Teachings of Christ Mind

Good Evening. And welcome to everyone who is joining us on the Internet.

This evening we’re beginning for those in the Second Edition on page 31, Section VII:

And for those who are in the First Edition, it is on page 27.

For those of you who are new, we are going … we go around the room and each person reads one paragraph, and then passes the microphone on to the next person. Anyone who would prefer not to read, just freely pass the microphone on to the next person.

You are welcome.

Let’s … this is a good point to stop at.

I understand that some of you have cast lots to see who, in the evening, will get to read the most sentences without being interrupted. [audience laughter] That leaves you out, Michael. [audience laughter]

I just want to point out that even when you think you’re not afraid, you are. If your back is turned toward the Altar, if you have said in so many words to the Father, “I would rather look at this by myself and determine what it is I am looking at,” then you have engaged in what has been called “The Fall.” You have separated yourself from the Father to have a point of view of your own.

And the moment that intention is acted upon and you do engage in having an independent viewpoint, you immediately feel the dissonance of having divided yourself off from the Wholeness of your Self, and you get feedback. It’s called your capital “S” Sanity. Your Sanity says to you, “You’re in dangerous territory. You’re in dangerous territory.” Or it says to you, “You are choosing to look at things in an unnatural way. It is not wise to act unnaturally. It is not wise to act unnaturally.” And this warning, this ever-present awareness that you have stepped out of what is natural to you, and that it therefore constitutes less than Sanity, you feel as an undercurrent of uneasiness.

And it should feel uneasy to you. If it felt totally comfortable to you, it would mean that you could actually become insane. If you can act at odds with the Source of your Being, and succeed at it, and be comfortable with it, it would mean that you had actually severed yourself from your Source, which you can’t do.

So, from that point on, once you are looking at everything from an independent vantage point, there is this undercurrent of uneasiness. And it’s a brand-new experience. It’s not natural. And the uneasy experience, the uneasy energy that you feel, rather than reminding you to return to what is normal to you, can begin to seem to you to be something to overcome. And you can begin to think that existence is a matter of successfully overcoming this feeling which you know isn’t natural to you. And so you engage in attacking the feeling. You engage in trying to overcome the feeling, rather than recognizing that it is a signal to go back Home, or that it is an ever-present signal that you are not at Home and that it is essential for you to be careful not to be sucked into any distraction from returning Home. In other words, that you must be careful not to forget what the undercurrent is calling for, and forget to go Home.

So, everything that follows that act of independence is experienced as fear and a feeling of vulnerability. So, until you all awaken, until you all come Home again, please understand that every moment of your existence is imbued with fear.

Now, we talked a few weeks ago about the fact that if you go to a foreign country, or you go into an area where the majority of the people there are not of your nationality and you’re in the minority, and they all have a different way of looking at things, you find yourself feeling uncomfortable—the reason being that you have no agreed-upon definitions with that group of people. And this tells you that when you are feeling comfortable, part of the comfort comes from having established agreed-upon definitions with everybody that you’re associating with. And as a result of that, you feel able to relax and not be on the defense. But that isn’t because fear is absent. It’s because you have found a substitute for fear—mutually-agreed-upon definitions that all of you are willing to abide by, and thereby, not rock each other’s boats. You see?

But that’s not peace, really. And that’s not an experience of the absence of fear. And it’s important for you to understand that.

So …

That is correct. Yes.

… I know it does not exist …

Yes. If someone relieves you of the discovery that your thoughts absolutely govern the way you experience Reality, you would become dis-empowered, and you would not find the occasion for recognizing the authority you exercise over your particular biased experience of Reality, the Kingdom of Heaven. And if you do not find the absolute relationship between your thoughts and your experience, you, first of all, will feel that you exist without any authority. And that therefore, you are like a leaf in the wind to be blown about hither, thither, and yond by whatever currents there are. And you will become depressed. And you will become even more dysfunctional. And you will become even more afraid.

You have to find out the absolute relationship between your thoughts and your experience; the authority you do have. Why? First of all, so that you can feel your power, even though it’s an ego power. You must discover your power so that you can demonstrate to yourself by a more constructive use of your mind that you can have a more constructive and harmonious experience. In this way, you learn that you are not subject to chance, or fate, or the way the wind is blowing, but you are subject only to the thoughts, the ideas, the definitions, the meanings that you are choosing to give everything.

Now, when you learn this, and how absolute the relationship is, and that therefore you are never the innocent victim of any circumstance, or anyone you know, you have experience that allows you to look at God and say, “If God is Infinite Intelligence, and if God, if the Mind of God is the Cause of Existence, the Cause of Being for everything that be’s, and if—no, not “and if”—then I have now the ability to acknowledge the possibility that the Thoughts of God absolutely govern Creation. And because God is indivisible and undivided, there can be no conflict in His Thought. And therefore, there cannot be any conflict in Creation. Therefore, since I have been learning that the call is to turn around to the Altar and yield to God, I can do it without being afraid that God is a whimsical God and that I will become subject to whatever whimsical thing He might choose for me that might place me at a disadvantage. I don’t have to be afraid that He’s a wrathful God. I know from my experience of the absolute connection between my thoughts and my experience, that God coming from an indivisible and undivided place is an absolutely secure Presence for me to yield into completely.”

Conversely, if you do not see the absolute connection, the absolute authoritative connection between your thoughts and your experience, and you feel vulnerable to life itself, you will not be able to bring yourself to yield willingly and completely into God. Because your God will be to you a reflection of the way you’re seeing life, and you will see Him as whimsical, even divided within Himself, and sometimes angry at you, and sometimes loving of you. And you will not be able to find the courage to yield to God.

Now, I’ve also pointed out before that even though you have chosen to look at things independently, and you have created your own definitions for everything, you cannot stop being the Son or Daughter of God that you are. You can’t stop being What God Is Being right there where you are. You do have intelligence, and you are able to have thoughts. And your thoughts ultimately do have power and authority. But you won’t find out the Truth of that power and authority until you’ve abandoned it by yielding to God and making the connection once again with your Source so that your thoughts might be derived from the Father, and therein have authority, but not an independent authority.

Your capacity to think, your capacity to experience ideas, is a Divine Capacity. But when you are experiencing that Divine Capacity from a vantage point you have chosen in which you have decided to relinquish your connection to the Father’s Point of View so that you might have one of your own, that authority becomes distorted. And because you are, as I said before, automatically in a state of fear when you turn your back to your Source, all of your ideas and all of your thoughts will be, will arise out of fear and will always be an act of defense.

Now, this is not an indictment on you. It’s something that every single one of the Sons and Daughters of God is capable of. Because you are capable of it, you are not doing something wrong that is punishable. It is like you, humanly speaking, having the capacity to put your hand under the faucet of hot water. It’s something that’s not practical to do, but the water that’s coming out of your faucet normally won’t harm you. It will just hurt; burn like hell. The point is … [crackling, popping noise and audience laughter]

So, the fact that you’re in a state of fear because you chose to experiment with looking at the Kingdom of Heaven independent of the Father’s Point of View, is not something wrong. It’s not something you will be punished for. And you’re not actually being punished for it right now. But you have chosen for a way of being in the Kingdom of Heaven that is unnatural, and so it will be uncomfortable. So don’t feel indicted. Don’t feel bad. Just understand what you’re doing, so that you can make an intelligent choice to stop doing it.

I just want to interject that there is also value in yielding to it whether you can see where it’s going or not. That is another aspect to be included.

Yes.

No. It’s the resistance to the flow that’s painful.

Yes. Indeed.

Indeed.

The reason for the pain is the desire to hold onto the familiar, to hold onto the current form of good that is existing, when it is changing. And that is why I said that the discomfort comes from resisting the change.

The remedy is to let go of the definition of good that has, let us say, remained in the picture, endured for a long enough time for you to feel comfortable with it and begin to think that there won’t be further unfoldment; more change. It’s at exactly those moments that the remedy is to turn back to the Altar. It’s a reminder.

“Father, what is going on here? My Guide, what … what is the Reality that is going on here? How do I behave appropriately to the Movement that is occurring that was unanticipated, and which I really would rather not have occur? How do I stay in touch with the Movement gracefully?”

And then you listen and you expect an answer. Why? Because you want to be dead center in the Movement of Fulfillment that God Is Being. Why? Because you want to fulfill your Function, which is to glorify God, to be the full-blown Presence of His Will right there in what apparently is nothing more than a human circumstance, at least as far as the ego is concerned.

You hold onto what you’re familiar with because you feel that its loss will constitute a loss, rather than a gain. “Oh, but I like it down here in the valley. No. We’re going to go up to the mountaintop. But it’s moist, and it’s verdant. And it’s … and there is a river. And it is enjoyable. And it’s going to be hard work to climb to the top of the mountain! It will be worth it. Aw, I don’t know. Please. Can we do it tomorrow?”

But when you yield, and you say “yes,” and you go to the top of the mountain, you find that the view is more expansive. You find that you have more than you had, because the valley is still available to you, but more has been added to it.

You are afraid of loss, and yet the gain of more than you already have will require you to let go of the little you have, to let go of your tight clutch on it that is so tight that nothing else can be embraced. You have to be willing to let it go so that more can be added to it.

Go ahead.

The Movement of God is the Cause and the Event.

Yes.

And then, you have a caricature of cause and a caricature of event that is called effect.

You are welcome. That is an improvement for you.

Or, sometimes, when you are not opening your mouth, what might you be agreeing to.

And why do you do that? I’ll let you continue.

You do that so that your act might arise out of Love, rather than out of fear.

Continue …

Yes. It is.

Yes, but it’s a lie about the Truth.

And if you give your attention to the lie, and study it, and see how humungous it is, it can be overwhelming. The point is not to examine the lie, anymore than it would be for you all now to go home after this evening and examine just how completely your life is governed by fear, even though you didn’t know it. That’s not the point.

The point is to grasp and understand the fact that until your attention has returned to the Father, and you are inquiring of the Father to know what anything means, you will be in fear. But you have the solution. You know to turn to the Father to inquire as to what the Truth is, so that you might experience Real Peace. And so that you might find yourself knowing exactly how to look, how to speak, how to be appropriately in the Flow of What God Is Being, and thus become an agent for change in the dream.

Exactly.

That doesn’t mean that there aren’t things that will need to be done, like eating, or going to work, or whatever, but you don’t want to do any of those things out of the habit of fear. You want to do them joined with One Who Is Awake so that you are constantly alert for what any of these activities have to do with Reality, and how they are fitting into What’s Really Going On in the Kingdom of Heaven right there where you’re eating and going to work, and so on.

I understand.

Yes. Yes.

When you are letting the Father lead, you will be where you need to be, and you will do what you need to do. And that, the fact that it is not predictable and that you cannot make it happen the way your ego thinks it ought to happen, means that you are now in a place where life is becoming delightful.

Now your ego will argue against that. It will say you’re being irresponsible, that you are going to fail, that disaster will result.

Or that because you’re not acting according to the mutually-agreed-upon definitions that are in place, you will … you will find yourself at odds with quote “the system.”

The rules. Yes.

And that is not what happens.

Well, that … we’ve been talking about the mutually-agreed-upon definitions since we started going through the Course. And as we continue, I will uncover them further.

But as I mentioned, all of you feel relatively comfortable here this evening. That is a result of a mutually-agreed-upon definition. You all have a code of conduct. You have a code of conduct with each other here that you don’t have with the people you work with. You have a way to behave. You have words that you can use. You have things you can talk about with each other that you can’t with another group of friends. And you have, therefore, what you might call codes of conduct with new people you’ve met, as opposed to acquaintances that you have, as opposed to friends that you’ve had for a long time. You conduct yourself differently with them.

You grasp the idea of a code of conduct. That is another way of speaking of mutually-agreed-upon definitions.

So you have many agreed-upon definitions, depending upon the circle you’re moving in, or the circles you move in, in your life. It’s not just one. But whatever they are, if you’re willing to look at it straight, any of them that you look at are not genuine. You get it? They’re not genuine because they vacillate. They are different from situation to situation. What’s genuine would remain the same no matter what circle of friends you were, or circle of associates you were, dealing with. You see?

So all of you, daily, live your lives presenting an appropriate picture for the setting you’re in. And if it works, it works because there are mutually-agreed-upon definitions there already in place. None of you might have ever sat down and discussed what they were, but by trial and error, you found out where the boundaries were. What you could …

Exactly.

And so you non-verbally taught each other what the mutually-agreed-upon definitions were. And the whole point of the Course, the whole point of everything I’m doing with you, is to help bring you to a place of genuineness. A place of genuineness that comes from reuniting with your Source, and not acting at odds with it. And therefore, not acting at odds with your Essential Being, which is constituted of nothing more, nor less, than All Of What God Is Being right there where you are.

Let us continue …

Wow. This sounds pretty great, doesn’t it?

Mmm. Let’s keep our feet on the ground. You need that kind of training so that you won’t suffer any more from fear. So that you might bask in, relax in, the Joy that is inherent in the Movement of Being.

When you choose not to engender fear in yourself, and you do say, “Father, what is really going on here? Help me to see What Is True so that I can move and act appropriately,” when you do that …

(Paul: Just a moment. I lost it.)

When you do that, you abandon your independence, and you get back in the Flow of the Movement. And you become a miracle worker. What I mean by that is that you become an agent for change. Your Presence no longer supports the continuance of the dream for many others. It lessens it. And your Presence becomes a dynamic focus of energy that blesses and heals others.

And you know what? It’s a side effect. And that’s what I’m trying to get across here. This isn’t about becoming miracle workers. It’s about learning how not to be at odds with the Source of your Being, so that you come back into the clearer Experience of Who and What You Are, so that you are not acting on the basis of fear, and therefore, not engendering fear. And because you are not supporting the ongoingness of the dream, you spontaneously and effortlessly become that which undoes the dream. Not because you’ve decided to undo the dream, but because you have withdrawn participation in it, and you have joined with the Father, so that His Will is finding expression through you, and that is what is transformational.

So, you may know that as you move forward in your Awakening, you will … you will be identifiable as miracle workers. But you let everyone else give you that definition, and don’t get caught up in giving it to yourself.

Continue …

Well, the miracle is a sudden shift of perception. Miracle-minded thinking is, indeed, whatever thoughts you use to justify turning toward the Altar, so that you allow yourself to become subject to It. And once becoming subject to It, you find the experience of being loved that you can’t hold in, and so it gets … it spills over and blesses everyone else as well.

And in the process, because you’ve abandoned the voice for fear as your teacher, you find that you’ve also abandoned the perceptions that were inseparable from it. And new perception is given. And so there’s a sudden shift of perception. And there is healing for you and blessing for everyone the spillover reaches.

Okay.

As a matter of fact, whatever causes you to justify turning toward the Altar, whether it’s clear or unclear thinking, identifies miracle-mindedness, and it primes you for the miracle. Yes.

Indeed.

Indeed.

It could be a New Year’s resolution that you followed through on. A New Year’s resolution is a stupid reason to yield to the Father, but if it works, it’s a good reason.

Clarification. What would not be a stupid reason? It would be you in touch with yourself enough to know that you’re not happy, or to know that you are afraid, or to know that you’re hurting, and realizing that you don’t want to be experiencing that, and that there has to be some alternative to it. A good reason is not wanting to suffer, and therefore finding justification to reach out beyond your best definitions and your best thoughts, and saying, “Help.” Or, seeing that a Brother is in pain, or is sad, or is hurting, suffering, and caring enough to reach out to the Father to say, “Help,” for your Brother.

Those are good reasons because they come from an honest connection, a genuine connection with yourself in the moment and the ever-present awareness that it’s your Birthright to be experiencing something other than suffering, and opting for whatever it is by asking for help from a Source outside your best thinking. You see the difference?

But if a New Year’s resolution gets you to do it, [snaps finges] doesn’t make a bit of difference.

Okay …

Actually you’re going to get to read for quite a while, because we have already talked about this in some detail.

Continue …

Oh. I will interrupt here. [audience laughter]

Read the rest of the sentence. [amused]

Read the rest of the sentence.

Yes. The purpose of the miracle isn’t to set your mind straight, but to cause a shift of perception. It’s … it’s like with your car. The miracle, the purpose of the miracle is to set your car in the right direction. The function of the miracle is not to fix the engine. The purpose of the miracle is not to set your mind straight, but to undo the false perceptions entertained in your mind. You see what I’m saying? So if the miracle is one of constantly setting your mind straight, getting to miracle-mindedness and the manifestation of miracles will never be arrived at.

Continue …

Indeed …

Is that not interesting?

In misperceiving creation, your acts arise out of ignorance, and so they will reflect your ignorance. What I want to emphasize here is that the miscreation constitutes a modification of Creation Itself, not a new creation. Like the increased heart rate, the ulcers, and so on. It’s a modification of What Is Real.

Continue …

And we could say: Creation and modification of Creation.

Indeed. So, the process of Awakening is one in which you learn to Love again. And you don’t know how to Love because you are in fear, and therefore always on defense. And so, in order to learn how to Love, you must turn away from what you have been relying upon to give meaning to everything, which are the mutually-agreed-upon definitions. And since that is where your total focus has been, it is going to seem to you that you’re going to have to turn to a point completely outside anything you are familiar with, even though you are turning back toward Home, and laying the groundwork for the “Aha,” [snaps fingers] the light bulb that will go on in your Mind, illuminating that your Mind is Whole, and never became less than Whole, even though your act of independence caused your attention to become focused only, we might say, in a very narrow bandwidth of the capacity of your Mind.

So, it’s all about Love. And Love can’t be explained to you. You can only be pointed in the direction where the experience awaits you, which is the direction I am consistently pointing all of you in, and which became even more clearly expressed at the last meeting, that it had to do with involvement with each other. And that it involved getting off the fence and no longer thinking that you had a safe place where you could hide by not determining something as needing correction, or not needing correction. And that it’s necessary to get off the fence and cast your vote to not be hot or cold, to be hot or cold, but not in some neutral, safe spot.

That’s not always comfortable. But you know what? Whatever level of comfort you all have arrived at through finding a group that all have the same mutually-agreed-upon definitions so that you don’t have to be nervous and you can feel safe, that has never illuminated to you What Love Is. And because it has never illuminated to you What Love Is, you haven’t been able to move to the point of casting your vote and being the Presence of Love in the process of discovering What It Is, because you faced the uncomfortable situation that required you to get off the fence and vote. Do you see what I’m saying?

Your comfort zone, your personal ego comfort zone is not the place where Insight and Inspiration will occur. That’s where the so-called “safe zone” is, where God does not find expression. And you continue to be stuck, ignorant of What Love Is, ignorant of feeling the Love you are loved by, because the center and circumference of You is entirely the Totality of God, and thereby not having the experience of being Love and experiencing the refreshment that comes from fulfilling your Function and discovering what that Function is, not as a definition, but as an Act.

Yes. Microphone.

Yes. When I talked about casting your vote, I didn’t mean … umm …

That’s right.

Exactly.

That’s right.

That’s right. You act. You embody it in behavior.

Indeed. You put your neck on the line. At least that’s the way the ego would look at it. But you know what? The ego calls it putting your neck on the line because you are being genuine from your Soul, with a capital “S.” And you and what you feel become joined. What you feel doesn’t remain hidden while you share what you think. Your thought and your action becomes one, and that constitutes within you an experience of indivisibleness.

And I’ll tell you that that indivisibleness feels like power. And it feels normal. And you feel integrated. And therefore, you feel your Integrity. The power you feel isn’t a power over anything. It is … it is what purity feels like.

If you have a glass of water from which all impurities have been removed, there are no little spaces in the water, no little holes filled by the impurities where the water is not able to touch itself. When the impurities are removed, every molecule of water is in total connection with every other part of the water.

That is Unity. That is Integrity. And well, in it, it is absolutely impossible to experience fear. That’s why it feels like strength. That’s why it feels like power. And that is part of the Experience of What Love Is.

When what you know, when what you find yourself knowing as a result of turning to the Altar, is acted upon, you could say that your knowing and your will have joined for the purpose of expressing Integrity, Indivisibility, Wholeness. Your will has become the servant of what the Father has revealed to you. It therefore has become the servant of the Father, and not an ego from a separated vantage point. And yet, there is no experience of willfulness in it. It’s just an experience of being a Presence, an utterly True Presence where everything that is True About You is being embodied in that act. Do you see what I’m saying?

I can’t give you the feeling. I can give you a hint of the feeling. And I can try to inspire you to let yourself have that experience. And of course, letting yourself have the experience means getting off the fence, getting involved, and not letting pain and suffering continue without objection, either in yourself or in a Brother. Involvement, in other words.

Okay.

Exactly.

Well, yeah. But why not say it could take three months? Why put that word in the air? That … that can become your new definition. It could take three seconds. You can … you can afford to not feel guilty if it doesn’t happen instantaneously, but don’t mess around with giving unreasonably long periods of time to yourself to get it. Because you may, with the power of your thought, cause it to take ten years, because that’s when New Year’s Day for you was set. You see? And …

Yes.

Yes.

But understand, and let’s go back here.

Now you must understand that right now as you’re talking about a process of Awakening, for lack of better words, I use this image. You are lying on a grassy knoll in the middle of the Kingdom of Heaven dreaming a dream of human existence. You’re already there. You’re already Home. And you’re already the fully endowed Presence of God called the Christ. Your dream says that existence happens slowly in time.

The only reason there can be an instantaneous healing, where physical evidence one moment is replaced with new physical evidence a moment later, is evidence of a time collapse. And the only reason it can change is because the injury was an illusion; was the result of some very specific authoritative thoughts that you held as fact for yourself that caused a distorted experience of what could not at any moment have become distorted.

You create distortion by modifying Reality in your experience, and then you say, “It could take ten years for me to get past the experience of this distortion.” You see? And you therefore, you thereby, add to the … you add to the difficulty of there being a time collapse.

Absolutely.

That is correct.

That was willfulness as well.

That is correct

Yes.

We are going to stop here for this evening.

Things are becoming really interesting, aren’t they?

The Course is not meant to be difficult to understand. And from page to page, it stands in support of your having and experiencing discovery and an increasing enthusiasm for watching misperceptions break down, dissolve, and disappear, leaving right there in its place the undistorted view of What God Is Being. And this isn’t something meant for a future time, but for now. And the mental climate on your globe is such that these things can be shared in a way that does support your increasing vital interest and curiosity to wake up now.

So we will end there for this evening.

Thank you.