Teachings of Christ Mind

^10.1 You would have to work mightily to turn the lessons of this Course into a tool, but many of you will not tire of this work until you succeed. This is how truths become dogma and dogma becomes tyranny. This happens by accepting a static state. A static state is not a living state because creation is not occurring within it. This is a living Course. This is why you are called to live it rather than to take it. This is why you are called to be a teacher and a learner both. This is how the exchange of giving and receiving as one occurs. This exchange is unity.

^10.2 Thinking that needs can be met only in certain ways is akin to another belief that has been replaced. This belief was first expressed in A Course in Miracles by the saying resign as your own teacher. This belief in the self as teacher has now been replaced with the belief that you only learn in unity.

^10.3 I ask you to think for a moment of a time when you attempted to recall a specific memory. This may have been a memory of a name or address, of a dream, or an attempt to recall a specific event. At such times, you often feel as if, just as the memory is about to return to you, it is swatted away as easily and routinely as a hand swats away a fly. You know that the information is contained within you and yet you are often forced to accept an inability to have access to this information. It is forced from your awareness by something you know not. It is there and yet swatted away as if by some unseen hand. Where has this information gone and what keeps it from you? You might feel frustrated with your memory at such a time and even say something such as “my brain just isn’t working right today.” I want you now to keep this example in mind as we explore learning in unity.

^10.4 You might think of unity as you have so often thought of your brain, but rather than thinking of it in the singular, think of it as a storehouse or giant brain in which all that has ever been known or thought is contained. The technology that has created super-computers will immediately come to mind from this illustration. While this illustration may be distasteful to some and intriguing to others, how many of you would not want to replace your ability to know with the ability of that of a supercomputer?

^10.5 While just an illustration, the reverse of this is akin to what you have done by replacing unity with singularity. You have narrowed your ability to know to an ability to know that which you have experienced. While what we are speaking of as knowing has little to do with the information stored in supercomputers, it is still a worthy illustration. For just as a supercomputer needs a knowledgeable operator in order to provide the information sought, so too do you need to become knowledgeable in order to access all that is available to you.

^10.6 Just as needs have been shown to be shared in like measure by all, so too is true knowing. Just as needs were shown to be distinguishable from wants by a discussion of their shared nature, so too now must knowing be distinguished from what you consider intelligence.

^10.7 While you are being told that you can no longer believe that what you know is related to experience, you are not being told that you have exactly the same knowledge as does every person of every variety and level of experience. Yet no one can know more of the truth than another, and no one can know less.

^10.8 Just beyond your mind’s ability to call it forth lies the truth that you and all other beings know. The access to what seems to lie beyond your ability lies in the Christ in you. You might think of the ego as the hand that swats away this knowing.

^10.9 The ego is the teacher you have relied upon when you have relied upon yourself as your own teacher.

^10.10 You forget constantly that the Christ in you is the learner here. What need is there for a computer brain or for the ego to be teacher when the learner in you is the all-powerful? The learner in you is the unifying force of the universe. The learning you are in need of is the learning that will call who you are back to your united mind and heart. This is the knowing that already exists, the memory that is swatted away by the ego.

^10.11 Why, then, is this called learning? Learning simply means to come to know. If what you know has been forgotten, you still are in need of the learning that assists you in coming to know once again.

^10.12 But as long as you continue to attempt to learn with your ego, or in other words, as long as you would continue to attempt to learn in the same way that you have previously learned, you will not learn because the “you” that will be involved in the learning process will not be the real you.

^10.13 The Christ in you is the real you. The Christ in you is the Self who you become when you have united heart and mind once again in wholeheartedness. Thus the union of mind and heart is, as was stated previously, the first union, the union that must precede all the rest. You are in a state of unity when you have achieved wholeheartedness. You are in a state in which you are able to learn. I am here to show you the way to the Christ in you. I began my teaching by appealing to your heart so as to ready you for the return of wholeheartedness, the state of union in which all that you learn is shared, first by mind and heart, and then in unity with your brothers and sisters. You achieve this state only by listening to one voice, or, in other words, by ending the separated state which is the state in which the ego exists. The end of the separated state or the ego, is the beginning of your ability to hear only one voice, the voice we all share in unity.

^10.14 This voice speaks to you in a thousand ways. It is the voice of love, the voice of creation, the voice of life. It is the voice of certainty that allows you to move through each day and all the experiences within it as who you are in truth. It releases you from the feeling of needing to control or protect your treasure. It releases you as well from the static state of trying to hang on to who you were yesterday, or trying to prevent change tomorrow.

^10.15 As was said in the beginning, it is realized that it is hard for you to believe that the Christ in you is in need of learning. Think a moment of why this should be so. Is there ever a moment in which coming to know is not appropriate? Is there any reason that coming to know should not be seen as something continuous and ongoing?

^10.16 Again your desire for a static state would make you rather listen to your ego as it prescribes learning for certain circumstances that would be quickly put behind you or chosen for specific outcomes. While many love to learn for the sake of learning alone, still they would be loath to give up or let go the ability to choose their lessons. And still we are only talking about learning as you have perceived of it rather than learning from life.

^10.17 What difference does it make to your concepts of learning when you think of life as your coursework? Would you be any more willing to let another choose your lessons for you?

^10.18 What are your plans and dreams but chosen lessons? While you do not think of them as such you do not think of life as your learning ground. You still think of lessons as being about specific subject matter. When life does not go as you have planned, you feel as if your chosen path has been denied to you. You often feel a sense of loss and rarely one of gain. Unless life goes the way you have intended for it to go, you do not feel gifted or blessed even when you may have looked back often on situations that did not go as you had planned and nevertheless gifted you with experiences or opportunities that would not have arisen had your chosen plan come to fruition.

^10.19 The Christ in you has no need to plan. A need to come to know, yes. But a need to plan, no. The Christ in you needs not for you to choose a lesson plan, but to let life itself be your chosen way of learning.