Teachings of Christ Mind

^10.1 Now let me address the issue of the peace you have been experiencing as well as your reactions to this peace. It is so foreign to each of you that you can’t quite imagine that it is what you are supposed to be feeling. There is a core of peace at the center of your Self now and the issues that you choose to deal with will not affect that core of peace at all. While you may find this almost disturbing, you will not go to extremes to break this peace.

^10.2 My peace is yours. You have asked for it and it has been given to you. To not have it, you will have to choose not to have it. And this will be tempting on occasion. You will wonder at the lack of extremes in your feelings and want to bring them back. You will experience this loss of extremes as a lack. You will think something is wrong. You will feel this particularly when others around you experience extremes. A friend is experiencing feelings on an extreme level and this will seem to tell you that this friend is really alive. Whether it be joy or sorrow, it will seem real in a way that peace does not. It will seem so human that a wave of desire to be fully human will wash over you. You will think that this human who has caught your attention is fully engaged and fully experiencing the moment. You will think this is what you want. And I say again that it will not matter whether it be joy or sorrow for you are, or have been, attracted by both for the same reason, the reason of wanting to be fully engaged in the human experience.

^10.3 Here is this experience you have created and how often have you been fully engaged in it? How often have you given yourself over to those highs and lows? You will be tempted to give yourself over once again in this most human of ways. You will cry and laugh for the poignancy of the human experience. This is the known that you will be tempted not to give up. If you can’t be moved from your peace by the greatest of these experiences, the most profound sorrow or the most all-encompassing joy, you will feel inhuman. You will think that this cannot be where you are meant to be, what you are meant to feel. You will wonder what is wrong with you.

^10.4 This is temptation. The temptation of the human experience. This is what you continue to choose over the Peace of God. This is not a right or wrong choice but it is a choice. It is your free will to continue to make this choice.

^10.5 You used your free will to choose the human experience. Now are you willing to use it to choose the Peace of God instead? Can you wholeheartedly choose peace? Can you choose peace long enough to become accustomed to joy without sorrow? If you cannot, you will continue to create hell as well as heaven and will continue the separation between the divine and the human. Is heaven worth enough to you to give up hell?

^10.6 These extremes of the human experience have been learning devices. They have cracked open hearts and minds to the divine presence within. You have chosen them for just this reason. But you can now be an observer and look upon them as your brothers’ and sisters’ learning choice without choosing to return to learning in the same way again. You no longer need these experiences to alert you to the divine presence. Once you have learned to read you do not return to learning to read over and over again even while you may continue to read for a lifetime. You can continue to experience life and still carry the Peace of God within you. As you live in peace you can be an example to your brothers and sisters, an example that says there is another way.

^10.7 Are you being asked to give up extremes? Yes. You are being asked to give up all that would take peace from you. But as you have been told before, you will be giving up nothing. It will seem as if it is so for a while perhaps. You will continue to be attracted to those living at the extremes and there is no reason not to take joy in observing another’s happiness or to feel compassion at another’s suffering. But you need not partake and you cannot partake if you are going to carry the Peace of God within you.

^10.8 This is what has been meant by the many references that have been made to God not seeing suffering. God exists with you in peace. When you feel peace, you feel the Peace of God. There is no other peace. There is no other God. Whether you believe it now or not, I assure you, within the Peace of God is all the joy of what you have known as the human experience and none of the sorrow.

^10.9 Each of you will have an experience you look back on, an experience of profound joy or grief that also became an experience of profound learning. You will think that you would not be who you are now without experiences such as this one. You will think that I cannot possibly be asking you to give up these types of experiences. But you have already had them! I ask you not to give them up. Only to make now a new choice.

^10.10 It is your memory of these events that holds such sway over you that you would choose not the Peace of God. But look past what you have remembered to what was truly there. No moment of true learning ever arrived without the Peace of God for without the Peace of God no true learning is possible.

^10.11 Let us separate experiences you might call peak experiences from experiences of extremes that served as learning devices. Peak experiences often follow occasions of happiness or trauma, but they do not happen within them. Peak experiences are what you can look forward to rather than back upon if you but choose the Peace of God.

^10.12 The extremes that we are talking of leaving behind are extremes of reaction to a chosen lesson. What you are being asked to leave behind is the need for such lessons. If you have learned the curriculum, what further lessons are needed? What quiet knowing cannot come to you in peace? Why would you believe you can learn from the turmoil of extremes what you cannot learn in peace eternal?

^10.13 This is what you have believed and why you have not chosen yet to accept your inheritance. Yet let the memory of the truth return to you now and you will see that peace is all you have sought learning to attain. If you do not pause now and accept that it is here, you will not know the Peace of God that is your own Self.

^10.14 Peace, in whatever way you find it, in whatever expression it takes, no matter what words you use to describe it, is your answer to God and God’s answer to you. Peace is the inheritance I left you. Peace of body, mind, and heart. Peace is the realm of miracles, the condition of the wholehearted, the prerequisite to the art of thought, the description of heaven, the abode of Christ. Peace has come to you and you to Peace.

^10.15 Now your final instruction is here. You who have found peace—live in peace. You have been given the Peace of God—go in Peace. Spread peace throughout the land. Go out in peace and love and service to all. For in this going out you come home and bring with you all the brothers and sisters you have brought to peace. Go in peace to love and serve with all your heart. Thus are we one heart, one mind, one unity. Thus are we one in a relationship of love and peace that is our eternal home. Welcome home my brothers and sisters in Christ. Welcome home.