Teachings of Christ Mind

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From the Christ Mind

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Chapter Ten

The Return of Wholeness

Always have you missed your Father, always have you longed to return to your true Home. This world will never satisfy you, it will never heal your wounded heart, for never will it be your home. You may build palaces; surround yourself with all possible pleasures, delights, and entertainments; seek comfort in the company of many other bodies; yet never will you be fulfilled. Shiny baubles, trivial pursuits, and meaningless goals, cannot conceal the emptiness and meaninglessness of worldly life.

You will never be happy here as king or beggar. The many different forms life seems to take merely conceal the emptiness that lies behind them all. No matter how glorious, all will end in death. The high and mighty, and the lowly, are all destined to return to the dust from which the body came. All hopes and dreams will grow dim in time, and the achievements of a lifetime are as nothing when that life ends in death.

You are not at home in this world. It is a place you came to for a little while, a place you can leave again when you so desire, when the longing to return Home rises to awareness and becomes the only thing you truly want. If you accept the Holy Spirit’s purpose for the world, it will in time become a happy place where the Truth of Heaven is reflected, and Love and forgiveness are extended to all. The beauty of Truth will shine forth, the Light will shine in every living thing, and you will see everyone as brother to you.

The world you see is but a dream, yet it can be a happy dream, showing forth the reflection of Truth. Here you will linger but for a little while, no longer a prisoner, while the Wholeness of your mind is restored. The Holy Spirit will give you this happy dream when you accept His purpose for the world you see.

Forgiveness is the world’s only purpose; here God’s Son can learn to forgive his brother and himself, thus healing the world of all sin and guilt. When the mind that made the world as proof of separation, as symbol of fear, sin, and guilt, has allowed itself to be healed, its perception returned to Wholeness, will the world then be transformed into a happy place where all are loved and forgiven and no one is feared or condemned.

The Bridge to Wholeness

Only through the exercise of willingness, in a consistent manner, is the past undone. The past is constantly running through your mind; your past thoughts determine how you see and react in the present. The present is not a blank slate; it is covered over by past beliefs and habits, and further distorted by mental projections and interpretations that have their origin in the past. If you could see the present without the coloring and influence of the past, you would be able to respond in a manner that is completely new.

The present is where time and Eternity intersect, for it is the only moment in time that is real. The present is the only moment in time in which you can be real and thus directly experience your own Reality. The constant intrusion of the past effectively obscures Reality, making it impossible for you to see anything but the past. The only thing you can say about the past that is true, is that it’s over. The past is over and gone, yet seems to live still in your mind because you hold it in memory and use it to cover over the present.

The ego’s strategy is to keep the past alive and cover the present, thereby assuring a future that simply perpetuates the past. It does this out of a sense of self-preservation, for in the present it does not exist. The ego is an invention of the past, of the moment of separation, and like everything that happened during that brief moment of time, it is over and gone. Yet the mind of separation has not let that moment go, and by holding it in memory and re-experiencing it as if it were now, the past seems still to be present, to be seen and experienced. Through the projection of the past onto the now, is the present covered up and kept from awareness.

Time itself is not sequential but is experienced as such, through the order you impose on it in your mind. Past seems to lead to present and present turns into future. All a dream, just a dream. The past is no more, the future has already happened, only the present is real. Your mind must be freed from its dreamlike association with time, that the present be available to you. To heal the mind of its belief in the past, its reliance on it, will restore you to the present and make possible Reality’s return.

Whenever you decide to let go of the past, to give up all thought of the future and to be present only, you are free of fear, free to learn, free to love without conditions. In these moments do you feel a touch of Heaven, and each time is Heaven brought a little closer.

The Holy Spirit knows time is an illusion; He gives it His purpose that it may be used to bring you to the end of time, where time is no more and you are free to return to Eternity. You have no real need of time, yet while you find yourself in this world, you must use it well. Time can be used to free as well as to imprison. To use time well is to not waste it pursuing dreams of happiness or worldly goals. The Holy Spirit will help you use time wisely, that your journey may be shortened. There is no need to linger in a world of shadows and vain illusions that is not your home.

Through the Atonement, the Holy Spirit will collapse time in exact proportion to your learning. Each miracle of Love you offer, each act of true forgiveness, enables Him to bring you closer and closer to the end of time and your return to Heaven. There is no other place to go but back to the Home you never left in truth. Yet It has been erased from your awareness, replaced by a world that can be perceived, and through perception made real in your experience. With the end of time comes the end of perception; nothing will remain to cloud your Holy Mind, and once again Truth will be all you know.

Forgiveness Is Your Function

Forgiveness is your true function here. It is both the way in which separation is healed and the greatest gift you can give your brothers. To forgive your brother is to see his innocence, his true identity as the Son of God; to see this is to offer Him that gift, and what is offered in Love is always received. The Holy Spirit in your brother’s mind will receive your gift of Love, and hold it for him until the time comes when he is ready to accept it. Forgiveness offers you both the Truth of your very Being.

Forgiveness is a miracle of Love, and like all miracles, blesses the giver and receiver equally. Through the forgiveness of your brother, you come to know and accept that you are forgiven. When once you realize through forgiveness that you are not guilty but completely innocent, you will naturally extend this recognition to all. It is the privilege of the forgiven to forgive. The truly forgiven see a world where all are loved and forgiven.

Forgiveness is based on Truth, only Truth; it sees truly for it overlooks all falsity, all sins that were never accomplished but in dreams. It does not take seriously what happens in dreams for it knows the difference between Truth and illusion, and never confuses the two. Forgiveness arises from Love and expresses only Love. It reflects the Wholeness of Love as Love exists in Heaven; and Heaven is brought a little closer through every act of forgiveness. Only those who have learned to forgive can be truly loving, for only they have accepted Love as It is. Through forgiveness you are made whole, and your mind is restored to the Kingdom.

Through forgiveness is the corner stone of the ego’s thought system of separation uncovered and undone. The world which arose from the belief in separation is based on judgement and the perception of sin and guilt. Without judgement, there is no sin and guilt. When the belief in and the attraction to sin and guilt are undone, judgement will also disappear. The mind committed to the practice of true forgiveness does not judge or condemn. It sees no sin or guilt anywhere but rather beholds errors that can be undone.

The Holy Spirit undoes all errors committed by anyone at any time. There is no error too big to be forgiven, all its consequences undone; and the mind that believed in its errors is freed of all false beliefs. The Holy Spirit sees all things as either Truth or illusion. He forgives all illusion by overlooking it and undoing its consequences, and He reinforces and strengthens everything in your mind that is true or that points in the direction of Truth. The mind of forgiveness is His gift to you, for you cannot practice true forgiveness without His help. The human mind in itself is not capable of forgiving its brothers all their “sins” for it sees them as real, and what is real, what has caused actual pain and loss, cannot be forgiven.

The Holy Spirit’s function is to teach you true forgiveness, and through your honest learning do you become able to receive the mind of forgiveness to replace the mind of fear and separation. To forgive guilt in all its perceived forms is to heal fear, for fear always accompanies guilt and strengthens it in your mind. When your mind is given over to forgiveness, joy and happiness will be yours; they follow forgiveness as surely as grief and pain follow guilt. You cannot be happy unless you forgive, for to forgive is to Love. The refusal to forgive is an attack upon your brother and yourself; attack will always lead to fear and drive Love from your mind.

Choose Again

Whenever you are tempted to be as you are not, ask yourself this question: Am I a body, doomed to suffer and die, alone and isolated in a world of fear and separation? Or am I the Holy Son of God, forever free, loved and loving, eternally at peace within the mind of God? The answer to this question determines what you experience yourself to be and the condition in which you find yourself.

You are not a body unless you choose to be. You made this choice once, and it continues to operate in your mind and determines your experience of yourself and the world. There is no law binding you to your present condition except the law that governs choice. What you choose is what you get. A choice made long ago continues in effect until it is revisited and decided against, or replaced by choosing differently. This is a simple and direct process, but by no means is it an easy one.

You who have forgotten who you are so long ago it has been erased even from your memory, need help just to recognize your error and accept the possibility of correction. To continue as you have been doing is meaningless; it is necessary to recognize this fact and open your mind to the true alternative, that it may be given you. In truth, no choice is possible or necessary, for you cannot be but what you are and what you have always been. Yet in dreams do you seem to be what you are not; your belief makes it real in your experience. So does choice become necessary and seemingly possible, for through the power of choice you have made a self to take the place of what you are in Truth. Through choosing again, will the Truth of what you are return to your awareness, making all further choice unnecessary.

Until that happens however, you must choose again and again, for all that is untrue in your mind must be uncovered and undone. The Holy Spirit will guide you carefully and direct your choices, if you turn over to Him the power of decision. He alone is able to use it wisely for He knows what is true and recognizes what is false, and never confuses the two. You must patiently learn, you must be shown, the difference between Truth and illusion, and the consequences that follow your choices. To choose either is to have all of it, for you cannot choose partially. Truth is One, and illusion also; this fact should make choosing easy. Yet the mind long accustomed to separation, to seeing choice where there is none, must learn to see truly, that it may let itself be guided in making the only choice truly possible.

When once you begin to let the Holy Spirit guide you to decide for what is true, it will become easier with each choice, as the results will demonstrate the rightness of your decision. The proof is in the pudding, the result you get. You will quickly learn to prefer the results of right choice, for the Holy Spirit guides you toward happiness and peace, and away from fear and pain. Who could fail to recognize the difference between results so different in every way? Sanity would choose joy over sadness, Love over fear, happiness over sorrow. Sanity recognizes what is needed and helpful, and does not confuse it with the painful and the unnecessary.

To choose that which causes you pain is clearly insane, yet this is what you do when you choose the ego as your guide, rather than the Holy Spirit. The ego will never lead you anywhere but further into fear and pain, for that is all it knows. The ego is not your friend, though that is what it would have you believe. To befriend the ego, to choose it as your guide to life, is to assure disaster. To consciously choose a course of action that will consistently result in disappointment, uncertainty, and pain, is surely insane. Yet this is what you do when you identify with the ego, the sense of separate identity centered in the body. The body is the ego’s chosen home; when you identify with the body you have chosen the ego as your self.

Your One Responsibility

The ego is not what you are, but is rather a mistaken idea about what you are. It is a part of your belief about yourself, the belief in separation, and from and around this belief has arisen a whole thought system of separation. This thought system operates ceaselessly to occupy your awareness. In the identification with the constant stream of thoughts, desires, and impulses, a sense of being a person, an identity to whom these thoughts belong, arises. This is simply an error, and is itself a kind of thought. I am the body, I am the thinker, is the basic error of mind that lies at the root of the misidentification.

When the wish to be as you are not rises to tempt you, ask yourself this question: Do I want pain and misery to follow me and fear to darken my mind? Or do I want perfect peace, joy, Love, and happiness to light up my mind and shine away all darkness? There is, of course, only one answer to this question, and it is self-evident; it is not evident, however, to the mind long accustomed to choosing illusion.

Living so long as a body in a world of bodies and separation that even the memory of what you are has disappeared from awareness, you can no longer see the obvious, for it is hidden behind a heavy veil of complexity. Your mind is established in habits that have worn grooves so deep, you cannot see over the sides. You do not see the present, and the possibilities and opportunities it holds. Only the past, projected out and seen as if it were now, is visible to the mind of separation. Such a mind cannot see what is there, for it is covered by a thick cloud of confusion. You are confused about what you are, what your function is, who created you, where you came from, and where you are going. Your cause and effect have been reversed, and you know not the laws of mind by which you live.

The process of Atonement is an undoing or correction of all the falsity, the illusion, that clouds your holy mind. The Holy Spirit guides this process in time; through your willingness and surrender, your mind is made empty and free of all that has occupied it for so long. Into this empty and purified mind, the Truth will come and claim Its own. Even now your mind is a part of Truth, but must be purified before you can know Truth again. To purify your mind is to welcome Truth, for It waits but for your invitation; a place made clean within your mind is not long empty before Holiness returns to set you free.

Your one responsibility is to accept Atonement for yourself. In this one act of acceptance, the acceptance of your one responsibility, is awakening assured; everything necessary for it to occur is included in that single declaration of allegiance. This acceptance, which is all inclusive, is repeated again and again throughout the day, day after day, as you learn to choose Truth over illusion. Your task and your constant focus is to remember this responsibility; the continuous false activity of your mind requires a constant vigilance and a consistent response to be undone.

The mind must be undone thought by thought, and all its dark corners, its secret hidden places where guilt flourishes, uncovered and brought to Light. Not one spot of darkness can be left to mar the intrinsic brightness of your holy mind. The only task to which your mind can be put that is worthy of it, is just this continuing watchfulness and conscious choosing of Truth. The functioning of illusion in your mind persists only through your support. The energy of your mind animates illusion, allowing it to maintain its hold over you. Withdraw that support by refusing to allow illusion to function freely. By choosing against all false thoughts and impulses, you thereby return the energy and attention of your mind to the Truth where it belongs. Over time, false thoughts and beliefs, the whole movement of illusion in your mind, will wither away.

Freedom of Mind

Your mind would be free. Deep within you is a yearning for freedom that has never ceased. It is the nature of your mind to be free, free to create, to love, to be itself. The desire to return Home, to recover the freedom of the Kingdom, will not be satisfied with substitute goals or attempts to find freedom where it cannot be found. Only in being your Self will you find fulfillment and true freedom.

The body will never be free, for it was made to limit the mind and reduce it to a tiny thing, helpless and alone, cowering behind a wall of flesh that is itself fragile and impermanent. Mind has always been free, and will be free again when you choose freedom and only freedom. A dream of death and imprisonment can never hold the mind prisoner that God created holy and free. Only your decision seemed to limit your mind, and only your decision will set it free.

Leaving the Dream

What is the purpose of life in this world? Does anything you do here give your life authentic meaning? The many activities with which you keep yourself so busy, the pursuit of pleasure, the attempts to reach various goals, all have one purpose: to keep God away. Although you long for Him unceasingly, this longing is suppressed and displaced, leading you to chase illusions, to try and fill the deep emptiness inside with what will never satisfy. This terrible emptiness is the absence of your true relationship with your Father. Nothing else will heal this wound but to return to Him, where you belong. Now is the time to leave this world of sorrows and empty dreams. You never wanted it; it is but an error in your mind, easily corrected when you no longer desire illusion, but choose Truth instead.

Accept the Holy Spirit’s purpose for the world, not the ego’s. He knows the only meaningful purpose the world has or will ever have. The world is a place where God’s Son comes but for a little while to learn, to remember, Who He is in Truth; and then He is gone, returned to His true Home, to be seen no more. All the love he felt, the love he gave, and every act of kindness, remain behind to help those in need. His Vision, his words of Truth, and the example he set, likewise remain to inspire and heal those who struggle still. And they will leave, each in turn, as the readiness to be Truth arises in their mind.

Each one that awakens helps to make it a little easier for his brothers, until all have returned to the Kingdom, the world of illusion has vanished, and only Truth remains. Such will be the end of the dream, all dreamers awakened and all dreaming undone, to vanish along with time and space. Time and space are but part of the dream; when the time of dreaming is done, they too will be no more.

If you would leave the dream, if suffering has lost its appeal, and the emptiness of all things in time is clearly seen, you must dedicate yourself to the only task worthy of accomplishment: the awakening to the Truth of what you are, the realization of the Self, and the leaving of this world forever. In this awakening are all your brothers included, for they are part of you, as you are part of them. By their inclusion do you accept the Unity of Being; it is this acceptance that sets you free.

When the mind is focused on the Self, as the Self, nothing can go wrong, for the Self is unperturbed by anything that happens, being not of this world. Only the mind that has limited itself by thinking it is a body, is seemingly subject to the ups and downs, the problems and sorrows, that characterize life in separation. Only your misidentification hurts you, for thereby do you make the dream real and assign yourself a role guaranteed to bring fear, pain, and suffering, whatever else it may also bring.

You are the hero of your dream; all that happens is what you wish, no matter how you may resist this thought. Your responsibility for what happens to you is total, for nothing can enter your life against your will. Yet you have forgotten, and this forgetting obscures the role you play in making the world and seems to leave you at the mercy of forces outside of you, absolving you of responsibility and allowing you to project guilt and judgement, thus maintaining the fiction of a separate world.

If this world were indeed completely separate from you, you would be helpless and no escape would be possible. Be then glad that the world you see is a projection of your mind, a dream you are dreaming, and thus is salvation possible for no one is doing anything to you; you are doing it to yourself. You are the dreamer of the dream, and are completely responsible for what happens, no matter what the appearance. You need but change your mind and the world you see will change accordingly.

Through forgiving eyes, through the Vision of Christ, you see a world in which Heaven is reflected; you see the Light in everything, and feel the Love of God surrounding you. The One Unity that embraces All will be self-evident, as you see that everything is in you, and you are in everything.

Your Thought System

After the initial acceptance of responsibility for your life, the next step that must be taken is to see and understand that how you use your mind actually determines your perception and your experience. Your thoughts, the ones you choose and the ones you choose against, shape your world and your experience of it. There is nothing you do that is not affected and determined by your thought system. You literally cannot see anything unless you have accepted it first in thought, although this is not apparent to the conscious mind because it is only aware of the thoughts it currently holds, at this moment. Yet it is obvious that the mind holds many many thoughts at the subconscious levels, for it is the entire thought system that makes consistent response, and a sense of constant identity, possible. The thought system to which you adhere must exist continuously in your mind, although most of it is unconscious at any given moment, or your mind and your life would simply be chaos.

The pattern that is your life is an expression of your adherence to your thought system, and the inevitable contradictions that characterize the egoic mind. The ego’s nature includes a constant tendency towards chaos, for it is an invention born of fear and made as defense against Truth. To exclude Truth is chaos and this fact cannot be avoided or circumvented. Consequently, every human life lived under the ego’s thought system is subject to chaos and contradiction. In the recognition of this fact and the conflict and suffering that result, the real motivation to change, to seek another way to think and live, will arise. There is no need to continue down a path that leads to where you do not want to go.

When this realization dawns, you are ready to take the next step. You do not know what it is but in the willingness to be shown, it becomes possible. What is very important at this stage, and indeed throughout the spiritual journey, is the recognition that you know nothing, you do not know what anything truly means. You must learn a completely new thought system, and learn in a completely new way. In order to learn, you must forget everything you believed before, because you were wrongly taught.

The Holy Spirit is in charge of this learning process which is both an unlearning, an undoing of what you learned before, and a learning of what is true, helpful, and necessary, to take its place. This process unfolds in time and requires great willingness, dedication, surrender, and perseverance on your part. It need not take long, for it is possible to return to God in any moment; yet the process of awakening occurs gradually and progressively for most.

The attitude that is most fruitful is to be patient, infinitely patient, turning your life over to the guidance of the Holy Spirit, maintaining the constant vigilance and willingness to learn what is required, and remaining open and ready for the experience of Truth every moment. Truth is always present and waiting to return to your mind; there is no time when It is absent or inaccessible. You need only meet the conditions of Truth for It to fill your mind once again.

All the help you need, and are willing to accept, will be given you; help is never lacking and is always available. The inability to perceive and receive it, is the only limit. All power in Heaven and on earth stands ready to assist; but it can assist only those who truly desire it, and welcome it with love and humility. Help is given you in many different ways according to the need, for the miracle is always a solution to a specific problem. It matters not what the problem is, for there is no order of difficulty in miracles.

The problems the miracle heals all have one essential thing in common: They are illusions. The various characteristics of illusions have no meaning, if they be part of illusion. The miracle corrects the false perception in which the illusory problem occurs. It matters not the size or nature of illusion, for illusion is illusion, and correction does not depend on apparent differences between them. What is not real disappears, for Truth has come to claim Its Own, shining illusion away.

Whatever the apparent problem, the Holy Spirit has the solution, if you will turn it over to Him. He will tell you your part and help you fulfill it, if you let Him. When you develop the habit of turning over all problems to Him, you will quickly learn, through experience, how beneficial it is, and you will leave behind the temptation to rely on yourself alone. To rely on yourself is to turn over decision making to the ego, which you surely know by now is a mistake. You want the real solutions to your problems provided by the Holy Spirit, not the false responses of the ego that perpetuate illusion and make certain that no problem is truly solved.

Remember, and remember well, that you never make decisions alone. They are always made with a guide: the Holy Spirit or the ego, the thought system arising from Truth or the thought system of separation. These are the only possible guides no matter what the time, place, or circumstances. Of these two, only one helps you choose truly and in your highest interest. When you decide by “yourself,” you are choosing with the guide to fear, pain, and suffering, thus deciding self-destructively. With every decision you make, you are affecting everything, for no choice is made in isolation. Even in the dream, all minds are joined. What is done by one affects all; it cannot be otherwise.

The most beneficial thing you can do for the world, for all your brothers, is to choose only Love, only Light, only Truth, at all times. Let this dedication be the source of everything you do.



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