Teachings of Christ Mind

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

We’ll go right into the book.

Indeed, most of the problems you have when reading the Course is that you try to interpret what it is meaning—“What? What is it saying?”—when it’s saying very specifically What It Means.

You all have the tendency to approach everything in your day on the basis of your past experience. You explore new territory within the context of your past experience. You listen for the Truth in the context of your problem, when what’s needed is, in the latter case, to be more interested in What The Truth Is that you need to know than you are in getting the answer to the problem which is fixed in your mind.

You have a problem. You’re suffering, and you want not to suffer. And so you must turn within and you must ask, “What is the Truth that I need to know? To heck with my problem at the moment. What’s the Truth? What’s the Truth about me? What’s the Truth about What God Is Being Right Here, Right Now, that I need to be aware of?” You see? You want to have the Vision, the Experience of What God Is Being Right Here, Right Now, in place of, not in the context of, but in place of the distress you’re experiencing, the problem you’re having. You need to untie yourself from the misperception that you’re suffering from. You’re not here to get a better understanding of the misperception you’re having.

Many people say, “Wow! Raj doesn’t say what I’ve read in the Course,” and therefore discount what I’m saying, instead of saying, “Why might he be saying this? What might he be saying that is consistent with the Course that I don’t see as being consistent with the Course because I’ve been reading the Course on the basis of my prior experience, my prior frame of reference, my expectations?” You need to disentangle yourselves from your old mindsets, which at the bottom line are responsible for your distresses.

Now, a very practical course. The tendency is to read it as though it’s otherworldly; as though it’s talking about things unrelated to your present experience. But I promise you everything in here is relevant. Why is it relevant? Because your present experience is a limited experience of the Kingdom of Heaven. And so, if the Course is addressing the Kingdom of Heaven, it’s addressing the Kingdom of Heaven right here, right now, that you’re right in the middle of. It’s not necessarily relevant to the way you’re looking at the Kingdom of Heaven right now. But right here and right now is what the Course is about. And you are what the Course is about. And you are the Christ that the Course talks about; the Christ entertaining a far more limited belief about what you are than What You Are in your Fullness at this very instant.

So, again …

… and what does it actually say? “Be ye, therefore, perfect, even as your Father in Heaven is perfect.” Be ye What You Already Are because God already is the Author of you.

… yours and mine …

Why is it a shared identification? Because we all have the same Father. Our Being is derived from the Father.

In other words, not fragmented into many little parts.

Now, listen:

Then, I would likewise say, “If you are sick, you are withdrawing from your Brothers and Sisters.”

There’s an excellent book entitled, Illness Or Allness. They are the two ends of the spectrum of one thing. Even the sound “ill” is a tightened form of the openness of “all.” Illness or Allness. Illness is a tightening up, a making smaller, a withdrawing, a making of oneself isolated from everything else. And when one does this, one is inevitably uncomfortable, because it is as though you are trying to constrict something that is Infinite—Yourself.

When you say, “Father, I’d rather see it my way,” and you’re withdrawing from the Father, and you lose the experience of your True Identity, you have withdrawn from Who You Truly Are. If you withdraw from me, you are withdrawing from What You Truly Are because we are the same—the Sons and Daughters of the Father that we all have in common, Who is the very Presence of each one of us always. And there is no other Presence where we are than the Presence of the Father embodied, expressed, experienceable.

So, you know what? Instead of looking at me as though I am something grand and far beyond you, instead of seeing me that way, and making yourself feel small, you should look at me and see in me the potential in you; not just the potential, but the Actuality of You at this moment. You should see in me how much more you are than you’ve been allowing yourself to believe that you are. It should be an inspiration, rather than something that demeans you. It should cause you to let yourself be like me, because we are the same, rather than letting it make you feel small, inconsequential, and worthless, and eventually hopeless.

… you hear that? Quite literally …

But what has God laid upon you? Infinite capacity. Undisturbable Singularity of Mind that It cannot be fragmented. That’s what God has laid upon you.

It’s all in the way you’re looking at things. It’s all in what you are choosing to believe.

If you realized that when you become defensive, you are completely blocking your avenue of escape from the need for defense, you would abandon defense, no matter what was confronting you. The act of defense isolates you more than you were before you brought it actively into play. It reinforces the sense of a split mind. It reinforces the experience of vulnerability that comes from fragmentation. It does exactly the opposite of what you want and need, which is coherence, Singularity, undisturbable Oneness that constitutes Peace. What you want is the Singularity that demonstrates to you where in your Mind that you are invincible, because it is impossible for there to be anything separate or different from you against which you need to be prepared to defend yourself.

And that’s what I meant in my first remarks. If you’re having a problem and you ask God to give you an understanding of the problem so you can understand how to control yourself and your circumstances better to make the problem go away, you’re not asking for the Truth. You’re asking for better control. You’re not asking for the answer which would render the problem, I’m going to say, unintelligible, meaningless to you, leaving nothing there to deal with or handle.

You cannot bring order to chaos by bringing God into the chaos in a form that would allow you to organize the fragmented pieces of chaos into a better format. You’ve got to arrive at a point where you are not valuing the problem more than you are valuing the Experience of Truth in which you will inevitably find the problem dissolving because it wasn’t real. It was nothing more than a series of fragmented thoughts jumbled together, and then an attempt has been made to make sense of it.

The re-establishing of Meaning. Meaning is always Singular. The re-establishing of What Is True in a chaotic thought system is the only way to heal it.

Meaning itself is not of the problem. Meaning exists entirely separate and apart from the problem, entirely separate and apart from confusion in your mind, entirely separate and apart from the appearance of chaos itself. Meaning is found always in Peace, the Experience of Peace, which is the Experience of Singularity, and is available to you constantly, if you will choose for It, rather than the rehearsal of the problem in your mind.

We’re speaking of God here.

You can not know it, meaning you cannot know it alone. You cannot know it standing all by yourself. You cannot know it when you don’t know Who You Are Truly.

Your Function, your Function, your Function is to embody Love. Embody Love—the Acknowledgement of What Is Real in each and every thing. A capacity you have because you are able to abandon the definitions you’ve given everything and ask of God what the Meaning of everything is so that the influx of inspiration and True Vision about a thing is there for you to give to that thing by means of your body. And your engaging in this activity which is your Function will constitute healing, not just of perception, but of what you would call your body.

Again I reassure you that there is no such thing as healing that isn’t evidenced. If you do not have the Manifestation of Perfection, correction is called for, and healing is called for. And that healing will be recognizable, experienceable, recordable by a camera, able to be seen by everyone. It won’t be bliss in the midst of disease, or a body that isn’t perfect.

The next section is entitled:

Well, by now hasn’t it become clear that if you are suffering, you’re in a state of non-acceptance of Reality. If you’re looking around and saying, “It’s nothing but a material world,” it’s like saying, “There’s no Santa Claus,” at Christmas time and the Spirit of the event is lost. When you’re looking around and saying, “It’s just a material world,” you are standing in the non-acceptance of the Kingdom of Heaven, which is What’s Really There, and which you’re having a false interpretation of, and which interpretation you are choosing to believe is valid. So, if right here and right now you are not seeing God in everything, and you are not recognizing the Kingdom of Heaven, then you are not in a place where you are in acceptance of Reality yet.

Please remember the obvious. The only thing there is to confront you is Reality. There is nothing else going on. And you’re seeing it either clearly, or unclearly.

Every single one of you truly does believe that if you yielded completely to God, you would lose valuable things. Maybe never to sew again. Maybe never to cuddle with your cat. Maybe never to be able to touch and smell and be fully aware of your partner. All because all of a sudden you’re going to turn into something utterly spiritual, and intangible, and incapable of having a tactile experience, or a Conscious Experience of Substance. So, you’ll hold off a little while. You’ll justify pushing the snooze button on the alarm, because these things are too valuable to you.

You are afraid to let your good in. You simply are. What is it? Nobody likes a good guy. You have all kinds of thoughts and sayings that keep you in your place, that keep you ignorant.

If you were going to let Truth in, Truth with a capital “T”, you’d have to, you think, recognize … you would have to recognize all your flaws, wouldn’t you? The Truth would uncover all of the error in you. What a bummer. Why would you want to wake up? Why would you want to know the Truth? You see how the ego perspective works.

You know what the Light of Truth does? It illuminates the Truth in You, and leaves you filled with the Conscious Experience of everything that is valuable in you, which God laid upon you by virtue of extending Himself right where you are. And so you need to find ways to abandon your fear of good occurring, to abandon your fear of God appearing in you and in your experience.

… it really is apparent …

Now that’s obvious. But you’ll scuttle this little bit of information back under the carpet, because it’s much easier to believe that Truth will uncover the awfulness in you, or that the Experience of Truth, as I said before, will require of you that you be too conscious. And it will be too much work. When the fact is that you will rest in the Infinite Conscious Experience Of Being. It will not be work.

You know, you go ‘round exercising your will, and you think your will is your private capacity to exert force and make things happen. And that is what you think gives you your individuality and creates a place of realness in the world of you. And so it seems like a great sacrifice to have to let go of that. But that is not your will.

Your will is the Will of God that God embodied right where you are. And that Will is a Singular Will. It’s undivided. It isn’t Him and me; God and me. It’s Us. And it’s so Us that it’s indivisible, and it doesn’t constitute a conscious experience separate from the Father’s.

So …

Now it doesn’t make sense, does it, to fear your own Reality? You didn’t set out to fear your own Reality, but as I said, the moment you said, “I want a divorce. I want to look at things my way for a while,” you imagined a new reality. And in abandoning the old one which was Real and which couldn’t be altered by your abandoning it, you nevertheless created for yourself a so-called independent experience. And you grew to love it. You grew to love the thrill, the excitement of overcoming everything you found yourself afraid of, which was All The Rest of the Kingdom of Heaven.

And so, because you began to take so much value from the experience of independence, you saw anything else which would have to be All The Rest Of What You Divinely Are, you began to see everything else as that which would undermine and deprive you of that which was of ultimate value to you—your assertion of your independent self.

So you didn’t do it on purpose. You did it because in the act, the imagined act of independence, you forgot Who You Were. And in forgetting Who You Were, all that you … all of your Self that you weren’t embracing became that which was your enemy. Why? Because the Rest of You is always insisting on reincorporating the little independent sense of yourself that you’re holding apart from the Rest back into the Rest.

So, the Holy Spirit, that which is nothing more than your right Mind, That Which Is The Rest of You, because It cannot help but engage in reintegration of Its Wholeness, is experienced by you as a threat, as a danger, as that which is intent upon upsetting the status quo, and disturbing whatever sense of peace you’ve managed to achieve in the middle of a conflicted world, a polarized world, which you believe you have the capacity to whip into shape; to temper, to train into better forms of obedience.

Something else obvious here.

… truly …

This is so obvious.

You do not know Who You Are. That’s the reason for the Course to remind you.

[laughing] If you don’t know what the Truth is, on what basis would you justify being afraid?

You see, when you become so preoccupied with what you think you are, and when you are so certain about what you believe you are, and when you have such confidence, it doesn’t matter what else might enter the picture; you cannot allow it. And even though you don’t know what it might be, you still can’t allow it.

But something—the Course, someone, me, and your Guides, and the Holy Spirit in each one of you—has come and is telling you what is beyond what you’re conscious of, so that you’re not ignorant and you’re not making a decision against it ignorantly any longer. You may still choose to ignore it, to distance yourself from it, but you won’t be doing it in total ignorance.

On the other hand, because you are not totally ignorant that the Truth about you, the Conscious Experience of Who and What You Really Are, is available to you, and because it is Truth, all that it will illuminate in you is the Truth of What You Are, [which] can give you the courage to explore, to allow for that which you had steadfastly disallowed for, because it wouldn’t have mattered what it was to you that was outside of your experience, you couldn’t let it in.

Now that I’m telling you the Truth will illuminate the Truth about you and free you from the illusions about you that you’ve been bound by, you do have a justification for letting in a fuller experience, for saying to the Father, “Father, Thy Will be done. Share with me what it is.” Or to say to the Holy Spirit, “Help. I invite You in. I make room for You. And I make room for You by giving my attention to You, instead of my best interpretations, my best definitions, and the strange love I have for ruminating about nonsensical, fragmented arrangements of things at the expense of gaining my access to the Truth that it’s my Birthright to be experiencing.”

So, again …

Now this is very important. Your fundamental Guide is the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is not attempting to force an alien will upon you, but to uncover that it already is, and always has been, your will, which you have been denying and blinding yourself to the experience of by choosing to attempt to be a private, autonomous presence with an ability to have force in your world all by yourself. It’s your right Mind that is insisting on rejoining with you; not an alien will. It’s You!

… your Guide …

… your Real Will …

And yet [laughing], it cannot be forced upon you, not even by that which is nothing more than your right Mind. This little rebellious speck of the Infinitude of What You Are must rejoin the Whole voluntarily by abandoning whatever means it is using to convince itself that it actually can be separate.

Continuing …

… what?

He is nothing more than your right Mind.

That Which Is Whole has no choice but to be Whole, because its Wholeness was set in place by the Father, by the Father’s Will. Therefore, that of you which has been held in trust while you dally with an ego sense of yourself, which is nothing more than your right Mind, is constantly insisting on being Whole because it is Singular. And so it’s constantly inviting you, not coercing you, not forcing you, but inviting you to let it back in. Constantly inviting you to abandon your insistence upon being tiny.

That means that you’re already surrounded by help. You already stand supported on behalf of your Wholeness, on behalf of your Conscious Experience of your Perfection. Everything that is going on is geared toward the miracle, the sudden shift of perception. You are not alone. You have never been abandoned. You are never out of reach because [laughing] you carry with you at all times that which is nothing more than your right Mind. The Whole of You accompanies you everywhere you go.

But you must arrive at a point where the Truth is more important to you than your problem, or the Truth is more important to you than your current belief system; where the Truth is more important to you because you’ve heard that it will, if you let it in, illuminate the Truth about you, and relieve you, release you, from the ignorances that you have been bound by inappropriately and unnecessarily. You are all so constantly accompanied by that which will make you Whole and that which is intent upon uncovering your Wholeness to you. And you know what? This stranger that is accompanying you is nothing more, no one more than your Self in your Totality.

As I was saying earlier …

“Yeah. Pretty [clicking sound], pretty awful to have to lose sin, sickness, and death. I agree. That’s quite a cost. And misery and confusion that accompanies it. Oh, my.”

You see, isn’t it wonderful here in this marvelous experience of independence, and the thrill and the excitement of overcoming the odds? You don’t realize that you have already sacrificed your peace and the Conscious Experience of your Wholeness; your capacity to be anywhere in Infinity in an instant, which you call teleportation; your capacity to experience the Whole of Infinity in the Singularity of one Conscious Experience and yet, at the same time, to experience the Infinite Specificity, the infinite minutiae of details of Creation; to have simultaneously the experience, the Conscious Experience of being Universal, as well as Specific.

You sacrificed a lot, but since no one has come along and said to you that the Rest of What You Are, the Rest of Infinity, is present and available to you right now because right now you’re more than you thought you were, you just plodded along, plodded along in your ignorance.

But now someone is telling you that you already are the Ultimate, that you don’t have to plod ahead any further. You simply have to, let’s say, abandon the trek. Pause a moment. Choose for your Peace, and desire to know the Truth irrespective of the problems that are going on, which your ego would just love to get a better understanding of so that it could manipulate everything into better order without ever allowing you to remember Who You Are. And no longer experience the sacrifice of the Truth About You together with the bliss and the Peace and the Joy and the Love, together with your capacity to look at each other and recognize Ultimate Value there, so that in the recognition of it, the making of the Gift of the recognition of it, you make it your own.

Wow! The Holy Spirit confronts you, not with the fact that you’re trying to be a bad boy, or a bad girl, but confronts you with the fact that, because it’s not God’s Will, it’s not yours either, leaving you in your Integrity, inspiring your Integrity to come forth, rather than become buried further.

Now I am not talking about what you would call your human will. I am not talking about any capacity you think you privately, personally have to be forceful, manipulative, and successfully controlling of circumstances and people.

There is no difference between What Your Will Truly Is and God’s.

What is it your will to do or be? Well, don’t try to figure out the answer to that question, ‘cause any answer you figure out will be wrong. Your will is to fulfill your Function. That’s the only thing your will can be.

“Oh, I know. Well, that doesn’t tell me a hell of a lot, does it? The expression of my true will is to embody my function. Thanks a lot! Anybody mind telling me what my function is?”—with a little bit of sarcasm and righteous indignation.

I’ll be happy to tell you what your will is. Your will is to recognize God in each and every thing. Your Function is, I’m going to put it to you gently, is to be like God. And God saw everything that He had made, and behold it was verily God Himself. God does nothing less than recognize Himself in the Movement of Being. Now what makes you think you might have a function different from that? Your Function is to see What’s True. Your Function is to see What’s Real. Your Function is to extend it and make it your own, so that you feel the Singularity of Being with no fragmentation associated with it, and therefore no confusion associated with it, and therefore with utter Peace. And a capacity to be Joyful; not just happy, happy, happy. The capacity to be Joyful, which is no small thing, because that which is Singular, when it is Joyful, is, for lack of better words, a Joy which resounds through Infinity without ever losing any aspect of the substantiality of Itself.

Talk about a hit the ego would get if it could have that experience. It shouts, but what it shouts fades out as it goes through space. But the Joy of Being extends Infinitely, without ever fading out, without the Full Substance of What It Is being fully experienceable. [Laughing] You will never have the experience of wondering if you’ve been heard.

The extension of the acknowledgement of What Is Real in each and every thing; which is another way of saying the recognition of God in each and every thing; which is another way of saying that the Experience of Being is the experience of glorifying God. That’s what the words “glorifying God” mean. A holy, religious experience? Yes, but you know what? It’s like looking at the poinsettias here and experiencing them fully. And you never really think of any spiritual words. It means being present with whatever is going on. The African violets over there. Each of you sitting in your chairs and experiencing the capital “M” Meaning, the significant Meaning, the Divine Meaning of each of you, of each thing. That’s what glorifying God is. It’s recognizing a thing for What It Really Is and enjoying it to the max, experiencing it to the max. And, by virtue of having the experience, broadcasting/communicating the experience to all the Rest of Infinity.

Don’t worry. You’ll never lose the opportunity to smell the roses. You just think you know what smelling the roses means. And it’s a hint. It’s a hint of the Ultimate.

Weird thing to stick in there, isn’t it? Hmm. Well, when any one of you speaks from an ungrounded and unconnected place, you speak “in alien tongues.” And you think in alien ways—fragmented, distorted, unintelligent. But communication never actually occurs. Whenever you are dealing with your neighbor, or your family, or your friends, and it’s not your intent to be glorifying what is of value about them, you are not only speaking to them in alien tongues, and they are not only speaking to you in alien tongues, but no communication is actually occurring. Nothing of significance is happening. So talking to each other from independent, autonomous stances is not your function.

But here’s your Function.

There will never be joint creations (plural). There will only ever be joint will where you and the Father constitute a Singularity—not a duality; not a friendly, chummy duality—but a Singularity in which neither one of you is claiming an independent vantage point. And you become One in Intent, One in Will.

To not claim a presence different from the One Infinite Presence That You Are, a Presence which is constantly Conscious, and therefore constantly in the Movement of Consciousness, which is therefore experienced as All That Is—the Kingdom of Heaven, the Universe, Infinity. The acknowledgement of That. The recognition of your Self in That. Where the full Meaning of the redness of the poinsettia is communicated Infinitely, for lack of better words, through the Universe, which is some Aspect of the Infinitude of You in your Singular, Universal Oneness, as well.

Now, I’m going to stop there.

You may think that I’m getting way out there. But what I’m trying to convey to you is that what you call “way out there” is the right here, right now. And right here, right now, is where you’ll experience it.

I love you.

Abide with what I’ve said. If anything, wonder, “Why did he say that? What were his reasons? What were the Divine Reasons for this being said, and not something else? And if it doesn’t jive with what I read in the Bible, or what I’ve read in the Course, why did he say it? Where might the compatibility of the two be found?” It will be found not in trying to magnify the difference, but in asking, “What might the Divine and Enlightening Reason have been for him saying what he said?”

And I look forward to being with you next week.