Teachings of Christ Mind

Okay. Good afternoon. And welcome to everyone who’s joining us on the internet.

I’m going to put you on the spot. Two weeks ago I gave you a homework assignment. Does anyone remember what it was? The homework assignment was to notice during the coming week how many times and in what ways your egos distracted you from asking the one essential question. Does that ring any bells?

Does anyone remember what the one essential question was? Two gold stars for Mark. Yes sir.

Indeed. Did anyone explore that? And does anyone remember what they discovered as a result? Okay.

No. The question was did you notice how your ego distracted you from asking the question?

What kind of thoughts did you … went through your mind?

Can you think of any specific interactions with others where you did not go to where your safety was, but engaged in subterfuge and reaction and what the techniques were that you used?

Approaching what?

Contemplating what?

What question?

And it wasn’t enlightenment that got stirred up.

No.

Does what Mark has shared remind any of you of any experiences you had during the last couple of weeks?

Yes. Anyone else?

Each of you has spoken of particular situations or instances that caused you to become unglued, unsettled, uncomfortable. But what I want all of you to be aware of is that you are constantly ill at ease even when no specific circumstance has caused you to flare up or for your ego to flare up. You are constantly primed for blowups. You are constantly on edge poised to defend yourselves. I do not say this to you to disturb you. I say this to you so that you might understand that in your relative peace, you already are disturbed. You’ve just gotten used to it. And as a result, you don’t bother to ask, “Where is my protection? Where is my safety? Where can I find my peace?”

Now Paul heard me ask the question as well and somehow thought that he was exempt from participating, and he was going to be very interested to see what everyone else had to say. And as a result he went through two weeks of constant opportunity to notice how his ego was distracting him from asking the essential question. As a result of his not recognizing his ongoing uneasiness, and thereby missing the point that his uneasiness was result of a choice he had made not to be joined.

He, like Mark and Judy, found himself finding fault with others. They were the reason he was miserable. And then poor Susan comes along and says, “I don’t know if you realize it but you’re really being cranky. You’re really not on the beam. You’re really not listening.” And of course Paul had allowed himself already to get into a state of self-pity. And then when she confronted him with the answer, he saw her as finding fault with him and maintained the distraction further by arguing with her and being unkind to her by suggesting that she was being thoughtless and insensitive, and you know, you don’t beat the guy when he’s already down, et cetera. Here, she was presenting to him what would allow him to get out of his funk and he saw it as even more reason to stay in his funk.

Now, the point is that as long as you are seeing yourself as an independent agent, as long as you’re seeing yourself in your own right, which ultimately means your own wrongness, you are experiencing vulnerability. You are experiencing vulnerability. No matter how numb you’ve become to it, you are experiencing vulnerability. And the only answer, the only resolution to that vulnerability is to stop maintaining your independent autonomous standpoint, the idea that you can exist quote “in your own right” unquote with your own rights that everyone else better recognize.

And of course, any action you take to get other people to recognize your rights is the way mutually-agreed-upon definitions are arrived at. Now if you can get everyone to agree with you that you have rights of your own and they agree to give them to you in exchange for your giving them their rights, you all are working together, consorting together, conniving together, to keep yourself from seeing where the answer lies, which is in not maintaining an autonomous stand, an independent stand.

I will tell you something and I’m telling Paul something. The more experience you have at being joined with Me or with the Holy Spirit, the more experience you get at being in Communion, the more you’re going to find acts of independence to be increasingly uncomfortable. And so what used to not bother you so much, will now become extremely bothersome. And being unjoined will be an increasingly uncomfortable experience. In fact, I believe this is what we talked about last week. And this is the way you learn that there is no value in independent autonomous activity, or the attempt to engage in independent autonomous activity. The more uncomfortable it becomes, the less value you will find in it. The more apparent it will become that when you are joined, when you are seeking not to be alone and you are letting involvement occur with Me or with the Holy Spirit or with the Father, the more the peace and the stability and the experience of invulnerability that you have in that joined place will be obviously desirable.

And so in this process of strenuous back and forth flip-flopping you begin to learn that you want to choose again, that you want to choose something new, that it really is more valuable to be joined, not with other egos in mutually-agreed-upon definitions, but with Me or the Holy Spirit or the Father in the Experience of Unity and Harmony and Wholeness. And then, because that’s what you enjoy more than suffering, you will put your weight on the side of your Peace. And you will not value the stance that gives you suffering. And so this is the way you learn.

It all seems too simple perhaps. It deprives me of having fresh new ways to tell you how to wake up because at the bottom line you have only one problem and that is that you have chosen to dissociate yourself, to separate yourself from your Source and attempt to exist in that imaginary, foolish, insane state of mind. The only answer to all of your problems, to the problem of the human condition, is breaking the isolation, turning toward the Altar. That is the only solution because the only problem you’re having is your committed conscious intent to try to imagine yourself as independent and bring that state of independence into actuality. As a result, I sound monotonous because I can’t give you 113,000 different things you could do to wake up. There’s only one. That does make it utterly simple.

Paul found that he was feeling vulnerable but he didn’t want to look at why. He felt vulnerable. He felt unloved. He felt disrespected. He felt discounted. On and on and on. And, you know, rather than project out on anyone, he wanted to make himself smaller and more private and just be in the sense of justified misery. Like to hell with everyone else. “I’m just going to be privately miserable. I won’t make waves for anyone. I’ll be kind. You know, I won’t make waves.”

But of course his behavior changed. And those around him, like his wife, noticed that he was reclusive and uncommunicative. And so she boldly brought it to his attention. “What’s wrong?”

“Ah, you don’t want to hear about it. I don’t want to talk about it.”

“No, talk about it.”

So he talked about it and ten words got out of his mouth and it was obvious to her what the problem was and she interrupted him. But now he was getting a little satisfaction out of somebody hearing his misery, right, and wanted more time at the podium. And so now she was thoughtlessly interrupting him when she had asked him, “What’s wrong?” When she spoke up with the correction, what would correct the problem since there was no need to go on at length about the problem, he demanded the right to have it, or to be able to criticize her for being inconsistent. “Well, you asked me. At least give me the opportunity to answer you.” You see?

You see the ego technique of self-protection, of self-protection of this imagined state of independence, will not allow for what will undo its intent to be private, its intent to be self-directed and self-governed. And so it does everything it can to distract.

First, it distracted Paul privately. It said, “Yeah, you have a right to just sog. You have a right to just be quiet and not bother anybody.” Okay, distraction number one.

Then Susan says, “Hey guy,” in so many words, “What’s going on? You’re not acting like yourself.” Ah! Now we have distraction number two. Now we’re not going to talk about … we’re not going to engage in sogging, we’re going to engage in defending against the imposition someone else is providing that would keep you from sogging. And so now whoever it is that provides this, whether it’s a crying baby, or a barking dog, or Susan confronting Paul with the answer, an attack on this bothersome element becomes a further distraction.

You see? You get sort of a zigzag course further and further away from the simple answer which is to turn toward the Altar, to break the isolation. All of the distractions are relative to the original problem. But they all are distractions to your finding the answer and employing the answer.

Now, what we’ve been talking about relates to what we are going to be reading about, so let us go to the book. The subject of this section is:

Remember again that when it is referring to the Mind, it’s referring to the Christ Mind, the Christ of each one of you who is imagining that he’s not the Christ, behaving as though he’s not the Christ, and believing his behavior.

As soon as it says, “Father, I would rather see it my way. I’d rather do it my way. I’d rather be the one to say what everything means.”

It sees everything as a separate whole. It’s like this plant here, the African violet, or the tree you see out in the yard. You think it is a discrete wholeness in it itself. But you know what? Well, let me say this. You also think of water as a thing in itself, a wholeness. You know that you need to water the tree. So you put the water in the ground and you know the tree will drink it up. But you know what? The tree doesn’t have any way to get the water into its roots. There are organisms that live on the surface of the roots. They depend upon the tree for their existence as well as the water, and what they do with the water transfers the water to the roots, makes it possible for the roots to absorb the water. So, the tree isn’t a whole on its own. It cannot exist without these organisms. And these organisms can’t exist without the tree. And the tree and the organisms can’t exist without the water. Everything is interdependent. Nothing is discrete and whole in itself. You know what? You need absolutely everything that exists. And everything that exists, whether it’s the African violet or the tree outside, needs you.

Nothing, absolutely nothing exists independently. The ego suggests that if something is truly independent, not dependent on anything else, it is eternal. If you didn’t have to eat, if you didn’t have to drink, if your cells were embodying wholeness in themselves, you would be eternal. Your body would be eternal. No. Your eternality depends upon absolutely every other part of Creation. It’s in the Wholeness of All That Is that your Eternality awaits you.

But that means you’ve got to give up this age-old quest for independence. It means that you have to allow for the fact that you fit in, not stand out. You’ve got to yield to the Wholeness. You’ve got to let yourself be part of the Wholeness. And initially, that’s the way it will look to you. It will look to you as though this little thing that you are has to say, “Okay, I’m willing to be a part of Infinity, a part of Creation, not the author of it, not being in some special position riding on God’s shoulder separate and apart not needing it all, but being able to enjoy it maybe through God’s eyes.”

You’ve got to find out that you fit in. This is very humbling to the ego. It’s actually humiliating to the ego. It is incapable of being humble. When you have had enough misery as a result of the attempt to be independent, when you’ve had enough misery from that that you are willing to join, you are willing to yield into, you are willing to find where you fit in, that breaks the isolation. And that’s what opens the door for your Mind to resume Its Function, which is to be the Presence of capital “M” Mind which is God, in which you are Experiencing All As The Infinitude Of Your Being because you are not claiming a being separate from the Movement of God which is the Meaning of the word “Be-ing.”

And so, ultimately [cell phone ringing] you find that you are not a part of anything. You are the Whole Itself. [more ringing, audience amusement] Part of Mark’s infinitude has just tried to connect with him. So again, once you yield to being part of the Whole and Joining occurs, you come back into your right Mind in which you are no longer a part of the Whole, but You Are The Experience Of The Wholeness knowing that every other part of the Wholeness is essential, and that no part of it is superior, no part of it is special. No part of it is actually separate in any way.

Let’s continue. Again …

… w-h-o-l-e …

… communication …

That means that when you’re not connected and you are experiencing ongoing uneasiness which you may have become numb to, you nevertheless continue to use communication solely for the purpose of reinforcing separateness. That’s very important to understand. If you realize that at all times when you are not joined, all communication occurs for the purpose of establishing and maintaining separateness, you will find more justification for questioning the way you’re perceiving things. You’ll find more justification for saying, “Mmmm, maybe I ought to actively try to employ a different way of relating with everyone and everything.” Because at the bottom line you don’t want to unconsciously be engaging in something detrimental to your Sanity and something detrimental to everyone else’s Sanity. You really don’t want to be constantly engaged in reinforcing your uneasiness, your discomfort, your illness, your frustration, your jealousy, or well everything that accompanies the human condition.

Continuing …

Which is, of course, what Paul was doing with Susan for two weeks because for two weeks she tried to establish communication.

Continuing …

So, here it is folks. As long as you’re not joined, you are using and abusing each other and nothing else. The interesting thing is that you don’t have to abuse each other harshly. All you have to do is just maintain a gentle level of abuse in order to keep yourself from waking up. Just a constant, slight undercurrent of thoughtlessness or judgmental words, just ever so slight is all it takes. So it isn’t like you’re all mentally raping each other, or physically punching each other, or doing grossly abusive things. All you have to do is just be a little out of sync with each other, just a little out of sync with each other in order to maintain an edge to things that keeps union from occurring, that keeps you from engaging with that Place of Excellence that is in You and from there joining with your Brother or Sister in the Place of Excellence in Them.

You know what? Trees, flowers, dogs and cats, mosquitoes, rocks, leaves, can contribute nothing to the development of mutually-agreed-upon definitions. All of your illusions occur as a result of manipulative communication with each other. Nothing, not the world, not the universe, not physics, nothing creates illusion for you except the way you use each other. You know, it doesn’t say in the Course that I looked at a rock and remembered God, or that I looked at a tree and remembered God. I looked into my Brother’s eyes and remembered God.

So there’s only one problem you have. And that problem is having chosen to imaginatively create in your mind a space in which you could conceive of yourself as being independent and autonomous from the Mind of God, which is the only Mind you have, and then you bind yourself to that by the way you interact with each other. So now you could say we have two steps involved in coming Home. One is to abandon your attempts to be autonomous and independent so that you might join with the Father once again or with Me or with the Holy Spirit in Inner Communion so that you might be infilled with perspective not embraced by the definitions you’ve given to everything. And the second part of it is that you must stop using each other to confirm your autonomy.

And that’s why in order to wake up you must have an object of your affection. And that object of your affection is not a cat, is not a flower, is not a tree, is not a chair, is not a star, but it’s the person, the Brother or Sister next to you. And you must find a way within yourself to care enough about them to want to extend to them something excellent. And the only place you can get something excellent to extend to them is from some place other than this imaginary space you’ve made for yourself that you’ve identified as the totality of what you are. In other words, Me or the Holy Spirit or God.

I and the Holy Spirit will only be conveying to you the Father’s Will. So however you approach it, whether it is through Me or the Holy Spirit or the Father, you’re still only approaching the Father. You’re still only inviting in a conscious embrace of your Source with the acknowledgement that you are not the source of yourself.

So it’s very simple. You have to turn toward God but the only justification for turning toward God that will contribute to your awakening is that what the Father gives you in response to your opening up to Him is to be a gift to someone else—your Brother, your Sister, your Fellowman. Isn’t it wonderful? The Wholeness of the manner of coming Home and the fact that in order for you to come Home, everyone else has to be embraced with you so that no one is left out.

“Oooh, well, that’s more work than I thought it was going to be.” No. The only thing that will make it work is your reluctance to actually be willing to care, to actually be willing to Love your Brother or your Sister. It’s not the loving that’s hard. It’s breaking down your resistance, it’s freeing up your willingness to extend Love, to be Loving.

Okay. Continuing …

… the Soul …

Now listen to this.

Creation is a gift. It’s an extension. Not just sort of poufed out into empty space. Not something extruded into a waiting vessel. Communication is the extension of something to something else, to someone. When the word “hello” is said, it is said to someone who can hear the word. It isn’t printed on a page and put on a bulletin board out on a telephone post out in the middle of the desert where someone may see it if they happen to be going down that road where that telephone pole is. Communication is something extended to someone or something that it can register with; where dialogue, interchange can occur.

Now, listen.

We were talking last week about the bad rap that channeling gets, but let’s face it. It’s your Function to glorify God. It’s your Function to represent God. It’s your Function to make the Gift of your Source.

Mind you now, we’re talking about the Christ That You Are right at this moment in spite of the definition you’ve currently given yourself and which you’re currently committed to. We’re talking about the fully Christed Ones that each one of you are right here, but which you’re not availing yourself of and you’re not employing, you might say, in everything you do.

Again …

Not the ego, the Mind.

Makes it sound like existence and Being are two separate things. And there is a distinction. Existence is the definition you’ve given to the Experience of Being. Being is the Experience of Mind, with a capital “M”, seeing All That It Infinitely Is and recognizing Itself in It. Being is a total Experience. You might say the Infinite Experience Of Being is totally grasped, totally understood, totally felt, without a single thought occurring, and therefore without a single definition being attached to it. Existence is Being with definitions attached to it.

Again …

In other words, when you realize how you fit in to it.

You are in relationship with All That Exists, with All of Creation.

Who want to share it.

Gift.

You see?

Divine Abstraction left abstract is non-existent creation.

You hear that? The constant going out, the constant extension of His Love, is blocked when His Channels are closed.

“Oh dear. How many guilty marks do you get for that? How bad should you feel?” Don’t waste your time feeling bad, but just understand the way it works. Joy is supposed to be your experience. And Joy is supposed to be the Father’s Experience. And so everybody should just get back to the business of doing what allows that Joy to be, rather than engaging in this idiotic preference to try to be independent and make independence real and as a result constantly feel an undercurrent that causes you to mistreat each other.

Continuing …

And again, that doesn’t mean shared with your cat or your flower garden. It means with a Brother or a Sister.

Continuing …

How?

This is how you praise God. Not by turning around and shooting the revelation right back to Him, but by sharing it with your Brothers, confirming Infinite Oneness rather than singular isolation.

Continuing …

Hmmmm, helpful. Well, that sounds like caring to me. That means being thoughtful. That means having someone on your mind besides yourself in a caring way. Not in the way Paul was treating Susan the last two weeks. Not in the way that any of you have treated each other when what you were doing was trying to secure your privacy.

Helpfulness and harmlessness.

Do you see that? This is a key sentence.

Hurt, therefore, is inseparable from an ego in the act of self-protection. And that’s the only source of hurt. That means there’s only one thing you need to stop doing. We’re not talking about fifty lessons you must learn that have 10,000 little adjustments you have to make in order to come back in alignment with the way things really are enough to promote a change. There’s only one thing you need to stop doing.

Again …

In other words, involvement with a Brother or Sister where kindness and thoughtfulness and caring is being expressed.

Those last three words need to be in bright red.

… what?

Another way of saying that is the Joy of our right Mind where no little part of it has tried to box itself off from the rest.

But, and this isn’t in the book, I can’t do that until something in you wants to be truly helpful. And that means being helpful in accomplishing something beyond self-protection.

Hmmmm, my guidance. Well, it’s not my personal guidance and I hope that’s clear to all of you by now. It’s not some really neat guidance that I came up with that I want to spread around the universe through you guys. My Guidance is nothing more and nothing less than the Father’s Will being extended to you in language that has meaning for you, and in ways that help your mind re-recognize itself and become willing to stand forth on its own, if I may put it that way, without employing the ego for any reason.

I hope as we continue on that it will become clearer and clearer to you how little is required to wake up. There’s only one thing you need to do, or as we said, two things. One is to abandon your independence by turning to the Father and saying, “Help,” or saying: “Thy Will be done,” and doing that in the context of wanting to do His Will for your Brother or your Sister. And I have certainly been illuminating for some time now the fact that You Are The Christ right now, using your mind in a way that causes you not to recognize yourself, and you are doing this with all of the Fullness of the Christhood That You Are, if you want to put it this way, the Divine Power of your Being.

And so there’s nothing weak about you at this moment. You are with the Power of the Universe enforcing darkness and blindness and ignorance upon yourself and claiming that this is your normal state of being. Therefore, all the Power in the Universe that is the very Nature of your Being stands ready for you to make a new decision. So you can’t claim that it will take you a long time to wake up because you’re nothing but a piss-ant mortal, a little puny ego that’s going to have to refine itself over many lifetimes and as a result of studying many thought systems, or that what you’re called upon to do is really, really hard, and therefore it’s going take a long time.

So, I’m uncovering to you how simple it is, how little it takes and that because you haven’t even at this very moment stopped being the Ultimate Expression Of God. You include within yourself everything that is necessary to make the shift. You already include it in yourself and you are employing all of the power to create for yourself at this moment the experience you’re having. So you don’t have to recharge your batteries. You don’t have to gas up with a higher octane fuel. All you have to do is stop saying, “I’m not the Christ. I’m not what you’re saying I am. I know what I am and I know it’s going to take a long time because I’ve got change from what I am into something I’m not. And that kind of adjustment is going to be hard. And you can’t expect me to do it overnight.”

So, like a drop of water wearing away on a rock, I will keep pointing out the simplicity of this so that you don’t continue to overwhelm yourself with the so-called impossibility of waking up, or the so-called difficulty of waking up. And the closer you come to an inner feeling that it’s going to be easy, [snaps fingers] the sooner it’s going to happen. And I’m hanging in here with you until you’re willing to accept the possibility that it might be utterly simple. Not only that but it truly is your Birthright and you aren’t what you thought you were.

We will call it a day. It’s joy to express the Truth. It’s even more joy that you’re listening, because that means that there’s more oneness. There’s more communion. There’s less defended isolation. And so more of the Brotherhood is experiencing its Wholeness. You must remember that whatever tinges of Wholeness you might be experiencing at this moment that’s new for you constitutes a new level of Wholeness for all of the rest of the Brotherhood that is already awake because now more of their Infinitude is connected with them. So the gift you give is one that’s received universally.

I love you and I look forward to being with you next week.