Teachings of Christ Mind

Good afternoon and welcome to everyone who’s joining us on the internet as well. And, again, today, if there are questions from the internet, some of them will be addressed.

Let’s go right into the book. And actually we will probably only read the first paragraph and use it as a springboard. Would you do the honors?

Perhaps the most important sentence in there says: “But it could not entirely separate itself from spirit, because it is from spirit that it derives its whole power to make or create.” And let’s be sure we understand the distinction between make and create.

Last week I suggested that the word “up” should be added to “make.” “Make-up,” to make-up something, an imagination. To make is what the mind does when it has separated itself from the Father and experiences, or seems to experience itself as independent, then it makes things. But the making doesn’t constitute Creation. Now the point is that not a single one of you has ever stopped being the direct Expression of God.

Your apparent capacity to believe yourself to be independent, to be unrelated to God by virtue of being at the end of a chain of evolution that started with a big bang and all you are is the result of a joining of a sperm and an egg, that is a made-up view of yourselves. And everything you do on that basis constitutes a making of things, and as I said, does not constitute Creation at all.

Now, it is still the Son of God making things as opposed to the Son of God creating things. You have not become an ego. You have not become what you think you are. And any power you have to draw a breath as a human being separate from God is derived from the fact that at this very moment you are the Son of God, the direct Expression of God, God embodied. This is very important for you to understand because it’s in this way that you can understand what I mean when I say you’re having a dream on a grassy knoll in the Kingdom of Heaven. At this moment you are exactly as you were created by the Father. This is why an ego does not have to refine its soul to get back Home. You’re already at Home. You’re already the Son of God pretending you’re not and believing the pretension. If that’s clear to you, your awakening will be much simpler.

Even in miscreation, the mind is affirming its capital “S” Source. You see that? Right now, you are, no matter how you see yourself, affirming and being the Expression of God, but you’re doing it unconsciously. And as a result of doing it unconsciously, you’re goofing up all over the place. You are mis-creating, and you are misunderstanding Creation.

The mortal dream of existence is what you experience when you make of the Kingdom of Heaven something other than it is in your mind, and then believe and devote yourself to your belief. But it’s still the Son of God confronted with and seeing the Kingdom of Heaven with all the power and all of the glory of your Divine Being active, but occurring unknown to you while you are devoted to your perception of it all. Period.

The experience is an uneasy experience. It is an unpleasant experience. It’s an experience in which there are these things called sin, disease and death. “But, oh, you accept the challenge of trying to overcome them” instead of coming back Home where they don’t exist at all because they were only ever imaginary.

It is the Father’s good pleasure to give you the Kingdom. That statement only means something if you’re in the mortal dream, the made-up concept of existence and the made-up sense of yourself as being separate because, divinely speaking, Creation is the undivided and inseparable manifestation of All That God Is, which includes you, and so Creation is the extension of you as well.

But if you have taken a stance of independence and you’re choosing to see things the way you want to see them, then the infinite embodiment of What-You-Are/God-Is becomes something you stand in receipt of. The very Presence of your Being becomes something separate from you that can’t become separate from you, and therefore, it can only be understood as God’s Gift to you.

But, you know what? The way the ego works, the way being is experienced when you have claimed independence from the Father is that the Gift, all of Creation, is also seen as independent of the Father. Independent in this sense: The very scientific physical sense that the Universe has nothing to do with God at all. It’s purely physical and started from a big bang. And everything about it is the natural evolution of matter and the way matter works. Now the Gift has become separated from the Giver. You see that?

Just as the one seeing the Gift separated from the Giver sees himself as separate from his Source, thinking that he is the source of himself and therefore has free will to be in whatever way he wishes without accountability to any other part of Creation, and it’s called the capacity to be original and introduce something new into the human condition. And then, this supposed capacity to be so independent that one can be so original that something valuably new can be introduced into the human condition becomes a source of pride.

Now, when you conceive of yourself as self-created, as independent from God, as I said, it’s an uneasy and uncomfortable experience. No one enjoys it and everyone does want to escape from it. Everyone wants to become free from suffering. And the manifestation of that independent stance is called dis-ease, lack of ease.

But when one accepts the independence as valid and finds himself experiencing dis-ease, lack of ease, discomfort, stress, and so on, and takes these on as a challenge to assert his authority or her authority as an independent authorizer and convinces himself or herself that in so doing, it gives him or her greater credibility so that it becomes a goal of great meaning and one makes commitment to quote “making his mark in the world,” what he has made and therefore takes pleasure in the suffering experience and the overcoming of it, that’s not dis-ease. That is sin. When one takes pleasure, finds gratification, finds meaning in the dream and the overcoming of it by independent means, that is sin.

And I’m going to be very frank with you. The fact that you’re not awake means that you are all enjoying the challenge of bringing your own unique independent viewpoint to bear upon life so as to overcome these problems. You are in sin. And so, in this sense, the traditional church, the traditional religious teaching that says, “you are all sinners,” is true. But the way I have expressed it comes from another direction. It doesn’t mean you’re guilty and it has nothing to do with punishment. It has to do with engaging in an activity that is erroneous that you believe is valid and which you are taking pleasure in engaging with.

The healing of dis-ease and the healing of sin are different. Why? Because you don’t enjoy dis-ease. And many times dis-ease is healed without your having to have any conscious awareness of what the specific belief was that was manifest in the form of the disease. But sin can only be healed when the specific pleasure that you are taking in it is uncovered so that you may see what you are doing, and consciously abandon it. And until it is seen and consciously abandoned, sin will not spontaneously and miraculously disappear. This is very important to understand.

In a moment.

Again, I am not using the word “sin” with the traditional connotations. All it is, is the commitment to an erroneous belief that is done with pleasure and satisfaction that strokes one’s ego, thereby apparently strengthening it. To know that this is what it is, means that you do not have to worry about retribution, about ultimate penalties, because you’re already experiencing ignorance of Home. You’re already experiencing ignorance of your connection with the Father. There’s no further penalty, and it’s not a penalty laid upon you. It’s just that if you’re not paying attention, you’re likely to stub your toe. So that’s all the extent … that is the extent of punishment, you might say, and it doesn’t come from any outside source, like the Father.

Understanding this will make it easier for you to awaken because you will not be existing in a state of fear of the Father’s wrath because you have sinned. You see? And so you do not need to be distracted by fear in the process of dealing with sin.

Yes, Michael?

No, you see, it’s not the state of not enjoying anything at that point that undoes anything. It’s the state of not enjoying anything and giving up …

… and yielding to the Father.

That is correct.

That’s correct. Yes. You will find that you come to the bottom of the barrel and you yield and there is transformation and there is regeneration. And that doesn’t mean that you’ve risen in the barrel. And there is a level of peace and a level of respite from struggle. And then …

… the bottom of the barrel drops lower and you find that the barrel was a deeper barrel than you thought.

Yes.

That is correct.

That … Yes.

Yes. And it’s natural to come to a new level of peace and self-appreciation in the yielding. But then subtler levels of willfulness, subtler levels of mutually-agreed-upon beliefs have to be uncovered. And so the bottom of the barrel drops further and you become, for lack of better words, more delicately attuned to the subtleties of the ego that you couldn’t even perceive at what I will call grosser levels of ego structures.

And when the bottom drops out again, you think, “Oh boy, and here I had thought I had made so much progress, and evidently I haven’t made any progress at all.” But that is an illusion. You have made progress. And now there’s further progress to be made, further yielding which now you are prepared to engage in, or better prepared to engage in, because you’ve already yielded up so much control and learned how valuable it has been not to be in control that there’s less resistance to abandoning even subtler levels of control that you heretofore were unaware you were utilizing.

Well, suffering is always equal to the amount of resistance to God you are introducing into the picture.

Of course.

Of course.

Now obviously if when you have claimed independence from the Father you have narrowed your focus of attention down because you’ve abandon the infinite view, every step of awakening, you could say, is going to involve greater, fuller, more glorious views, I’ll say, of Reality. That part sounds very desirable to you. The part you may not be aware that you will want to avoid is the apparent responsibility to embrace it consciously because it appears to you that it requires you to be more conscientiously conscious than you’ve ever been before. And that terrible word “work” looms its head. “Oh, if this is awakening and it’s natural to my being, it shouldn’t seem like work!”

Well, what’s natural to you does seem like work if you have managed to push the wholeness of you out of the picture and the wholeness of your capacity to be aware out of your experience in favor of a much smaller dimension of everything, and so it does look like more work. It does look like not having any free time to just let go and relax because there’s so much to be conscious of. And there’s a tendency to want to fall back into … mmmm … fuzziness.

Now, awakening is a process of learning. I mean you’re going to be changed from the way you’re experiencing yourselves. You’re going to know things that you had forgotten. And in that sense you’re going to re-learn them. You’re going to reincorporate them into your Conscious Experience of Being. And in the reincorporating, you will seem to change. Learning means change.

Now those of you here at least have been engaged consciously in what you have called an awakening process and so you have been studying yourselves, you might say, you have been examining your motives. You have been examining your beliefs. You’ve been examining your concepts to see whether they’re serving you. And then you have been willing to consider the possibility that none of your concepts and beliefs serve you well at all and therefore you are willing to reach beyond them to the Father for His Guidance.

And so, all the way along this apparent process of awakening, you have been faced with the correction of your ignorances by virtue of their being replaced with what I’m going to call clearer and clearer experiences of Truth. You, yourselves, privately, individually, I’m going to say, have looked for those places in you which call for correction, and if you have made any valid progress, you have been willing to uncover not only your beliefs that promote dis-ease, but the false pleasures in illusion that you have been committed to for the purpose of self-satisfying ego-building. And so you have all engaged in uncovering sin in yourselves.

If you have made progress, it is because you have allowed what you would have kept secret to be uncovered to you so that you might see it clearly, so that you might make the distinction between illusion and Truth so that in the clarity of the distinction, you can abandon your commitment to illusion. Right?

Okay. For the most part since we have been going through the Course and for the most part as most students of the Course have studied it, they have and you have, taken this as a course of study about voluntary individual growth as though the answer to all problems is an entirely private individual affair and that your doing that will be sufficient to change the world. And, as a result, you’ve ended up still being private, still being separate from the world. And yet, we’ve discussed the fact that you are the salvation of the world.

Today is sort of like a … when you take chemistry, you have three days a week of class work and then two days a week of lab work so today’s a little bit of lab work. Okay.

We’ve talked about involvement, haven’t we? We’ve talked about being present with and for your Brother. We’ve talked about turning back to the Altar so that you might be infilled with the Father’s perspective which it’s your Birthright to be experiencing because the Father’s Mind is your Right Mind. And what? The fact that in order for what the Father reveals to you to have meaning will occur only when your desire to know the Truth is on your brother’s behalf. You can’t get the goodies from the Father for yourself privately! It’s simple. It’s un-reversible. It’s unchangeable.

If you want the blessing of the Father’s point of view, you’ve got to ask for it for someone else. You have to have an object of your affection and you’re not a sufficient object of your affection. Because if you could be the sufficient object of your affection to experience the Father’s Will and wake up, you could leave everybody behind and still be separate from everyone because there had been no caring, no extension of Love, no involvement, no unity. And I’ll tell you, Unity with God does not mean an absence of Unity with your Brothers and Sisters. You can’t have Unity with God and leave your Brothers and Sisters out. It’s like talking about dry water. There ain’t no such thing!

Now, when your Brother or Sister is ill, experiencing dis-ease, your turning toward the Altar, your refusal to accept what your conditionings cause your eyes to see in a Brother and your decision to turn toward the Altar to learn of God what the Truth is, not about that person’s problem or their particular dis-ease, but the Truth about them as the Son or Daughter of God. As you do that, healing can occur.

But if that individual is suffering from sin, you’re put in a new position, a different kind of position. When you turn to the Father to learn the Truth about them, the Truth about them will be the truth that will help them release their fascination with and devotion to the pleasure that they’re getting out of indulging in believing an illusion. And you will have to be a teacher. You will have to uncover the sin. You will have to not keep your mouth shut and say, “I’ll let them work it out for themselves.” In effect, you’re saying “Oh, I’ll let them suffer a little longer, even though if I spoke up and uncovered it, it could lead to their instantaneous recovery, or at least more rapid recovery, because what they’re keeping hidden from themselves will be brought out at least for them to accept or consciously reject again.”

Awakening is a process of education. And so, your having an object of your affection, a Brother or a Sister, and your caring enough about them to turn toward the Altar to learn of God what is the Truth about them, will provide you with what it takes to be bold enough to not join in keeping the sin hidden, keeping the sin secret, keeping the pleasure, the false pleasure in something that is binding them still hidden, still covered up.

I’m constantly uncovering to you your illusions. And so it’s obvious to you that illusions and devotions to illusions can be uncovered without insulting you, even though at times I know I bother you.

Now as I said as we’ve been going through the Course, we’ve been talking about these principles as they relate to you individually and your own inner work. But you exist in a Brotherhood and you’re not an island. And your devotion to your Brother, your Love for him and your Love for your Sister requires that you involve yourself with courage. And when the Father reveals to you what needs to be uncovered and impulses you to engage with your Brother on behalf of his release, it will require you to abandon the inclination to let each one work out his salvation on his own and speak up and involve yourself. Involve yourself and cast your vote on behalf of Truth, which is the Truth about them that can and will undo their bondage to their devotion to the pleasure they think they’re getting from, I’m going to say, independence and the further establishing of it.

Now, if you look at yourselves, if you look at yourselves honestly, you will be aware of all the arguments you have used to avoid looking at the Truth; all the excuses you have, all the justifications and the arguments you have employed. And so you must be practical enough to understand that you are going to meet resistance in the uncovering of that which another wishes to keep secret and who feels that the uncovering of the secret will jeopardize them, damage them, injure them, rather than release them. And you must be willing nevertheless to care enough to voice the Truth without indicting that one.

Now, another aspect of this that you must understand so that you’re not surprised. I’ve spoken before about the crab barrel theory where a crab tries to crawl out of the crab barrel and the other crabs grab it back and that’s why there don’t need to be any covers on crab barrels. First of all, the mutually-agreed-upon definitions that you abide by have arisen out of a mindset, an imagination, that you can be independent and that you are independent and therefore you are a person, private person with a boundary. And this person is flawed. And you all mutually agree between yourselves that you are flawed and you all mutually agree that you will use each other’s flaws which you all know about to keep each other in line. Right? That’s just the rule of the human condition.

Now, when you have been willing to abandon a personal sense of yourself, when you have been willing to say, “I desire to see things outside of the box of my personal sense of things. I intend to yield to the Father. I am willing to let the Father in.” And you let that infilling occur, and you begin to have your illusions revealed to you, and you set them aside and you grow and you exercise less and less control, you move into, for lack of better words, an arena where the word “personal” doesn’t apply to you because there’s less and less boundary to it and it’s more and more infinite, more and more all-inclusive.

And the simple fact is that by the time you arrive at a point where you’re able to yield to God and feel the infilling of enlightenment and greater clarity to the point where you can distinguish between Truth and illusion and make the choice, and none of this activity in you has anything to do with personal authority or personal control, you are able then to know when to speak in an educational way to a Brother or Sister to uncover the secret that great pleasure is being taken in.

And when you do, the response is likely to be to call you back into a personal sense of yourself. In other words, they’re likely say, “Well, that’s just your opinion,” belittling the clarity. But it isn’t just belittling the clarity and the more infinite view. It is a ploy to re-engage you in a habit newly released by you of responding to everything from a personal level, a personal sense of yourself. And because your familiarity with those responses isn’t far enough in the past for you to not be hooked by at all, it is possible for you to be hooked and then abandon the more infinite view in order to defend yourself.

Another response could be: “Well, you’re just afraid. You’re actually acting paranoid. You’re seeing awful things everywhere.” In other words: “You’re crazy. Your mind is not functioning well. You are at fault for what you are seeing.” And again, you see what it does? It calls a personal integrity into question. And if any of you have seen [the movie] “Back to the Future,” you know that the main character could not resist responding unintelligently to the suggestion that he was a chicken.

The suggestion that you’re an ego, when you are not coming from an ego place, is something that you are subject to reacting to because your habit of acting as an ego is not far enough in your past for you to be free of the knee-jerk response to a personal ego … a personal attack in the sense of re-igniting in you the dynamics of being an ego and the need to defend yourself.

Now, I could give you more examples, but it is important for you to understand that regardless of the variation in the examples, all of the varied things, because those who know you will use what they perceive to be your weaknesses, and they won’t be the same for each person.

But the point is that when you have been willing to do the work to abandon your own egos, to not validate them, to not resist them, but to turn your attention undividedly to the Altar desiring to know of God what the Truth is and becoming undefended enough to let the Truth infill you, you become more stable. Your experience of peace is more grounded. Your feeling of invulnerability is more secure.

And because you are not bouncing off of your own ego reactions, it can then be a surprise when you extend Love to another to have them try to reengage you in your old habits of ego reactions. And you need to be practical enough to know that it’s inevitable that that’s going to happen, so that you’re not surprised and not sidetracked from being able to be an agent for change because you can make the distinction between what is illusion and what is Truth.

And because you can make the choice for Truth and make commitment to it and voice it to your Brother or Sister, so that you say, “No, I will not join you in that. Yes, I will join you in this. Will you join me in the Truth about you? Will you bear with me long enough to hear what will release you from the suffering you’re experiencing?”

Oh, but another ploy is, “Well, you’re the one who’s causing me my suffering.” And of course what they mean is, “You’re uncovering what I need to keep secret, because my keeping it secret is what keeps me safe.” And they will say, “What you’re doing is not love.” And what you have to be clear about is that keeping silent and letting the secret remain covered, that is what is not love. But again, this means involvement; this means what the other person would call butting into their business. And it means when you are dealing with sin, meaning the pleasure in keeping a secret, the pleasure in engaging in and embodying a lie which you will not let anybody else see, but which you revel in doing.

It means that their accusative response pointing the finger at you and saying, “you’re not being love and therefore you can’t possibly be hearing God and this is all your ego,” that when they do that, you’ll take it. And you will stand there in the face of their distress without flinching and without abandoning the Truth that you know that they need to know so that their suffering can stop. And you teach them. And you say, “No, here is the Truth.” You care enough to hang in there and re-educate, because that’s the only thing that will correct sin. You see what I’m saying?

This is not a private work. Your clear correct perception or your clear correct experience of Truth can heal disease and death instantaneously as I did, but sin requires education. And education requires involvement. One-on-one involvement.

You must understand that in order for the private personal ego sense of itself to survive, it must defend itself against its non-existence being uncovered. And therefore, it will aggressively protect itself. And it will protect itself by unscrupulous means. It will not protect itself intelligently, reasonably, kindly, but always by unscrupulous means.

Now, am I saying this that you might know that you are faced with a deadly enemy, or at least is nothing less than malicious and therefore you ought to be afraid? No. Because it’s still nothing. But you must understand the way it works so that you are unequivocal with it, because it will attack your integrity, either directly in your mind or out of the mouths of others, and cause you to doubt yourself because it’s only when you doubt yourself that it can reign freely. It’s purpose is to keep you from remembering Who You Are because when you remember Who You Are, it will cease to seem to be anything.

Now you must understand this, not so that you might see just how starkly the opposites are opposed to each other, because these are not opposites. It’s Something and nothing! Those are not opposites. It’s God and nothing. But you must understand that because the ego is imagined and is not real, it cannot gather anything to substantiate its existence that has substance. And it, therefore, operates with what? It operates with the discomfort, the bell that rings when the truck is backing up.

The warning bell, your innate Sanity that tells you that: “When you’re not connected with the Father, you are in territory that you need to be alert to so you don’t accept it as real and you get back Home as soon as possible because you’re attempting to do something impossible.”

It [the ego] takes that uneasiness and says: “It has nothing to do with your remembering Who You Are. It has to do with the condition of existence. And you know what? You have the capacity to overcome it by strengthening yourself and feeling your integrity and your personal power. And so I will help you enhance your sense of personal power in your privateness in order to overcome this uneasiness.”

Which can’t go away because it’s your innate Sanity saying: “You’re playing with impossibilities here. You are playing with what would cause you to not be fully conscious.” And your innate Sanity provides you with the warning so that you might stop.

Okay. If you understand that this is the way the ego works, and that it succeeds only by making you feel personally vulnerable as a tiny personality. It will even try to convince you that all you are is a personality and that everything you’re seeing is your creation. And if you’re seeing something you don’t like, it’s your mis-creation, et cetera. And it undermines your capacity to see that there’s an absolute difference between what is Real and what is illusory. So absolute that what is Real is the Only And All That There Is, and what is unreal is non-existent.

So when we’re talking about glorifying God in everything you see, we’re talking about something that’s far from passive. Something that’s far from private and uninvolved. Something where you call a spade a spade. Something where you don’t mince words. And where the education, the loving persistent expression of what Truth is, is presented. And a clear-cut expression that, “this isn’t true, this isn’t appropriate, this does not serve you, this is illusion,” gets voiced because it’s part of the educational process of making the distinction. And it provides a requirement for the individual who wants to believe that anything goes and that there is no black and white, it provides them with the inability to believe that unchallenged.

The lie has to be challenged. I’m challenging the lie every time I speak with you. And the Course is challenging the lie in the world whenever anyone reads it. It says, “There is another way to look at this.” And it’s not just a point of view. It is not just the perspective of the author. There is a God. There are absolutes. And there is nothing else.

There is black and white, and white cancels out black so there’s only white. But there’s not fuzziness. There’s not ambiguousness. And to the degree that you do not make the distinction between Truth and illusion, and protect Truth by proclaiming It out loud and loving your Brother enough to join in an educational process, you will be promoting ongoing nebulousness and you will not be glorifying God. You can’t keep your mouth shut. And you must call a lie a lie and you must call the Truth true. And you must, if you’re going to be an agent for change, and if you’re going to be the salvation of the world, you must declare yourself declaring God.

And now I’ve brought you face to face with the dirty word “work!” I’ve brought you face to face with the fact that as you open up to more, it’s going to seem like there is more responsibility, more to be conscious of. “God, do I have to be that alert? Do I have to be that conscious? Do I have to be so on the ball that [snaps fingers] in the moment something happens, I can reflect God back? Don’t I get a rest?” What you mean is, “Don’t I get time to be fuzzy and unconscious?”, as though being conscious and the presence as an active agent for change is not natural to you and is not easy for you. Because it is natural for you, it is easy for you, but you’ve been practicing, let us say, that you can be conscious at warp speed, but you’ve been practicing traveling at only 5,000 miles an hour where you didn’t have to pay as much attention and you could see the sights “at your leisure, Ohhhh.” You see?

Warp speed is natural to you. And you will find that it’s natural to you when you’re willing to come out of the closet, when you’re willing to get off the couch, out of your easy chair, out of your mentally fuzzy thinking and actually be conscious with God for yourself and your Brother so that none of capital “C” Creation escapes your notice. And so that the wholeness of you doesn’t escape your notice.

You know what? You’ve got to stop giving rights to the human condition. You’ve got to stop giving rights to the human condition. “Ah, well, they’re only human. You know, we’re bound to have terrorists. You can’t get rid of terrorists. Everybody has different points of view and there’s always going to be terrorists.” Bullshit! Stop being lackadaisical in your mind. Stop giving rights to the human condition.

The human condition is an illusion! It can’t be given any rights because it doesn’t exist. But to the degree that you’re lazy and sloppy in your thinking and give it rights and you say, “Well, there’s nothing you can do about that. Ah, you know what? The best thing to do is leave it alone, and it’ll go away.” No, it won’t, because the ego is intent upon preserving itself and undermining and getting rid of that which will disclose its non-existence. Leave it alone and it will secure more and more ground by virtue of mutually-agreed-upon definitions of more and more people who are valuing their illusions.

And as long as it’s going on over in the Middle East, or as long as it’s going off some distance away from you, you can for a while say, “Just ignore it. It’ll go away.” But you know what? That’s not the way the ego works. The ego is squeezing God out. Not successfully. But that is its motive because only in the absence of God can an illusory self seem to have any presence and existence. You see that?

You know what? Don’t speak up and the human condition will expand until it’s on your doorstep, in your face, aggressively undermining whatever peace you have been able to achieve by virtue of un-involvement because you were at a distance. And now you will be faced with the call that I’ve been giving you today, a call for correction that I’ve been presenting to you today. Not because there’s a threat out there, but because you want to wake up. And you’ve said you want to wake up and you’ve said you want to be an agent for change. That you do want to glorify God. And you don’t glorify God passively by un-involvement and not magnifying the lie by pointing it out, uncovering it. It will arrive at your doorstep and then you will have to do what I’m saying today because it will be overwhelming. It will be in your face.

Now, I’m not suggesting that you’re on the threshold of Armageddon. I’m not suggesting that you’re on the threshold of a great war–inner or outer. I’m not describing anything any worse than is going on at this very instant. At this very instant you’re not awake. You’re the Sons and Daughters of God, whose Mind is your Right Mind. And the contents of that Infinite Mind are by Birthright yours, and you’re not experiencing it. And you will not regain the experience of them through some private spiritual process of waking up.

Now I’ve said that the only thing the ego can’t defend itself against is disregard. So, does that mean that as long as you disregard the ego, you can go along your merry way and everything will be hunky-dory? No, because you’re not awake yet! Because there’s something else to do besides not defend yourself against the ego by disregarding it. The something else is to want to wake up, to want to come back into your Sanity, to want your Right Mind which never abandoned you, but which you compartmentalized so that the majority of it was out of sight, so that It might be restored to you.

And what I’ve shared with you today will help you deal with the way the ego will attempt to distract you from your desire to come back into your Right Mind so that you won’t be surprised and shocked that it’s happening. And so that you won’t be afraid of it when it’s happens. As well as illuminating the fact that when your Brother or Sister is caught in the pleasure of an indulging in an illusion and wanting to keep that covered up, if you don’t want the effects of what they’re covering up to eventually encroach directly on you in your face, you’ll uncover it with Love and with education. And you won’t be afraid to say, “This is wrong,” and, “This is right.”

You know, you grew up. You were a child and you looked forward to the day you were twenty-one when you would be emancipated from your teachers and you would graduate into being independent. Not realizing that it wasn’t independence at all but was a shift into a responsibility to be cooperative with the whole. Yielding to that which blesses the whole and that at no point was there the freedom to be like a wild cannonball careening without any order, or path, everywhere and anywhere it wanted to go with no intelligence to it whatsoever.

The belief was that when you got to be twenty-one, you wouldn’t have to do any more learning. You would have learned enough to be able to function without any more information, directions, rules, crammed down your throat that you would have to abide by. And so it’s very difficult for many so-called adults to adjust to the fact that society and circumstances, and so on, place requirements on them. And they have to change, if they haven’t been willing to cooperate with the way things work. And, well, the fact is learning goes on. And as long as learning of Truth goes on, change occurs in you, and you grow and you become something new.

Your desire not to be told what to do or how things work, your desire to be free of having to cooperate with the way things work, fuels your resistance to telling other people the Truth, telling other people that there’s need for change. That this works and this doesn’t work, and therefore, you need to start doing what works. Being the Voice for Truth.

“Well, I grew up. I got away from home. I’m making a living. I’m supporting myself. I’m paying my way. I’m not leaning on anyone. No one has a right to tell me anything.” Not true.

And once it dawns on you that it’s your job to witness for your Brother and Sister, to be there with them and for them on their behalf, and that they’re there for you, they’re there with you for the same reason, when that becomes clear to you, you will stop being afraid to open up your mouth and say, “Stop this now. This works. Do that.” As long as everyone thinks they have the right not to have to learn anything new and change, you will continue to have evidences of chaos and confusion in your relationships, in your country, and internationally.

I said a little earlier that you would have your chance to ask questions. I’m not going to, because I want what I’ve said to sit there undiluted by comments and where the questions might lead us. And next week, at the beginning, if you have questions relative to what I’ve said today, we will take time for that because, to tell you the truth, I hope you do have questions. I hope it moves you to the consideration of uncomfortable things, which will cause you to have questions that will be less fuzzy than you might otherwise have had, and because of their focus will lead to answers that will be even more illuminating.

Do you know how much I love you?

I look forward to being with you next week.