Teachings of Christ Mind

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

As we go through the book, there’s basically only one thing we’re talking about, and that is making a shift of identification from body to Mind. I have pointed out from time to time that body, world, universe, all of the things that you are aware of, you are aware of with and in your Mind. It is your Mind which is conscious of it all, not your body. It is your Mind which is conscious of your body and your home and your world. But you all identify with the body.

Mind is ever-present, isn’t it? As long as you are conscious it’s present. But you give it little attention. You say, “I use my mind” in the same way that you would say, “I use my hands,” as though it’s one of many possessions, instead of the Ground of your Being, the fundamental of your Conscious Experience Of Being.

Body and Mind have both been present in your experience, but you have weighted your attention on the side of your body. There’s a good reason. It’s really a bad reason. But there’s a reason you do this, and that is that when you got your bill of divorcement from the Father, when you said, “Father, I’d rather see it my way,” and you abandoned the Father’s Perspective consciously and conscientiously by means of developing your own meanings for everything in your experience, you, as I’ve said before, lost your Conscious Experience of Oneness with everything. You said, “I’d rather see it myself,” and you drew a boundary around yourself and suddenly All The Rest Of What You Infinitely Were became something different from you.

Well, now you look and the only thing that’s you is the specific identification of you, which has always been but it was part of the Infinitude Of You, but now it’s all there is of you. And so you had to begin to redefine yourself. And your definition of yourself was based on, built around, this one little part of the Infinitude Of You that you call your body. So you equate yourself with the body. And if this equation is carried to its logical conclusion, you believe that when the body ceases to be alive, you cease to be alive. And so, many of you, not that many of you here, but many of you in the world believe that “from birth to death” is all there is to you. That’s how definite and binding your identification with body has become.

Now, I’m reminding you that this other thing that’s in your experience called your Mind isn’t just another thing. It is an unbounded and therefore Infinite Presence of Mind, Presence of Conscious Awareness, in which body, world and universe is going on. And I keep pointing you in the direction of going through your day being more aware of yourself as Mind, reminding yourself that you are the Consciousness in which all Conscious Experience is occurring, so that you might have the opportunity of having that awareness trigger for you what you would call a reinterpretation of the daily events of your lives. Because depending upon what you are identifying yourself with, your experience of everything will be different. And you all deserve a different experience than the experience of bondage you’re presently in.

Last week we spoke … last time we were together we spoke extensively about the body being a Means of Communication. It doesn’t exist on its own, for itself. It exists as a vehicle for the Extension of Communication, the Extension of Meaning, the Extension of Value, with a capital “V”. At the bottom line, it is the means of your engaging in acknowledging What Is True about your Brother, your Sister and everything that you see. It is the means you have for recognizing God in each and every thing. That is its Function. But when you get caught up in preoccupation with the body, you lose its Function, you become distracted from extending the Acknowledgement of What Is Real in each and every thing, and you have moved into an attitude of self-defense. Because as long as you have no contact with the Infiniteness Of You, you can only be in touch with the limits of you, the finiteness of you, and consequently your utter vulnerability to everything. So when you are identifying yourself with your body, you are engaged in defense.

But you say, “I don’t feel like I am engaged in defense.” But the simple fact is that when you are preoccupied with yourself as a body, and making it in the world as a body, and earning respect as a body, and learning how to be in charge through force that can be brought to bear by your body, you are not engaged in connection. You are not engaged in extension. You’re not engaged in the act of recognizing and acknowledging everything That Is Real in everything that you’re looking at. You’re preoccupied with self. If you’re not engaged in inclusion of it all, but are engaged in being separate from it all, you are in a state of defendedness. It is that simple.

Now let’s go to the book. We ended with the statement:

This means that you will never have, on your own, unified purpose. There’s only one thing called Unified Purpose, and that is God Being. And if your purpose is unified, it means there is nothing present blocking or interfering with God’s Purpose. You are being a transparency for God.

So …

Well, that’s what’s called the human condition. You have interfered with His Purpose by having a purpose of your own, by having a purpose of wanting to be able to determine what everything is, to determine how you’re going to deal with it, to determine how you’re going to defend yourself, to determine how others better behave, and on and on.

When you chose to be an authorizer, you chose to ignore the capital “A” Author. And you have interfered in His Authority. Now the fact is you can’t interfere with God’s Authority. But when you try to insert an authority of your own between you and God’s Authority, you interfere absolutely with your capacity to experience the Father’s Authorship. You interfere absolutely with your ability to experience the Source of your Being, and therefore the Reality of You. And it says here:

What are the results of your condemnation? Sin, sickness and death. They’re not true. They’re simply not true.

In other words, you are seeing him in no larger a way than you are allowing yourself to see yourself. And if you are allowing yourself to see yourself in a larger way, you will automatically include your Brother in that larger view.

But you know what? [laughing] If you’re identifying yourself as a body and someone else is identifying themselves as a body, and the two of you look at each other and see the other as a body, and you all agree to this illusion, you can have a pretty good knockdown, drag-out, artificial fight. I say “artificial” because none of it is real. It’s a fantasy that the two of you are playing out with each other. But it isn’t real. And the consequences … the apparent consequences of it cannot be real. And as a result, when one of you breaks the agreement to play this game of fantasy with each other and one of you remembers the Truth, instantaneous healing of the apparent results can occur. Why instantaneous? Because there never was an actual effect that has to be undone. And this is important to understand because it means that no matter what you might be suffering from at this moment, you can experience instantaneous relief without going through some process of healing.

Continuing …

Remember that in order to break the sense that something impossible is possible, you have to shift from body-identification to Mind-identification, shifting your attention from the definition of yourself as a body to your Conscious Experience of Being as the definition of you, and abiding there and observing everything from there.

Again …

… as an actuality …

… but you won’t shift into unlimited communication as long as you are identifying yourself as a body.

Well, Wholeness is a State of Invulnerability. It’s a State of Being What God Is Being right there where you are, with the awareness that it is God Being What You Are right there, with God’s Perspective. There is no vulnerability in that Perspective.

… what?

Using the body as a Means of Communication. Communication of what? Extension of what? The Acknowledgement of What Is True in what you are seeing. And how do you see What Is True there? By abandoning your belief about what is there and asking within of the Father, “What are You being there? What is the Divine Meaning of what I’m looking at?”

Extension of the Acknowledgement of What Is Real, which is another way of describing Love. It’s something that happens through the body. If on the way you become preoccupied with the body, the extension will be arrested. Your attention on that which you are seeing What Is Real in will be arrested, will be interrupted, because there’s an attention being given to the body.

… or in this body …

… what?

You will open up your mind to the experience of the extension of the Acknowledgement of What Is Real and the Joy of the experience of making that extension. And in that experience, you will find God revealed as your Conscious Experience Of Being. And because you will be introducing nothing extraneous to it, you will find yourself being the Movement of Creation. Let me put it this way. You will find yourself being with the Movement of Creation. And in being with it without introducing anything extraneous to it, it will be All There Is of you.

It is in this way, and this way only, that you become co-creators with God. It’s not an independent act you do along with God. It’s the absence of independence that allows you to be absolutely at One with God, and therefore experiencing nothing but What God Is Being. In a way, this is what Paul is doing right now. So don’t think that in doing it you will suddenly be swept into some nebulous indescribable experience. What will happen will be that everything you engage in will be infinitely meaningful. And so here and now is the place to start.

You will experience your body as What It Is, not as what you have come to believe it to be. And you will experience your world as What It Is, the Kingdom of Heaven, and not what you have come to believe it to be.

The next section is entitled:

Well, let me put it this way. Because I know some of you are wondering what in the “you know what” that means?

If you have an attitude toward the body, your attention has been arrested. You’re already preoccupied with something other than making the extension through Communication of the Acknowledgement of God in whatever it is you’re looking at, the Acknowledgment of the Real capital “M” Meaning of the thing that you’re looking at. If you have an attitude toward the body, your attention has already been arrested. And therefore, you are in a defense-mode, which is the flip side of saying attack-mode. When you’re in defense-mode, you’re defended against something.

And just because you’re preoccupied with the defense doesn’t mean that the opponent isn’t there as an integral part of your mindset, because if the opponent weren’t there you wouldn’t be thinking about defense. “Oh, but I’m not thinking about attacking anybody.” [small laugh] It doesn’t matter. If you are busy calculating your defense, being preoccupied with your steps of defense, etc., even though you’re thinking of no one in particular, everyone in general is the reason that you’re engaged in preoccupation with defense.

Again …

And of course when you’ve gotten your bill of divorcement and said you’d rather see things your way, you have decided what a thing is for, you have adopted it, and you believe your definition.

Again, not what it believes a thing is. What a thing is for.

What your body is, is a Means of Communication. What Creation, your world, is, is the Kingdom of Heaven, not a physical world and universe that you have defined. But, of course, the ego has as its function not to see what it is, because the predicate of it all was, “Father, I’d rather see it my way, not the way it is.”

Continuing …

Now that’s not true. But as long as you are in that mindset, that will be your experience. You see, when you’re not in that mindset, you could say that the body is the source of its own health. Because the body in itself is neutral, is benign, it has no function relative to itself. It only has function relative to the Communication of Love—Love being the recognition or acknowledgement of That Which Is Real in each and every thing.

Continuing …

And, of course, any definition that has been applied to something that is different from What The Father Is Being there is an inaccurate definition.

Which is another way of saying, “You are not God, but God is All There Is of you.”

Now listen to this.

And you could look at it this way. You can grasp the idea that “to know in part is to know wholly” is illustrated in a hologram. Because if you cut a small part of a hologram away, you’ll find that the whole picture that was in the entire hologram is present in the part.

So …

And I would use a capital “K” there.

… and …

… or Knowing …

And I would add: Its constellation leaves nothing outside of it. It is all-inclusive. It is Whole.

The only place where change is apparently possible is from the frame of mind in which body-identification predominates. And the only place where change is impossible is in the frame of reference where it is Mind, the Conscious Experience Of Being, that identifies you or is your Identity. If you want variableness, stay with body-identification. If you want, let’s say, permanent harmony, if you want forever stable experiences of Being, identify with and as Mind. It doesn’t mean stability in which the Movement of Creation doesn’t occur. It isn’t God frozen. But it’s God, and nothing but God, in constant Movement, unchanging in Nature, Character, Intent or Actuality. The Movement of Creation is unchangeably What It Is.

Continuing from where we left off.

“Seems” is the key word.

Now when it says here that “the body is regarded as capable of shifting its control from one to the other,” it means the same thing as you regard yourself as capable of shifting your attention from one to the other, from one voice to the other, “making the concept of both health and sickness possible.” There’s where you get into change. That’s where you get into fluctuation. Because you think you actually have a choice to think for yourself or yield to God.

And when the going gets rough, you yield to God. And when things straighten up, you think for yourself again. And when you think for yourself again, you find things getting difficult and you arrive at a point where you have to decide to yield to God. And you know what I’m telling you? I’m telling you that this sense of self that thinks it can shift its attention from one to the other doesn’t really exist, except in your imagination. You haven’t stopped being the Christ. You haven’t stopped being the Evidence of God.

Continuing …

This is why waking up can feel like failure. Because it means abandoning the quest for success as an independent agent. And it’s very humiliating to that which tried to build itself up out of nothing into something, which was forever an impossibility. Intelligence, dawning upon the mind, realizes this and doesn’t bother to feel guilty and get sidetracked, but immediately chooses for Sanity and lets go of the attempt to be something on its own. Continuing.

You see? Being sick isn’t real. It’s something you have a right to be free of. And it’s something you can be free of instantaneously because it isn’t real. But the ego needs it to be real, so that it can convince you that you are vulnerable, and therefore need to defend yourself. And once you take the bait, you’re caught on a merry-go-round that goes nowhere, but exhausts you.

Again …

What’s the underlying attack? The belief that you’re a body. The belief that you’re independent. The belief that you are an orphan and have no source, and that you are what you’re experiencing yourself as at the moment, which is a body. The attack is body-identification.

Cross-examined sickness.

… in other words, those who want to be authorizers, those who want the thrill, the hit, of creating meaning out of nothing and making it become truly something.

I’m going to back up.

Now when you are confronted by someone who is identifying himself or herself as a body and is engaged in defense, being with you as though you are an opponent whether you’re asserting your opposition at the moment or not, you will find that they will not address What’s True In You. But they will address any little ego beliefs which you treasure. And, of course, these ego beliefs will not be true. And because they are beliefs that you as an ego—one identifying with a body—treasure they will call it into question. They will demean it. They will insult it. Why? So as to call out from you an ego witness to the one calling it forth.

You may be doing quite well in being clear about the Truth. You may be doing quite well in staying in your Peace. You may be doing quite well in staying with the Holy Spirit and letting the Holy Spirit reveal to you His Perspective, which at the bottom line is your True Perspective.

An ego in defense approaching you, will not want to call forth witnesses for your Clarity. They will … the ego will call forth ego dynamics in you that are not yet put to rest; ego beliefs that you still intend to defend because you treasure them. This is very important to understand, because when this happens, it’s an invitation for you to abandon the Holy Spirit or your right Mind. It’s an invitation for you to crawl back into the crab barrel and react from the old habit of personal self-protection, and the old habit of somehow finding a way to be equal to or better than the one challenging you, so that you can once again attempt to have the satisfaction of truly being something on your own. The ego of another will never seek in you a witness to that which is in balance in you. And so you must be alert when you find yourself losing your balance and becoming reactive and willingly engaging in defense, because the ego of another is making an ally of that which isn’t even real in you and that which you really do not wish to reengage. But that is the way it happens.

Continuing …

You know what? It’s a reflection. It’s a reflection of the Movement of God. It’s like the leaves on the trees moving as the reflection of the movement of the wind.

Its True Function of what? Being a Means of Communication. It causes your attention to become arrested and preoccupied with the body.

And if it loses its True Function, you lose your Real or True Conscious Awareness of Who And What You Are. And so it’s very important to this little impostor, this state of self-defense, defending the existence of something which doesn’t exist.

… two …

And if it’s inconceivable, it’s impossible to experience. If you are going to continue to try to maintain this divorce from your Source, you are going to be faced with these two premises and these two premises only. That the body is for attack. And that you are a body.

So as you proceed in this coming week, once again, have some fun exploring the experience of identifying yourself as Mind, the Conscious Awareness in which every single experience you will have this week will be going on. Which means that every single experience you have this week will be a mental experience, not an independently existing experience of a physical world.

You see, considering the body as an end rather than a means, means you’re arrested at the Movement of the Acknowledgement of God, the Acknowledgement of What Is Real in everything you’re seeing. That Movement has become arrested at the point of its expression because you’ve become preoccupied with yourself as a body.

So this week practice not letting your attention become arrested at the body. But let your attention persist in fulfilling the intent to recognize God in everything you see, to extend or give acknowledgement to God in everything you see.

Continuing …

Well, external. External to what? External to the Holy Spirit, that which is nothing more than your right Mind, which is, for the lack of better words, right in the middle of you, the central core, actually the center and circumference of your Being, which is not different from God and is therefore Infinite.

Continuing …

… the need to depend on external guidance …

And …

How many of you fuss over the possibility, how many of you fuss over the nature of the ego that means that you’d better be alert, constantly second-guessing what the ego might do next, taking in, classifying, categorizing ego data, instead of saying, “Father, what’s the Truth? What’s really going on here? And I don’t mean what’s really going on here with all of these ego ploys that are going on all around me, but what is the Truth of Reality right here? I’m willing to consider the possibility that all of these ego ploys and dynamics that are parading themselves in front of me most vocally and forcefully, I’m willing to consider the possibility that they are not actual, that they are not real, and therefore don’t require my attention. And I want to know, Father, what is really going on here? What is the Movement of Creation that is going on here and being the nonexistence of this ego folderol?”

Continuing …

You can learn to recognize ego ploys. And knowing, as you do, that the ego is a liar and the father of it, meaning the father of the lie, you will realize that there truly is no useful reason to examine the lies, to understand the lies, to find out the motivation for the lies, and so on.

Continuing …

Well, what happened here? Where did this learning device come up? Well, we’re talking about the body, and as long as you think you are body and that it is an end rather a means, What It Truly Is escapes your notice. And therefore, because there is a call for correction so that you might experience What It Truly Is and not lose out on the fulfillment of it, it becomes a learning device for you. Whatever of What Is Real you have obscured from your sight becomes a learning device. It becomes the focal point for correction of perception.

The body is not a teacher. A learning device, meaning the body, is not a teacher. No learning device is a teacher. But it is the means by which the correction of misperception can occur. You know what? It doesn’t tell you What The Truth Is, but it makes you want to know What The Truth Is, so that you will open up your mind to the Father, or to the Holy Spirit, your right Mind, to reveal to you What The Truth Is. And then What That Thing Truly Is no longer needs to be a learning device for you because you’ve come back into your right Mind.

Now …

And specifically we’re here talking about the body.

And yet you get up in the morning, don’t you, and you check your body to see how you feel. Sometimes you do that to see if maybe you have a justifiable reason for not going into work.

So …

The only thing about the ego that is wholly true is that it is incapable … is that it does not know anything.

It’s an impostor. A figment of the imagination. But the problem is that that figment of the imagination you believe is real. And so, everyday you identify yourself as a body. And everyday you live in a state of defense. That’s your habit.

It’s a long standing habit which we are in the process of breaking. And we’re in the process of breaking it by means of your being confronted over and over again with the Truth that you are Conscious Awareness, not the body. That the only thing confronting you is the Kingdom of Heaven, not a physical universe that came from a big bang. That you are the Christ right now, not the mortal sinner you think you are. That you are in a forever State of Invincibility, and not vulnerable. That the Substance of everything you see is Spirit, not matter. And that every thing you see is an Idea, not a physical form, experienced by Mind. And you are that Mind. That Mind is you. That everything going on is purely mental.

And this keeps being presented to you as a means of arousing your curiosity beyond the definitions you have accepted, so that you might dare to let yourself be beyond the definitions of everything that you have accepted, beyond the capacities that you somewhere along the line decided have boundaries. You are being invited to let yourself into the fuller Conscious Experience of Being that is not only your Birthright to be experiencing, it’s your capacity at the present moment to be experiencing. It’s just that you’re not pushing the envelope.

Continuing …

If you want to see an acquaintance or a friend as mean-spirited, as selfish, or as overgenerous, or unreasonably kind, you will miss what that one is actually being, because you will interpret everything that one does according to the definition you hold. And if you are holding the definition, you want the definition.

Continuing …

And I promise you that as long as you are insisting upon harboring in your mind a definition of your Brother or Sister that is not true, your willingness to listen for What Is True is absent. And the Holy Spirit’s Voice will not be loud at all to you.

Listen to this:

… such respect. It’s a little bit more than respect. It’s the fact that you walked away from the Father, you divorced your Source on purpose, and the only way you can return to your Sanity is for your own reasons and because you have your own commitment and you are willing to take responsibility for every step you take on the way Home, so that there will be no confusion in your Mind. Your arrival at Home will be, and can only be, the result of your own Singularity of Purpose.

… we started out today.

… that which is nothing more than your right Mind …

… to reach your Brothers, not attack your Brothers.

… the Holy Spirit’s message …

Because you get to keep what you give.

… and this includes the body …

You hear that?

If you identify with the body, you will see the body as an end, instead of a means to an end, and sickness, sin and death will be your experience. If you see it as a means to an end, your body will be incapable, and you therefore will not have the experience, of sickness, sin and death.

Why? Because it’s not real? No. Because it is Real as a Means of Communication. What? To glorify God.

… the body …

… our right Mind …

And let me be very clear about something. When the word “health” is used here, it means identifiable health. It means the disappearance of sickness. It means the disappearance of blemish, the disappearance of damage, the obvious, I’m going to say, recordable evidence of regeneration.

That Voice is the Voice for Truth, the Holy Spirit, that which is nothing more than your right Mind, and that which is What You Are—Mind, not body—Mind in which the Experience of Creation is going on, in which everything that is experienced is recognized as an Idea set in place by the Will of the Father which is the Infinitude of your Being.

So remember again this week, the simple concept is you want to make a shift from body-identification to Mind-identification. Not a tiny pea-brained mind. Even that is a concept. “Oh, your mind is in your brain, and your brain is in the skull, and it only weighs a certain number of pounds which isn’t very significant, and therefore it’s a small mind.” No. That’s an interesting idea, isn’t it? But not one of you has found the edge of your Mind. Pay attention to the obvious. I will say not all of it is fully illuminated to you at the moment. But when you have explored the extremities of your Mind, you have found you can keep going and going and going, like the energizer bunny. Pay attention to the obvious, and then take hold of the obvious and begin to live your life consciously according to the obvious.

Let that Mind be in you which was also in me. Why? Why let it? Because it already is. And you might as well stop objecting to it. Let it be in you. Agree with what the Father already set in place. You see? Don’t let that Mind be in you which was also in me because I did it, or because it’s a good idea, or it’s better than anything else. Do it because it’s the Truth About You. It’s already been done. It already is you. Do it so that you will be in total internal consistency with yourself, instead of at odds with yourself. Do it because it embodies the Integrity, the already existing Divine Integrity of You. Do it because it means coming back Home into your right Mind so that you might enjoy the fullness of your Sanity.

I love you, Who You Really Are already. And I look forward to being with you next week.