartedness.

^19.14 This is, in essence, why the greatest thinkers have not been able to decipher the riddle, the mystery, of the divine, and why they conclude that God is unknowable. God is knowable from within the mystery of non-duality itself. It would be impossible for you to be a being that can yearn for knowledge of your Creator without this knowledge being available. In creation, all needs are fulfilled the instant they become needs, which is why there are no needs. If everything you need has been provided, having needs makes no sense.

^19.15 Philosophy applies thought to mystery and that is why philosophy becomes such a muddle of words. It is difficult for you to accept that what you most need to know cannot be achieved through the same methods you have used in order to know about other things. And, increasingly, you are willing to exchange experience for second-hand knowledge and to believe you can come to know through the experiences of others. Yet, in the case of coming to know what lies before you now—coming to know your own Self—it is obvious that another’s experience will not bring this knowledge to you, not even my experience. If this were so, all of those who read of my life and words would have learned what I learned from my experience. While many have learned much of others, this type of learning is but a starting point, a gateway to experience.

^19.16 To think without thought or know without words are ideas quite foreign to you, and truly, while you remain here, even experiences beyond thoughts and words you will apply word and thought to. Yet love has often brought you close to a “thought-less” and “word-less” state of being, and it can do so again. As you join with your own Self in unity, all that in love you have created and received returns to its home in you, and leaves you in a state of love in which the wordless and formless is very near.

^19.17 Your only concept of oneness is of a single form, a single entity. There is either one chair or two. One table or four. Your emphasis has been on quantity, and one is seen as less than any other number. Yet, on the other hand, when only one of anything exists it is highly prized. God is thus “God” due, at least in part, to what you view as His singularity. You view those who worship many gods as primitive, although those who believe in a god synonymous with creation are closer to a true picture of God than those who view God as a solitary figure. Still, oneness and unity go together, the unity of creation being part of the oneness of God, and the oneness of God part of the unity of creation. A mind trained by separation can have no concept of this, as all concepts are born from the mind’s separate thoughts. Yet this same mind could still conceive of a creator. A mind that can conceive of a creator combined with a heart that yearns for knowledge of, and union with, that creator, can bypass the need for the separate thoughts of the separated one’s thought system. But you must be trained to do this. Thus your training begins. And begins with prayer.

^19.18 As was said in the beginning, praying is asking. You but asked for your separated state and it was made so. Now you need to but ask for unity to return for it to be so. The condition or state of being from which you ask is what is in need of adjustment and thus of training before you can be aware of the answer you will receive. It is clear you can ask for what you know not. This is not the problem. The problem is in who is doing the asking. The separated self, while capable of asking, is hardly capable of believing in or accepting the response. It is this non-belief in a response that makes it capable of asking. Now that you are beginning to shed the concept of the separate self and to believe in the possibility of response, you will find yourself more afraid to ask. All your asking or prayer awaits is but your belief in the love without fear that has always responded.

^19.19 Out of the deepest, darkest chaos of your mind comes the possibility of light. It is a bit like traveling backward, or the review of life that some experience after death. In order to remember unity you must, in a sense, travel back to it, undoing as you go all you have learned since last you knew it, so all that remains is love. This undoing, or atonement, has begun—and once begun is unstoppable and thus already inevitably accomplished.

^19.20 My brothers and sisters in Christ, do not become impatient now. We are on the home stretch and all you long for is nearer than ever before. To talk of going “back” will undoubtedly make you feel impatient, but this is not a going back that will in any way resemble the “going back” that you have tried to do before. While it is, in a sense, a request to review your life, it is the last such review that will be required before letting the past go completely. All your previous attempts to go back have been like attempts to pay a debt that will never go away. This going back will leave you debt free and thus free in truth.

^19.21 This going back is the journey without distance. You need not go in search of it, and in truth, cannot, for the past does not abide in you. What you need rather do is strive for a place of stillness from which what needs review can arise as if it were a reflection arising from a deep pool. Here what is in need of healing will but briefly come to the surface and leave the hidden depths where light could not reach it and healing could not come. What comes forth for healing needs but a nod of love from your heart, a passing glance of compassion, the merest moment of reflection, before it will dissipate and show a new reflection.

^19.22 This going back is, in reality, more in the way of reflection than review, although if you were to think of this as a re-viewing of your self, you would be quite accurate. It is like unto the final judgment as it has been described, a sorting of the real from the unreal, of truth from illusion. Despite the similarity between what this will call forth and the description of the final judgment, judgment is not the means or end of this reckoning.

^19.23 The loftiest aim of which you are currently capable is that of changing your perception. Although our ultimate goal is to move beyond perception to knowledge, a first step in doing this is changing your means of perception to that of right-mindedness. Your willingness to accept me as your teacher will help you to accept my sight as your own and thus to be right-minded. The way you have perceived of yourself and your world until now has not been right-minded, and you are beginning to realize this. Thus it is now appropriate for the realization to come to you that your mind, and your perception, can be changed. This is necessary before you can look back in a new way and not simply cover the same ground you have covered a million times, seeing causes for recriminations, blame, and guilt. Looking back in judgment is not what is required here. Only the opposite will advance our aim of uniting mind and heart.

^19.24 The Holy Spirit exists in your right mind, and is the bridge to exchanging perception for knowledge. Knowledge is light, and the only light in which you can truly see. You will not truly desire to unite your mind and heart in wholeheartedness until you see clearly. One purpose of the distinctions you have made between mind and heart are their ability to keep one part of yourself blameless. Whatever happens, your divided notion of yourself allows you to both protect and conceal. Fault always lies elsewhere. The guiltless part of you is always free to redeem the guilt-filled self. This idea of self-redemption has long been a culprit that has kept union, even with your own Self, undesirable to you. The concept that in oneness there is no need for blame or guilt or even for redemption is inconceivable to the separate mind. But not to the heart.