Teachings of Christ Mind

^5.1 A point of access will no longer be needed once full entry is attained, just as a key is no longer needed once a door has been unlocked and passed through. Even though it will not be permanently needed, however, this point of access will remain crucial as long as you maintain rather than sustain the state of unity. This point of access will thus now be discussed, both as an initial entry point and as a continued entry point so that it is available to you until it is no longer needed.

^5.2 For each of you this access point will in truth be the same, but perhaps quite different in the action which you use in order to enter it. For those of you who have felt the point of entry to be the mind in experiences already registered, there is no need to combat this feeling. For those of you who have felt the state of unity through experiences of the heart, there is again, no need to struggle against this. Let me elaborate.

^5.3 For many of you, “thoughts you did not think” are among your first experiences of unity. Thus, just as when you might look up when trying to remember something, or tap a finger at your temple, there is, in a certain sense, a “place” to which you turn for these experiences. This does not mean that these experiences come from your mind or from a place just beyond your physical concept of the mind but, since you are not your body, the idea of what originates “within” coming from a point beyond the body is not now too unbelievable to contemplate.

^5.4 As we said yesterday, our form of meditation, a meditation that is not a tool but a function of your natural Self, is a focus on access. Thus we begin with what feels natural to you. We give access a focal point in the realm of form.

^5.5 This focal point must be of your own choosing. Your point of access may be your head, or a place just above or to the right or left of your head. It may be your heart, or some mid-point just beyond the body. It may, for some, feel like a connection that arises from the earth and as if it is just below the form of the physical body. Some could feel it in their hands and others as if it comes directly from their mouths as speech is enabled that bypasses the realm of thought completely. Do not fight any of these feelings or others that I have not named. Just consider them givens and choose what feels most natural to you as a focal point for your focus on access.

^5.6 What we have focused on for some time now is love. Love never changes. It thus is the same for each of us. Yet not one of us expresses love in exactly the same way as another. This is important to remember now as you begin to work with your access to unity.

^5.7 Unity and Love—as we have within this work shown them to be—are the same.

^5.8 Thus, access too is the same. It exists. It is there for you. It is given. It cannot be denied unless you deny it. It is only because you have not known this that we speak of it in this way here.

^5.9 Just as it is helpful in some instances to associate love with your heart even though we have identified heart as the center of the Self rather than the pump that functions as part of your body, it will be helpful to have identified this chosen access point for unity even while remembering it is not of the body alone.

^5.10 While the purpose of this work was to have you identify love and thus your Self, correctly, there is still fine-tuning to your understanding to be done, and this will be done as you come to know what unity is, and so more fully come to know your Self and love.

^5.11 There would seem to be one major difference between unity and love and that difference would seem to be love’s ability to be given away.

^5.12 Access to unity will seem, at first, a quite individual accomplishment, something one may have and another may not. While this remains the case, you may desire to give others what you have and feel unable to do so. Yet, like love, unity is known through its effects. All the benefits of union can be given away to any willing to receive.

^5.13 While you do not consider yourself as having or needing an “access” point to love, and while you may treat love still as an individual attribute intimately associated with the Self you are, you know love is not an attribute and that all love comes from the same Source. You know you have been able to “give” love only when you have felt you “have” love to give. You thus have long known the truth of giving and receiving as one within your own heart. You might think of access in the same way—as enabling you to realize that you “have” the benefits of union to give.

^5.14 Like love, unity has one source and many expressions. It will be in your unique expression of union that your Self will come to wholeness and you will be fully who you are and able to express love fully.

^5.15 Realize here that although you are now a part of a community seeking the same goal, the realization, or “making real” of your accomplishment, and its expression, will not look the same way twice. What you each desire from union most will be what finds the greatest expression through you.

^5.16 A “healer” for instance, might, thus, feel her access point as being the hands and express what is gained through unity by a laying on of hands. Similarly, you might say healing is one of the ways the healer expresses love. In truth healing and love are the same.

^5.17 Who you are now, what your desires are, and where your talents have been recognized, are as given as the goal you now desire to realize. Again I remind you that the sameness of union is not about becoming clones or one specific type of idealized holy person. Union is being fully who you are and expressing fully who you are. This is the miracle, the goal, the accomplishment that is achieved through the reign of love, the maintenance and finally the sustainability of union.

^5.18 Realize here that while you want to know the specifics of how this thing called access to unity will work, you are also impatient with specifics. You want immediate results, not more practice. You want relief and an end to effort, not another lesson to learn that you will be told is not a lesson. Not another cause for seeming effort in order to arrive at the effortless. But realize also that this effort that you rail against is still of your own choosing. The realization of a “way” to make things as they are is never effortful in and of itself.

^5.19 As you may seem to pause here in your movement in order to understand the way in which that movement is achieved, you will almost surely once again have doubts. Doubts are never more pronounced than when specifics are being dealt with. Yet you continue to desire specifics. This is because you are still entrenched in the pattern of learning, as your earnest effort to leave effort behind implies. Remember that union cannot be learned, for if it could be, the time of learning would be perpetuated rather than ended.

^5.20 Remember that you are tired of learning. You are tired here, after your climb. You simply want to rest and have whatever transformation is to come to you to come. If you could indeed give in to this desire fully, it would speed the transformation along quite nicely. So please, listen to your weariness and to your heart’s desire to rest. Listen to the call to peace and let yourself recline in the embrace of love, feeling the warm earth beneath you and the heat of the sun above you. Let languor enfold you and apply no effort to what you read here. Just accept what is given. All that is being given is the helpful hints you have desired from an older brother who has experienced what you, as yet, have not.

^5.21 In this frame of mind, we can return more specifically to our focus on access. Wherever your chosen point of access lies, imagine now the needle that was discussed as passing through the onion in the Course chapter “The Intersection,” and imagine the point of intersection connecting with your chosen access point. Imagine this now, not as a needle but as the wisdom you seek. Imagine this wisdom not as being stopped by the layers of thinking and feeling that we used the onion to illustrate, but as a point of entry and pass-through. What comes of unity enters you and passes through you to the world. This is the relationship you have with unity while in form—a relationship of intersection and pass-through.

^5.22 No longer will what enters you get stopped by layers of defenses. No longer will it meet the road-block of your thinking, your effort, your attempts to figure out how to do it and what it all means. There is no cause for such effort. Effort is only a layer of defense, a stop gap between what you would receive and what you would give in which the ego once made its bid to claim ownership. Effort, as translated by the ego, was about turning everything that was given into what “you” could only work hard to attain, and thereby claim as your individual accomplishment. Obviously, union is not about this. While the ego is gone, effort remains, and while it remains, you will not realize full access to what you are given. We are speaking here of letting your form serve union and union serve your form. This service is effortless for it is the way of creation. Again, this is why the “effort” of learning must cease.

^5.23 Let’s return to the image of the healer that was discussed earlier. While many will heal, all attempts to teach or learn “how to” heal must be thwarted, for if not, the pattern of learning will remain. This is why there have always seemed to be “secrets” held among the great healers and spiritual guides. They have understood that what they have gained access to cannot be taught. This has not meant that they were not eager to share, only that the means of sharing was not one of teaching or learning.

^5.24 Each expression of union must remain as what it is—untaught and unlearned. Each gain from unity will only, in this way, be seen as the new givens come to replace learning.

^5.25 Remember this as well as you focus on your access to unity. Focus does not mean thinking. Focus does not mean learning. Remember the example of how your breathing becomes unnatural when you think about it, and contrast this with the increase in awareness of breath that comes from the focus of meditation. A focus point is a point of convergence. A focal point is a point of intersection that gives rise to a clear image.

^5.26 The intersection spoken of here is that of pass-through. Although we have spoken of this focal point as an entryway, this does not imply that something that is not of you is entering you, and it does not imply entry without exit. When you think of breathing, you may think of inhaling as taking in air, and of air as something that is not “of” you. But the air you breathe is “of” you. You may think of the air you exhale as being more “of” you, but there is no more or less to the relationship of entry and exit. You are in continual relationship with the air you breathe and in continual relationship with unity. It is a constant exchange. When you are fully aware of this is when full access is attained. So we will continue our work now in releasing you from those things that would still block your full awareness.