Teachings of Christ Mind

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

We spoke at length last week about some wonderful things which I would encourage all of you to review, even as we move forward because they lay a groundwork that is essential as you move forward.

The one thing that you all suffer from is the idea … the idea, the belief, that you have a will different from the Father’s. In other words, that you have one that you got from somewhere and it’s all your own. And in entertaining that belief and adopting it as true, and behaving on its behalf, rather than on behalf of your Real Source, you automatically and unavoidably find yourself in a state of fear, because that which grounds you, that which is the immovability of you, has been set aside by you in favor of your imagination. And without that groundedness, you have no choice but to feel vulnerable.

But it’s not your Birthright. Feeling vulnerable is not your Birthright. It is not natural to you. And ultimately, it’s not a real experience. It’s a perceived experience, but it’s not real because the Christ That You Are, the Visibility and Tangibility of God That You Are is unalterable, hasn’t changed, hasn’t gone anywhere.

If the experience of vulnerability is not natural to you and is not real, you are free, you are free to abandon it at any moment you choose. You are utterly free not to set into motion any further the dynamics that cause you to feel vulnerable, because you have the choice. And you also have, at least, the intellectual awareness because I’ve been sharing it with you. You have, at the least, an intellectual awareness that you aren’t what you thought you were, that you really are the Christ, that you really are at this instant nothing more, and nothing less, than God Expressing Himself As You. So you have a justification for attempting to abandon the processes, the intellectual mental processes that set into motion for you this invalid and unreal experience of vulnerability.

This you that you ask God to fix up is pure fantasy. It can’t be fixed because it doesn’t exist. And waking up constitutes your abandoning the belief that you as something on your own have a will different from God’s.

We also talked about one other thing that I want to re-express, and that is that when you are convinced that you are an independent entity in your own right, and that it is your purpose to be this independent entity successfully and well, your prayers to God end up being prayers to help you be independently successful, responsible. But when you do, you are praying for something you do not want. If you could get God to say “Yes” to that prayer, you would be getting God to put His stamp of approval, His agreement, His determination on the idea that you are different from Him, that you are independent. And at the bottom line, that means that you would get God’s determination about you that you are an orphan, and therefore permanently lost, because God’s determination is an eternal determination. Thus, that kind of prayer will never get an answer.

Some of you are beginning to get a feeble glimmer of the fact that no matter how hard you try, you just aren’t making it as an independent entity. And I don’t mean that you are getting the idea as a result of quote “this lifetime” unquote, but a longer, a much longer experience of failure at not being able to determine your world and your life and yourself, all by yourself, and that you have not been able to come anywhere close to succeeding at creating a presence out of whole cloth, out of nothing more than your pure imagination. You are beginning to have the experience of exhaustion. You are close to being willing to give up the ethic, like the Prodigal Son [deep sigh], and turn wearily for Home—wearily because you’re exhausted from the effort to accomplish something that’s impossible. It’s finally beginning to sink in to you that maybe it is impossible, and that it’s no longer a task worthy of your attention.

Let’s go to the book.

Believing something doesn’t make it True or Real. The fact that it’s Real is what makes it Real, whether you believe it or not. But for you to experience it, you have to be willing to accept the Truth of it. You must let the Truth penetrate your awareness by bringing no resistance to it.

Continuing …

Now see, you can deny that you’re the Christ. You can just say, “I’m just a human being. And I’m struggling through my life. And my life is particularly difficult because my parents weren’t highly educated. Or they thought they were, but they had peculiar ideas, and therefore I ended up being taught things that were not useful to me. Or they behaved toward me in a way that wasn’t supportive of my developing a healthy sense of my self-worth. And as a result, I’m warped. I’m a twisted person, suffering through my adulthood because of their inarticulate way of raising me, their ignorant way of raising me.” You see? “And that’s me. Twisted, little, poor me struggling. But you know what? They couldn’t kill my determination! [laughing] No man, they couldn’t kill my determination. They couldn’t get me down. And so, you know what? I’m overcoming my shortcomings with a vengeance.”

[in a very amused voice] And that is the best choice of words. This is me, Raj, saying that is the best choice of words. Because one who is that state of mind determines to be whole at the expense of those who sought to take their wholeness away by not illuminating it to them, by not treating them the way they expected to be treated, and on, and on, and on. If it’s not parents, it’s the political system, or it’s the school system, or it’s the medical institutions, something. Something has deprived that one from developing the best in themselves. “And that’s me,” they say. “That’s me!”

And in one way or another, each of you is saying, “That’s me! You know, sure glad I have the Course though, ‘cause poor, twisted me really needs it.” Bullshit! There is no poor, twisted you, except in your imagination. But you exist, and you need the Course. Why? Because you’re twisted? No! Because you’re not twisted. Because you have not stopped, no matter what you have come to believe, being exactly What God Is Presence-ing Himself As right there where you are.

The Course is like the Truth shining on you and uncovering what is Real about you, so that what is unreal about you which you have adopted and believed, can be seen for the fallacy it is, for the nothingness that it is, so that you stop acting as though it were true. And especially, so that you stop acting as though it were true because you have begun to realize that you don’t have to do anything to earn What Is True about you. You don’t have to do anything to deserve What Is True about you.

But there is one thing you do have to do. You have to stop behaving as though it’s not true about you. You have to stop acting out the old habit patterns which are the way you get vengeance on your past. And I promise you that as long as you’re trying to get vengeance on your past, or those whom you attribute to your problems to out of your past, you are confirming for yourself that you are a twisted victim now.

You, on your own, are what you’re asking God to do when you say to Him, “Help me be independent without all of this suffering.” You are determining for yourself that you are indeed independent, that you do indeed have a will of your own, that you are exactly what you believe you are, and everyone and everything else is what you believe it is. And you’re confirming it, and locking yourself in to the very suffering that you do not want.

Of course, in order to have what you want, which is the Experience of Peace, the Experience of being the Presence of Love, the experience of invulnerability, the way in which you’re going to get what you want, what you really want, is that you’re going to have to let go of all of the determinations you have adopted as being true about you which are not true at all, because they were never set in place in you by That Which Is Presence-ing Himself right there where you are right this moment. Because God is not putting in you what He is not.

Simply realize that you love what you’ve determined that you are. You have an attachment to it. But it’s an attachment to something that isn’t real. It’s an attachment to something that God didn’t put there. And the attachment itself to something that isn’t there, is something that God didn’t place in you. Therefore, your addiction has no actual substance to it. And that’s why you can be released from it instantaneously without withdrawals.

Continuing …

There is no Love without you being the Presence of Love. It requires your cooperation. It requires your involvement. It requires you to let It in to you so that It can spill over through you. If you don’t let It in, you’re blocking the Function of your Being, or at least attempting to and suffering in the attempt, because when you attempt to do the impossible, it never feels good.

Continuing …

So much for, “Well, everyone creates his own reality. Everyone creates her own reality.” [brief laugh] No way! Reality was set into motion not by you. And you have only one choice, and that is to cooperate with it. The human condition is the apparent result of not cooperating with the Way Things Work.

Continuing …

… your attempts of any kind to deny What Is …

[amused] It’s like the degree to which of the … the degree of force that you bring to the movement of your fist into an immovable object will be exactly correlative to the amount of pain you will experience.

To whatever degree you resist God, to whatever degree you deny your Identity, to that degree you will be having an uncomfortable experience; a suffering experience. Not because the wall is punishing you. Not because the Laws of God are punishing you. But because you are attempting to do something impossible. And whatever amount of force you bring to bear, whatever degree of determination you bring to bear upon the denial of What Is, you will be that uncomfortable. Get this point, because then you’ll stop blaming God. And because you know what’s causing the discomfort, you will know what to attend to.

You will know, “Oh, I’m going against the Way Things Work. I’m trying to be what I cannot be. I had better find something else to do.” Ah! Now you’re in the arena where a miracle can occur; a sudden shift of perception. And that’s the key.

Continuing …

Does everybody now understand what that means when it says, “even though you do not want it”? Again, it means that you do not want, ultimately you do not want confirmation of your orphan-hood. You do not want confirmation from the only thing that can give a true confirmation which is God, you do not want confirmation that you are not connected with Him, not connected with your Source. You do not want that.

You think you want what you’ll get in place of it. But what you’ll get in place of it, is something you have imagined; not something that is actually available to you to have. And until you know that, you won’t give up. Until someone tells you that, you won’t have justification for giving up the ethic, the quest, for successful righteous independence.

Again …

Now that’s the big question.

Did God give you the capacity to devote yourself to nothing? No. Is your devotion to nothing valid? No. Can you then ever have in actuality devoted yourself to nothing? No. Which means that all of this time that you have thought you were devoted to something, which was really nothing, hasn’t been happening in actuality.

Now this is not an accurate, true illustration, but it gives you the idea. You’re asleep on a grassy knoll in the middle of the Kingdom of Heaven, having a dream of devotion to something that’s impossible. What’s really happening? The Son of God is basking in the sun on a grassy knoll in the Kingdom of Heaven. The Christ. And while falling asleep and having a dream, a fantasy passed by. But the fantasy didn’t happen. The Christ resting in the sun, was what was happening the whole time. You see?

So, all of this time that you think you have spent refining your soul, all this time that you have spent trying to be a successful independent entity, has also been part of the fantasy. The span of time, all of these years and centuries of committed effort that you have put into it, is a fantasy, as well. There is no time that has occurred.

You’ve all had the experience of having a [snap of the fingers] full-blown idea instantaneously, which it’s taken you a half-an-hour to share with someone else when you put it into words. Well, in the same way, [snap of the fingers] your dream of years and years of committed effort was a moment, [snap of the fingers] a flash.

Well, what’s the cost to you to have to give up those years of determined effort to be a responsible, respectable entity that others ought to respect because of your commitment? Commitment of a fraction of a second? What are you giving up? Nothing!

But you see, you believe it’s something. You’ve got the story worked out in your mind. You lived out the story in your mind. Not in actuality, but in your mind. And you believe the whole thing. And then, you believe that to give up that whole thing is a great sacrifice, instead of an [snap of the fingers] instantaneous flash of a thought, or a fantasy, that didn’t actually happen, because what actually happened was that you didn’t for a moment stop being the Christ, the fully-Christed Son of God, resting on a grassy knoll in the sun in the middle of the Kingdom of Heaven. You see?

Now everything that I have said here could be called an allegory. I do not want you to take the specifics of the grassy knoll and the sunshine and the Christ lying on the grassy knoll, but you’ve got the picture. You’ve got the reason that I used that illustration.

Only in your dreams. [laughing] Only in your dreams. Therefore, you never have.

Therefore, you have not set yourself up for a penalty. When you wake up from the dream, you will not have a penalty to pay for having had the dream. You were paying the penalty while you were having the dreaming, and it was part and parcel of the dream. You know, the pain is the equivalent of the force you bring to bear upon doing the impossible. That’s the penalty. But the pain was always the equivalent of the amount of personal force, willfulness, that you were bringing into play attempting to do what can’t be done.

So, what’s this with being bad little girls, and bad little boys, who didn’t listen to their father, or their mother, and who deserves every bit of suffering they get? You see? That’s part of the dream, too. “Well, I better not wake up, because if I wake up, then I’ll really have to pay.” No. When you wake up, you know the Truth. And you know the dream wasn’t the truth. And the dream, and the content of it, never happened, except as a figment of the imagination.

Continuing …

Like I said last week, how could you have a devotion to something that God doesn’t have a devotion to? How could you think that you have a function different from God’s? And God’s Function is to see everything that He has made and recognize Himself in it. That’s your Function—to look at everything that God has made and recognize God in it. And in being willing to recognize God in it, instead of yourself, you will find yourself in it, because you’re not separate.

The Mind of God is a Singularity. And there is no other mind for you to experience but that Mind. If you are Conscious, you are Mind. And there is only one Mind. That’s what gets uncovered when the Truth shines on you. When the Light of Truth illuminates you, it illuminates God to you as You. And Seeing as God Sees, and Being as God Be’s, becomes your unavoidable Conscious Function.

Gave you everything.

Now, that implies, doesn’t it, that everything That Is Real includes everything That Is Real. Did you realize you are part of the Infinitude of the top of that petal, the third from left on that poinsettia, and every other petal and leaf, and the pottery pot? You’re some part of the Infinitude of that Idea. You are essential to that poinsettia, just as it is essential to you.

And the poinsettia petal has everything because It Is Real.

How would you create? By letting yourself be the Presence of the Movement of That Which Is Creation. Which means you would have to yield your independent autonomous authority to the Movement of Creation that is already in Movement.

Well, another reason is that as long as you believe that fear is possible, you’re still holding yourself separate from your Source and you don’t know Who You Are. You don’t know What You Are. And that, as I said, is always an uncomfortable situation. Why is it uncomfortable? Because your irrevocable Sanity is telling you, “You’re out of your Mind. You’re out of your Mind. Get back in your Mind. Get back in your Mind. Become Singular again. Stop trying to be what you aren’t. Be What You Are. Come on back Home.”

Again …

Creation requires defenselessness from you because you can’t let anything in, or through, if you are defended.

Continuing …

No. Can it actually make Reality meaningless? No. But it will make it meaningless to you, because you’ll withdraw yourself from recognizing What It Really Is. And why will you withdraw yourself from recognizing What It Really Is? Because you’ve chosen to try to be something on your own, separate from your Source, and that still has value for you, even though it’s an unreal experience that is happening only in the imagination, and [snap of the fingers] only in a fraction of a second. It’s been a long second, right? A long fraction of a second. But if you understand, get the idea, that it is only a fraction of a second, and you’ll realize how little there is to be undone. You see? It’s not a big job that has to be done here. Just an unjustifiable abandonment of a commitment. You see? That’s all.

Continuing …

God’s Will is not only already possible, it’s the only thing in place. It’s the only thing in play. It’s all you get. The only reason that we would say that it’s already possible is to counteract your belief that it’s not, to implant in your mind that, in spite of what you believe, it’s already possible. God’s Will is already possible. And I carry it further and say it’s already possible because it’s the only thing in place. It’s the only thing in play.

And there you have the description of how the human condition came into play, or seemed to.

And the human condition, the material world and universe, a mortal body, sin, sickness, and death, are nothing more than a distortion of Reality. It’s not a new world. It’s not a new universe. It’s not a different dimension. It’s just a distortion of What Already Is, and What Only Can Be.

Willfulness, as I have described before, is like if you have a frame that you have nailed a piece of latex to, willfulness is pushing your fist through the latex, or your face through the latex, distorting the flatness of the latex so that it seems to have the configuration of whatever you’ve pushed through it, or against it. It can’t be torn. It can’t be broken. So the further you try to push yourself through the latex, the more resistance it’s going to give, the more energy it’s going to take. And you’re going to say, “Whew! This is hard work. I am getting a lot of resistance from this. It’s not yielding to me very well. It must be against me.” [laughing] That’s sheer projection. “I must be against it. I must really be pushing hard against it. I must be trying to do something that ultimately can’t be done which is to push my way all the way through it.”

You’re trying to make yourself stop being the Christ, and be a puppet without strings—a Pinocchio. You see? I promise you that’s not what you want.

… anxiety, depression, and ultimately panic …

… God.

That’s a prayer. It’s an acknowledgement of the Truth that I’ve been sharing with you, which, at the moment, seems more like theory than Truth, or a possibility than Truth. But it is the Truth. And that’s where you must start, if you’re going to see healing. You must start with the Truth about you. You must invite that Truth in, because, even if it’s just a little Ray of the Light of Truth shining upon you, it has a power of illumination that goes way beyond the little bit that you let in. But start there.

What is this? This is the way you begin to acknowledge Truth about yourself that goes beyond the definition you’ve been employing for so long.

You don’t ask Truth to shine on the wretched, confused, awful mess that you’ve come to believe that you are. You ask the Truth to shine on the Truth In You. You’re not here to fix up the mess, because the mess is part of this [finger snap] flash of an instantaneous fantasy. You see?

And you want the Light of Truth to shine on the Christ on the grassy knoll in the middle of the Kingdom of Heaven with such warmth, we’ll say, that it causes you to stir from your dream and notice your Self, the One You Are, at Home where you belong, consciously embracing It and your Self, for What It And You Are. That’s what you want. We’re not here to fix anything up.

This acknowledgement:

… I’ll just throw this in for extras. “I am in you. I am with you.”

This doesn’t mean, [in a funny lofty voice] “The Christ is in me, whatever the Christ might be. I know it’s something holy. And it’s in me. It’s with me.” No.

The Christ is Me. The Christ is a Conscious Son of God. The Christ is the Conscious Daughter of God. And the Christ is with you, each one of you, right now. This statement is a statement of fact. Christ is in YOU and where He is God must be, for Christ is part of Him.

This is the bridge away from the fixer-upper mentality. You get it? You are neither behind the Point of Perfection, nor advancing toward it; you are at that Point, and must understand yourself therefrom.

You see? That’s what we’re talking about. It’s the acceptance of that fact that serves as a bridge out of something that is not, and never has been anything more than an [snap of the fingers] instantaneous fantasy, even though it seems to have enveloped great passage of time, great continuity of effort and discipline on your part that you thought would make you worthy of respect and dignity and truly autonomous entity-hood, if I may put it that way.

The next section is called:

As I’ve said before, Paul really does want to wake up, but he is afraid of yielding up his special uniqueness—not meaning what he’s doing right now—but just special uniqueness that makes him different from everyone else, and therefore, you know, part of the Infinite Expression of God that has to be unique. And therefore, if he gives up that which he perceives to cause him to be unique, it will cause him to sort of blend into the Whole and lose identity. And so, he’s afraid to let himself into the unknown.

… that you’re afraid of it …

… because you don’t want what you’re afraid of, even if what you want is what you want. Even if waking up is what you want, you won’t get it if you’re afraid of it. That’s what it’s saying.

Suppose that you seemed to have been born deformed, or with an infirmity, and you’ve lived with it for your whole life. And someone comes along and says, “Healing is possible.” If there’s dissatisfaction with the experience of limitation, the immediate, overwhelming response would be, “Oh, thank God! I can’t wait to get out of this wheelchair,” or, “I can’t wait to get out of this bed that I’ve been in!” And it’s a genuine, true feeling.

But, uh oh, the minute that one gets out of the wheelchair, well, nobody’s going to want to help him. No one’s going to take care of him. Boy, he’ll have to get a job. He’ll have to find a purpose. So much responsibility will come that was never there before.

“God, I don’t know if I could take that. I don’t want to be here, but I’ve already lost so much ground. I mean, after all, here I am thirty-five years old. Everyone else thirty-five years old has gone way ahead of me. I can’t possibly make up the difference. I can’t possibly become trained. I can’t possibly change into a frame of mind where I feel competent and equal to everything else. And besides, you know, the loving support of everyone around me that I’ve received all these years, I know that’s got to be of God. I know it’s been real. I don’t want to give that up. People wouldn’t love me like that any more. They wouldn’t love me if I didn’t become responsible, self-responsible; if I didn’t start taking care of myself. And then they’d say, ‘Hey! Get on the stick and take care of yourself. We can’t take care of you forever. Now you can get up and move around, you’re as capable as everyone else.’” You see? Now that’s fearsome after thirty-five years of constant, willing attentiveness that’s been received. You see?

So, you think you want something, but getting it can be a fearful thing. So understand how that can be.

“I want to be relieved of this particular suffering of being confined to my wheelchair,” let’s say. “But I don’t want to be relieved of all the help I’ve been getting. I don’t want to be relieved of not having to be self-responsible.” You see? “Just this one little thing I want to be relieved of.”

So it’s not a request for healing at all. It’s a request for a relief from a particular form of suffering, and not relief from not being able to do all the things that the suffering has kept him from being able to do.

Continuing …

It’s a Law of Being that effort cannot be wasted. Effort is always maximally effective.

Now this applies equally to your Guide. When you ask something of your Guide, whether you hear the response or not, there is always a response.

That’s like at Christmas. There are many gifts you have been given, but some of them you haven’t opened yet.

Now, it’s likewise true that any Gift of Love that any of you have extended to a Brother or Sister, whether it was received or not, whether it was opened or not, has been put under their Christmas tree, as it were. It is in their presence, and will remain in their presence. No matter how completely they ignore it, it cannot be gotten out of their presence. And it remains there for them to notice and open until they notice and open it.

When you, any of you, make an Extension of Love out of the infilling and overflowing of the Movement of Love from the Father through you, because you dare to care enough to not react with judgment, but to be willing to recognize the Truth in them, and let them be the object of your affection, and thereby allowing this Movement of Love through you, that Love extended has hit its mark, and will remain there until it’s let in. This is foundational fact. You can’t get any more basically factual than that. It is the Truth, no matter what you believe about it. And I am telling you this so that you might understand that any Expression of Love that you have participated in the flow of, has not been futile. And its healing effect, like a dormant seed, simply awaits a little attention, a little moisture to germinate, and grow, and bless.

I want to come back to this prayer, because we’re going to end here for tonight. Up until this section, “The Answer to Prayer,” for the last couple of weeks our attention has been on you. The Course’s attention has been on the Truth About You.

And we ended up with this bridge out of the fixer-upper mentality.

… which would have to mean in you …

Now if this is the bridge out of the illusion of a fixer-upper mentality and all that goes along with it, if this is the bridge out of it for you, it’s the bridge out of it for your Brother. If this is what you must be willing to acknowledge about yourself in order to wake up, it is what you must be willing to acknowledge about your Brother in order for you to have the Vision that helps him to wake up.

Now, your Brother’s behavior may not exhibit this knowledge, or this fact, at all. Are you going to go according to your interpretation of your Brother, developed during this expansive period of time that has passed in which you have been diligent and demonstrating respectability, and the passage of time is that which gives proof to your committed-ness, and your stability, and blah, blah, blah? That all is a [finger snap] fraction of a second of imagination, you know. Are you going to look at your Brother and believe beliefs that have been acquired by you during this long, long, long [finger snap] fraction of a second? And believe your beliefs? Or, are you going to look at your Brother, no matter what the behavior seems to be exhibiting, with a willingness to say, “Christ is in her. Christ is in him. And where He (the Christ) is, God must be, for Christ is part of God. Christ is part of Him.”

The bridge out of the fixer-upper mentality in which condemnation, judgment, justice, penalty, are all elemental parts, the bridge out of that depends upon your not trying to function in the fixer-upper mentality. If you’re going to abandon it for yourself, you’ve got to be willing to abandon it for your Sister, or your Brother. You’re abandoning it for yourself while you’re still being assholes to one degree or another. Right at this moment I’m … there’s no judgment there. You’re just not awake yet, and so, therefore, you are behaving ignorantly, because you believe what you believe, instead of the Truth. And so everyone requires this bridge out of the fixer-upper mentality.

And if it’s your salvation, it’s your Sisters’ and Brother’s salvation. If it’s your salvation, your Extension of Love has to involve providing that bridge in your mind out of what their behavior is expressing, so that you can move to the point where you’re willing to see Christ is in her, and where He is, God must be, for Christ is part of Him.

And it’s not [said assertively, authoritatively], “Wow! Where Christ is God must be. God must be in you. You hear me? God, Christ, must be in you. Get it? If not, got it? If not, get it. Do you hear me?” No. No.

You don’t impress the Truth upon them. You don’t coerce them into the Truth. You don’t know the Truth to make something happen. The Truth is What Already Is. And everything else is part of this humungous epic of [finger snap] instantaneous proportions. Nothing that you believe is something humungous.

Now I want to end here, because it sets the stage for next week. And for once, I’m going to ask each of you to read the next three or four pages before you come next week. Because it’s going to be a meat and potatoes session, which means it’s going to be very nutritious.

Starting where to begin to read with the paragraph:

Right where we ended.

Read to the end of the chapter; 2½ pages.

Okay.

It’s such a pleasure to be in the Light that illuminates What Is True About You. I love you all and I look forward to being with you next week.