Teachings of Christ Mind

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

I could speak for Paul, but I won’t. I will take this moment to let him speak.

PAUL: Okay. I, speaking for myself and Susan and Chris and Judy, want to thank everyone who responded yesterday. We’re very, very grateful for the support that was extended. It is going to allow us to pay back the three loans we got this past week at the end of the day today, which is a great relief, and is greatly appreciated. And the Love that was extended in those gifts I promise you, it’s felt. We feel it. Thank you.

No, I’m going to say something else. I’ve … because as I was being quiet and turning it back over to Raj, I realized that the support has been encouraging. I feel encouraged.

You know, I won’t stop listening to Raj, no matter what happens. And in one way or another I won’t stop, unless Raj says we’re not going to do it anymore. I will not stop extending and sharing what Raj has to say. And it would never be my desire to crawl into a closet and just write books where I was never involved with anyone, but could sit cozy and shielded from the messiness of human relationships and just spout the Truth.

Okay. I don’t know why it was important to say it, but the support has been encouraging. Okay.

RAJ: What is the one thing that can break isolation? What’s the one thing that can violate and undo (well what I’m going to call) the strength of the ego frame of reference in you? It’s gratitude. You can’t feel gratitude and be upset at the same time. You can’t feel gratitude and successfully employ defense. In fact, if you’re going to be a warrior for the ego, it will be part of your credo to avoid gratitude, because it will undo your capacity [small laugh] to be able to defend yourself and engage in attack.

Gratitude is something that never exists in isolation. You must be grateful for something. The gratitude will have an object. And if you’re experiencing gratitude, or if you are employing gratitude, you are in the act of defying and breaking any state of isolation or defense that you’ve been engaged in. That’s why in the past I have suggested at times that you go on a diet of gratitude.

And you know, there’s something else. You can engage in gratitude even if you’re upset. Being upset does not make the state of gratitude totally unavailable to you and impossible for you to engage in. And the moment in your upsetness that you do begin to engage gratitude and persist in it, and I’m talking about real gratitude, the upsetness will begin to fade. Always your upsetness is the result of one thing only, and that is that you have crawled into a very private place that you are defending against intrusion. When you do that, you’re uncomfortable. When you are uncomfortable, you have done that.

Now, at this point in the Course, we’re looking at the way the ego works. But mind you, just because you understand the way the ego works, it doesn’t mean that the ego is any more real than it was before you understood how it works. To understand how it works is to be able to see more clearly its meaninglessness. How silly, how ridiculous, how impossible the existence of such a thing as an ego frame of reference is. So, don’t think that as you’re gaining an understanding of the ego that it must mean that there really is an ego. [small laugh] What you’re gaining an understanding of is that there isn’t any such thing as an ego because its premise is illusory. It therefore has no foundation.

In other words, let’s bring it home a little more, because right now I’m talking about the ego. Generally speaking, the ego is this, the ego is that. There’s no “generally speaking” about the ego. The ego is your current sense of yourself that has been built upon the idea that you are the trigger, that you are the impulse from which you and your life come forth, that you’re the alpha and omega of your experience. In other words, there is no God. There is nothing outside of you. There is nothing beyond you. There is nothing more than you, this body, which has developed a mind that can live a life, defend itself, succeed, and so on, which, of course, is a complete misunderstanding about your Identity and your Being.

And waking up, experiencing enlightenment is the way in which you get beyond the box of the definition you have of yourself, so that your Self can be seen in its original and only context, which is infinite. And which, because it is infinite, is all-inclusive, all-embracing, and in which all that is within it is involved with every other aspect of what is in it so that you are inseparable in actuality from every single one of your Brothers and Sisters, every flower, every tree, every manifestation of Life. And it’s an intimate, infinite involvement. Now that’s more than you can swallow in one swallow in terms of a shift of consciousness.

So how do you begin the process of getting out of the box so that you can become susceptible to the larger experience? Again, through the practice of gratitude. Through the practice of gratitude. What better word or act could I use to describe the meaning of the word “Love”? Love your neighbor. Love your Brother when he’s in the midst of despair, when he’s in the midst of what’s called a terminal illness, when he’s in the midst of turmoil.

Well, how can I Love? The easiest way to begin loving is to find something about them to be grateful for. What are the things about them that you appreciate? What are the things about them that you can express gratitude for? That’s comprehensible, where the word “Love” can be inscrutable, you might say, and a little difficult to put your finger on. But gratitude, that you can cope with, that you can understand, and that you can bring into play.

And the interesting thing is that as you begin to express gratitude, even if it’s for apparently silly things like I’m grateful for the fact that every day I see her, she wears clothes that are lovely, I enjoy the clothes she wears, I appreciate the presence that she is in her choice of colors and textures, and so on. Or I appreciate her for being straightforward, honest, frank, gentle, tender. Or I appreciate my home, I appreciate the opportunity it gives me to express order and to express loveliness, and I appreciate the shelter it gives me. You see? We don’t have to get otherworldly in terms of appreciation.

But if you’re upset, if you’re in a really bad mood, your starting with these simple things that you can genuinely feel gratitude for, and your continuing to find more and more of these things to be grateful for makes it easier and easier for you to find more things to feel grateful for, and the inclination for gratitude to pour forth doubles and triples and increases. And pretty soon you realize that you’re not in the bad frame of mind that you were in; the reason being that you’ve abandoned the intellectual commitment to isolation and thoughts that confirm and support it. Because remember what you’re hurting from is a decision to be alone. If you’re hurting, you have made a decision to be alone. It’s that simple.

As you abandon that and express gratitude, you are embracing, including, and extending yourself, and as you do that, the number of things to extend your gratitude to increases. The isolation is broken. You begin to feel better, and your action blesses everything that you have expressed gratitude for. Then, this new appreciative frame of mind that you are in allows you to become mobilized, where your isolation and misery had caused you to become immobilized. And now you’re in a position where you can act. You can turn that gratitude into an action that might be a hug, or a thank you, or a wiping off of the counter that needs to be wiped so that it looks lovely again. Actions of appreciation expressed quote “in the world,” not just embraced in the withinness of your mind.

The key is for the Truth to register with you, for the Love That You Are to register with you, so that it can emerge into action, acts in the world, so that it becomes visible in the world. And there is something whole and healthy and transformational to replace the ugliness, we’ll say, that is managing to be acted out in the world, so that hope might be experienced by those who think that the acts of hate are normal. You can always use the words, “There is another way to look at this.” But another way to be acted out in the world gives a visual, experiential example of the fact that there is another way to be. And that gives hope. That is inspiring.

You want to know what the ego is? The ego is a closet Christ; a Christ who hides what he is from the world. And you know what I’m doing? I’m outing every single one of you. With Love, I’m saying, “Come out of the closet. Show what you are, because the world needs to see it and you need to feel it.” Because until you do, you’re in a state of misery that is undeserved and illegitimate. How do you come out of the closet? By finding ways to express gratitude; first within your own consciousness, and then expressed in the world, so that new actions from each of you replace old actions that were confirming the ego in you and in others.

Waking up starts as an inside job, but it doesn’t end as an inside job. It ends as that inside transformation becomes expressed in actions that will cause observers from space, let’s say, to say, “Oh, something is happening there on planet Earth. Things are changing. Not only is there less conflict, there is a new energy emanating.” Why? Because something is actually happening right in the middle of the human condition.

And you know what? It won’t be a matter of these observers saying, “Wow! What’s happening down there? Suddenly the population is becoming less and less. Hmm. It just disappeared. Hmm. Just poufed out of existence. What is going on?” It’s never going to be a matter of flashing out and leaving this place. It’s always going to be a matter of being in this place more fully in a way that embodies in words and deeds and feelings and thoughts What You Divinely Are, What Is Really True About You.

So waking up, that wonderful thing all of you seek, you say, is to know Who and What You Are, and what your Purpose is. Well, your Purpose is to be What You Are. And the only way you can be What You Divinely Are is to embody it in involvement with your Brothers from that awareness of What You Are, which is Divine, extending What You Are to your Brothers and Sisters whom you now recognize are also Divine, so that What You Are confirms What They Are. And in their discovery of Who They Are Divinely, they confirm What You Are, so that there’s a Singularity. That’s what it’s about. And the same thing about the trees and the roses and the plants and animals.

You will get no support from me on any otherworldly ideas about what is involved in Awakening. Now are you the Sons and Daughters of God. Right here and now you are. So right here and now is where you will discover that that’s What You Are. And right where you are now is the Kingdom of Heaven seen through a glass darkly. It’s not anything else. And so right here is where you will once again re-discern the Kingdom of Heaven. And the key to unlocking the Kingdom of Heaven is your willingness to express and embody in actions gratitude, Love, by becoming involved with everything from your Love because you’re beginning to have an awareness that what you’re loving is also Love, is also Divine, is also God presenting Himself right there.

Actually, we’re going to back up one paragraph just for review and context. We’re going to the book.

And we discussed last week that the power of the mind that the ego denies is the Christ Presence That You Are, which is pretending at the moment to be an ego, and believing its pretension.

In other words, that Which You Divinely Are is using its capacity to imagine that it is not What It Is. And because it is Divine, it manages to create a sense of not being What It Is as an experience. And this that it isn’t, which is called the ego, must deny that which has created it, because if it doesn’t manage to keep the Christ That You Are covered from your vision and you rediscover it, then that will be the end of the ego. So it’s in a state of denying the very thing that allows it to seem to have existence. That can only be tension producing. It must walk a fine line so as to not actually to come anywhere close to destroying what is allowing temporarily for its existence through the use of imagination.

… the Christ That You Are …

Do you see why it is itself a state of conflict, a state of tension?

It’s like the saying, you know, “Don’t bite the hand that feeds you.” But the ego’s job is to bite the hand that gives it life, because it must keep it out of sight. This is why you can never refer to the ego frame of reference as your friend or your ally, and you must understand that it is always acting not in your best interest. It is always acting to your detriment, which means it’s always acting to the detriment of What You Divinely Are. You might say that’s its job, because that’s the only thing that will seem to keep it going.

… by what?

Now that which had only been an intellectual process has become an attack on your perceived sense of yourself. And you say, “Oh, I am feeling threatened. I am feeling uneasy. I am feeling uncomfortable. Mm. I don’t like this so I’m going to try to overcome it.” And then you try to overcome it by never … [small laugh] … never discerning the fact that the feeling has been suggested to you, insinuated into your mind, you might say, as a threat that you’re experiencing, rather than the threat that the ego is experiencing, and you never get around to undoing the ego itself.

In other words, by guaranteeing that you will not remember that you are invulnerable because of What You Really Are.

Know anything.

… or Knowing is total. It’s a Singularity …

Or Singularity.

… You see? The ego originated from an idea of less than wholeness. The ego originated in an imaginative sense of limitation, tininess. If you’re going to be different from the Infinite Singularity That God Is Being right there where you are as you, the only other choice you can have is to be less than that. Right? Because there’s nothing greater than Infinity that you could choose from. So if you’ve chosen to have a point of view of your own, that point of view is always going to be smaller than the Singular Wholeness of Being. And therefore, the ego as a concept, as an imaginative thought, originated out of a sense of tininess. And that out of which it originated became the purpose and function of the ego, of that which came forth. And so the ego’s function is to continue to create tininess, closets, little private spaces, and to ensure that no one else will suffer from the inspiration that would cause them to become bigger than the little space that the ego says it is confined to.

Which is what I just described. The method by which something comes forth becomes the purpose and function of what comes forth. So if something is begotten in tininess, in limitation, then tininess and limitation will become its quote “creative” unquote function.

That’s the Law of Being. So whether you have adopted a limited frame of reference or not, whatever proceeds, whatever follows, will be an expression, I’m going to say, of the matrix which is the source of what comes forth. So, if you are not claiming a private mind of your own, and you are letting that Mind be in you which is God, then your very Presence and Being will embody and express in actions Infinite Creativity, if I may put it that way. It will embody that by which it itself came forth, expressing the nature and character and quality of that which formed it. And likewise because you are unable to escape from Reality, even though you imagine that you can, if you adopt a biased, tiny, limited frame of reference, everything that follows will embody that.

What I am meaning to convey to you here is a fine point and it is this. Whether you are ignorant or Awake, ignorant or Enlightened, everything still functions according to God’s Laws. And so because nothing can come forth from a source unlike its source, because of that, even when you are ignorant and creating ignorantly, that which comes forth will unerringly embody and express its source. Therefore, because the ego is a tiny, private, personal sense of yourself which holds itself apart from everyone else, everything that you do from that frame of reference will continue to embody and create and express those very same qualities of privateness, tininess, personalness, and so on.

Are you seeing what I’m saying? My point here is that whether you are Awake or asleep, God’s Laws still govern and govern absolutely, and the Way Things Work still work absolutely. That’s because everything is inviolably a Singularity.

So if you have two ways to be; one which, we’ll say, generates harmony, and one … . If you have two ways to be; one way that generates harmony, and one way that generates disharmony or inharmony, you may know that whichever you choose, it will work absolutely. And you will perfectly express inharmony. You will flawlessly express inharmony. And never while you are coming from that frame of reference will anything other than inharmony come forth. It will be impossible for you as an ego to become enlightened. It will be impossible for you as an ego to really express Love. Why? Because that requires involvement, and the ego is the embodiment of an idea of privacy, and so all it can generate is aloneness.

That’s why miracles are called for. And what is a miracle? A sudden shift of perception. It will always be a shift of perception from tininess to Infiniteness, to bigness. It will always be a shift of perception from hate to Love. It will always be a shift of perception from defense to gratitude. Another way of saying it is that you can never solve the problem from the level of the problem, because from the level of the problem, all you can do is generate problems. So you must step out of the level of the problem into the level of the answer, which inevitably will beget the solution. And actually making the shift will have been the solution.

Is this making sense?

… that’s its programming, you might say.

… that’s what its operating system requires it to do.

That doesn’t mean this allegiance makes it (the ego) treacherous to Love. It means that because its (the ego’s) allegiance is to fear, it is treacherous to the ego for you to Love.

Okay, so you know that because of what the ego is, it’s always going to be denying the Truth About You, because the Truth About You, if you begin to have a glimmer of it in your awareness, will cause you to withdraw your faith in the ego’s suggestions.

… the Christ that you Are …

… meaning the Christ that you Are …

Right now that which You Divinely Are does not want the ego experience. Now that which You Divinely Are is what? The Holy Spirit, that which is nothing more than your right Mind. The Holy Spirit which is your right Mind doesn’t want the ego, and so it stands with you constantly on your behalf. Your Real Mind, your right Mind, stands with you on your behalf constantly insinuating Itself through your defenses so that you might recognize It and begin to remember yourself. So that It, the Holy Spirit, your right Mind, your Christhood, can inspire you with what? With the experience and remembrance of What You Are, so that your allegiance to the ego will begin to falter, because it begins no longer to make sense to you, because you’re remembering Who You Are. Because Who You Are is managing to register with you. I’ve said before, the Holy Spirit is your Divinity held in trust while you dally with the ego.

… the Christ of You.

But you didn’t even know you had a right Mind. You thought you were just you, and you thought your mind was just what it is. But now you know that you have a right Mind. I’ve been telling you. Over and over I keep reminding you so that you don’t forget and you don’t slip back into ignorance of it and just waltz along following the traditional, habitual, ego patterns.

If it recognized ANY part of the Sonship. Well, here’s the wonderful thing. Every one of your friends, every one of your neighbors, every individual you run into every day, provides you with the opportunity to remember the Sonship. But you’re pretty sure you know that the word “Sonship” applied to them does not have a capital “S”, and so you’re not open to the inspiration and revelation that awaits you in every encounter. Thank, God, you haven’t met all of us yet. Because you have no opinion about an Awakened Brother, the only thing you know for sure is that you don’t know anything about what an Awakened Brother is, except that an Awakened Brother has something you’re envious of.

You at least know that there might … that there is something wonderful that might be gotten from an Awakened Brother. And so you have Guides which you can turn to and they become the one, the any part of the Sonship that you can recognize that would allow you to begin to know yourself.

You also have the Holy Spirit, something else you have no opinion about, except that It has something you probably want. And so there’s a resource for you to turn to that you can’t pooh pooh, because you haven’t become familiar enough with it yet to think you know what its flaws are, and have an opinion, a judgmental opinion about. And so you have means of breaking the isolation if you are arriving at a point where isolation is beginning to be too uncomfortable for you to continue in.

Continuing.

… another way of saying that would be that the ego therefore opposes all gratitude …

And this is True. Once again it is the Way It Works. It’s one of the Laws of God.

Whether you’re enlightened or dreaming a dream, every commitment you make is total. And so if you have made commitment to the ego, it’s total, and everything that comes forth from that frame of mind will engender and embody and attempt to continue embodiments of that which is of the nature and character of the ego—limitation, fear, defense, jealousy, hatred—all the things that firmly establish isolation and the ongoing need for securing that isolation.

Continuing, regarding the ego.

It’s like if you paint a picture with red paint, the picture will be red. That which you use to make something is what the something will be. And so, if you paint with the ego, the picture will be ego expressed, ego embodied, ego illustrated, and nothing else. How a thing is made is what it will be.

Now, on the other hand …

And to bring it home again, this “Him” is nothing more than your right Mind. It’s you. Your right Mind cannot perceive them at all—illusions. They therefore do not exist for your right Mind.

Your right Mind…

It would be wonderful to have a friend like that, wouldn’t it, who can see that clearly, to help you see that clearly? It’s even more wonderful to know that you have something closer than a friend. You have your very Self, your right Mind, accompanying you every moment, having one Purpose on Its Mind, and that is help you become DISillusioned, free of illusions.

You see the ego has set up a lot of straw dogs for you to attend to. And straw dogs are things that don’t actually exist, but which you have been fooled into believing do. It’s like kids sending other kids out into a field at night to go snipe hunting with a candle and a gunny sack, because if you hold the candle up, it will confuse the snipe and it will fly into the gunny sack. Well, that’s a wild goose chase, or an attempt to attend to a straw dog.

And to try to understand illusion is a wild goose chase. And so your right Mind helps you neglect to attend to foolish endeavors that can’t be accomplished, and so it saves you time and energy. The ego, on the other hand, provides you only with straw dogs, only with wild goose chases.

Continuing.

… and we could say gratitude …

… that which is nothing more than your right Mind …

The ego has managed to convince you that there’s such a creature as a snipe that you can catch in a weird fashion. And of course, you have to be sure no one else goes with you because that will scare them away. And then you end up being the lone fool out in the middle of the field with a candle and a gunny sack, while all of your knowledgeable buddies stand way back and laugh. The ego is not your friend.

Again.

Besides God and His Kingdom.

You could say, “Vigilance has no place at all in Singularity.”

And I’m going to add: But remember that you have not made it True.

Catch the shift.

The ego is a buck-passer. It believes it can do something that it’s impossible to do. It actually believes that it has done something that it’s impossible to do. And then it persuades you that you’re the one who did it. And if you buy that, then you’re stuck with a straw dog to get rid of, and you’re trying to get rid of something that doesn’t exist and undo something that never was done. And you’re like the kid out in the field walking through the wheat, or whatever is in the field, looking like you’re doing something, when you’re doing nothing except being a fool.

Continuing.

And in this instance I would have capitalized that “m”. That you cannot be capital “M” Mind. That you cannot be the Christ. That you cannot be the Singularity that is the Conscious Awareness of Being that is God being the only Presence right where you are. That you cannot be the Christ.

… because I’ll tell you something, the ego does know that it is a fallacy, that it is purely imaginary.

Okay. The Light of your understanding has been covered over to you, because you have adopted the belief that you’re a personal private mind. Not only that, this mind is something that is physical going on in a brain in a skull in a body that’s part of an evolutionary process that started with a big bang, and, as I keep saying, had nothing to do with God.

And what am I doing? And what is the Holy Spirit in each of you doing? It is intent upon and is engaged in reminding you that your Mind has a Light because it’s not in a brain, and that it is a Singularity which is the Presence of God, and you are the Christ. You are more than you thought you were. You were more than you conceived yourself to be. You are more than you have imagined yourself to be. You are more than the definitions you have given yourselves. And if you hear this enough and if you are willing in the slightest to embrace it as a possibility and you reach out to it by turning toward the Altar and inquiring of it, you will break the isolation.

… your real Mind.

That’s the power of your Being. The power of your Being is itself the nonexistence of the ego and its delusional system, because the ego and its delusional system are both delusions. They’re both nonsense. And you … not any one of you is nonsense. You are valid, valuable Presence of God. And for you to be suffering from a belief that you’re anything less is abominable. It’s a travesty. And it calls for correction. It calls to be dispelled by the Light of your understanding. Your understanding will be enlarged. The enlargement, the increase of your understanding will be the natural and spontaneous effect or result of practicing gratitude.

You want to have a different kind of week this week? Go on a diet of gratitude. No matter what’s going on, find something to be grateful for. No matter what distressing thing is happening or who is being distressing, find something you can be grateful for about that thing or that individual. Do not get locked into a pseudo-singularity of hate, or a pseudo-singularity of a definition of that thing or that person that disallows you from feeling gratitude. You see what I mean?

What I want you to be alert for is any tendency that you have to become single of mind about a lie, single of mind about an illusion. If you hear that so-and-so is ill, in your mind say, “‘Tain’t so.” That way you don’t get into the singularity of accepting the statement as a fact that’s unchallengeable and become a singular attitude that is incapable of healing or changing the status quo. Watch for it. Watch for any tendency to become locked in to a commitment to that which isn’t Love. Because the minute you get locked into that commitment, you will begin to be the presence of that which generates the act, the impulse, that brought forth the lie that you’re becoming committed to.

When you become committed to the lie, you become committed to increasing the lie. That doesn’t mean the lie becomes more than it was, because 10,000 zeros are no greater than one [zero]. But, it does mean that you’re unavailable as the Christ That You Are to the rest of the Brotherhood of Christs with the Singularity of Mind that undoes the general ignorance that your Brothers and Sisters have about What They Divinely Are, their Christhood. And you want to be that which is undoing illusion rather than confirming it.

This isn’t anything new. This has been known for ages. So it isn’t the knowledge that’s important. It’s the practice. The one thing that hasn’t been general knowledge is that you are right now the Christ, that you are right now the Ultimate. You’re neither behind the Point of Perfection nor advancing toward it; you’re at that Point and need to understand yourself from there right now, right here. What you didn’t know was that the Holy Spirit is nothing more than your right Mind, and that it’s right in the middle of you, and that it’s your ally. And its Purpose is to uncover the nonsense that you’re believing makes nonsense, to uncover it so that you can see the nonsensicalness of it, because you will never hold on to and value what you recognize as nonsense. And it does this so that you can become unhooked from your addiction to illusion.

What you didn’t know was that the world and universe that you thought came from a big bang is the Kingdom of Heaven seen through a glass darkly. And the Kingdom of Heaven is not some place to go to, but to be attentive to right here and right now so that you can bring curiosity to your existence right now which is where it all awaits you. So you know some things that haven’t been known down through the centuries.

Now you just need to continue to dare to explore it, investigate it, be open to it, persist in pursuing it further. And you’re bound to be successful because that which is doing the search is the Christ, because you haven’t stopped being the Christ. And as you begin to realize that it is the Christ in You that’s looking, a disintegration of the structures will begin to occur. The ego structures, it is almost as though they will crystallize and break up into thousands of shards, crystals, whatever, and then disappear. They will just collapse and you will make the connection. The Christ that’s looking for the Truth About You, which is the Christ, will see the Christ and make the connection, and you will come back into a Singularity. You’re bound to succeed because that which is on the search is what is being looked for. It really does exist and it will find itself because it never did successfully get split up. The Singularity hasn’t been violated. So you can dare to challenge the status quo, because right now the status quo is a denial of What’s Real. But it can’t make What’s Real not Real. It can’t get rid of it.

So what does it mean? It means you’ve got to abandon your bad habits. Your habit of believing that you know what a thing is, and reconfirming it, and reconfirming it, and keeping yourself in the dark. You’ve got to get in the habit of challenging the status quo, loving the unlovely, honoring the dishonorable, invalidating sin, sickness and death, and thereby becoming an agent for change. And because you don’t have to do it all at once, you don’t need to be afraid to begin.

Okay. I look forward to being with you next week and everyone on the Internet as well.

And I hope you’re beginning to enjoy what’s in this book, because what’s in this book is a mirror that points to you and uncovers you to you. And that’s got to be a satisfying and enjoyable experience. It needs to be. And that truly is the nature, the atmosphere, the context of waking up, of coming Home.

Okay. I will be with you next week.