Table of Contents
Good afternoon. And welcome to everyone who is joining us on the internet.
As we finish up the section we’ve been on, I want to remind everyone that the Holy Spirit is nothing more than your Right Mind. The Holy Spirit is nothing more than your Real Mind.
And so it begins:
The Holy Spirit must work through opposites because He must work with and for a mind that IS in opposition.1
In other words, your Divinity, which is being held in trust while you dally with the ego, has to deal with this dallying part of your mind which is necessarily conflicted and oppositional. It is not only oppositional within itself, but it stands in opposition to your having the Conscious Experience of your Divinity, of your Right Mind, of your Real Mind.
Correct and learn, and be open to learning. You have NOT made truth, but truth can still set you free. Look as the Holy Spirit looks and understand as He understands.
You see how important it is to be aware that the Holy Spirit is nothing more than your Right Mind, because looking as the Holy Spirit looks and understanding He understands is really You letting yourself back into your Right Mind. And that’s why whole-izing and healing can occur.
His understanding looks back to God in remembrance of me. He …
… the Holy Spirit …
… is in Holy Communion always, and He is part of YOU.
In actuality, He’s all of you. But as long as you have yourself separated off, then your Real Mind and your ego sense of things seem to be two parts of you. Even though at the moment you’re only letting one part register with you—the ego.
He… the Holy Spirit … is your Guide …
… your right Mind is your Guide to salvation …
… because He …
… It …
… holds the remembrance of things past and to come. He holds this gladness gently in your minds, asking only that you INCREASE it in His name by sharing it to increase His joy in YOU.
And this doesn’t mean to increase His joy about you. It isn’t so that the Holy Spirit can be joyful about you. It is so that His joy will be experienced by you as your joy because you are nothing more than the Holy Spirit which is nothing more than your Right Mind.
The next section is entitled:
Therapy and Teaching
And these are the correct words for this section heading.
Therapy and Teaching
As we read this, you’ll find that it’s apparent that I was addressing Helen and Bill, but you know, at the bottom line we’re all therapists and teachers. You’re always teaching something. And you’re always therapizing upon each other. And so this applies to all of you as well; has transfer value, you might say.
Therapy. Hmmm. Therapy when you’re not joined with the Holy Spirit is your ego busy nudging and coercing your Brothers and Sisters into either new mutually-agreed-upon definitions that you have come up with, or to keep them in line with already established mutually-agreed-upon definitions. And this goes on all day long every day. What you choose to be silent about becomes part of the teaching. By virtue of your silence, it teaches others the appropriateness of being silent, whether it’s actually necessary to speak up or not.
And what you choose to talk about and the way you choose to talk about it, teaches your Brothers and Sisters how to likewise speak and feel. And this is the way you reinforce your ignorance. And this is the way you contribute to everyone else never having an “Ah ha!” experience that moves them outside the box.
Now, one other aspect of this section that I want you to keep in mind is that the way I am talking to Helen and Bill is the way I work with each one of you when you’re open to me. And it’s the way in which the Holy Spirit, your Divinity works with you as you are willing to release your frantic grasp on your ego sense of things.
So there is an example here of what you can appropriately expect from listening for my Guidance or listening to the Guidance you get from the Holy Spirit. And it also sets an example for your behavior, let’s say, your appropriate behavior, your healing behavior with your Brothers and Sisters. So this section, which for the most part doesn’t appear in the first or second editions, is very important.
Continuing …
You must have noticed how often I have used your own ideas to help you.
Well, it’s the same with you. You will find Me, you will find the Holy Spirit using your own ideas. Why? Because it’s easy for you to grasp what you’re already familiar with. It allows you to be in communion with Me or the Holy Spirit without feeling like you are engaging with a foreigner. And also because many of the ideas you already have are true; it’s just that you don’t know how true they are. And so, I have the opportunity to express to you your own ideas so that you have an “Ah ha!” about those ideas, so that you see them in a new light. It’s a kind and loving thing to do because it helps you know from the outset that you’re not all bad, you’re not all goofed up, that you’re not a total mess. And your ignorance of Truth isn’t total.
Again, I want you to think about that in light of your involvements with your Brothers and Sisters. You don’t want to come on with a brand-new metaphysical or spiritual language, or a whole new set of concepts, that blow their mind because they don’t relate in any way to the concepts and ideas that they’re already familiar with. You want to care enough to illuminate the Truth that is already there in your Brother’s and Sister’s mind, even if it’s in a different language than the Course or a spiritual theory. You see?
I continued …
You have learned to be a loving, wise and very understanding therapist EXCEPT FOR YOURSELF. That exception has given you more than perception for others because of what you saw in THEM, but LESS than knowledge of your real relationships TO them because you did not accept them as PART of you.
Understand that perception is, or amounts to, the definition you have given to everything in the Kingdom of Heaven, including yourself, that has not been drawn from God but from your imagination.
By learning to be a loving, wise, and very understanding therapist, even though you were excluding yourself in the process, it has given you more than just perception, more than just ego perception for others because of what you saw in them, but less than Knowledge, less than what would come out of your mouth if you were connected with Me or with the Holy Spirit and were experiencing Knowing.
Continuing …
Understanding IS beyond perception because it introduces meaning.
In other words, it’s not just a concept. You feel it. That’s what it means when the word “Meaning” is used. When you are experiencing Meaning, you are feeling the Truth Of A Thing.
It …
… understanding …
… is, however, below knowledge…
… or Knowing …
… even though it can grow TOWARDS it. It is possible, with great effort, to understand someone else to some extent and to be quite helpful to …
… them …
… and to be quite helpful to him, but the effort is misdirected. The misdirection is quite apparent; it is directed away from YOU.
You see, it’s still me and them.
Knowing, the Experience of Knowing the Truth makes it utterly obvious to you that the Truth you’re Knowing is not only True of them, it’s True of you. Or the Truth that you find yourself Knowing, revealed to you, is not only True about you, it’s True about them and there’s no way to maintain a sense of separateness.
This does not mean that it is LOST to you, but it DOES mean that you are not aware of it.
Now, listen …
I have saved all your kindnesses and every loving thought you have had.
And I’m going to interject here: even though you’ve extended it to others but not applied it to yourself. Even though you’ve extended it to others, but you have overlooked and ignored the fact that you were being the Presence of Love, and that it was yourself you were embracing your Brother with, thereby demonstrating or embodying the Oneness of you both.
You see, as a therapist the tendency is to see it as one-half of a partnership; therapist and patient; helper and helpee. And so, of course, the therapist helps the helpee, but stays aloof, keeps himself or herself separate in his or her mind. Not involved, in other words. Not recognizing the Brotherhood of the two of you. Because, of course, if you get into Brotherhood, that means involvement and that will spoil the therapist-client relationship. Mmm.
So I have purified them. I’ve saved all of your kindnesses.
I have purified them of the errors which hid their light, and have kept them for you in their own perfect radiance. They are beyond destruction and beyond guilt. They came from the Holy Spirit within YOU, and we know what God creates is eternal. What fear …
… and I’m adding this: in you …
… has hidden still is part of you.
So even in your dreams, even in your nightmare, even in your ignorance, because you are the Presence of God you do express Truth and you do embody Love. But as long as you are insisting upon seeing yourself as separate from your Brother, you will keep yourself, you will have kept yourself from recognizing your part in the exchange with your Brother. You will not have let yourself conceive of yourself of having been actually involved. You will see the Truth or the Love that you’ve expressed as an object transferred to them; something which you picked up and gave away. You will miss the fact that the gift was a Gift of Yourself. And you will miss the fact that you and your Brother are One. And you will have missed the involvement. But nevertheless, all of that is held in trust for you to be able to recognize and experience and enjoy, once you abandon, once you abandon your intent to remain separate.
Continuing …
Joining the Atonement, which I have repeatedly asked you to do, is always a way OUT of fear. This does not mean that you can safely fail to acknowledge anything that is true.
In other words, just because you know you have a way out doesn’t mean that it’s safe for you to continue to behave ignorantly. It’s similar to the statement that the Holy Spirit can turn every experience to your advantage, and the idea that because that’s true, it really doesn’t matter whether you do what’s right or wrong, because if you do what’s wrong, the Holy Spirit can turn it to your advantage, you see. And so that line of thought says that it’s really not necessary for you to behave responsibly. It’s not really necessary for you to embody Truth. It’s not really necessary for you to declare that you have a position. It’s all right to be wishy-washy, as I was saying yesterday. That’s what it suggests. But it’s not.
Continuing …
However, the Holy Spirit will not fail to help you reinterpret everything that you perceive as fearful, and teach you that ONLY what is loving IS true. Truth …
… the unyielding, as I spoke of it yesterday; the immovable …
… is beyond your ability to destroy, but entirely within your grasp. It belongs to you because you created it. It is yours because it is a part of you, just as you are part of God because He created YOU.
[Editor’s Note: Raj said, “It is yours because it is part of you” instead of “It is yours because it is a part of you.”]
Truth is forever with you. You, as an ego, did not create it. But You, not standing separate from God, letting the Mind Of God be in you, are the creator of Truth because God Is Truth Being and you are not separate from that Movement of Being. That’s the Ultimate Truth.
Continuing …
The Atonement is the GUARANTEE of the safety of the Kingdom. Nothing good is lost because it comes from the Holy Spirit, the Voice for creation.
I would like to touch on that. The Holy Spirit is nothing more than your Right Mind. And I said here that the Holy Spirit is the Voice for Creation. That’s your Function. Your Function is to be that which gives Voice to Creation. And you give Voice to Creation by recognizing and acknowledging God in it. You see? And not acknowledging and giving voice to imaginations that you’ve come up with and definitions of things that you’ve preferred to What Everything Really Is.
Again …
Nothing good is lost because it comes from the Holy Spirit, the Voice for creation. Nothing that is NOT good was ever created, and therefore CANNOT be protected.
Now, conversely …
What the ego makes it KEEPS TO ITSELF, and so it is without strength.
As a therapist or when you are therapizing on each other, you are holding yourself separate from your Brother, being the beneficent giver of things that ought to be believed. And so, the one essential thing for healing is never given—the Essence of You—and your acknowledgment that you are giving your Brother something, that you are involved with your Brother, not sitting on a sideline proffering ideas that will help him fit into the mutually-agreed-upon definitions better. You see?
So what the ego makes, it keeps to itself, and so what it makes is without strength.
Its unshared existence does not die; it was merely never born. Real birth is not a beginning; it is a CONTINUING.
That’s another way of saying that Real birth is a Movement. It’s another way of saying Being is a Movement. And that’s why I’ve talked about catching the wave and finding the balance point on the Wave of the Movement, because that’s the way you become harmoniously present with Creation.
Because Real birth is a Continuing, or a Movement, you, when you are interested in catching the wave and finding the balance point, will always find yourself to be in a state that your ego calls unstable. You will find that existence, that Being is something you cannot be in control of. In other words, Being is an experience of being forever out of control. Now you understand your reluctance to waking up. Because up to this point, coming from your egos, existence is only about control, and your safety and your life, your very existence depends upon it.
The difference between the two is the difference between the two operating systems that we’ve been talking about.
Continuing …
Everything that can continue has BEEN born, but it can INCREASE as you are willing to return the part of your mind that needs healing to the higher part, and thus render your creating undivided.
So the part of your mind, that you are currently keeping separate from the rest of your Mind which is the Holy Spirit, needs to be willing to return to the rest of your Mind. And as I’ve said before, this is something no one else can cause you to do. The key word here is, “as you are willing,” not willful-ing, but willing to return the part of your mind that needs healing to the higher part, and thus render your creating undivided.
Now, continuing …
As a therapist, you yourself tell your patients that the real difference between neurotic and “healthy” guilt feelings is that neurotic guilt feelings DO NOT HELP ANYONE. This distinction is wise though incomplete. Let us make the distinction a little sharper now. Neurotic guilt feelings are a device of the ego for “atoning” without sharing…
Therefore, and I’m interrupting here, this kind of guilt is something that is processed and experienced entirely within you. And so you, without sharing it with anyone, experience the guilt and come to a conclusion that you’re not going to do this anymore. But you haven’t shared it with anyone. It’s private.
Repeating …
Neurotic guilt feelings are a device of the ego for “atoning” …
… in other words, it’s not really atonement …
… without sharing, and for asking pardon without change.
You see, that’s why you must keep it a secret. Because if you didn’t keep it a secret, you’d have to change.
The ego NEVER calls for REAL Atonement, and cannot tolerate forgiveness, which IS change.
Your concept of “healthy guilt feelings …”
And mind you, this idea of healthy guilt feelings and neurotic guilt feelings isn’t something that only trained psychologists understand. You all understand it perfectly well, too.
Your concept of “healthy guilt feelings” has merit, but without the concept of the Atonement it lacks the healing potential it holds.
The healing potential that Atonement holds.
You made the distinction in terms of feelings which led to a decision not to REPEAT the error, which is only PART of healing.
This is very important.
You made the distinction in terms of feelings which led to a decision not to REPEAT the error, which is only PART of healing. Your concept lacked the idea of UNDOING it.
Mary Baker Eddy recognized the same underlying truth here when she said, “You are not truly healed until the liability to be ill is overcome.”
Healing goes all the way. Guilt must go away completely. The feeling of guilt, the call of guilt, if it is healed is eradicated from your experience.
Continuing …
What you were really advocating, then, was adopting a policy of sharing without a real FOUNDATION.
And this is important too. When there’s a real foundation, when the healing of guilt has occurred because there’s a real foundation, it is cleansed from your mind. And the liability to feel guilty, or indulge in guilt, will not occur again.
Continuing …
I have come to GIVE you the foundation, so your own thoughts can make you REALLY free. You have carried the burden of the ideas you did not share and which were therefore too weak to increase, but you did not recognize how to undo their existence BECAUSE you had made them.
A key point here …
You CANNOT cancel out your past errors alone. They will NOT disappear from your mind without remedy. The remedy is NOT of your making, any more than YOU are.
Listen to this …
The Atonement cannot be understood except as a PURE ACT OF SHARING.
Sharing of what? Of an idea? The sharing of a truth? The sharing of an insight? The sharing of a trigger to awakening? No. A sharing of your Essential Being. A sharing of You with your Brother so that you’re able to say, “I recognize myself in him.” And so that your Brother can say, “I recognize myself in him.” You see? Involvement—actual connection. Not the bouncing back and forth of wonderful ideas that may end up being very valuable. You haven’t given, you haven’t engaged in a pure act of sharing until what’s been shared is you!
Continuing …
That is what is meant when we said it is possible, even in this world, to listen to ONE voice. If you are part of God and the Sonship is one, you CANNOT be limited to the “self” the ego sees. Every loving thought held in ANY part of the Sonship belongs to every part.
And every Son or Daughter in the Sonship belongs to every other Daughter or Son in the Sonship because you are all One, if you’re willing to abandon your privacy finally and recognize yourself in your Brother and recognize your Brother as you.
Again …
Every loving thought held in ANY part of the Sonship belongs to every part. It is shared BECAUSE it is loving. Sharing is God’s way of creating, and also YOURS. Your ego can keep you in exile FROM the Kingdom, but in the Kingdom itself it has no power.
And you know what? As I’ve said over and over, your ego keeps you in exile from the Kingdom of Heaven by causing you to define the Kingdom of Heaven as quote “dirty word, the world” unquote so you look at the Kingdom of Heaven every day. Every day the Kingdom of Heaven confronts you and you don’t see It. Ordinarily you think of exile as a matter of being removed from your homeland but this exile is you exiled right in the middle of your homeland, because there isn’t any place else for you to be removed to.
Continuing …
You have become willing to receive my messages as I give them without interference by the ego, so we can clarify an earlier point. We said that you will one day teach as much as you learn, and that will keep you in balance. The time is now because you have LET it be now. You cannot learn EXCEPT by teaching. I heard one voice because I had learned that learning is attained BY teaching.
And I’m going to add: I learned that I couldn’t be the teacher.
And that’s why I keep telling you that you must have something that is apparently not you to yield to, because unless, until you learn to yield, you’re still going to maintain this false sense of authorship and authority that you fool yourselves with. And there’s no humility in it. And there’s no joining in it. And there’s no defenselessness in it. And so the Holy Spirit, which is nothing more than your Right Mind, is something you have to yield to. And I’m making it very clear to you that until you yield to it, it will seem to be different from you.
Continuing …
I heard one voice because I had learned that learning is attained BY teaching. I understood that I COULD NOT ATONE FOR MYSELF ALONE.
Atonement has to be offered to a Brother by you. And in your willingness under whatever the circumstances are to offer Atonement to your Brother, you receive it. You can’t receive it if the desire and the Love is not present enough for you to want to give it to your Brother even before you have it.
This is not heavy stuff, is it? This is very fundamental, very grounded. You don’t get a spiritual high from the idea. But you will get an ultimate spiritual high from embodying the idea and actually Loving your Brother and Sister.
Continuing …
Listening to one voice means the will to SHARE the voice in order to hear it yourself.
You don’t get the gift until it’s your desire to extend the gift to another, and then you get it.
Continuing …
The mind that was in me is still irresistibly drawn to every mind created by God because God’s Wholeness IS the wholeness of His Son.
Now, continuing …
Turning the other cheek does NOT mean that you should submit to violence without protest.
When something wrong is occurring, you must dare to express the unyielding immovability of Truth and Integrity. You must object. You should …
Excuse me. Repeating …
Turning the other cheek does NOT mean that you should submit to violence without protest. It means that you cannot BE hurt, and do not want to show your brother anything EXCEPT your wholeness.
Listen to this carefully. You object, but not because you’re hurt. You object because what is being objected to does not represent in your Brother what he divinely is and you will not join in confirmation of his expression of what he is not. You respond by objecting. You don’t react.
When you respond with objection from the Experience of Wholeness, nothing you do convicts the Brother of the behavior you’re objecting to. Understand that when the objection arises out of reaction, you are therapizing. You are finding a means of coercing your Brother into certain already existing mutually-agreed-upon definitions of behavior through the use of guilt. And that will leave you as an unhealed victim because you will have to maintain your victimization in order to back up the guilt that you’re trying to therapize your Brother with to get him to behave properly. And it will not lift your brother out of the very dream that caused your Brother to behave in a way that was inappropriate. You see this?
Reaction and the demonstration of hurt is the way the ego maintains control over your Brother in order to keep him bound to his ignorance, and also in order to see to it that neither one of you is healed of the perception that you could be hurt or that you could hurt another, or that you could be hurt or that you needed to hurt someone else.
Is this clear? Is anyone … I don’t want to be going too fast here. Okay.
Continuing …
Show him that he CANNOT hurt you and hold nothing against him, or you hold it against yourself.
And, as I said, you keep both of you bound to the experience of no healing.
Continuing …
Teaching is done in many ways,—by formal means, by guidance…
Now I’m not speaking of Divine Guidance here.
… —by formal means, by guidance, and above all BY EXAMPLE. Teaching is therapy because it means the SHARING of ideas, and the awareness that to share them is to STRENGTHEN them. The union of the Sonship IS its protection.
Now why was that sentence put there? It sounds like one has changed the subject. Teaching is therapy because it means the sharing of ideas. When all are sharing everything with all, that is absolute Unity. When no one is withholding anything from any part of the Sonship, the Sonship is indivisible, undivided. Therefore, the sentence, “The union of the Sonship IS its protection.” Conversely, you could say the splintering or disintegration of the Sonship is its vulnerability. Make sense? Yes.
The ego cannot prevail against the Kingdom BECAUSE it is united, and the ego fades away and is undone in the presence of the attraction of the parts of the Sonship which hear the call of the Holy Spirit to be as One.
Now, if the call of the Holy Spirit is to be as One, then it means that you all in hearing the Call and accepting the Call, will begin allowing for connection with your Brothers and Sisters, with each other. In the context of witnessing for What Is True about them that is also True about you, which means that there’s no way for you to stand as the beneficent giver of the acknowledgment of their worth, because it’s clearer to you or more True about you than it is about them. Do you see that in witnessing for what is best in your Brother, for his Divinity, because you understand that you are both nothing less than What God Is Being, it brings the two of you into a state of pure equality, oneness, no superior/inferior dichotomy?
You know what? None of you, none of you are going to find your invulnerability until it becomes your goal to demonstrate to your Brother his invulnerability. Not as an intellectual task, not as a behavioral task, but because you don’t want to experience any further severance from your Brother, because you don’t want to experience any further severance from the Brotherhood, and because you don’t want to experience any further severance from your Father Whose Existence is the proof of your Sonship, and therefore of your Reality, and therefore of your Validity. Again, nothing heady here.
Continuing …
I cannot forget my need to teach what I have learned, which arose in me BECAUSE I learned it.
What is it that arose because I learned it? My need to teach what I had learned. Why? Because, in order to have the learning, you must share it. If you keep it private and do not share it and do not connect with your Brother, you don’t demonstrate your Oneness and you are still as asleep as you ever were.
Continuing …
I call upon you to teach what you have learned because, by so doing, YOU can depend on it. Make it dependable in my name because my name is the name of God’s Son.
“Oh boy. Oh, God’s Son.” Be careful! I’m not the only begotten Son of God. That is not a special designation. The minute you acknowledge God, Who You Are begins to become clear to you. As long as you are not denying the Father, you are not actively denying and obscuring from yourself your own Identity.
So, make it dependable in your name because your name is the name of God’s Son or Daughter. Make it dependable by acknowledging your Source so that you might Know, and I mean truly Know, with a capital “K”, Who You Are. So that you come back to Integrity. So that you come back into the full Conscious Experience of Who You Are and what your Function is. Why? So that you can now enjoy a new, glorious position? No. So that you can share it and make it your own. As long as it’s just an idea, it hasn’t become yours.
Continuing …
What I learned I give you freely, and the mind which was in me rejoices as YOU choose to hear it. The Holy Spirit atones in all of us by UNDOING, and thus lifts the burden you have placed in your mind.
It does it by the undoing of guilt and therefore its eradication. It does it by undoing the liability to be ill, and therefore, thereby removing illness from your experience as a possibility.
The Holy Spirit atones in all of us by UNDOING, and thus lifts the burden you have placed in your mind. By following Him…
… this which is nothing more than your right Mind …
… He leads you back to God where you belong, and how can you find this way …
… here it is …
… except by taking your brother with you?
My part in the Atonement is not complete until YOU join it and give it away. As you teach, so shall you learn. I will never leave you or forsake you, because to forsake you would be to forsake myself and God who created me.
And if I did that, I would lose the Experience of Who I Am. I would lose my Identity, and I would be in a box, like you are. I can’t get out of the box without returning to you who are in boxes, and coming into the darkness and coming into the stress and coming into the distress and coming into the pain where you are, to help you out of the box, to help you see that you’re suffering from nothing other than an imagination that has replaced the Real Meaning Of Everything with definitions you have chosen and which all of you together have agreed to commit to about the Kingdom of Heaven, definitions that are different than What The Kingdom Of Heaven Really Is.
And here it is …
You will forsake yourselves and God if you forsake ANY of your brothers.
So you want to come Home? Grab someone’s hand and lift them up. And if you care to do that, you will be lifted up as they are lifted up. And if you know that you won’t be lifted up until they’re lifted up, you will find it of great value to you to persist in spite of their fearful, unstable and aggressively unpleasant behavior.
Continuing …
You are more than your brother’s keeper. In fact, you do not WANT to keep him. You must learn to see him as he is, and KNOW that he belongs to God as you do. How could you treat your brother better than by rendering unto God the things which are God’s?
Just let this set for a moment. When you look at your Brother and render him unto God because he’s God’s, you put yourself in the position of remembering his Real Identity, his Sonhood, if I may put it that way, because you acknowledged God as the Source of him. And now you have a gift to give to him, and it’s a gift that will give you your Identity back to you. Can it be more simple? If you don’t do it and you leave your Brother out in the cold, you’re out there with him. This is the unyielding, immoveable way things work. And there’s no shortcut. There’s no way to get around it.
So, roll up your sleeves, everyone, and get involved for your sake. And get your blessing because you extend a blessing to your Brother, because you’ve arrived at a place where you are miserable enough that you are willing to try the very radical action of being the Presence of Love and caring about someone else more than your own self-protection.
Aren’t you glad that the really good stuff is so simple? And don’t worry. I will not let you make it more complex.
I love you and I look forward to being with you next Sunday.
T5.4 The Guide to Salvation ↩
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