Teachings of Christ Mind

Okay. Good afternoon to everyone here and to everyone who is joining us on the internet as well.

Before we begin, I need to mention that, as many of you know and some of you don’t, the Gathering scheduled for next Saturday, September 20th, has been cancelled. As a result of the announcement, many have gone through interesting imaginations, and some wild conclusions have been arrived at. And others have felt that perhaps it was their fault because of something they did that the Gathering was cancelled. But it’s simpler than that really.

We were speaking last weekend, last Sunday, about rehabilitation. About the fact that although everyone may think they have the right to behave in any way they wish, they do not have the right to do it without objection. And in your thinking processes you should not ever assume that anything goes, that that is the new metaphysical and spiritual paradigm, that anything goes and it must be allowed.

In talking about this as I did, it brought home a point to Paul and Susan regarding something in their lives that was not getting attended to, that objection was not being made to, and something that literally calls for rehabilitation. After the meeting was over, they spoke with me at some length and Paul with me until nearly five in the morning. And in the course of our conversation I made it clear that indeed this area in their lives needed to be addressed, and that addressing it was incompatible with the preparation necessary for the Gathering on the 20th, and that it had higher priority. And so at my direction Paul announced that the Gathering was cancelled.

The specifics are irrelevant, but I ask that instead of indulging in vain imaginings, and instead of speculating via the grapevine, that each one give Paul and Susan the benefit of the doubt and assume the best. They are about their Father’s business, if I may put it that way. And they are being obedient to the call that is on their plate. It’s that simple.

We will have the Gathering on Sunday, the ACIM Study Group as we are right now and the format will be as it has been every Sunday.

Okay …

Two words that necessarily go together because healing is always the uncovering of wholeness. Healing is always the revealing of you to you as What The Father Is Being right there in all the Fullness of His Self-Expression. Healing is not the changing of one thing into another. It’s the uncovering of the only thing that could ever have been there from the beginning, no matter how covered over it has become by your commitment to a belief that you are less than whole.

You all resist depression.

Continuing …

In other words, singularly, not divided up between a desire to be happy and a desire to be resentful, a desire to feel your Joy and a sense of necessity to attend to something unpleasant which you therefore have reluctance to attend to.

Again …

What that means is that you send out different messengers simultaneously. You send out messengers of expectancy and of hope and of doubt and of fear. And those messengers go out, find confirmation, and return to you. And they return to you with conflicted messages which cause you to continue to be conflicted. Your conflict is reinforced.

Again …

Which of course isn’t an option you have available to you.

So then, what’s the first essential element in the healing of your mind that will constitute the healing of your world, of your neighbor, of your friend, your brother, et cetera? It is your willingness to abandon fear right where fear seems to be called for, whether it’s behavior that arouses fear in you, whether it’s a physical condition that arouses fear in you. You must be willing to abandon the fear and move into that Place in You where Love is felt, where your Love is available. That must be more important to you than reacting to fear.

That is part of the healing process. If you are going to be a healer, you would have to make commitment to that first step constantly. You would know that’s the way it works and therefore this is my task. This is the way I do it. I consciously choose to abandon my inclination to react with fear, and instead I insist upon connecting with my ever-present capacity to feel and be the Presence of Love so that from that Love I may extend a singularity of intent and send out only one kind of messenger, so that it might return to me with confirmation of Its Energy, of Its Intent, and of Its Blessing.

Continuing …

I know that most of the time all of you feel alone, but listen to this.

If you will remember that, it will cancel out your feeling of isolation, and you will find yourself receptive to the Experience of the Love embodied in those beneficent thoughts, and you will realize just how much value there is in your extending to your Brothers and Sisters only beneficent thoughts.

The ones from whom those beneficent thoughts come.

And let me be very clear right now. He doesn’t have any unholy children so it isn’t a classification that maybe you’re in and maybe you’re not. The reason it says this is that:

Whether you say the prayer or not, it’s a Law. It’s the way it works. And so you can reverse it and say, “As I know myself, I know my brother.” That’s just the way it is. So how do you know yourself at the moment? A bastard, a prick, a bitch? A difficult person, a cranky person, someone in her period? Whatever way you know yourself, you have no capacity to see anyone else differently. And the way you are knowing yourself is what constitutes the messengers you send out into your world to look for confirmation.

Now if the messengers are coming from the ego, they are as dishonest as the ego. And so they will always lie when they return and confirm to you what they were sent out to find. They haven’t the capacity to return true messages to you. And that’s important to understand.

Again, you must understand that when you send liars out, they will come back with lies and confirm to you your belief about yourself, and therefore your belief will end up coloring everyone in your experience with lies. So you can’t escape what you have set into motion.

Take a look at that honestly, because in looking at it honestly, it will allow you to make a new choice as to what messengers you’re willing to send out. And if the messengers, coming from your ego structures, from your mutually-agreed-upon definitions and your misperceptions of Truth, cannot but report to you that which confirms your sad state of being, then you, understanding that, will choose to go to a different source to learn what messages to send out, what messengers to send out.

You will learn that if you want to escape suffering, and if you wish to escape the confirmation of the need for suffering, you must find that Place of Excellence in You so that you might be informed by It about yourself, and in that informing, have new messengers to send out which will then confirm to you your Holiness when they return, by confirming to you your Brother’s and your Sister’s Holiness to you.

That’s called making one. That’s called becoming undivided. That’s called becoming unfragmented. That’s called becoming singular in intent. And what is singular in intent is singular in result. It’s a Law. It’s absolutely dependable. And equally dependable is that fragmented messengers sent out will come back with fragmented confirmation of your sad state of existence, even though it will be a lie.

Next heading.

And become glad!

… because there are no private thoughts …

The messengers you send out from the Place of Excellence in You are Messengers of God. They go out with God’s Message of His Joy and His Love. And they confirm His Presence in every one and every thing they meet. And they return to you, not with threats of war, but with an olive branch in its beak.

Continuing …

Okay. “Only the healed mind,” that means only the mind which by your conscious choice has become singular in intent, even if it’s only for the space of ten minutes, or five minutes, or two.

Again, it’s just the way it works.

Which is what we’ve just been talking about.

By the sending out of the Messengers of Love.

… the messengers come back confirming the Truth …

Let’s not turn that page too fast. Let’s not skip over something important here.

If you can accept the concept. It’s really the Truth but it’s easier for you to think of it as a concept at the moment. If you can accept the concept that the world is one of ideas. Is one of ideas. It’s not a world of matter. It’s a world constituted of God’s Ideas, Pure Spirit.

Ideas which embody the Intent of their Source, that being God, and the Intent of their Source, being God, is to embody and express God perfectly. His Nature. His Character. His Intent. His Singularity, and therefore the impossibility of His Expression being conflicted. Therefore demonstrating the fact that every Idea Of God is a Joyful Idea, a Joyful Idea the Substance of which is the Spirit of God.

And once again, we’re talking about the petal on the rose, [tapping] the glass on the table top, your fingernail. It’s an Idea. And it’s not an idea an ego made-up. Your ego may have made-up a secondary definition about a Primal, Original, Eternal Idea Of God. But That About Which it created a definition is Real and It is Spirit. And It embodies God and His Singularity, and therefore it is the Embodiment of Joy in the act of giving Its Joy away to be experienced by all universally. Now that’s the fact.

And that’s the fact about an appendix that’s about ready to burst. And that’s the fact about a part of the body that seems to be cancerous. And that’s the fact about a digestive tract that doesn’t seem to be functioning properly.

But you’re not going to be able to see it and experience it until you’re willing to become a healer who knows, first of all, that it’s necessary for him or her to abandon the inclination to react to the appearance, or to the symptoms, or to the definitions, that seem to be embodied and to choose for your Peace so that your mind might become single. And so that in that Peace you might access the Place of Excellence in You in which God’s Perspective is available to you so that you might sent out new messengers that are unconflicted which will return to you confirming Purity, Integrity, Healing.

Now you may turn the page.

Mind you, this statement is absolute, whether we’re talking about Thoughts conveyed to you by God or thoughts created by your separated, defensive little ego. They increase by being given away. The more you believe, the more who believe in them, the stronger they become.

So the first step is to become single-minded so that the thoughts that increase by being given away are Thoughts expressing and embodying the Singularity and the Integrity and the Loving Purpose that is the Movement of God’s Mind.

Continuing …

Now listen to this, and don’t forget it.

I’ve said before that the Holy Spirit is your Divinity held in trust while you dally with the ego.

Now let’s be very clear on something here, because your ego is likely to take hold of this and say, “Ah! It’s me! It’s me when I’m being right. You don’t have to reach beyond yourself because it’s your own right mind.”

Well, let’s be very clear. As long as you are identifying as an ego, as long as you are committed to the mutually-agreed-upon definitions that you and other egos have come to, you are operating according to an entirely different set of rules than the Holy Spirit, which is your Right Mind, is working by. There is no compatibility between the two.

And so you will not be able to say, “Oh, I’m just going to have a clearer and clearer experience of myself. We’re gonna start with who I think I am right now and this self that I think I am is going to become clearer and clearer and clearer. So, I will have more faith in the excellence of this self I think I am because, well, after all Raj has said, ‘There’s a Place of Excellence in You.’” No. I didn’t say there was a Place of Excellence in your ego. I didn’t say there was a Place of Excellence in this one you think you are. I said there was a Place of Excellence in You that is not the one you think you are.

And so you are going to have to still reach beyond your present sense of things and your present sense of yourself as though you are reaching out to something entirely different from you. If you do not reach out to something beyond your present sense of yourself, there will be no yielding. There will be no relinquishment of any sense of personal authority. There will be no place where you will say, “Thy Will be done,” that means something other than your personal will being done.

Now the simple fact is that when you reach out to the Holy Spirit, your Real Mind, the Holy Spirit will respond, but it will respond according to God’s Laws. It will respond, you might say, according to the Infrastructure Of What God Is, where[as] your ego is always responding to the infrastructure of the mutually-agreed-upon definitions.

This is very important. As you reach out to the Holy Spirit, which is the way you become One, which is the way you make one out of that which seemed to be split, as you do this you become informed about being from a new level, you might say, with new rules. The first of which is you are not in charge, but something is. And you won’t find out what that something is until you relinquish the authority you think you have and embody enough trust in what you don’t yet know consciously that it might begin to reveal itself to you.

And as this revealing of the new order of things begins to dawn in your mind and you begin to become familiar with It, instead of the stranger to It that you are, then you find yourself having a continuing and growing capacity to yield into It with even more commitment. And as this happens, you will begin to recognize your Self in your Right Mind in the Experiences of Singularity that you’re having. And as this is yielded into further and further, you bring into pay less and less commitment to the definition you have given yourself. And with joy and confidence, you will express less and less faith in how the ego had determined everything worked. And so this sense of yourself that you had been maintaining will begin to shrivel for lack of investment of confidence and commitment. It will begin to fade and give up the ghost. You see? This is the way it works.

Again …

And I’m going to add: although it is much more and completely different in nature and character and function than what you’re calling your mind at the moment.

Healing.

Now, as we continue through the book, and as you read the book on your own, no matter where you are when you read the words “Holy Spirit,” remember this:

Continuing …

Which I’ve already explained.

Now the fact is that this Comforter came into existence the moment you decided to imagine that you could have an independent thought, because you couldn’t get rid of your Right Mind, even if you were using it stupidly. And so, It simply became unavailable to you because you chose to ignore It, but stayed present as your Divinity held in trust while you chose to ignore It.

Continuing …

Now, that confusion should be over because I’ve made it very clear.

You see? Everything you learn about your Real Mind, about your Real Self, is something you learn about every other individual who exists. And if you don’t know that, you don’t yet Know the Truth About Yourself. Waking up does not happen exclusively. It is impossible for it to be an experience of specialness.

Continuing, repeating …

… k-n-o-w …

Or best, allows it to come. In fact, allowing it to come is really the only way it comes. When you have ceased to express private, assertive authority of your own, you allow it to come because you’re not blocking it with an imaginative sense of your having a will of your own.

Continuing …

In other words, beyond your mutually-agreed-upon definitions.

In other words, the minute you went off on an imaginative path that was impossible to go on, there was at that very moment the means of retracing the path established. Why? Because, as we’ve said in the last few weeks, you had to use your Christ Mind, you had to use your basic [laugh] Divine Capacity to imagine an illusion, and then attempt to imagine that you could make the illusion real. And since you are using your God-given Capacity, your Christ Mind, if I may put it that way, to behave as though you’re not the Christ and believe your behavior, the fact that you’re doing it with your Christhood constitutes the ever-present Capacity to return to your Right Mind, to a realization that indeed You Are The Christ and never stopped. You see?

You couldn’t get outside of your Divinity to have an experience of quote “the human condition” unquote. And so the means of coming back into your Right Mind has been present with you every step of the way as you attempted to get further and further away from It. Your movement away created the path back, because you never could stop Being What You Divinely Are. It’s that simple.

So, the Holy Spirit …

Is the simplicity of this becoming clearer and clearer? It’s referred to as a journey without distance. Is the distancelessness of it becoming clearer to you? And the fact that you have never become enervated? The Divine Energy Of You As The Christ has never been drained from you, and therefore you’re not in a weakened state at this moment. You’re just really excellent actors behaving as though the Energy Of Spirit, your Divine Energy, has vacated the premises of you. And you’re tired, and you’re exhausted, and you don’t have in you what it takes to re-embrace your Divinity, and therefore, it’s gonna be a struggle. A struggle that is going to deserve for you all the gold stars in the heavens when you finally make it back to God. You are not enervated. And the Energy Of Spirit, the Divine Energy Of Your Being is in full use right now, but you’re using it to cover up the Truth About You to yourself. All the Energy it takes, all the Divine Capacity it takes to reawaken, to come back into your Right Mind, is actively in use right now. It just needs to be put to a different use. And what’s the different use? It’s embodied in the words, “Not my will, but Thine, be done.”

Continuing. The next section …

Your Right Mind is the capital “M” Mind of the Atonement. In other words, the very Mind which is behaving as though it’s not Divine is Itself the means of coming back Home by choosing to abandon its use of Itself to create a mask of ignorance of the Truth.

Again …

Why is the last step taken by God? Because it’s the place where you relinquish the belief that you can take a step by yourself at all. It’s the place where the sense of you says, “Uncle,” and gives up the ghost. It’s the place where you return to normal by not asserting any so-called authority that you privately have. You see? It’s the place where you abandon any act of self-defense, self-preservation.

God takes the last step because you’ve arrived at a point where you allow for the fact that God’s the only One Who’s been taking any steps, where God is the only Author of Creation, is the only Movement of Being, including the Movement Of Being That You Are.

Continuing …

… your right Mind …

If it’s incapable of attack, it’s defenseless. If it’s defenseless, there’s no block to communion with it. There’s nothing standing between it and anything else.

Where? In your experience. Real qualitative differences. Like fearlessness where fear used to prevail. Like the equivalent of confidence where you had in the past always felt inadequate. Qualitative differences in your inner experience of being present.

Continuing …

And this is the next point.

When singleness of mind has been accomplished because you have come to a point of complete abandonment of any right you thought you had to having thoughts of your own which you initiated and made-up, then healing has been accomplished. And it’s no longer necessary to consciously choose for Singularity, for Singleness of Mind.

And when that point comes and you have yielded, you find that what you yielded into is the Movement of Creation, your Conscious Union with God in which What Everything Is and What Everything Means is utterly clear to you, together with the fact that you become unequivocally conscious of the fact that your Real Function is to be in constant Acknowledgement, constant Conscious Awareness of the Divine Meaning Of Everything As The Movement Of Being Moves, so that you find yourself recognizing God In Everything, and in that recognition glorifying God In Everything. And because you are making that Gift Of Recognition, you are infilled by God with the Conscious Experience and Joy of the Experience Of Your True Identity.

Continuing …

I’ve mentioned before that your Divinity is constantly pressuring against the walls you have built against your Conscious Experience of It. It’s constantly nudging, constantly insinuating a larger picture into your awareness. And you call it, when you don’t block it, inspiration, inventiveness, creativity.

Again …

Abandoning it.

So you see we’re still talking about rehabilitation: the uncovering of capacities that already exist which seem to have been lost through lack of use.

Continuing …

Which doesn’t mean you’re gonna run out of time for this to be done. But as long as you are insisting on looking at Eternity through a lens called time, this will be kept alive in you until you’re willing to re-embrace it.

You see? The miracle itself is just this. Nothing more, and not the giant thing you thought. It’s just this: the fusion or union of will between Father and Son.

Now, again …

… your real Mind.

Again …

Again …

That they both began at the same time is a statement of the Divine Integrity of your Being that was never lost.

Well now, if God is asking you to listen to what is at the bottom line your Real Mind, it’s an invitation to utterly simple Sanity, isn’t it? Nothing complicated. It’s like, “Pay attention to yourselves, guys.” That’s all. That’s all waking up is about. Stop paying attention to your imaginations. Pay attention to your Self.

Continuing …

Why? Because It Is You! It couldn’t be more in you than to Be You Yourself.

And I will add: where you are right now, but you’re unconscious of it because you’re having so damn much fun thinking for yourselves, and suffering from your thinking. And taking the challenge of overcoming the suffering that you’re experiencing from your thinking, instead of saying, “There must be another way to look at this, even if it requires me to completely abandon everything I have built confidences in. I’m willing to look again because I don’t really have the intent to be insane. That’s not really what I want to be doing. I didn’t know that that’s what I was doing.”

And I’ll tell you as long as you didn’t know that’s what you were doing, you had no recourse. But now it’s becoming clearer that there is another way to look at this, and there is another choice to be made. And it’s the choice for Healing or Wholeness. It’s the choice for Integration. It’s the choice for Unity.

But in order for Unity to be experienced, you’re going to have to be willing to be present with everything without insisting upon determining for yourself what it all is. That’s all. And what that means is that you’re called upon to be present with All That Is with curiosity and the willingness to discover what you never knew about It before. So that in the breaking down of the act of isolation, you might find yourself beginning to realize that you did know what It was before. You see? And remember Who You Are, and remember What It All Is so that the Experience of It All will be Joy. You see?

Are you enjoying A Course In Miracles?

I know that everyone thinks from time to time, “What in the heck does this have to do with my life. This is such irrelevant bullshit, because it has nothing to do with what’s going on, and seems to give me no leverage in the world I’m living in.”

Well, A Course In Miracles came forth from the Holy Spirit. It expresses a different set of rules. A set of rules different from the rules that you have all developed in the process of forming your mutually-agreed-upon definitions, and in that sense it doesn’t compute.

But you know what? As long as the only words you had to think with were words that were defined by a false sense of who you were, you didn’t have any other option. And so I ask you to please forbear the difficulty you’re experiencing and hang in here because what the Course is doing is giving you a new way to use the words you’ve been using that don’t lock you into the mutually-agreed-upon definitions, but inspire in you a capacity to become curious and to explore the unknown. Because there’s a payoff for you, but mostly because it’s wrong for you to feel trapped in the status quo when you’re the Sons and Daughters of God. And you need to feel the right to reach for something you’re not conscious of at the moment. You need to be inspired to explore and to let new things happen so that you break the habit of rigidity.

So, you’re aware that since we began reading, I have been making things relevant to quote “the human condition.” Maybe not when you want it, and maybe not about what you want it to be about, but a groundwork is being laid for you to have new words to use in new contexts, so that your involuntary entrapment to your old meanings for those words lose their hold on you. These words are not here to put you in a new context of words to be trapped by, but to inspire you to be willing to look with great abandonment of self-protection and control, so that the walls of your prison that you built become weaker and weaker and weaker until they crumble, and the view becomes available to you of How Things Really Are.

So be patient. You don’t know what A Course In Miracles needs to do for you, or how it should bring about the changes that need to be made. So try not to quibble too much when you can’t find the relevance, remembering that what your ego calls relevance is that which conforms to its rules.

Okay.

I love you very much, and I look forward to being with you next Sunday.

Okay.