Teachings of Christ Mind

^20.1 Your longing now has reached a fever pitch, a burning in your heart quite different from that which you have felt before. Your heart may even feel as if it is stretching outward, straining heavenward, near to bursting with its desire for union, a desire you do not understand but can surely feel.

^20.2 This is a call to move now into my embrace and let yourself be comforted. Let the tears fall and the weight of your shoulders rest upon mine. Let me cradle your head against my breast as I stroke your hair and assure you that it will be all right. Realize that this is the whole world, the universe, the all of all in whose embrace you literally exist. Feel the gentleness and the love. Drink in the safety and the rest. Close your eyes and begin to see with an imagination that is beyond thought and words.

^20.3 You are no longer the object viewing the subjects of the kingdom. You are the heart of the kingdom. The kingdom’s beauty revealed. The beloved child suckled at the breast of the queen mother earth, one child of one mother, nameless and beyond naming. No “I” resides here. You have given up the vision of your eyes and the “I” of your ego. You are loosed of bounds, no longer a thing of beauty, but beauty itself.

^20.4 “Thingness” is over, and your identity no longer stands in form but flows from life itself. Your beauty is the gathering of the atoms, the order in chaos, the silence in solitude, the grace of the cosmos. Our heart is the light of the world.

^20.5 We are one heart.

^20.6 We are one mind. One creative force gathering the atoms, establishing the order, blessing the silence, gracing the cosmos, manifesting the light of the heart. Here we live as one body, experiencing communion, the soul’s delight, rather than otherness. It is a seamless world, a tapestry where each thread is vibrant and strong. A canticle where each tone is pure and indivisible.

^20.7 We have returned to the embrace. And now your arms cradle me as well, for an embrace, although it may begin with one reaching out to another, concludes with mutuality, shared touch, a melding of one into another. The embrace makes one of two.

^20.8 And now we begin to see with the eyes of our heart. We are no longer looking out but looking in. All landscapes and horizons form within the embrace. All beauty resides there. All light is fused and infused within the embrace. Within the embrace our sight clears and what we see is known rather than understood.

^20.9 Here, rest comes to weariness and gently lays it aside. Time has ended and there is nothing you must do. Being replaces identity and you say, I am. I am, and there is nothing outside of me. Nothing outside of the embrace.

^20.10 From here your life becomes imaginal, a dream that requires you not to leave your home, your place of safety and of rest. You are cradled gently while your spirit soars, dreaming happy dreams at last. With love surrounding you in arms that hold you close, you feel the heartbeat of the world just beneath your resting head. It thunders in your ears and moves through you until there is no distinction. We are the heartbeat of the world.

^20.11 This is creation. This is God. This is our home.

^20.12 We exist in the embrace of love like the layers of light that form a rainbow, indivisible and curved inward upon each other. Love grows from within as a child grows within its mother’s womb. Inward, inward, into the embrace, the source of all beginnings, the kernel and the wholeness of all life. The whole exists untroubled by what it will be. It is.

^20.13 The time of parables has ended. A new time of no time awaits. Nothing is like unto anything else. Likeness, like thingness, has been overcome with oneness. Oneness prevails. The reign of Christ is at hand.

^20.14 I am alive and you do believe this or you would not be here. Yet you think not of me living and imagine it not. Christ reigns in the kingdom in which I live just as Christ reigned within me on earth. In the cave on this earth where my dead body was laid, the Christ in me returned me to the embrace. The singular heartbeat of the man Jesus no longer sounded. My heartbeat was the heartbeat of the world.

^20.15 Imagine a body in a cave, a cave in the earth, the earth in the planet, the planet in the universe. Each cradles the other. None are passive. None are dead. All share the heartbeat of the world and are at rest within each other, within each other’s embrace and the embrace of God’s love, God’s creation, God’s heartbeat. God’s heartbeat is the Source of the world, the Soul of the world, the Sound of the world in harmony, existence with no beginning and no end. One embrace. All in all. None lesser and none greater for all is all. One is one.

^20.16 There is no longer cause for alienation, nor for the feeling of abandonment so many of you have felt. You are now within the embrace where all such hurts are healed.

^20.17 The world does not exist apart from you, and so you must realize your compassionate connection. The world is not a collection of cement buildings and paved streets nor of cold, heartless people who would as soon do you harm as good. It is but the place of your interaction with all that lives within you, sharing the one heartbeat. The heartbeat of the world does not exist apart from God. The heartbeat of the world is thus alive and part of you. This heart connection is what we seek to return you to. This realization that the world is not a thing, as you are not a thing. Your identity is shared and one in Christ. A shared identity is a quality of oneness. A shared identity is one identity. When you identify with Christ you identify with the one identity. When you realize the oneness of your identity you will be one with Christ. Christ is synonymous with oneness.

^20.18 Who could be left out of the embrace? And who from within the embrace could be separate and alone?

^20.19 Have you never felt as if you would wrap your arms around the world and bring it comfort if you could? This you can do. Not with physical arms, but with the arms of love. Have you never cried for the state of the world as you would for one small child in need of love? Has the world then not lost its thingness? And has it not as well lost its personalness? Are your tears not shed for what lives and breathes and exists along with you? And is the you who shed such tears a personal being? A thing? A mass of flesh and bone? Or are you, like the world you cry for, devoid of thingness and a personal self? And when you have leapt for joy at the world’s beauty, has it not leapt with you, returning grace for grace?

^20.20 Is it possible to have a concept of wholeness, of all, and for it not to exist? And how could it exist apart from you? Oneness with Christ, dear brother and sister, is nothing more than this concept realized. And also nothing less.

^20.21 This lesson is only as complicated as the most complex among you needs it to be. But for some it can be simple, as simple as realizing the oneness of the embrace. Within the embrace you can let all thought go. Within the embrace, you can quit thinking even of holy things, holy men and women, and even divine beings, even the one God. Is not the embrace itself holy? Is not the sunrise and sunset? Is not the least of the birds of the air as holy as the mighty eagle? The blade of grass, the fleck of sand, the wind and air, the ocean and her surf, all live by the universal heartbeat and exist within the embrace. Is not all you can imagine holy when you imagine with love? Is not all you cannot imagine holier still?

^20.22 Sanctity is all that exists within the embrace. How could you be less than sacred? You exist in holiness.

^20.23 The first step in remembering this holiness is forgetting. Let yourself forget that you do not feel holy and that the world does not appear to be sacred. Let your heart remember that you are holy and that the world is sacred. A thousand things can pull you from your remembrance. Forgetting “things” can free you to remember.

^20.24 Forget yourself and memory will return to you. Beyond your personal self and the identity you have given your personal self is your being. This is the face of Christ where all being resides. This is your true identity.

^20.25 Thankfulness is the nature of your being. It could not be otherwise when awe and magnificence encompass you in the embrace. Your heart sings in gratitude for the all that you are. You are the beauty of the world and peace abides within you.

^20.26 Peace is the foundation of your being. Not a peace that implies an absence but a peace that implies a fullness. Wholeness is peaceful. Only separation creates conflict.

^20.27 Love is the source of your being. You flow from love, an outpouring without end. You are thus eternal. You are pure and innocent because you flow from love. What flows from love is changeless and boundless. You are without limit.

^20.28 Power is the expression of who you are. Because you are changeless and boundless, you are all-powerful. Only lack of expression leads to powerlessness. No true expression is possible until you know who you are. To know who you are and not to express who you are with your full power is the result of fear. To know the safety and love of the embrace is to know no cause for fear, and thus to come into your true power. True power is the power of miracles.

^20.29 Miracles are expressions of love. You might think of them as acts of cooperation. Holiness cannot be contained, and it is not within your power to limit it. To feel the holiness of the embrace is to release its power. While expression and action are not the same, understanding their relationship to each other is essential.

^20.30 Expressions of love are as innumerable as the stars in the universe, as bountiful as beauty, as many-faceted as the gems of the earth. I say again that sameness is not a sentence to mediocrity or uniformity. You are a unique expression of the selfsame love that exists in all creation. Thus your expression of love is as unique as your Self. It is in the cooperation between unique expressions of love that creation continues and miracles become natural occurrences.

^20.31 This cooperation is natural when fear has been rejected. You have long embraced fear and rejected love. Now the reverse is true. This reversal of truth has changed the nature of your universe and the laws by which it operates. The laws of fear were laws of struggle, limits, danger, and competitiveness. The laws of love are laws of peace, abundance, safety, and cooperation. Your actions and the results of your actions in a universe of love will naturally be different from your actions and the results of your actions in a universe of fear. You set the laws of the universe when you chose fear. The laws of the universe of love are God-given.

^20.32 Acceptance of your true power is acceptance of your God-given authority via your free will. When I beseeched my Father, saying, “They know not what they do,” I was expressing the nature of my brothers and sisters as caused by fear. To accept your power and your God-given authority is to know what you do. Let the fear be taken from this area of your thought so that you can see the application of cooperative action. As long as you fear your own ability to know what you do, you cannot be fully cooperative.

^20.33 The rest of the universe, existing in a state of compassionate free will devoid of fear, knows what it does. There are no opposing forces that are not in agreement about their opposing force. No atoms do battle. No molecules compete for dominance. The universe is a dance of cooperation. You are but asked to rejoin the dance.

^20.34 The embrace has returned you to attunement with the heartbeat, the music of the dance. You have not known what you do or what to do only because of fear, only because you have been out of accord with the one heartbeat. The world, the universe, is your partner—and only now do you hear the music that brings grace to all your movements, all your actions, all your expressions of love. While this may seem to be metaphorical language it is not. Listen and you will hear. Hear, and you cannot help but rejoice in the dance.

^20.35 You have not before now been able to even imagine knowing what you do. You hope to have moments of clarity concerning what you are doing in a given moment, what you have done, what you hope to do in the future. But even these moments of clarity are fractional. They seldom have any relation to the whole. Knowing what you do comes from existing within the embrace. You know you do the will of God because you are at one with that will.

^20.36 Bitterness and uncertainty are replaced by hope. Hope is the condition of the initiate, new to the realization of having a home within the embrace. It is the response that says to all you have just read, “Ah, if only it were true. If only it could be true.” Notice the complete change in this “if only” from those we have spoken of earlier—the “if onlys” of fear. If you put half as much faith in these “if onlys” as you have in the “if onlys” of fear, all the certainty I have spoken of will be yours.

^20.37 Knowing what you do is a present moment knowing. It is not about plans. It is about moment-by-moment knowing exactly who you are and acting out of that loving identity, and it is about knowing that as you do so you are in accord and enjoying the full cooperation of the entire universe.

^20.38 Hope is a manner of acting as if the best possible outcome you can imagine could truly occur. Hope is a willingness to accept love and the grace and cooperation that flow from love. Hope is a willingness to ask for help, believing it will come. Hope is the reason and the outcome for which we pray. Hope acknowledges the kindliness of the universe and has no use for things. The inanimate as well as the animate is called upon, depended upon for service. All use is replaced with service, and appreciation replaces the callousness with which use once occurred.

^20.39 All service is cooperative and depends on a belief in mutuality. All fear that what is good for one may not be good for the whole is replaced by an understanding that each one is worthy of his or her desires. Eachness replaces thingness but not oneness. All fear that what one gets means that less is available for another is replaced with an understanding of abundance. Receiving replaces all notions of taking or getting. All that is received is for the mutual benefit of all and takes nothing away from anyone. There is no limit to love and so there are no limits to anything that flows from love. What one benefits from everyone benefits from.

^20.40 Receiving is an act of mutuality. It stems from a basic law of the universe expressed in the saying that the sun shines and the rain falls on the good and evil alike. All gifts of God are given equally and distributed equally. It is your belief that this is not so that causes judgment. All who believe they have “more” fall prey to righteousness. All who believe they have “less” fall victim to envy. Both “fall” from grace and limit their ability to receive. No gifts are received when all gifts are judged. While the gift is still given, the judgment changes the nature of the gift by limiting its ability to be of service. A gift one feels one cannot “use” is discarded. Thus have many of your treasures lain fallow.

^20.41 What you each have been given is that which will serve your purpose. You could have no more perfect gifts, for your gifts are expressions of your Father’s perfect love for you. Look deep inside and feel your heart’s gladness. Your construction was no mistake. You are not flawed. You are not wanting. You would not be other than you are except when you give in to making judgments. Look deeply and you will see that what you would call your imperfections are as chosen and as dear to you as all the rest.

^20.42 You would not be other than who you are. You may know that this is true or you may dwell in fantasies, desiring what another has or some success, fame, or riches that seem impossible for you to attain. And yet, whether you know it is true or not, it is true: You would not be other than who you are. Herein lie your peace and your perfection. If you would not be other than you are, then you must be perfect. This is a conclusion both logical to the mind and believable to the heart, and its acceptance is a step toward wholeheartedness.

^20.43 To believe in your perfection and the equality of your gifts is peaceful because it releases you from trying to acquire that which you previously believed you were lacking. It releases you from judgment because you know that your brothers and sisters are also beings of perfection. When you begin to see them as such, what you will receive from them is far grander than anything you would before have wished to take from them.

^20.44 Your thinking will begin to change to reflect your recognition of reception. Reception and welcome are highly linked. You will find you are welcome to all the gifts you recognize in your brothers and sisters just as you freely will offer yours to serve them. To serve rather than to use is an enormous change in thinking, feeling, and acting. It will immediately make the world a kinder, gentler place. And it is only a beginning.

^20.45 To serve is different from your ideas of service, however. Your ideas of service are bound to your ideas of charity. Your idea of charity is based on some having more and some having less. Thus, you must remain cognizant of this distinction between serving and service. It will be helpful if you keep in mind that the idea of to serve is being used to replace the idea of to use and is its opposite. It replaces the thought of taking with the thought of receiving. It implies that you are welcome to all the gifts of the universe and that they can be given, through you, to others as well. It implies willingness rather than resistance. To change your thinking and your feelings from expecting resistance to expecting willingness is another key change that will lead toward wholeheartedness. When you change your actions from those of resistance and use to those of being willing to serve and be served, it will assist not only you and your peacefulness, but will bring peacefulness to the world as well.

^20.46 Before you begin to resist the notion that you could have anything to do with world peace, realize that you naturally have reacted with resistance. You must replace your willingness to believe in your inadequacy and smallness with your willingness to believe in your ability and mightiness. Remember not your ego concerns and remember instead the warmth of the embrace. Remember not your personal identity but remember instead your shared identity.

^20.47 Your personal concerns are concerns you have been taught to believe you have. They are small concerns and they are among the reasons for your belief in your inability to effect change within your own life and certainly within the greater life of the universe. You must understand that when you think of your personal life, personal concerns, personal relationships, you are separating yourself from the whole. These concerns are a matter of perception, and are things your mind has been trained to see as being within its scope. It is as if you have cordoned off a little section of life and said, “These are the things that relate to my existence and to me and they are all I need concern myself with.” Even when you think of expanding your view, you deem that expansion unrealistic. You cannot do everything. You cannot effect world peace. You can barely keep your personal concerns in order. Your effort to do so is all that stands between you and chaos.

^20.48 Your heart has a different scope, a different view. It is the view from within the embrace, the view from love’s angle. It is the view of the dying who realize nothing matters but love. This realization is not one of sentiment, regrets, or wishful thinking. It is the view from the embrace, the return to one heartbeat, the return to what is known. This knowing you might call wisdom and think of as an attainable ideal of thought. Yet it is not about thought at all, but is beyond thought. It is not wisdom but the truth. The truth is that which exists. The false is illusion. Love is all that matters because love is all that is.