Teachings of Christ Mind

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

Over the past few sessions we’ve discussed the practice of hesitation. It is key. Don’t underestimate its importance. Hesitating before responding off the top of your head, hesitating before engaging in a knee-jerk reaction, is the only thing that is going to help you get off the merry-go-round of life—the constant repetitive practice of everything you’ve already believed—the constant repetitive reinforcement of everything that keeps you from waking up, experiencing enlightenment, fresh insight, that allows you to be and behave in a new way, and in new ways that elicit new responses from your world.

Now, be aware that when you hesitate [in order] to inquire of the Holy Spirit what is appropriate, the goals are going to change. You hesitate in order not to perpetuate self-defense, because always your knee-jerk responses, always your responses off the top of your head, will reinstate the practice of self-defense. That is what you all do automatically.

Many of you get confused when you turn to the Holy Spirit. And because you’ve turned to the Holy Spirit because there is an emergency of some sort, or a need of some sort, or you are feeling a need for defense, you turn to the Holy Spirit and you ask the Holy Spirit for a better defense. “I, I, I, I.” “How can I protect myself? How can I keep from being bombarded with unpleasant people—trying situations?” And you ask a question that the Holy Spirit can’t answer, because the Holy Spirit doesn’t see the conflict that you see as though it were real. The Holy Spirit does know your frame of mind and your current perspective, but unlike you, the Holy Spirit doesn’t believe your perspective.

Perhaps the most difficult aspect of practicing this hesitation and succeeding at its purpose, is allowing the shift that must occur from self-defense to extension [to] take place.

“Oh, but Holy Spirit, You’re not helping me have a better defense.”

And the Holy Spirit says, “But you’re not abandoning your conflicted frame of mind. You’re not abandoning your confidence in your belief that you are threatened, so that you can dare to reverse your position from ‘I, I, I’ to ‘you, you, you’ or everything else, and make a Gift.”

“Yeah, but Holy Spirit, that isn’t what I came to You for. I came to You to have an answer that would help me feel safe.”

And the Holy Spirit says, “Yes. But you’re asking Me to give you an answer that makes you feel safe while you’re still abiding in your own misperceptions of being a solitary, a lonely, vulnerable entity. And you see, that isn’t What You Are. And I cannot provide an answer that will help this ‘you’ that you think you are, but which only exists in your imagination, to feel safe. I cannot make an imagination feel safe. But I can reveal to you What You Are. And I can turn your attention, if you’re willing, in the direction that will lift you out of the box of polarity, the box of conflict, that you see yourself in because you are believing that you’re separate, solitary, isolated, and vulnerable. And so, you are going to have to shift your modus operandi. You’re going to have to allow your intent to change from self-protection to Love, from self-protection against that which you are perceiving as opposing you to the Extension of Love to That Which Is Really There. Why? Because with Me, you can only have one goal. In Reality, you can have only one goal. And that goal is the Extension of Love. You’ve got to be willing to shift to the prayer, to the intent, ‘I wish to see only the Evidence of Love.’”

Now, when you say, “I wish to see only the Evidence of Love,” don’t let it just be just a wish. “Oh, well, I wish to see the evidence.” “I wish to see the Evidence of Love, but … .” You know. “Well, I really do wish to see the Evidence of Love.”

But you have the wish, and it sits there un-acted upon, I’ll put it that way. If you wish to see the Evidence of Love, you are going to abandon the way others are presenting themselves. And they are presenting themselves based on their sense of being isolated, and alone, and vulnerable, and in danger, as well. They’re presenting that. Is that what you wish to see? Is that what you’re going to give your attention to? Is that going to be what you base your responses and actions upon? No.

“I wish to see the Evidence of Love” means that you engage in looking right where someone is presenting themselves poorly, or badly, or obtusely—you look there with an active desire to see the Evidence of Love. You look without validating the manner in which your Brother or Sister is presenting himself or herself. You don’t validate it. You invalidate it by disregarding it and looking with an actual desire to recognize the Presence of Love there.

And you may have to start out purely intellectually by saying to yourself, “If there’s anything right there where I see a difficult person, if there’s anything there presenting itself badly, there must be something there behind it that is genuine, because there is no such thing as a pure illusion.” And so, at least intellectually, you acknowledge that there must be something Real, with a capital “R”, there. And you persist in letting that premise be elaborated upon, either by drawing from prior—and I’m talking about memory—prior teaching that you might have learned about What You Are Divinely that you can transfer in your mind, intellectually, to this person.

Now, what’s happened here so far? You’ve abandoned … you’ve hesitated and you’ve abandoned your habit of interpreting what you’re seeing from memory. You’ve abandoned interpreting what you’re seeing based upon the obtuse presentation your Brother or Sister is presenting. And you go to another place to draw upon for clarity.

So, by starting out with more than just a wish to see the Presence of Love there, but a conscious act of giving attention there, and redefining it, I am going to say, intellectually, as to what you have learned must Really be going on there, you are now not being the evidence of habitual thinking, habitual perceptions. And you have freed yourself from confirming, let us say, the bad behavior of your Brother or Sister, together with the poor assessment of them that must follow that determination. You’re now in new territory where your inquiry of the Holy Spirit can be answered because you’re not blocking the new goal that the Holy Spirit will present to you of being the Presence of Love.

When you hesitate, you’re providing the opportunity to get off the merry-go-round of habitual perception where the view is the same over, and over, and over, and you can confidently expect the view to remain unchanged, and therefore you can be confidant that healing/transformation/correction will not occur. That’s what you’re stuck with if you don’t step off the merry-go-round of habit. And that’s why hesitation is so important.

But remember that when you hesitate and get off the merry-go-round, your goal is going to be new. It’s not going to be self-centered. It’s going to be all-inclusive. And the gift is not a gift that you think needs to be given to you, but the gift will be your acknowledgement, your willingness to acknowledge, your invitation to be able to acknowledge God in everything you see.

The only protection you will ever be provided with by the Holy Spirit is the realization that you need to abandon defense. The only way you will ever be safe is by abandoning your perception of an opponent— something not like you; something not good like you; not somebody who doesn’t …

(PAUL: Just a moment.)

You see, until you can abandon the sense of difference, you’re not going to be willing to embrace. You’re not going to be willing to extend. And the simple fact is that until you make the Extension of Love, the Love won’t be had by you. It won’t be made yours. And until it’s made yours, you’re still going to be in some way seeing yourself as separate, isolated, alone, vulnerable, and therefore in need of defense.

As you know, whenever we sit down for a Gathering, Paul says, “I allow only for that which expresses the Christ-Consciousness. And I allow only for that which is in Harmony with the Purpose of capital ‘B’ Being—the Father’s Will.” In other words, “Thy Will, not mine, be done.” This is what he says. “Let the reign of Divine Truth, Life and Love be established in me, and rule out of me all self-will. And may Thy Word enrich the affections of all mankind and govern them.” That’s called hesitation.

No matter what’s going on in his life, no matter what may be catching his attention or hooking his ego, when it’s time for a Gathering, he sits down and hesitates, stops proceeding down the path of spontaneous reaction. He hesitates and shifts. He abandons self-defense by virtue of his expressed desire for his will not to be done, but for the Father’s Will to be done. And for everything that follows to express what? Reaction, hate, fear, anxiety? No. That which expresses the Christ-Consciousness.

That’s the way you shift. And that shift is essential, and is something that everyone needs to begin consciously and conscientiously practicing, because until you get off the merry-go-round in this manner, you’re going to continue to listen and be attentive for that which will confirm your vulnerability because you’re asking for better and better defense.

What you want in terms of answers is that which reveals to you that you are invulnerable—not because there is much to be defended against, but you have the ultimate defense and now you’re invulnerable—but because you’ve moved out of the state of isolation in which the Kingdom of Heaven appears to be conflicted, and therefore dangerous to you.

Oh, but the suggestion is that things are too dangerous for you to take the time to hesitate. You know the saying, “He who hesitates is lost.” Well, the fact is that he who hesitates is saved. If the hesitation is the first step in shifting one’s goals and shifting the source from which you gather your comprehension of everything you’re experiencing, you could say, “He who hesitates is found,” like the Prodigal Son whom the Father lost, but on his return, his Father has found.

Let’s go into the book.

… it’s a Singularity …

I wish to see only the Evidence of Love. Until you have that wish and look for it, you won’t find it anywhere. And if you stay in a state of defense against your neighbor, or your family, or your boss, or anyone, if you stay in a state of defense with them, you will not see Love there because you will not be looking for Love. You will be looking for more and more evidence of the fact that you need to be defended.

You could say instead of “Wholeness,” Being is Indivisible, Being is a Singularity.

Until you give the acknowledgement of it away.

Now I promise you that as long as you feel that defense is essential, you will not take the essential step of giving away the acknowledgement of Wholeness, the acknowledgement of God. That’s very elemental. It’s very fundamental. And you can’t afford to overlook it.

Continuing.

Anything else that you would engage in would be a belief about yourself. And you believe a lot of things about yourselves. And your beliefs, because they aren’t Knowing, have no basis in What God Is Being right there where you are. And therefore, you don’t know yourself. You’re lost in a morass of complex beliefs and belief systems.

… until you do that …

It’s like the Singularity still applies in the box as well as out of the box. And so what you believe about yourself, you will believe about your Brothers. And what you believe about your Brothers, you will believe about yourself.

And if what you believe about yourself and your Brothers is based upon a sense of yourself that’s not true, based upon a sense of yourself as being independent from a God, a Divine Source, then everything that you believe based upon that misunderstanding, you will apply equally to yourself and your Brothers.

Now the simple fact is that when your perceptions are based upon ignorance, when they are not based upon Truth, there is throughout them tension, fear, frustration, general but absolute conflict. But when you know yourself, because you’ve stepped out of that level or out of that box, what you learn about yourself, you know is True about your Brother. And you extend it to your Brother. And the Singularity applies. What you know about yourself, you know about your Brother. And what you know about your Brother, which isn’t gathered from what they’re presenting necessarily, you know about yourself. And there is no conflict in it. And there is no fear in it. And therefore, there is in you no shred of defense. And your Innocence becomes theirs, because it is a Singularity. And although, in time they may not acknowledge their Innocence readily, they find no justification for increasing their defense with you.

Continuing.

“Oh, God. It would be so much easier if all I had to do was work on myself.” Well, ’tain’t so.

You see [laughing] …

And here’s where the shift of intent occurs. The goal changes.

Oh, it breaks the isolation, first thing off the top of the list. You’ve got to be involved. You’ve got to care. And then you’ve got to care to send only the very best, because whatever you send is what you get to keep.

Continuing.

You are here to glorify God. Another way of saying that is, you are here to confirm What God Is.

And the gifts that you give which are received, stand as confirmations of What You Are, which stand as confirmations of What God Is.

… or you might say, they are simultaneous in actuality …

Well, let’s not jump to that last sentence and try to be from that standpoint.

Take the time that it takes to embody your willingness to shift from self-defense to the Extension of Love. You must take the time to extend the acknowledgement of What Each Other Truly Is, because until you do that, you won’t have the confirmation or the experience of What You Are. It won’t become your own. You can’t do it all by yourself. And you can’t do it for yourself. But you can be inseparable from the Movement that causes you to receive the blessing. You see? But you just can’t get around the fact that you have to be willing to give, to extend something where your private, personal, tiny, vulnerable sense of self says, “They don’t deserve it,” or, “It’s foolish to do this because they’re not going to understand it. Don’t do it.”—because you’ve got to attend to protecting yourself.

Continuing.

Because there’s only One Mind to be shared.

But at the moment, we could say, “In your closed mind are your creations in imperfect communication born of imperfect concepts.”

When you think you have nothing to do with a God, that you’re just a physical organism, born of a sperm and an egg, you cannot make a gift that will lift you out of that ignorant misperception. And you will constantly confirm it.

Now how hard is it for you to break the habit of self-defense, and hesitate and make this kind of shift? You find a lot of resistance. Some of the resistance just comes in the form of, “It’s difficult for me to believe that this can be true.” But that is a resistance. It is a difficulty.

Now, if it’s difficult for you to be willing to make this shift, you’ve got to use some common sense and realize that when you do make the Gift to someone else so that you might have it, you are likely to run into resistance as well, initially. And so it’s going to make it seem like doubly-hard work. But we are undoing a deeply-established habit. And if you are the ones who have arrived at the point of seeing the way out, even though it’s difficult for you to accept fully and embrace easily, don’t be surprised if there’s a little bit of effort that is called into play, because you become, in effect, the way-showers to an audience that says, “I don’t have time to go that way because there are too many dangerous things going on that I must attend to, or in one way or another, it will cost me my life.”

Repeating.

Now it’s not necessary for you to swallow the whole elephant in one bite.

Don’t say: “Well, gee whiz. There are some experiences that I have had that make what I’m hearing truly meaningful, and there are some experiences of the Presence of God that have demonstrated to me that what I’m experiencing is not really satisfying, but I haven’t yet seen everything As It Is so that I am not tempted in any way to look at things the way I used to, and to believe what I used to believe. And so it seems as though there are still things the world has to offer to me that I haven’t let go of.”

It doesn’t matter. You persist with the way out, knowing that the habits in you resist the step, and the habits in others resist the receipt of any gift you actually manage to extend to them.

It isn’t that waking up is so hard. It is that your commitment to your beliefs is so deep. And it is the depth of the commitment to your beliefs that makes it seem as though it’s not worth it to put forth the degree of effort that you perceive it will take in order to wake up.

Well, what I’m telling you is that from within the box, from within your accepted state of mental conflict, the easiest thing in the world, the most natural thing to you is going to look difficult because part of your deeply ingrained belief is that what is perfectly natural to you is not natural to you. Why? Because you aren’t Divine. Why? Because you aren’t the Christ; there’s only one Christ—Christ Jesus. Someday you may be like him, but you’re not the Christ. You can’t even lay claim to any part of what “Christhood” means because you’re not That. And you’re firmly committed to that belief. But you are the Christ, and to be the Christ is utterly natural and utterly effortless.

I’m telling you that so that when it seems as though what I’m saying is an impossible task, you may know that it is the one thing that is actually possible, so that you will persist, not in doing the impossible, but in recognizing that it is going to look impossible from your conflicted point of view. If you know that it’s going to appear to be impossible from your conflicted point of view, you will have more justification for practicing hesitation and shifting gears, because when you shift gears, the appearance of the impossibility of it vanishes. It vanishes because it was nothing more than part of the infrastructure, you might say, of imaginative ideas based upon error, not based upon Truth. And that’s the only reason it appears to be impossible.

Continuing.

… your Brother …

Well, in the process of Awakening, what will your creations be? Your creations will be the active, conscious Extension of Love; the active, conscious Extension of the Vision of your Brother’s Holiness that the Father has revealed to you.

Does that mean you’re acknowledging the Divinity of that poor bastard? No. It means you’re acknowledging the Divinity of the Christ that you are seeing where your limited perception was seeing a bastard. But now you know that there never was a bastard there. There was just your misperception which grew out of your own sense of vulnerability and fear that had to have an enemy in order to justify its fight for survival in a hostile environment—a hostile environment that was created only in the imagination in the void left when you got your divorce from your Father and said you would rather see things your way.

Continuing.

Here’s the Singularity again, like I said before. That is This, and that is This, and that is This, and that is This. It’s All One. No matter how Infinite the Expression of Being that the Father Is Being, it’s still All The Father.

You, divinely speaking, are inseparable from the Father. And therefore, What The Father Is Being is What You Are. And your Experience of Being constitutes an Extension. And the Gift you give is your creation. But understand that we’ve been saying that the Gift you end up giving when you break the isolation is the Gift the Father has given to you. So the Gift you give is the Father’s Gift. And you give it to your Brother.

And if you’re going to stay at the level of Singularity, you’re going to realize that you giving the Gift to your Brother is what your Brother’s Function is, too. Your Brother gives the Gift from the Father to you, to his Brothers. It’s One Thing embodied, for lack of better words, Infinitely.

It’s essential for you and your Brother to be brought into a pure awareness of What Truth Is. It is necessary for you to abandon the idea that you, as a spiritually advanced person, are gifting somebody apparently unworthy of the Gift, so that he or she might be blessed enough to become illuminated.

The Gift of Acknowledgement that you give to your Brother is not a gift to what they’re presenting themselves as. And it is not a gift to the concept you have of them. It’s a gift to What They Truly Are. I mean if you’re giving the Acknowledgment of What They Truly Are, you must be seeing What They Truly Are. And you know that you’re not giving a gift to the bitch or bastard that you thought they were, or that they think they are, or that they’re behaving like. You see?

Is this a real stretch? No, it’s really simpler than what you’re thinking. You know what? If your Brother isn’t worth this kind of attention, then neither are you.

The Singularity is always there. If you want to wake up, and whether you want to or not, you will, because you’re being asleep is an illusion—you are already the Ultimate. But if you want to wake up, you’re going to have to find your Brother and Sister worthy of your attention, and whatever it takes, however long it takes, to be the Light, you might say, that provides the illumination necessary for your Brother or Sister to see It for himself or herself. Now, that is something you have to keep in mind because you seem to be coming out of a three-dimensional frame of reference—time and space and little entities progressing—little private entities growing into a clearer experience of themselves.

But what I’ve pointed out to you tonight is that although that’s the appearance, and part of your learning is the willingness to give for as long as it takes, even if it’s forever, the fact is that the Gift is being given to One Who Already Knows, because you’ve got to be addressing the One Who is neither behind the Point of Perfection, nor advancing toward it, but is there, and must be understood therefrom. And it’s your task to understand them from there, and see them from there, because that is the Truth.

If you say, “My brother is worthy of this kind of attention for a couple of weeks, or a couple of years, but not forever,” then you can see that your intent to make the gift isn’t Whole and doesn’t constitute a shift in you. It’s partial giving. It’s conditional giving.

Your capacity to be the Presence of Love, because you are the Presence of Love that God Is Infinitely Being right where you are, is your capacity to give it without limit, and to give it gladly because it constitutes the fulfillment of What You Are. And so part of your stepping out of time is learning to be willing to be the Presence of Love for as long as it takes, without reserving the right to not give it if it’s going to take too much time.

When you’re willing to give it for as long as it takes, like I am willing to give it for as long as it takes, when you are willing to do that, you will have made a shift inside. And now there won’t be anyone holding out for a little bit of time to be able to spend not being the Presence of Love. And if you’re not willing to be the Presence of Love forever, the Wholeness of You hasn’t dawned on you within you as your new Awareness of What You Are, which is a return to your Sanity.

Doing this is not an insurmountable problem, but I’ve made it very clear to you. Why? So that you won’t waste your time with non-essentials. And so that the shift that comes as a result of hesitation might occur wholly, with less process to it.

I love you, and I look forward to being with you next week.