Teachings of Christ Mind

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

We’ve been talking about the purpose of the body and the use to which you put it, and the fact that when those two things are out of sync, you have problems. The body is a means, not an end. It is a means of communication. And the only worthy communication that you can engage in is the acknowledgement in another, or in a thing, of That Which Is Divine about them; the acknowledgement of What They Truly Are; the recognition of God right there. The purpose of the body is to be the means by which the communication of such acknowledgement occurs.

Now let’s talk for a moment about body as an end. You might not think I’m aware of things like this, but if you walk into any department store into the kitchen section these days, you will find toasters that are styled in a 1930’s and 1940’s theme. Now you tell me what the style of the appearance of a toaster has to do with browning bread so that you can enjoy it with your eggs and bacon in the morning? [laughing] It serves a purpose of being an end in itself—a decoration in your kitchen. And, of course, if you’re one of the first ones to have it, wow, you can be proud of being up-to-date in a modern kitchen—which is really ridiculous because it’s a design from the 1930’s! I mean, you see the senselessness of it? When a toaster becomes a fixture in your kitchen so that it (the kitchen) has a pleasing appearance, and even makes some statement about you [sparse scattered audience laughs], it’s lost its purpose, hasn’t it? It has become an end in itself. And, at the bottom line, the purpose of it having an end is to make a statement about you. This is always what using a thing as an end means.

Now, I’ve mentioned before that there’s really only one Function, or one Purpose, for Vision, for seeing. It’s much the same as the function of the body, in that the Purpose of Vision is to allow you to be able to acknowledge That Which Is Real in whatever you’re looking at. In other words, the Purpose of Vision is to give something.

But I’ve mentioned before that you generally use vision to get, to gather data, to know if you’re safe, to know how to behave under the circumstances. And when you’re doing that, you’re not making the Gift. When you’re doing that, you are involved in self-consciousness—not other-consciousness—self-consciousness. And the only reason any of you ever engage in self-consciousness is for self-protection, which means that you have identified yourself as body, rather than Consciousness/Mind. Whenever you are not identifying yourself as Consciousness, giving your attention to making the Gift of acknowledging the Truth of everything you’re seeing, you’re engaged in self-defense. You are identified as a body. Your body has become an object that you call you. And you’re like the toaster that has some other purpose than browning bread. You’ve lost your purpose.

You see, we’ve used the phrase “using the body as a means or an end,” and you might not have quite understood practically what that meant. But when you are self-conscious and you are using vision to get, you have shifted to using the body as an end. How is that? When you are gathering data to find out whether you’re safe or not, you try to do this data-gathering skillfully and unnoticed. Right? I mean, you don’t really want everybody to know that you don’t trust them.

And so, you use your body to distract them by making a presentation that has a certain effect. One of the ways you do it is that you dress nicely to make a good impression. You don’t walk in with guns on your hips, and bullets across your chest, and a knife in your hand. You walk in looking as benign as possible, with as much elegance as is appropriate under the circumstances. You don’t want to look like a slob, because you want to appear to be credible, decent, respectable. Right? But still, you use your body to make an impression. That’s not a Gift because it’s selfish. You’re protecting yourself while you engage in surreptitiously gathering information.

You roll over in bed in the morning and turn to your wife, or husband, and in a soft voice you say, “Did you sleep well?” You see? Benign. [laughing] What you’re really asking is [laughing], “Is it safe for me to get up out of bed without being on guard?” You see? But you have a presentation. And this act of apparent caring is totally selfish. Why? Because you think that you may be in danger, that you may be confronted by somebody who’s still mad at you for what happened last night. You see? That’s what is characteristic of self-consciousness.

Now, I want to shift here. Creation is an UN-self-conscious, exuberant, joyful, spontaneous Expression of Being. If something happens that tickles your funny-bone and causes you to burst out laughing, you suddenly move into a state of total un-self-consciousness. And if you want to find out what happened, how you behaved, you would have to go back to a videotape; some sort of picture that you could watch. You would have to find out what you were being after the fact, because you were in a state of un-self-conscious self-expression. In other words, the impression you were making, or how you looked, was the furthest thing from your mind.

God doesn’t BE FOR anyone else. Creation is not a movement to impress. Creation is not a movement to create an impression. It is a spontaneous Movement of exquisite perfection, because as we’ve been talking about, God is a Singularity. Creation is that singularity rendered visible, recognizable, experienceable to the Mind that moved that was the Act of Creation.

When you are using your body properly, you’re not self-conscious. You’re not into any level of conscious awareness of what kind of an impression you’re making. You are engaged in the on-the-spot recognition of the Presence of God moving in whatever you’re looking at, whether it’s a Brother, or a Sister, or a plant, or a table, or a leaf, or a fingernail. It’s a pure Gift without strings. And you know what? You can bring that Purity of Being, you can bring that Conscious Experience Of Being into any and every aspect of your day. It’s not a holy, or spiritual, or religious thing to be relegated to a synagogue, or a church, or a temple.

So we will continue. But at least now you have a better understanding of how it is that you can slip into using your body as an end, rather than a means.

Your habit, your persistence of perception would hold your body as something separate from you; something not you that you inhabit for a period of time, and then abandon. Or it abandons you, it would seem. But this is not the Truth. It is the Visibility and Tangibility of your Individuality which is God presencing Himself right where you are. And your body must be brought back into your recognition of your Self, just as the world must be brought back into your recognition of your Self, so that there is not this split perception in which some of your conscious experience is yours and you, and the rest of it is not yours and is not you.

The ego’s goal is for you to keep this separation, to keep this artificial division in place in your mind, because that’s the one thing that can keep you from remembering Who You Are. It’s the one thing that can apparently successfully distract you from waking up. And so it’s very important, it’s essential to become clear about body, world, universe, and you.

Okay. Next section:

And once again, let’s not forget that the Holy Spirit is nothing more than your right Mind.

Well, what would be a real question? A real question would be something that uncovers and undoes a misperception. The questions the ego asks distracts you from asking such pertinent questions.

… wow! There’s a good question: One that will tend to undo the illusion or the misperception …

Now this is an example of the absurdity of an ego’s question: “Where does your lap go when you stand up? What is the sound of one hand clapping?”

They are questions that can’t be answered. But the ego asks them, together with the suggestion that there is an answer, and that it would be well for you to engage in finding it. It’s very much like the children’s game where they send an unsuspecting buddy out on a snipe hunt, knowing that there aren’t any snipes, you see, and taking advantage of the buddy’s ignorance. It’s a … so we’re talking about learning to distinguish answerable and unanswerable questions, evaluating the ego’s questions, so that you can recognize that going for that answer is going to be futile and will not uncover anything that will displace a misperception.

See [small laugh], when the ego tempts you to sickness. You see, the proper place to give your attention is the undoing of the temptation—the recognition that you’re being tempted—so that you may turn your back on the tempter, and say, “Get thee behind me. Get out of my sight. I do not choose to embrace you and give any part of my attention to you.” You see?

Now, there’s an important point in here.

It doesn’t say ask the Holy Spirit to help you see that the body isn’t real, or that it doesn’t exist. You ask for the right perception of the body, because something is going on there That Is Real, and you want the right perception.

This next sentence is very important.

… it’s a distorted use of will.

The ego would say, “Your body is acting up. Your body is at odds with you. Correction of your body needs to occur. You need medication. You need to coerce it, one way or another, into better, more harmonious behavior. Understanding, of course, that it’s not really you. And it’s only a temporary abode. And therefore, doesn’t really care about you, doesn’t have your best interests at heart. So you need to coerce this that is perfectly willing to function at odds with you and not in your best interest. You need to finesse this enemy into better behavior.” And all the time that this dialogue is going on, you are being tempted not to give your attention to the tempter and still his voice by withdrawing your attention from it.

Your body cannot be at odds with you. It cannot be your enemy, your opponent, because it’s sole Function is to Identify the Presence of your Individuality perfectly. It is nothing less than your total ally. But the ego says that it is something that it is not, and wants you to deal with it on that basis.

Now …

The Reality of your body is totally harmless, because total harmlessness is the condition of its Reality. The Father moved. The Father moves and the Movement looks like you. What do you mean, “looks like you”? Looks like you. Is experienceable as you. And because the Movement of God was harmless, the Visibility and Tangibility, the Experienceability of you, is harmless. Not only that, it is also harmlessness.

In other words, you don’t really have a mind that is capable of being successfully split, and therefore conflicted; that actually has the capacity to look at something and see something that isn’t there; see something different from What’s Really There.

It’s important here, not only is the Course bringing your attention to the fact that every Aspect of Creation is harmless, in spite of the apparent danger that you can see in it; your Mind is also harmless—not truly capable of creating a conflicted world to see. It may distort your perception, but it can’t make God’s Creation actually be harmful. Your capacity to see the Kingdom of Heaven is intact. That’s the point. Your capacity to see Reality As It Is speaks to the harmlessness of your Mind. The fact that no matter how conflicted you seem to experience it, that is not its true state. That is an illusion as well.

Do you see that what it’s saying here, the Reality of everything observed—I’m inserting that word—the Reality of everything observed is totally harmless, because total harmlessness is the condition of Its Reality. It is also the condition of the observer of Its Reality. You see now? Harmlessness is the nature of the observed and the observer. So don’t be too proud of yourself if you are one of those who can quickly and easily recognize something is wrong. Got it?

If you are going to fly in the face of the ego’s suggestion that you do indeed live in a hostile and harmful environment, you are also going to have to challenge the idea that you actually … actually have a capacity to recognize danger, a capacity to see evil. Because if you want healing, you’ve got to recognize the benign-ness of that which needs to be healed, together with the benign-ness of your Mind in the act of observing the thing that needs healing. That is the only way you bring Singularity into the picture. And Singularity is the only thing that causes instantaneous transformation of illusion into the Conscious Experience of Reality that’s called healing.

How on earth could you stand making a Gift of acknowledging the Truth of what you’re seeing, if you hold out for the right to not only see Truth, but error as well? If your mind is split, you’re going to give the gift of a split mind. And so you’ll say, “There’s a real something going on here called cancer, but I know that cancer isn’t real. I know that cancer isn’t ordained by God. And so I am going to give my attention to acknowledging what has to be the Truth right there. And I am going to thereby invalidate the seeming evidence of a lie there, of something untrue.” But if you don’t do that and then, as well, correct the idea in your mind that you, because of your spiritual advancement, are able to see the difference between a real problem and the Truth, and that’s what gives you power to heal. You’ve got to get past that, because you don’t actually have a Mind capable of seeing an illusion needing to be corrected.

And as long as you claim that capacity to be able to clearly see Truth and error—“real error” that the Truth can destroy—you haven’t moved into an unconflicted State of Mind in which you are being the spontaneous, uncalculated Giver of the recognition of Truth. You will not have moved into Singularity. If you’re going to see the benign-ness, the harmlessness of the thing you’re observing, you need to also claim the benign-ness of you as the observer.

Continuing …

Now I’ve just talked about meeting its conditions. The conditions are your willingness to acknowledge and embrace the fact that the Truth Of You is that you are Pure Consciousness which is benign, because it’s not divided. It’s not split up into a capacity to see good and evil. And you have to be willing to embrace the fact that no matter what out there seems to need to be healed, there still is only one thing going on there, and that is God presencing Himself as Creation, and that this Creation is, in spite of the way It is perceived at the moment, utterly and awesomely Perfect.

When you bring the observed, and yourself as the observer, into that kind of Singular alignment of Intent, your will becomes identical with the Father’s, and there is only One Will present. And this constitutes Singularity. In other words, don’t mess around with the word “Singularity” and wonder what it means. It means un-conflicted-ness, Pure Harmony, Pure Peace. When you are experiencing Peace, Real Peace, there’s no conflict. That’s Singularity. Singularity is not some sort of universal not-quite-understandable meaning. It’s an experience where nothing extraneous to It is present, like Peace.

Reality will seek you and find you when you meet Its conditions.

Truth reveals Itself the moment you are presenting nothing to block Its presentation of Itself, and you get rid of the blocks to Its experience by being the benign observer of a benign world. A benign observer and a benign world that are benign because you aren’t a shitty little ego, and you aren’t living in a shitty world, because God is All That Is Going On, and you’re not separate from that Going-on-ness of God.

Continuing …

… so much less is called for from you than you think.

… Truth, Reality …

The moment you’re undefended against Reality, it will flood you.

Yes. I know. Sounds so simple, and it can’t possibly be that simple.

How do you let the Whole be yours? See how quickly you forget. You let the Whole be yours by not reinforcing the definitions of everything that you’ve always been using. You let it in by getting up in the morning saying, “I don’t know what anything means. I think I know what it means. I thought I knew what it means. But I am willing to make the assumption that I don’t know What Anything Really Means because I’m quite positive I’m not awake yet. And therefore, there is more here for me to see. And so today I am going to dedicate myself to the best of my ability in every single situation to be looking for the more of What Is Going On than what I’m seeing. I am going to stop defending my confidences in what I think everything is.”

All you have to do is neglect to reinforce what you believe. You should write that down. All you have to do is neglect to reinforce what you believe. That is how you let the Whole be yours.

The minute you take down the dike, the minute you remove the wall, what’s on the other side of the wall fills up the space, rushes in, infills you. And what’s on the other side of the wall? The Rest of You that’s been called the Holy Spirit. The Answer. That which is the Answer because It knows all the Answers, because It is the full Consciousness of Truth that is yours.

You all already know the answers. You’ve just been playing around at, “What would it be like if I didn’t know all the answers?” I’m going to play being ignorant for a while, and see what the experience is like. And so, you block off All The Rest Of You that Knows all the Answers. Take this little tiny piece of the Infinity Of You and you say, “This is me. And only that which is inside that small area is what I know. And so there’s so much that I don’t know that it’s going to be a pure adventure to discover it.” You see?

Reality.

Now …

… what? Surprise! Surprise!

Don’t shake your head.

As I’ve said before, you’re afraid of Waking, Awakening, for a number of reasons; not the least of which is that you’re afraid it’s going to be too much work. It’s going to require too much of you, that you’re going to have to be too conscious, that you’re going to have to be too alert. And being alert, because it’s always been a part of defense for you, has not been something you’ve been able to recognize as so absolutely natural to you that you rest in alertness. That alertness, that Consciousness, is an Experience of Peace. And so you push Awakening away from you for fear that it will be so demanding of you that you would rather put up with, tolerate, the dissonance of life that you’re experiencing because it’s not so demanding.

Being Awake is absolutely UNdemanding, because a Mind that isn’t experiencing disintegration is in a State of Perfect Peace. And Mind moves infinitely in Perfect Peace, and work is a concept entirely foreign to It. It is effortless. And your fear that it will be too demanding keeps you from discovering and having the experience of Effortless, Peaceful, Infinite, Conscious Awareness.

Again, all forms of sickness, even the one that seems most impossible to deal with, death, are physical expressions of the fear of Awakening.

… what?

Again, because you do not realize that the Experience of Consciousness is an Experience of Rest. Creation, the Movement of Creation occurs in the context of effortlessness. Therefore, rest.

Making One.

… what? [laughing] The crazy dream of that you have woken up and you’re getting ready for work, while you’re still sound asleep in bed.

… dreams are illusions of doing anything. But dreams are specifically illusions of joining…

Well, joining while you’re sleeping under the ego’s guidance amounts to data gathering, constantly making moves against your opponent. Maybe even making moves against your opponent that are so close to being for your opponent that your opponent doesn’t realize that you’re really seeing him as an antagonist. You see?

In other words, the Holy Spirit can turn every single one of your dreams to your advantage. How? By helping you to question what you’re looking at so that you’re asking questions that help break misperceptions. Misperceptions? Well, the only place misperceptions are going on are in your dream, your current state of unconsciousness of Truth. So the ego uses your misperceptions to keep you asleep. While the Holy Spirit uses your misperceptions to help you wake up, by not distracting you from questions, the answers to which will undo misperceptions and release you from the bondage of your commitment to them.

And I’m going to say how you wake up is the sign of how you went to sleep, as well. In other words, your Awakening, as I’ve said before, is going to be you retracing the steps you took away from Home. So the trip will be unique to each of you, because you all used different reasons for arriving at the same place, and you will undo those reasons, one by one, as you go back Home.

Again …

It doesn’t make sense. Let me ask it this way to help clarify [it] for you. Who are you giving your dreams to now? Who are you giving your sleep-time to now? Are you giving it to the Holy Spirit? To the best of your ability, aren’t you taking your experience and turning it over to the Holy Spirit and asking the Holy Spirit, “What’s the Truth here?” So now you are giving your sleep experience and your dreams to the Holy Spirit asking for clarification. But until you did that, you were giving it to the other teacher. And, of course, the other teacher kept telling you to push the snooze button. You see? “Stay asleep a little bit longer. Stay asleep a little bit longer.”

So …

And I’m saying, “And to whom are you giving it now?”

And …

And I’m adding, “Under which teacher are you placing it now?” You know. “Holy Spirit, here is my dream. Here’s my sleepiness. Help me see the Truth.” Which teacher are you giving it to now?

Now this can be used metaphorically, as well as actually, we’ll say. When you go to sleep at night, do you turn your rest over to the Holy Spirit? Or do you just say, “Wow! I’m a very tired body. It’s been a rough day, and I know it’s going to be rough tomorrow. And so I’m going to get to sleep as quickly as I can so that my poor, tired, physical body can go through a process of rejuvenation. And so that I can have a certain appropriate number of dreams that cause my mind to come back into better balance. And I sure hope I have that appropriate number of dreams because I know I need to be able to be ready to deal with tomorrow.” You see? Is that the way you’ve gone to sleep? Or have you turned it over to the Holy Spirit?

But, likewise, in terms of truly waking up to the Conscious Experience of What You Are and your Birthright, you must turn that over to the Holy Spirit. And inevitably your Awakening, even if it seems to be in little increments, will be invariably an Experience of Joy; not one of dispiritedness.

Continuing …

And I’m going to say here, sickness in terms of a wish to have things be what they are not. A wish to have things be what you’ve defined them as, rather than asking the Father to disclose to you What It Really Incredibly Is.

Continuing …

It’s impossible for you to become less than What You Divinely Are. It’s impossible for you to become less than What God Is Being right there where you are right now. It’s impossible! Because it’s impossible, you haven’t accomplished it, even though you believe your imaginations. And because you haven’t accomplished it, you can wake up right now.

Because Creation moves in Peace. Creation moves effortlessly.

… “Help me, Father, to no longer be afraid of waking up. Help me be willing to risk the chance that the experience of being Awake will be an absence of personal demand on me to keep everything together, and to keep my mind in such perfect order that nothing bad can happen to me in an infinite world that I can’t be positively assured is benign.” You see? “Help me see that that’s not what I’m faced with. Help me risk the chance that if I abandon my control, that if I abandon my need to be in charge, I will experience being inseparable from the Movement of Creation, and that it will be an experience of pure effortlessness, while being more Conscious than I ever remember having been.” Let this be your prayer.

The will to wake. You see, it’s really simple. The will to wake isn’t some sort of will you’ve got to screw up the courage to express. The will to wake is simple. The will to wake is the will to Love. That’s not foreign to you.

… and what is Love? It’s you using your body as a means of communication in acknowledgement of That Which Is Real in each and every thing.

Again …

… that which is nothing more than your right Mind.

Your function.

… what?

You don’t just see it—the difference. You see it, and because you see it, the false gets replaced by What Is True. What are you doing when that happens? You’re allowing yourself to be the benign observer of that which is observed as being benign. And we’ve brought the Singularity into place where you’re recognizing the harmlessness of your world together with the recognition that you, the observer, are engaging in harmlessness by not seeing in a conflicted manner.

… on the other hand …

The observer from the observed.

You could say to make unconscious is to heal. And, of course, for the mind to become unconscious of the Truth secures the ego’s existence. And that is healing from the ego’s vantage point, because anything which undermines its existence is an enemy that it needs to be healed of so it’s not present in its experience, and there is no threat of its annihilation.

The ego sees True healing the way you see disease in your ignorant state. Anything that will undermine it is an enemy, is a—what do you call it?—a terminal disease, which it can’t afford to catch. So healing of the potential of this terminal disease, for the ego, would be for the terminal disease to disappear. And yet what is a terminal disease for the ego is nothing more than, and nothing less than, Truth—Reality. Because Reality will make it obvious that the ego had no existence and was just imagined.

Continuing …

… or to make, to render unconscious …

As long as you are experiencing ignorance, and as long as you are looking through the lens of ignorance at your world, and you’re not experiencing It as What It Is, and you’re not experiencing yourself as What You Are, isn’t this making nothing out of what God created? Because why? There’s no Gift occurring. There’s no body being used as a means to an end—that end being the recognition and acknowledgement of the Presence of God in each and every thing, as well as in yourself. You see? And so while you’re not recognizing God, all of you are, in effect, making God nothing and nowhere. It doesn’t make God disappear, but it does make your experience like that.

Now, if you can’t make nothing out of God, then you haven’t been made mindless. You haven’t been made incapable of recognizing and acknowledging God. And so your capacity to do that is totally intact. And you need to know that so that you can be curious to know how to reinstate it as your Conscious Experience by asking, “Holy Spirit, God, how do I renew my Birthright of being able to see Reality as it is right now?” See, that’s one of those questions that the ego will not direct you to ask. And it’s one of the questions that will, when the answer is heard, undo misperception.

Continuing …

Why? Is anybody wondering why? Why? Because it thrives on the hit of believing that it can succeed through attack in overcoming the Consciousness of God that would remind you of Who You Are, so that it (the ego) through your faith and commitment in it, may become enthroned as the equal of God, because it has succeeded in causing you to forget God. And that’s it in a nutshell.

It’s just an insanity. It’s … let’s put it this way. It’s not a big problem. It’s just a misperception, which is being held to so tightly that it seems to be insurmountable. It seems as though it will be impossible to wake up, but it’s not. It’s a little problem. It’s a little misperception. It sounds terrible.

… mm. Wonder where it got the substance to feel and despise something. It didn’t.

This could be quite an indictment on all of you, if you all accept the idea that you are an ego. But you’re not—that you are, is a little misperception.

Sounds serious, doesn’t it? It’s just a little misperception about what you are. There is no ego that has a capacity to desire anything or want anything. The ego is an imaginative collection of thoughts, draped around a Christ. That’s all. And if there’s any impetus to anything, if there’s any will, if there’s any feeling, if there’s any commitment, it’s borrowed from the Christ around which this flimsy collection of ideas is draped. Because you put on your ego garment for an impression, like the modern 1940’s toaster that will make your kitchen look so good. You see?

So just remember, you are the Christ right now wearing a garment that you are tempted to believe and be committed to, but the garment is nothing but a collection of spurious ideas that express no intelligence whatsoever. But you are quite capable of believing unintelligent things.

The way out of this dilemma is the one we’ve been talking about, and talking about, and talking about. Have an object of your affection. Find anything, find as many things, find everything, if you can, in your experience worthy of an inquisitiveness on your part, an inquisitiveness to see the more That Is Real right there than what you’re seeing. Because somewhere you heard that there’s a God, and that this God is All in All, and that everything that is occurring is the Reality of the Movement of Him, His Mind, including you.

And you want the clearer experience of you, as well as your world. You want the clearer experience of what being the observer means, as well as the clearer experience of what the observed is, so that there is healing. You ask for that, so that in the influx of the inspiration of Truth that comes because you asked for it, you will be ready to spontaneously give the acknowledgement of that to that which you are observing.

So, it boils down to the centuries old answer to the problems of human existence—Love. And you all understand What Love Is. So, what you’re being asked to give, in order to have the experience of waking up, is something not foreign to you. And although we have hundreds of page here yet to read, and even though every Sunday night I can turn three pages into seventeen pages of text [audience amusement], the answer is simple. And we will continue as long as we need to in discovering the simplicity of it, so that you allow it to happen.

I look forward to being with you next week. Okay.