Teachings of Christ Mind

Good afternoon. And again, welcome to everyone who is joining us on the internet.

I will continue reading from the transcript as it was completed by Bill Thetford. And so those of you who are reading either the first or second editions, you will have to bear with the fact that there are differences. And you might feel like you’ve lost your place, but I suggest that when you’ve lost your place keep your finger there and at some point it will pick up again.

A Course In Miracles … a course. Well, all of you know what a course is. You’ve taken courses in college. You’ve taken courses at weekend workshops. And if you’re not careful, you’re likely to approach A Course In Miracles in the same way you’ve been taught to approach other courses, and that is as a means of gathering new information which will help you to more skillfully deal with life, without ever calling into question the student who’s taking the Course, without ever calling into question the mind that is studying the Course. And if you don’t make that distinction, if you don’t know that there is that distinction, then you will not catch the real meaning of the Course and you will end up being an ego practicing the principles of the Course so as to be better in control in your life, and so as to be more safe because this wonderful Course In Miracles has presented you with a new defense.

Sometimes the misunderstanding of what the Course is about, meaning that which calls the mind that is studying the Course into question, causes one’s behavior as quote “a student of the Course” unquote to become most unkind, thoughtless. Throwing out statements from the Course that don’t really address anything at all except the security and defense system of the one throwing out the words. And the end result is hurt rather than healing. Someone behaves badly. The one towards whom the bad behavior has been expressed says, “Ouch! I don’t like the way you’re behaving. It hurts.” And the one behaving badly says, “Well, it’s all in your perception.” Wow, what an unkindness. Not only that, if the person to whom that statement has [been] made is halfway intellectual, he or she is likely say, “Hmmm. Maybe you’re right.” And then they go off on a tangent of trying to improve their perception so that bad or hurtful behavior doesn’t hurt them. Awful.

An ego practicing the principles of the Course is no more useful than an ego practicing any other system of thought, or an ego practicing any other principles.

We are in Chapter 5 and as most of you are aware, you haven’t really been given any useful tools for being a more skillful ego in the world. And you can end up thinking that the Course really isn’t useful. But as we’ve been going through it I have been pointing out to you over and over and over again as the Course has been pointing it out over and over again that until you Know Who You Are, until you Know How Things Work, you can’t understand what you’re reading about. And until you understand that the Course is from the get-go calling your ego into question and not addressing your ego at all, but addressing that Place of Excellence in You which is your Divinity, until you recognize that, you are not going to be in any position to be an agent for change in the world. You are not going to be in any position to be a healer. You are not going to be in any position to be what the Course calls a co-creator with God.

As the Course says the Place of Excellence in You is called the Altar. The Place, you could say, where the Flame of Truth is lit and burning, illuminating everything for you. But if your back is turned to the Altar you seem to be able to be free to give new definitions that are not the Truth to everything. And so before A Course In Miracles can even begin to make sense to you, you have to recognize the necessity of not reinforcing your ego any further.

You must recognize that the Course is not addressing your ego. It is not there to improve your ego nor its skill at anything. The Course is here to help turn your attention to a different resource that’s right in the middle of you. This Place of Excellence. This Place where you can connect with the direct Experience of Truth. This Place where there is forever flowing forth God’s Perspective.

These two apparent resources that you have available to you are called the Voice for Truth and the voice for fear. The Course is not directed at those who are listening to the voice for fear, those who are defining themselves according to the voice for fear. It is addressing the Divinity of every single one of you which is present right in the middle of each one of you at this moment, and is not a state to be achieved, grown into, but one which you must care enough to become quiet enough to sense in the withinness of you so that you might begin to consciously use it as your prime resource.

The Voice for Truth is also the Holy Spirit. And again, I want to remind you that last week we read, “The Holy Spirit is nothing more than your own right mind.” The Holy Spirit is your Divinity held in trust while you dally with the ego, while you play around at being an independent thinker and definer of things, a pseudo-authoritative presence that can never become actualized.

The last sentence of the last section reads, or the last two sentences:

Which simply means it calls you back into your Right Mind, into your True Experience of your Self where you’re not blocking It by insisting upon expressing authority that God never gave you and that you can never really have. It’s you becoming Sane again. It’s you not having a mind divided where there seems to be the occasion for choice.

This section is called:

And I’m reading …

… meaning the Holy Spirit …

Now it is not only possible, it is absolutely necessary even in this world to hear only that Voice and no other.

Now, as the ego reads the Course, it’s looking for ways to control and manipulate the world better to its benefit. And because that is its habit, it can’t make sense out of what I just read, because what I’ve just read says that what you need to attend to first is becoming single-minded; unconflicted within yourself. Well, how can that solve your problem at work? How can that solve your problem with your family? How can that solve the financial disaster that you’re in the middle of? Well, that isn’t what needs to be attended to first. What needs to be attended to first is for you to get in your Right Mind so you can perceive What Is True about what is going on and what is not true, and in that clarity make better choices and correct what needs to be corrected.

Continuing …

Now another way of saying that is the Voice of your True Mind is the call to reintegration, the reintegration of you.

The mind? Your mind.

Well, of course. If the Holy Spirit is your Divinity, then when you have stopped denying It and you have stopped making a choice for something imaginary, It’s going to remain with you, isn’t it? Your Self is going to remain with you except that now you will Know Who You Are. And you will know that you have no authority of the sort you thought you had as an ego. And you will know that it is your Joy not to express independent, authoritative presence, but to glorify God by reflecting Him in every act and thought and meaning that you embody.

Continuing …

… your Real Self …

Sanity breaks through into the middle of who you thought you were, redefining you to yourself, re-illuminating Who You’ve Always Been to yourself.

As an ego studying any system of thought, including the Course, you can think that you are learning how to make better choices between what I’m going to call bad options without ever arriving at a point of realizing that there’s a whole other level from which choice can be made. The choice isn’t between good and bad methods of control. The choice is between believing that you can have control and try to exercise it, or yielding all sense of control up and deferring to the Father. Deferring to what comes forth from that Place of Excellence in the middle of You that has been ever-presently waiting for you to turn around and look at It again.

Again …

… what I’ve referred to as Knowing …

And in effect it means you simply stopped paying attention and started ignoring God. And you did it because it seemed to you to be an interesting thing to think independently, to think originally.

Continuing …

To remember and to forget. To remember Who You Are and to forget who you think you are. To remember that your Function is to let All That God Is Being find expression in you by your giving it way, by your sharing it, by your letting your every act and thought and deed glorify something other than you. And to forget this you that you made-up. And to forget to try to protect it. And to forget to use your life to manipulate others to agree with you to whatever degree it takes for you to not be threatened by them.

Continuing …

That’s the work, if you will. That’s what you’re going to perceive as work anyway because you’re going to have to remember not to proceed willy-nilly and thoughtlessly down the paths of old mental habits, and rather, stop and ask of that Place of Excellence in You, “What is appropriate here? What is really going on here? Aside from my best judgments, what is truly needed here? Not that which will protect me, but that which will glorify God. That which will embody God right here. Because I’m told that if I give that precedence in my mind and I find a way to let that be embodied in me, I will find my invulnerability and the fact that I don’t need to be in a constant state of self-protection.”

But you’re going to have to make that choice. You’re going to have to make it over and over and over again because that’s the way you break an old habit. That’s the way change happens.

Continuing …

Choice itself is meaningless. What outside of the Infinite Movement of Creation which it is your Function to experience and acknowledge and recognize Its Source in, could constitute a choice? Can you see that when you made a choice, when you attempted to imagine that you could make a choice, what you had to do, because there’s nothing outside the Infinite Movement of Creation, was to block and limit your Conscious Experience of the Infinite Movement of Creation?

That’s the only thing you could do. That’s the only thing that any act of personal or private creativity you could engage in—blocking the full Experience of Creation. You might say that’s like using drugs and slowly killing off the cells in your brain, and finding that the choice to be limited in your ability to be aware causes a temporary experience of exhilaration caused by the dying of the cells in your brain. You see what I’m saying? Except that in your choice to ignore parts of the Infinite Movement of Creation, nothing died. Your Right-Minded, Real-Minded Capacities blocked off by you from your awareness of It, remains intact and forever available to you, simply awaiting the time when you will tire of the unnatural effort it takes to be in a constant state of Self, with a capital “S”, Self-denial.

So, here you are at a point of having to make a choice between the capital “S” Self You Are and the made-up small “s” self that you can never really be. And you’re going to have to make the choice on purpose, and you’re going to have to make it over and over and over because that’s how you escape an unnatural bondage to ignorance, to being asleep. Not fully awake. Constantly in a dopey, drowsy state that doesn’t absorb the Fullness of Everything in front of you. Continuing.

The difference is the power to choose as you have been using it, not as it’s being spoken of here, the power to choose is the power to create definitions and choose for your definition which has as its function self-protection which is selfish in nature, where[as] the Power To Create is your Capacity to make a Gift, to extend, to glorify God by extending What God Is to your Brothers, your Sisters, your world, your Universe, and everything in it. The Power To Create is your innate power to extend blessing to everything by recognizing God In Everything. You see? It’s unselfish. You might say it’s “otherish” except in extending Truth, in extending Love, in extending the Essence Of What God Is to your Brother, you provide yourself with the experience that your Brother is yourself, that your Brother is not separate from you, that your Brother is not other than you. Because the Function each of You has is the same Function—to glorify God.

Continuing …

You get that?

What that means is that you seem to have created another way. You seem to have created for yourself a capacity to think for yourself, to choose for yourself, to have an intent of your own that originates with you and nothing else. And you believe you have succeeded, and you govern yourselves accordingly. Having created that imaginary capacity to choose, which you could never totally succeed at having created, it made You As That Divine One Whose Function It Is To Glorify God another choice. But when you finally abandon thinking that you have a capacity to choose independent of God, then glorifying God, being the Fullness of the Radiance of What God Is Expressing Himself As right where you are, will be the unchallenged Nature of Being and won’t constitute a choice at all.

Nevertheless, while you seem to have made the choice for doing things your way, and I am continuing here.

You see? The Divine One That You Are never speaks for Itself. It speaks for God. And that’s why it’s absolutely necessary to understand that this is not a Course to give the one you think you are a better means of control, a better way for you to speak for yourself, a higher, loftier motive for speaking for yourself, so that you might one day perhaps change the world with the loftiness of a position you have taken as an independent one. You see? Without ever having remembered Who You Really Are.

The Holy Spirit speaks for God, not for you. Your Real Self speaks for God, not for itself. You see the difference? Until you catch the scent, the flavor of the meaning of what I’ve just said, you can’t possibly be in a position of being an agent for change in the world, or a healing Presence in the world.

Continuing …

It not only speaks in a different way, it speaks with a different intent, and it speaks for a different outcome. It doesn’t speak for an outcome of self-preservation. It speaks for an outcome of the Extension of All That God Is through you.

And you know, I’ll promise you something. The excitement you think you experience being an independent ego making decisions and definitions on its own and trying to succeed in overcoming the hostile world it sees itself living in, the excitement and thrill of that doesn’t begin to match the Joy and the Bliss and the Innocence and the utter Safety that you experience when you’re being utterly congruent with your capital “S” Self and are introducing nothing foreign to it.

Continuing …

… which is nothing more than your right Mind.

And that’s what I’m constantly doing. It’s constantly reminding you of the Truth which you deeply know within your Being because you couldn’t get rid of It even if you buried It where you thought It was out of sight. And I remind you of the Truth, and your Divinity when you turn to It will remind you of the Truth. Not so that the you, you think you are can embrace the Truth and live it better, but so that in the experience of the reminder of what you know from that Place of Excellence in You, you have the opportunity to say, “Wow, maybe I’m going stop making a choice for my best capacity to reason and think and come to conclusions and give definitions and manipulate the world. Maybe, maybe I’m going to abandon that in favor of this experience I’m having within me which is an experience of utter Peace and utter Integrity and utter Safety in which I feel universally grounded and Whole. Maybe I will give that preference and explore the experience more fully.” All of this because you have been reminded of something.

The Voice of the Holy Spirit …

Not because it reminded you with force but because it stayed out of the way and illuminated some part of your Divinity to you so that you might, because it’s part of you and you can tell that it’s part of you, find the inclination to investigate it further.

Continuing …

And I’m adding this: He cannot know it by consciously choosing to ignore it.

You can all not know it by consciously choosing to ignore it, but ignoring something doesn’t make it go away. And so when you consciously choose to ignore What You Are in favor of an imaginary and exciting false picture of who you are, all you have done is, you might say, closed the door so that the Truth About You is out of sight, out of mind. But It’s sitting there. It’s sitting there at this moment accessible to you at this moment, available to you at this moment.

And you know what? You don’t have to study any course in order to get the skill to re-access your Right Mind. All you have to do is let there be a little chink of doubt about the mind that you think you have. All you have to do is be willing to withdraw the trust you have invested in the way you’re seeing things and say, “Father I would like to see the Truth here. I would like to have an experience, a point of view that’s bigger and truer than any point of view I have arrived at.” That’s the way you do it.

You withdraw investment of trust in the way you have decided everything is and invite a new perspective from God. I say “from God” because you want a new perspective that is utterly Truthful and the word “God,” to you, does involve the meaning of Ultimateness. So desire to Know Of That Which Is Ultimate What The Truth Is. And let there be a stronger intent to have the new experience than to reestablish the old one that you have created for yourself.

Again …

Isn’t that amazing?

That means that when you chose to ignore the Truth and make-up truth for yourself, God didn’t give you some other guide, something different from you to be your guide. The Holy Spirit is your own Right Mind. Therefore as you lean into the Holy Spirit for the truer Experience of Being, you’re leaning into, how shall I say it, you’re leaning into something you can trust because it’s your Self. You’re leaning into that which would be the most dependable thing that could be given to you to rely upon—your Divinity. Your Guide isn’t a stranger to you, in other words. What Integrity that embodies that what you must lean into is the Voice for God that is your very own Being. You get it? You get the Integrity of it? You get the stability of it, the dependability of it, the reliableness of it, and the fact that the solution to the human condition is so utterly thoughtful, so utterly Loving, and so full of Integrity?

In other words, you’re leaning into your Divine Integrity in order to have It uncovered to you so that the process is one of constant, fuller confirmation of That Which Is Valuable About You. You can feel the Unity of it, the Oneness of the process of coming Home, and why it ultimately is, I’m going to say, maximally powerful.

Again …

That is your measuring stick. If what you’re hearing isn’t speaking for God, it’s not the Holy Spirit. If what you’re listening to is speaking for you so that you might be exercising better control with loftier motives in the world, you may know that you are listening to that which is going to bind you to longer dreams and more sleep.

The Holy Spirit … Reading again.

Now listen to this.

Now, again you see we’re not talking about how to fix your financial picture or your horrible relationship. We’re not talking about what she’s doing, or what he’s doing, or what they’re not doing. We’re talking about what is essential before you can even address the healing of anything. And what is essential before you can truly address the healing of anything is for you to choose for the Voice that will confirm healing, rather than conflict and disease.

So don’t try to rush ahead. Don’t try to skip over this.

Reading …

Well, don’t fuss around and mince around about whether or not you should be being decisive because after all the only thing that can be decisive is the ego. Bullshit! Make a decision. Make a choice between the voices.

… my choice …

I cannot make it for you. No one else can make it for you. You made the choice for moving into the realm of imagination and then trying to believe that what you were imagining was truly real, and you must unmake that choice by making the only other choice that’s available to you which is to abandon your imagined right to have ideas and thoughts of your own independent of God. And turn around from that and say, “Father, Thy Will be done. Father, I wish to glorify You because I have decided that I want the effect of my presence to be an Expression Of What Is Truly, Divinely, Eternally Real. I want the effect of my presence to embody and illuminate what is Ultimate, not partial.” But you’ve got to want it. No way you can do this on lip service. You’ve got to want it. You’ve got to decide for it.

Continuing …

You see? “Oh! I want to glorify God!” Hmmm. Well, to what? To whom? Glorify how? Are you just going to go out in the black corner of the universe and glorify God, or go to a desert island and glorify God there on the little, you know, one mile square perimeter that you have of land to stand on? No. Glorifying God is involvement with your Brothers and Sisters. It’s involvement with every aspect of Creation. It’s extension, not out into the void, but extension to a Brother or a Sister, to something, to an object of your affection. It’s involvement, as we’ve spoken before.

Key words there.

Ahh. The Mind that will make the decision for you is the Holy Spirit. That Place of Excellence in You which when remembering that It Is What Is Real, chooses from what I’m going to call that Level of Clarity, rather than the imaginary sense of self that is nothing but unclarity. It makes the decision. The ego you think you are does not make this decision to wake up. Let’s be very clear on that. The decision to wake up is impulsed by You from that Place of Excellence in You, and it’s not a calculated decision, calculated to have a particular effect. It’s a decision to be unconflicted within yourself any more. That’s what it is.

Again …

This states in a different way what I told you last week. The Holy Spirit, your own Real Self, your own Real Mind, operates according to different Laws than your ego sense of self does. It operates according to God’s Laws, where your ego responds according to the laws set up by the mutually-agreed-upon definitions that all of you have made-up together. They serve two different purposes. One is a service of self-protection, and the other is a Service of Extension.

Therefore, as you begin to reach out to the Holy Spirit, even though you now know that it’s your own Real Mind, it is at the beginning going to be exactly like reaching out to something different than you, something that will require you to yield up your self-trust in favor of. Again, it’s just another way of saying that waking up is not a matter of ego self-improvement; it’s a matter of abandoning the ego and making a choice for That Of You Which Is Real and Sane. It’s really a matter of being willing to forget insanity.

Again …

Oh, you cannot imagine the Joy of the Peace and the Effortlessness of Being Infinitely as compared to the effort and strain it has taken you to experience things finitely. Trust me on this.

So, if you ever wondered what you were here for, now you know. You’re here to wake up from the repetitive process of falling asleep and having dreams called incarnations. You’re here to wake up from falling prey to the distraction of looking at the Kingdom of Heaven through the lens of mutually-agreed-upon definitions. That’s what you’re here for. So that you don’t have these endlessly repetitious experiences of Reality through the distorting lens of false perception.

When you wake up, you’re not going to go anywhere. You’re just going to see here with fresh eyes in which everything you see is some Aspect of God embodying His Purity, His Beauty, His Loveliness, and His Indivisibleness. Universal Indivisibility while at the same time being Infinitely Expressed.

Continuing …

And I’m going to say, “and in which it has forever continued to be even though no one is noticing it because they are distracted by the thrill of independence.”

Continuing …

You see, you keep looking for something in the Course to miraculously change your life in the world. But that won’t happen until something else happens first, and it’s called joining. It’s called abandoning your independent stance. And you know what? It’s not possible to join with egos. It’s not possible. The only thing it’s possible to join with is something that’s Real. And that which is Real Is Divine.

Continuing …

It doesn’t matter whether I was saying this to Helen and Bill or not. If you are experiencing Me in your mind, it is because you have grown vaguely aware of the fact that there is another way or another Voice.

This is very important.

You see?

Not for you! Not for you. The Holy Spirit’s Will is for God. God’s Will is for You. You already are God’s Will In Expression. You are the Presence Of God Embodied. And there’s nothing more nor less than the Infiniteness Of God constituting the Presence That You Are.

Again …

… Brother and Sister. I’m inserting that.

It’s a whole shift of Being for you. A shift from getting to giving. A shift from self-protection to Loving your Brother enough to be benign in his experience, and therefore be a demonstration of the fact that fear is not called for, and thereby be an inspiration to him to dare to have the confidence to set aside his conviction that self-protection is essential.

Everyone is indeed becoming clearer. I may not be providing opportunity very frequently for dialog, for interaction, but our Communion, Mine with each of You, is very definite and is going on whether you are able to interact on Sunday afternoons. And your increasing Clarity is nurtured, you might say, fertilized and protected by Me and by your Guides.

And you want to know something? Your own Real Self, the Holy Spirit, is experiencing Joy as all of this becomes clearer to you. And you’re going to begin to experience it as Joy felt for no good reason. And I want you to know that when you have that experience of feeling Joy for no apparent reason, that this is a True Experience Of Your Real Mind. And in your recognizing that when it happens, it will constitute a further act of Integration and Unification.

Now, I do not mean to imply by anything I’ve said today that there is not going to be healing in your world. I am not saying that you should not expect a reversal of financial disaster, or that you should not feel it is important to be healed of a disease. All I’m saying today is that before you tackle healing a disease, before you tackle the correction of a financial disaster, that you make sure that you’ve done everything you can not to rely upon your ego to do it. And that the means for avoiding investing further energy into your ego is to ask of the Holy Spirit or to ask of the Father, “What is the Truth here?” The Call, the necessity is for abandoning the isolation and joining with the Father, or the Holy Spirit that speaks for the Father, so that the healing or the reversal of misfortune cannot ever be attributed to the expression of will on your part. Every single time you think that your expression of will has accomplished something, it has strengthened your faith in the utilization of will power, which has caused your back to be turned more solidly toward the Altar.

The Course is not about improving the ego or its skills. It’s really about the Divine You coming out of the closet. And you know what? There’s no way for you to be “out-ed.” No one else can “out” you unfortunately, or fortunately. So, you can feel comforted if you want to that nobody can demonstrate to anybody else your Divinity, or your Capacity to Experience perfect Health, perfect Harmony, all the Abundance you might ever want. No one will ever expose your Capacity to be Meaningful. Don’t worry. It won’t happen until you make the decision to make commitment to the Voice for Truth that is the Holy Spirit which is your own Real Mind.

I love you all. And I look forward to being with you next week.