Teachings of Christ Mind

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

Have you ever noticed how your daily social interactions and your social life with friends is usually made up of interactions or discussions that have at their root [laughing] your not knowing “what the answer is” about this, that, or the other thing? You basically spend your time talking about “What if this?” or “What if that?” What if China behaved differently? What if Bush does this? What if the economy keeps getting worse? What if there was a new way to do this, or that, or the other thing?

As long as you can come up with some really interesting “what ifs,” you can be the center of attention. You can be the contributor to a wonderful evening of conversation, and you can come home and feel as though you had spent your evening well and something of substance had happened. In other words, your social lives, your interactions with each other thrive on not knowing “what the answer is.”

I’m going to say, in light of the Christ that each one of you is, that you feign ignorance for the purpose of having an interesting evening. Why do I say you feign ignorance? Because you have the capacity to know “what the answer is” and you’re not choosing to utilize it.

Hey, [laughing] you’re having a wonderful party. Twenty, thirty people are standing around chatting, talking. Some parts of the group are more animated than others. But what if in each group the answer was arrived at? Oh, [laughing] what would you do then? I mean, what would there be to talk about? What would be a reason for interaction? What if everybody came to the party already knowing the answers? [laughing] What would you do?

When we get together as we are right now, we’re not having that kind of social interaction. What I’m talking about is not a “what if” but a “what is.” You see, as long as you stay in the “what if” mode, you never arrive at anything you have to commit to. And yet, to know the Truth and make commitment to it, is the whole point.

Now, in your social interactions, you tend to group together with people who are asking similar “what ifs.” You might be a seamstress, or a quilter, or a… you know, and you get together with others because they say, “Well, what if you did it this way? It would be easier. It would be more efficient. You could get your points perfect, and so on and so forth.” And those quilters would not get together with auto mechanics who are saying, “What if we work on the hydraulic system and tweak it this way or that way to get better mileage or better speed?” You see? You tend to group together with those who ask similar “what ifs.”

And those in a metaphysical or spiritual vein will get together with others who are asking “what ifs.” What if God is All? What if sickness really is an illusion? And you can still get caught in never getting to the answer. You can enjoy the possibilities presented by the “what ifs” that come up, but then a brother, or a father, or a husband, or a good friend says, “The doctor has said blah, blah, blah, and has only given me so many months to live.” Now you find yourself in a very uncomfortable position—a position you wouldn’t find yourself in if you had not been using your prior time just enjoying the potentials brought up by “what ifs.” Now you come to a point where there’s a requirement to make a commitment to something. Because until you make commitment to Truth, the force of Truth will not proceed from you. This is the reason I keep saying to take every opportunity you can to have an intimate moment with anything in your experience so that you can shift gears from a “what if” to an experience of What Is Real, when there aren’t heavy-duty dynamics associated with it.

Now there seem to be two orders of reality. Actually there only seems to be one real order of reality and that’s the one described by your doctors and your scientists. And your world, generally speaking, starts with the big bang theory. The world is a material universe functioning according to laws of physics. Laws of matter is another way of putting it. But then there are those spiritual folk who say, “But there is a God. And God is Supreme. And God’s Laws govern. And they don’t coincide with the laws of physics. What are called ‘the laws of physics’ can serve God’s Laws, but in and of themselves they are not absolute.” So now we seem to have two orders of reality.

And if you’re a student of the Course, or if you are in a metaphysical vein, you talk in terms of God’s Laws being Real, and material laws being an illusion or being unreal. And so these two orders of reality are called “Reality” and “unreality,” but you still have two orders going on. And you will seem to have two orders of reality going on until you withdraw your commitment from one and invest it in the Real One.

You see, when you got your divorce from the Father, you gave your allegiance to (in quotes) “unreality”—the likenesses that you made-up to replace What Everything Really Was. And then you made commitment to your definitions. Because you made commitment, you brought your will—which is a Divine Will, it’s the only Will there is—you brought it into play and your decision has governed your experience. It makes God and God’s Laws seem to be otherworldly—spiritual in the sense of not really having too much to do with the material world—ethereal, evanescent, wispy, wonderful, but not really relevant.

And so, in many ways, the Laws of God and God being the only Creator is really rather unreal— [knocking on the table] not real, tangible, solid. [knocking on the table] Stuff that makes noise, stuff that hurts your knuckles if you hit it too hard, you see, that’s real.

Now, the warrior that all of you are to some degree or another, is really the Christ using his or her power poorly. Now what are you going to do, if you decide [to do anything] upon hearing of the potential demise of a friend, or a relative, or a mate—as a warrior what are you going to do? Let me put it this way. In order to respond as an agent for change, meaning change from the status quo, you, as the Christ, are going to have to use the very same capacities that you “as the Christ pretending to be a warrior” were using.

What are the characteristics of a warrior? Well, commitment to purpose, diligence, unswerving allegiance, strength, the capacity to commit fully. You see, there isn’t really a warrior with those capacities. There is the Christ with those capacities pretending to be a warrior. And what you’re called upon to do, in order to actually be an agent for change, is to bring those very same qualities and capacities into play on behalf of What Is True. In other words, on behalf of the Order of Reality that is the only Real One, even though you have come to believe that that one is vague, wispy, spiritual, and therefore, not really, really, very relevant to the human condition—when the fact is it’s absolutely relevant to the human condition because “the human condition” is what you are calling the Kingdom of Heaven and Life as a Christ. You see? You’re calling it something different from What It Is.

Tell me, what would be the point of our sharing these ideas that I’ve been talking about if it weren’t for the purpose of your being able to face a dire circumstance, what is termed “a dire circumstance,” in a way that contributes to its disappearance? Well, someone this past week said, “I don’t think I have a snowball’s chance in hell at [small laugh] being able to be an agent for change.” Someone else said, “Well, I’ve never seen cancer healed, or, I’ve never seen this problem overcome.” Well, I promise you, you never will see it overcome if you adopt that attitude, or continue to reinforce that attitude. You will never see a change, a healing, if you are unwilling to step outside the box and look outside your current definitions. And so you all need to get about the business of consciously, purposely intending to see things with new eyes because it’s your Birthright to be seeing the Kingdom of Heaven, instead of “the human condition” that you’re claiming is what is going on instead of the Kingdom of Heaven right where the Kingdom of Heaven is.

Now a warrior would stand up to the problem, whatever the dire circumstance is, and find a way to beat it. But, for lack of better words, an Awakening Christ, one who is not caught in the warrior role and mental attitude, would say, “I challenge the god of sickness by challenging the idea that I have the capacity to choose between God and the gods I made-up. I challenge the idea, the belief, that I have the capacity to see something that God is not being right here, right now, nor has He ever been.” You see, the Awakening Christ, leaving the warrior stance, doesn’t try to change circumstances, but calls into question an apparent capacity that he has to see something that isn’t Real, to see something that isn’t True—meaning to see something that was not set into place by the Creative Act of God. And then, using the capacity to bring full commitment into play, he or she stands right in the face of everyone else’s reaction to the dire news and does not join in with it, and with purpose and diligence remains true to the Truth.

You say, “Well, nobody I know has ever overcome a death notice.” Well, hell, at least you have somebody still alive to work with. I didn’t have that with Lazarus. In fact his sister said, you know, laughed, scorned me, you know, “His body stinketh.” He’d been dead so long that he’d started to decompose. You know, this was the material view, this was the typical view adopted and committed to by her and everyone else. But it wasn’t my view. And I couldn’t afford to say, “Oh, yes, I know. It’s awful, isn’t it? What a loss. Everybody is going to miss him. Yes, you are right. Nothing can be done.” You see? Hey, and what evidence did I have then to rely upon of anybody else having been raised from the dead? Not any more than you have. But that’s not a handicap. That is not a handicap. One with God is a majority, is a Singularity.

And with your already well-developed, existing capacity to be a warrior, you can use those qualities and capacities to be the Christ. You don’t have to develop new capacities. You just have to use your capacities well, instead of poorly. You see? You may not see how to do it, but you can see intellectually my point. All of this that we’re talking about is about being differently in the same old circumstances. In other words, challenging the status quo, not by overcoming problems out there in the world, but by withdrawing your commitment to a so-called “capacity” you think you have to see what God didn’t make.

And we’ve already talked at length about how you do that; how you withdraw from your commitments to your definitions. You stand right in the face of the problem that everyone else is crying and whining and grieving about, and you say, “I choose for my Peace, because in my Peace, my capital ‘V’ Vision becomes available to me, which is essential to my seeing the Truth and finding correction happening.” Correction meaning visible, tangible healing where the doctors say, “Where before I saw a problem, I see nothing but perfection.”

So don’t whine and cry because you’ve been presented with an opportunity to be a warrior well, to be the Presence of the Christ committed to the capital “V” Vision of Reality—the only Reality there really is—that heals, that corrects the illusion for all to see. You abandon your strength, your imagined strength over things, in favor of your Strength to not be distracted by what doesn’t exist. You abandon your allegiance to the laws of physics. You abandon it in favor of making commitment to and giving your allegiance to Truth—the Omnipotence of God.

Now, before we get into the book, one last thing. When you agree with the grievous reactions of everyone else to whatever it is the doctors have said, you have abandoned yourself to their fate, and you’ve abandoned them to theirs. I say that because if you refuse to yield to everyone’s typical response, and you disagree with their typical response, and you do not validate the dire outcome that is predicted, you do it for yourself and them. And the gift you give them, you get to keep. If you want to buy into their mortality, you buy into your mortality. And you will seem to create for yourself a fantasy of mortality. But why? The habits are deep. The mutually-agreed-upon concepts and definitions have been around for a while. But you don’t have to succumb to them. And the fact is that the whole point in everything we’ve been doing leads you specifically to the point of contradicting the presentation with whatever clarity about Truth you have experienced, and standing with warrior-like allegiance and commitment to those Truths. Not “head truths,” but felt Truths.

Oh, but here we get back to how everybody is conditioned to behave with each other in social settings. And hey, you know, a whole family getting together, family and friends commiserating over the bad news from the doctor, hey, that’s just a party with a downbeat. It’s just a social gathering on a negative basis where everybody doesn’t know the answer, but suggests answers, you know. “Well, we know he’s really eternal and so we don’t have to really be so sad because we know he won’t really die. And we know that someday we’ll be able to be with him again.” You see? Those are apparently answers. You come up with them so as to not feel as bad as you might otherwise feel.

But answers that are Answers correct the illusion, correct the problem, eradicate the problem. And that’s what this is all about. So when you get this kind of news, remember what this has all been about so that you don’t spontaneously join in the crowd mentality and lose your opportunity to demonstrate your immortality along with your brother’s, or father’s, or husband’s or wife’s. You see? One could say, “Well, this is an opportunity.” Here’s another kind of thing that you could hear in a social setting, “This is an opportunity for me to find out whether all this that I’ve been believing in is true or not.” You see, it’s a little bit more positive attitude. “This is my opportunity.”

Either you love Truth, or you don’t. Either Truth is all-important to you, or it’s not. And you don’t do something, you don’t align yourself with the Father, you don’t turn to the Father in your extremity to find out whether the Truth that you’ve been learning is true. You’ve got to be more connected than that. You’ve got to make commitment to Truth regardless of the outcome, because you don’t want to be participating in or experiencing delusion in any way. It’s like it’s time to put your cards on the table to see whether you’ve got anything in your hand or not. And if you’ve been bluffing, let it be known. And if you’re not bluffing, then [finger snap] be consistent with what you really believe and stop presenting yourself as though you “don’t know” because that fits in with the group mentality; that’s safe.

Thank God for every opportunity you have to challenge what you know cannot be true. And every single one of you know that God, Life Itself, the Energy and Movement of Life Itself, is incapable of creating anything that comes anywhere near death; the snuffing out of the slightest speck of Reality. You know that. That’s what’s in your hand, and that’s what you need to put on the table, and declare yourself to yourself, and become consistent, and not just appear to play at it because that’s what everyone else does and no one likes a “Jesus freak.” No one likes a holy, holy man. So I will know what I know but I will not present myself as though I know it, not even to myself. But you come upon circumstances that call for that kind of clarity when you get the bad news about yourself, or you get the bad news about someone else.

Let’s go to the book.

Now, you’ve got to accept that as an Absolute Fact. It is the Truth. Either something is, or it isn’t. There aren’t any “maybes.” There aren’t any “what ifs.”

It’s very black and white. And that’s what commitment is. It’s very black and white. It either is there, or it isn’t there. There aren’t any “what ifs.” There aren’t any “maybes.”

… which you all talk about, and your physicists talk about it, and therefore it seems as though you’re talking about something real because you’ve got words naming it.

If God is All and God is Singular, then All of Creation exists in Absolute Perfect Harmony. That’s the Law of Being. That’s the Law of Existence.

“I know,” you say, “but I look around me and I see chaos.” Then I say to you, you look around you and see nothing! You look around you at the Kingdom of Heaven and see “the human condition” and I tell you that what you’re seeing doesn’t exist. Your false interpretation of the Kingdom of Heaven is not the Kingdom of Heaven. And what you think the Kingdom of Heaven is that you’re calling “the human condition” is a hypothesis and has no actual existence. You are looking at your belief and you are seeing nothing.

Cancer is nothing, believed to be something. It’s an imagination believed to be more than imagination, and then suffered from. And all of it isn’t happening. That’s a radical statement. But in the Order of Reality that is Real, it is an Absolute Statement that means that you, and your fathers and husbands, and mothers and wives, and children, who are faced with death, cannot possibly be faced with them. And therefore, you cannot afford to join in their belief and the belief of everyone else around them that they can die and that they will die.

Continuing.

Chaos was not made-up in the Mind of God and chaos was not made-up in the Mind of the Son of God. But the Son of God has had an imagination, and has imagined things that God did not create, and then made commitment to those imaginations, thinking that he has created something when he has created nothing.

Continuing.

… there’s nothing there to take your peace away from you …

Because there ain’t nothin’ there to give ‘em to.

You see? You see how black and white this is? Either God’s Laws are Omnipotent, or, there are no Laws of God and everything is chaos. And yet, at this very moment, if you just pay attention to where you are, chaos is not going on.

Continuing.

We could say you are not free to give up Reality, but only to deny it. You are not free to give up being the Christ, but only to deny it. You are not free to give up Knowing, but only to deny it; only to deny that you know. Because after all, if you knew, it would be a pretty dull evening with the crowd tonight.

This is how black and white and absolute you need to get, you need to be, when you hear so-and-so has a terminal condition, or you have a terminal condition. The only way that experience, that illusion could seem to come up is if you’ve been willing to abandon your Capacity to be clear—your Capacity to be clear, to be Singular. And you do that, you all do that for many reasons—so that you don’t stand out in the crowd, so that you don’t make waves, so you don’t stand in receipt of others’ jealousy because they think you have more than they have, or their hate because they don’t want to hear the answer when you are the answer, and so on.

Continuing.

Now, you do have a Capacity to endow things because you’re the Christ and you have the Will of God as your Will.

So:

Seems to have been, but it has never been. That is why there can be instantaneous healings. Because “the thing healed of” has never been because God never created it. And that’s why its seeming presence can evaporate instantaneously.

And I don’t care whether you’ve never seen it happen yet. It’s the Truth and it does happen. And you might begin to seek out those to associate with who are asking the “what if” kind of questions that include experiences of healing, because they are all around your globe. They just don’t get the publicity.

Continuing.

Is that other-worldly? Is that irrelevant? Well, you can make it irrelevant by saying, “Yeah, in the sweet bye-and-bye I can believe that’s the case, but not here.” And so you, with all the authority of the Christ, lay down the law and govern your experience. And I’m saying that you, as the Christ, can lay down a different law—a law that is in harmony with God’s Law.

Continuing.

With a Capacity to endow.

Listen to this again.

… you know… what have you made? You’ve made a definition.

And it goes like this. If a doctor says you have terminal this or terminal that, and shows you X-rays demonstrating that what he says is there, is really there, [you say,] “I will believe him. I will take it in hook, line, and sinker. And I will not object. I will agree with him completely.” And then you cry and you anguish when you get his word—the doctor’s. But it isn’t because you’ve gotten “his word.” It’s because you have this definition, this rule in your own mind that says, “I will unquestionably believe this man’s statement without ever questioning the depth, or the breadth, or the height of his knowledge of What Truth Is.”

…such as a rule like that…

In other words, as just a hypothesis that’s not real, has no existence, and that you have made commitment to it, and you’re making yourself miserable.

You will see that there’s nothing there.

…isn’t that what I’ve said? Look at the flower and have a moment of intimacy with it to see the more that is there than your current definition is allowing you to see.

…the likenesses that you serve. The gods that you have made-up.

When you let the obstructions go. And it will envelop your brothers, and your husbands, and your fathers, and your wives, and your friends.

…images. Likenesses…

God.

It is yours BECAUSE it belongs to Him, …

Because it belongs to Him, His Extension of Himself includes All That He Is, and so it is yours because it is His.

To have, give all to all. What you give, you get to keep.

And it thereby has to be the same for you.

Now, for those of you who are dealing with the pronouncements of physicians regarding loved ones, I want you to read this section that we’re reading from and every time it uses the word “you,” let it represent “the loved one” that has received this determination, because then you’re knowing the Truth about your Brother.

So, you say of your loved one:

…meaning your loved one…

God.

…your loved one’s…

What better use could you put your mind to in response to the grief and the sadness that your loved ones are experiencing? Could it possibly be more beneficial for you to join them in their grief? You know better than that. So use your mind this way.

Continuing, with reference to your loved one.

God’s Definitions.

Meaning it doesn’t affect the Truth About You at all.

So, if something else seems to be going on, nothing else is going on.

Well, how on earth could you be a participant in a miracle if you are crying and whining and grieving along with your distressed Brother or Sister?

Who is not validating illusion. Who is not validating what can’t be true. And [who] isn’t joining in, but is, instead, going within to the Altar and saying, “Father, what is the Truth here? I don’t know enough about Reality to come to a conclusion about this illusion. I don’t know enough about How Things Really Work to know how upset I really ought to be under the limited circumstances I find myself.” You see? “So, I am going to appear to be irresponsible, and not be reactive when I don’t know yet enough of the Truth to know whether this really is serious.” You see? “And in the absence of playing into reaction, I’m going to stay in my Peace and I am going to listen for Your Voice. And when I can’t hear Your Voice, I will pay attention to the Words of Truth that I understand the meaning of, even if I haven’t experienced the Meaning of them.”

…mutually-agreed-upon definitions…

His brothers, his father, his mother, his wife—whoever is suffering from false gods at the moment.

…the miracle …

You see? That’s your Capacity as the Christ to be the agent for change, because you’re not joining with the little, puny ego-sense of self that sees his life coming to an end unavoidably. And it is joining with the Eternal Christ that has to be there in order for there to seem to be less than that there.

…God…

…God’s Voice…

You see? Your task here is to be a miracle worker, not a grieving family member. Is that clear?

…get that word, “CAN.” Not cannot.

So, when you have heard the bad news and you find yourself unable to keep your Peace or your Joy and you become depressed, you’re not lost.

…gone…

And this is your task. Your task is to be the place where the miracle can occur right in the face of an illusion that seems to justify your abandoning your willingness to believe the Truth.

You see? “But it’s so grievous. There’s no way I can keep my peace. It is so grievous. And I’ve never seen anybody else escape from this. So, I’m going to abandon the awareness of Truth that I do have.” You see? Well there’s the Christ making a law, endowing something that doesn’t exist, or endowing something that doesn’t deserve your allegiance with justification for allegiance. And you see, you’re serving the god of sickness, which I pointed out last week was your belief that you have a capacity to see something that doesn’t exist, and then make a choice between “what does exist” and “what doesn’t exist.” It is the belief that you have a capacity to choose between gods.

Again.

You have the capacity to put all your faith in it, because you have been a great warrior fighting on the wrong side, fighting for the wrong thing. But the strength is the Strength of the Christ brought to bear in stupid directions. Now bring that same Strength that you have never stopped exercising, bring it to bear on the Truth.

…let your capacity as a warrior to make full commitment come into play and give your full allegiance to the Truth…

Everything is black and white. Everything is either “yes” or “no.” Either there is existence, or there is nonexistence. And all of you, I encourage all of you to cease existing in “the neverland” between “what exists” and “what doesn’t exist.” And stop being with each other from that place of nebulous not knowing; in the world of “what ifs.” Become hot or cold, black or white.

Okay.

I invite everyone to just abide with what I have shared. Don’t engage in “what ifs” about it. I was not having a casual social interaction with my friends. I was being the Answer with my friends, uncovering the fact that my friends are the Answer and know the Answer.

Okay.

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