Teachings of Christ Mind

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

If I were to say to you that you’re nothing but a bunch of conditioned responses, that there’s basically nothing original about any of you as you go through your day, you might be surprised. And yet, for the most part this is true, and you don’t realize it. And it’s in the realization of this fact that you prime the pump, as it were, for a new experience, for an “Aha!”—for a shift of perception.

Some of the conditioned responses were provided by those who educated you. And, as a matter of fact, the majority of the conditioned responses are things you taught yourself. Conditioned responses are behaviors. As you grew up, some of you consciously practiced how to hold your hands, how to sit. You practiced various kinds of laughs and finally decided on the one that you liked best, and practiced that until you got it down. You observed other people—how they stood, how they spoke firmly, how they spoke gently—and tried out various of these different forms of vocal expression until you adopted one, or endorsed one, and made it yours.

But, you know, it’s very important to understand that if you are behaving on the basis of conditioned responses, if your behavior relative to stimuli in the world are coming from adopted standards, then your responses are never genuine responses to the stimuli going on around you.

And what you may not realize is that this causes you to become a prime target of manipulation. Anyone, who can recognize your adopted preferences, can then present themselves to you or present ideas to you that you will find harmonious with you and will cause you to have trust in them and what they’re presenting. And you thoughtlessly become sheep following the leader.

Now, remember, if you are constantly measuring what’s going on in your experience against a memorized habit so that you might know the safest and best response under the circumstances as you have learned to define the best response, you’re unconscious. You’re just coming from memory. And you’re not available to give a real response to the real stimuli that are happening. This means you cannot be an effective presence. You can easily be herded into a corral, or an oven, or a concentration camp, or blind obedience to an unscrupulous leader of your country, or to the profit-seeking drug companies who do studies to find out the typical responses to certain words amongst those who will see their advertisements so they can pick the words that will cause you to be the most defenseless and agree where disagreement is called for.

Now why am I saying all this? I’m saying it because waking up, learning to hesitate before you come out with a knee-jerk response and to listen within to the Holy Spirit, to that which is nothing more than your right Mind, causes you to sidestep an unconscious response to your environment and puts you in a position to see it freshly and behave in a totally appropriate way in the moment that isn’t a response of habit that is irrelevant to the moment. Waking up is going to mean your behavior is going to change. Your behavior is going to be appropriate to the moment. And it might mean speaking in a way that you’ve never spoken before—with authority that you’ve never spoken with before, or with gentleness and compassion that you’ve never spoken with before.

Waking up is about being made new. It’s about getting out of the rut of the behavior patterns that you think are you. You smile and you don’t realize that the smile you’re giving was something you decided to use when you were three years old, and that the smile you’re giving has nothing to do with what is called for in the moment you’re in. There’s nothing genuine about it because it doesn’t arise out of a real connectedness with What’s Really Going On in the moment.

Oh, you’re a gentle person, a kind person, a thoughtful person, and so you never confront anybody. You’re never rude enough to call them on their lies, or their deceit, or their bad behavior. And you know that the meek are blessed, don’t you? And so, you are meek, and you get steamrollered, and you get mistreated, and you get used, and you get abused. And you say, “Well, nevertheless, the meek shall inherit the earth. So I will not say ‘No’ when ‘No’ needs to be said, because my concept is that ‘No’ never needs to be said. Only kind cooperation, or even kind and gentle and not well-focused disagreement.” You see? And so you’re never honest in the moment. You’re never connected in the moment. “All we, like sheep, follow the leader.” All for the sake of not violating this self you think you are that you didn’t think you made-up, but you did—smile, by stance, by verbal expression that you adopted as you grew up.

That’s not your Birthright. Your Birthright is to be able to be Real, to be present with What’s Going On, seeing it without referring it to your memory so that you are being present with What Is Going On with innocent eyes, where you are not projecting onto What Is Going On the requirement you have to always behave according to the definition of yourself that you’ve made-up which constitutes your conditioned behavior, your untrue dishonest behavior.

You haven’t thought of it as dishonest and you haven’t thought of it as untrue, because everybody does it and everybody encourages everybody else to do it. And you’ve been able to have a generally pleasant experience as a result. But the fact is you have another way to be that is available to you that I’m encouraging you to be open to, to open up to, let in, and express. That’s what the Course is inviting, eliciting from [small laugh] the depths of you to the level of your Conscious Awareness.

There is a Place of Excellence in you, I’ve said. There is an Altar in the middle of you, the Course says. And there is a Voice, with a capital “V”, in you that is the Voice for Truth. It’s called “the Holy Spirit”—which, to bring it into really practical terms, is nothing more than your right Mind held in trust while you dally with your memories and your conditioned behaviors and responses. It’s your Birthright to be experiencing this Mind in you that is your right Mind. And it’s your Birthright not to be a puppet of your endorsements which you gave to a limited set of behaviors that keep you locked into certain kinds of experiences.

So, when we’ve been talking the last few weeks about healing and the fact that it’s not appropriate for you to anticipate that you could have a changed perception without having a changed experience, that means that, as well, you can’t expect to have a changed perception without having a changed behavior—a behavior that is a real response to What Is Really Going On, rather than a conditioned response to what you think is going on.

What the world needs today is more conscious people—citizens who are more conscious than unconscious, who are not responding out of habit, but out of connectedness with issues, with needs, and behaving in ways that abolish the needs so that the suffering from the need ceases. So not only will a withered arm no longer be withered and no longer will broken teeth be broken, but you will be a dynamic real presence being the evidence of change yourself, which, because the change is arriving out of an experience of illumination or enlightenment, is recognizable to everyone else as of value, which causes them to be able to look at things freshly themselves and perhaps break loose of their conditioned responses. You’ve got to be the first domino that falls by letting the change happen in you so that your behavior is arising out of a Knowing, rather than a pre-programmed, intellectual response that you’d apply, that you apply to everything of a similar nature out of habit. Are you getting the idea or the feel?

Now you could look at what I’ve said as though it were an indictment on you. “You’re nothing but a bunch of conditioned responses and you didn’t know it, you ignorant assholes.” You could take it that way, but you don’t need to.

You can simply take the Truth of what I’ve said as a justification, if you will, for more actively pursuing what we’ve been talking about for months, which is to be willing to look at everything with innocent eyes, to hesitate a moment before you confirm within yourself that the way you’re understanding things to be is the way it is, so that in that moment of hesitation you might say, “Father, Holy Spirit, what’s really going on here? I could tell You, I could talk for a half an hour telling You exactly what’s going on here, because [small laugh] I sure as hell know what’s going on here and it ain’t good. But, Holy Spirit, in spite of what I think and believe and have conditioned myself to see, what is really going on here and what is really needed? How do I need to be to give evidence to the Truth; to be an agent for change that uncovers the resolution of everything that I know ain’t good? I’m willing to listen, rather than assert my conditioned responses.”

You see, in other words, it can be used as justification for becoming curious and inquiring as to, “What is the more that is here than what I’m seeing? What is the more of God that is going on here that I am misinterpreting, and thereby seeing less of? Because I don’t want to get caught up in confirming the less that I’m seeing that doesn’t represent What’s Really Going On.” So all it is, is a justification for curiosity—which is a pleasant thing to bring into play.

To know that you are basically a blob of conditioned responses, should simply convey to you that there’s a whole lot of good available to you that you’re not yet experiencing because you’re not looking at the Kingdom of Heaven through innocent eyes, when you could be. You see? Don’t you want to see the more of What Is Here than what you’re seeing? Of course you do! So give your attention to that. It’s an easy thing to do all day long.

And nobody will know you’re doing it. You don’t have to publicize it. You don’t have to carry a placard on your chest saying what you’re doing. You don’t have to do it out loud where everyone can hear it and wonder about you.

Curiosity, oh, curiosity is a blessing to utilize. It’s a wonder to have active in you. But you now know that this practice of curiosity is significantly more than you thought it was because it’s the way out of your dream, your sleep.

You can be alert during the day—not like you’re on an internal witch-hunt searching out the bad in you—but you can be alert during the day to notice when conditioned responses arise. Usually it will come out as spontaneous defense. When you find yourself, without thinking, spontaneously defending yourself, you may know that you’re asleep. You may know that you are relying upon conditioned responses, which means that at the very moment you’re doing that, you can’t possibly be aware of What Is Really Going On, and therefore you can’t possibly know what a Real response would be. And you are blinded and unconscious—and that’s not what you want.

Why are you defended? Why do you spontaneously defend yourself? Because of a definition you have of yourselves—a definition that you are little, puny, basically inconsequential if you do not build up a façade of strength with a strong voice, or a strong will, to save yourself from your vulnerability.

But, you know, I cannot say it often enough. Each one of you, right now, is the full Expression of God. Each one of you is right now the Ultimate Christ believing you’re not, and behaving as though your belief is true. And you don’t need to be doing that. You defend yourself because you don’t know what your Birthright is, and so you don’t let yourself feel your Birthright.

Why does the Course say that bad behavior is a call for Love instead of just bad behavior? Because it serves to remind you that there’s a different response from your conditioned knee-jerk response of defense. It reminds you that there’s another way to respond—a way that will heal instead of continuing to confirm the human condition that you’re all suffering from. And you want the way out, you say. You want to be out of the human condition and the suffering. So you’ve got to do something different from reasserting your conditioning.

You’ve got to be willing to acknowledge there is another way to look at this. And then, don’t try to figure out a new definition of how to get out of it. Be still. Go within. Inquire within. Bring your curiosity where? To your memory to see if there’s any experience you’ve overlooked that might be helpful here that you haven’t brought into play yet? No. You bring your curiosity to something beyond your memory banks—to the Holy Spirit, or the Father, where you break the isolation, as I’ve said so many times. And invite and create a Conscious Experience of Joining that breaks the isolation that causes you to rely upon your memory of your private experience since you got your divorce from the Father. You see?

Then you have the opportunity to have your right Mind register with you that knows its relationship with the Father, that knows that it’s the Son of the Father, but All That The Father Is has been gifted to the Son as the Son. Then you come back into your Real Power, your Real Substantiality, your Real Invulnerability that means you don’t have to have Divine Power to overcome the opposition. The Divine Power that is yours, by virtue of your Invulnerability being gifted to you by the Father because the Father Is Invulnerable, constitutes the nonexistence of any experience of threat. And in the absence of the experience of threat, any call for correction can be dealt with in a way that promotes the correction smoothly, effortlessly, because there’s nothing but the love of clarity of the Knowledge of Truth that finds expression in what you’re saying or doing, where the call for correction occurs. You see? And so, you do not make corrections as a means of overcoming a potential threat to your well-being.

You are the agent for change or correction by virtue of understanding that the behavior that is a call for correction is based upon something that isn’t even true. And you can speak from that point. If another is behaving in a way that expresses a call for correction, it doesn’t change the fact that innately and fundamentally and actually they are neither behind the Point of Perfection nor advancing toward it either—that they are at that point and you do understand them therefrom. And so you speak to them, knowing that. You give what you know. And all that emanates from you is Singular Love—not love held up like a cross against a vampire.

Let’s go to the book.

The section is called:

When you’re weary.

Oh, when you’re wearied by the dynamics of the human condition. When you’re wearied by the ongoing, excellently-thought-out effort that you’ve put forth to live a good life and to be honest—and things go wrong. And it seems to you that your intention to be intelligent and righteous and loving hasn’t acted like the cross that would be held up against a vampire—and the vampire seems to be getting you. You see? When you are wearied by doing what doesn’t work.

“Now here’s another one of those terrible indictments against you, you sad jerks.” You see? No. When you realize that you have been attempting to do something that doesn’t work, it doesn’t mean that you’re stupid. It means that you’re at a point of realization where what? You can make a new choice! You’re at a threshold where change can occur. And you realize that nobody else has to change—just you. Maybe you have to adopt a new way of standing, or a new smile.

But in this case, you now know that in order to have a new behavior, you’ve got to have a new experience, a new conscious awareness, that isn’t arising out of your memory banks. In other words, you realize that you’ve hurt yourself by trying to be separate from the Father, trying to be an orphan, and trying to be successful at it, instead of saying, “Father, I’m willing to have a Father again, so that I might know Who I Am, so that I might have my Real Identity back, instead of the one I made-up for myself which isn’t getting me anywhere at all.” You see? That’s all it means. You have hurt yourself by doing something that doesn’t work, and there’s another way to do it and here’s what it is. And then explore the doing of it. You see? It’s good news.

But if you think that it’s someone else that’s hurt you or circumstances that have hurt you, or the human condition that you’ve been submerged in, you poor divine soul, and that you just have to tolerate till you die out of it—when you know that nothing else is responsible for it, then you know the power you have available to you to change the situation. If it’s all because you have been doing what won’t work, then all you have to do is start doing what does work. And nothing in this Universe—no human condition, no mortal existence, no hard-hearted individual—can keep you from it. You’re sovereign.

You need to know that you’re sovereign. But as long as you think that someone else has hurt you instead of that you have hurt yourself, you won’t find that place of sovereignty, that, I’m going to call it that “right of decision” that abides with you that supercedes everything else. So, you have the right of decision to go through your day expressing curiosity to see the more of God that is present than what you’re currently seeing. And nobody can stop you from doing it. And nobody has kept you from seeing the more that is present except you saying, “Father, I’d rather see it myself. I’d rather define it myself and become a successful orphan.” It’s that simple.

Again.

… and most of you are weary all the time, to one degree or another, of the anxiety of your lonely stance.

Well, what is your Comforter? What is the Comforter? The Holy Spirit. Not something afar off. That which is nothing more than your right Mind.

… as an orphan …

You, unjoined with your right Mind, cannot give yourself rest.

And in effect, that’s what an orphan tries to do—give himself rest from the dissonance inherent in trying to be what he is not—an orphan. On your own, you try to give yourself rest from suffering, not realizing that the suffering is simply the unavoidable experience which occurs when you try to be what you’re not—an orphan.

… you as an orphan …

The occasion for weariness wouldn’t have happened because you wouldn’t have been trying to do the impossible.

It’s just not in the program. It’s not in the Way Things Work.

Why would it surround you silently? Because, in His Peace, there is no awareness of conflict, and no need for arrogant, loud, strenuous self-assertion against the enemy.

(Just a moment. This is me, Paul. There’s a word that’s escaping me. Just a moment.)

Another way of saying this is that confusion, the absence of order, dis- or non-integrated conscious awareness is the root of all evil.

… having no cohesiveness to it …

I will tell you that it doesn’t even know that it’s attacking. And yet, because everything that comes forth from it is defense, it does constitute a lack of recognition of the benign-ness of that which it is afraid of.

… the only thing that’s there …

God is Singular, therefore Mind is Singular, therefore Conscious Awareness is Singular—not confused, not polarized, not disintegrated. This, therefore, is What You Are. And it is the Nature of your Being. And this is what it is your Birthright to be experiencing. And this is what you need to be curious to experience and let in.

Your reliance upon your memory always attacks you by distracting you from a truly Conscious Awareness of What Is Going On and engaging you in defending yourself against it. You go through your day in states of defense, but the only thing truly confronting you is Reality, with a capital “R”—the Kingdom of Heaven, the Infinite Presence of God called Creation.

… in other words, at the Point of Perfection—where you are.

But [small laugh] is it any surprise? You are at Home amongst your Brothers—the Divine Ones that are God In Expression—and you don’t see it. Why? Because [small laugh] you know who that bastard really is, don’t you? And you know what a sleaze she is. And you know how undependable he is. And your definition rules supreme. You see?

Now, let me ask you something. If, based on your definition, you have treated these people according to those definitions, do you think they’re going to be happy? And when they express unhappiness at the way you are perceiving them, distressed at the way you’re seeing them, you’re going to say, “See, I told you so. She doesn’t have her peace. And, boy, when she loses her temper, loses her cool, she’s lost all ability to speak intelligently or rationally. She has provided me confirmation of my definition of her.” You see? You have promoted it, and then you blame your Brother for a natural response of distress at your not seeing them for Who They Are.

… God’s Son or Daughter …

[laugh] “I can’t let him be my friend. I can’t dare to get close to him. Never can tell what’ll happen.”

So you’ve said, “I won’t be his friend.” You see? “I won’t see anything worthwhile in him. Even if he’s not behaving badly, human nature isn’t dependable, so therefore I still won’t get close to him.”

And you say, “I will not be a friend to him.” You make that decision, and then you tuck it away, asserting in your mind that it’s simple common sense and not a decision you have consciously made to exclude him, whether right or wrong.

And then you will say [in a weepy voice], “I don’t have any friends. I am friendless.”

Now back to a little Sanity.

Well, the answer is, “No.” If He willed to be alone Himself, then he would let this be Real. You see?

God is All-inclusive. And the keyword is “inclusive.” All is God. And exclusiveness is an impossible concept in that which is Singularly Infinite.

Now, this doesn’t mean, “Oh, my sweet dears, if you but knew, you poor things, what God Wills for you, your Joy would be complete.” It’s not a putdown.

So, bring a little curiosity into play to see the more of What God Wills For You right here and right now, because right here and right now in what you are so sure is nothing more than a human condition, is the Kingdom of Heaven and you, the Christ—the Christ Presence that is God Presencing Himself right there as the Fullness of You. Bring a little curiosity into play, desiring to have a fuller experience of that fact. And then expect to have a shift of perception and a shift of behavior—a spontaneous impetus to disregard memory and conditioned responses.

Because the freedom to be present with What Is Real, knowing that It Is Real, allows you to be involved in what I’m going to call “an interplay of Real Things”—a spontaneous, unguarded ability to dance with Infinity—all of It—at once.

But you’re very afraid to let too many things go on because you won’t be able to keep control of everything to make sure that you’re safe. And so you keep yourself locked up in tininess because you don’t know What You Are. You are the capacity to dance with the Infinite, to be in constant interplay with all of It, without a need for control to make sure you’re safe.

So desire to know What God’s Will For You is so that your Joy may be complete.

Look at this.

… God …

Again, you’re neither behind the Point of Perfection, nor advancing toward it.

Is this getting boring and monotonous? It’s so simple. And the more often you hear it, the more often you’re reminded of it, the more you will be inclined to be in the moment minus the conditioned responses, minus memory, minus definitions you made-up in the past when you thought you were an orphan, so that you are present with the Light on in your mind that lets you see the Light on in the human condition that reveals to you that it’s really the Kingdom of Heaven in all Its Glory.

I’m going to change the words here, so it sounds less condescending.

So, give your attention there. Give your curiosity there.

… it’s not off in the future for you. It’s already happened. It’s already the fact. It’s something you cannot actually escape, even though you can ignore it conscientiously.

… and we are talking from, about moving from, darkness to Light—darkness meaning the unconsciousness of conditioned responses and made-up definitions of yourself—moving from that into the unguarded, unpretentious willingness to stand fluidly and flexibly in the middle of the Movement of Life, not resisting any of It and not trying to be in charge of any of It so that What Is Really Going On might register with you, cause a sudden shift of perception, an “Aha!” that lets you recognize the Divinity, the Innate Worth and Value of each and every thing, so that you can respond to It on the basis of What It Really Is, at the same time being aware that you—what is responding to What It Really Is, is in his or her right Mind.

… instead of claiming my will is mine. Unjoined me has a will of my own that is mine.

Meaning the orphan.

Does that mean you’re going to be a walking advertisement for God? Is that what it means, that you’re going to “create beauty in His Name”? No, it means that your going to create Beauty [whispering] without leaving Him out of it—[normal voice] without leaving God out of it by choosing to be the sole authorizer of it. You see?

… it’s natural for you to know that the Beauty you express is Divine. Is it Divine because of some private Divine Authority you have? No. It’s Divine because you are the Presence of God in action.

You have a Father. You have a Relationship. You’re not alone. You have a Source. And so you will create Beauty without leaving your Source out of it.

[small laugh] In other words, the world you made-up in place of What It Really Was, the definitions of it that you made-up, will vanish into nothingness.

In other words, you will spontaneously embrace all without requiring any of it to be the end result of some decision or definition you have privately made. You will let yourself and everything else be the Presence of God. You will be willing to find God in everything. You will be willing to find Good in everything.

And if you have trouble with the meaning of the word “God,” because you cannot fathom what God would be, or what God would look like, remember the word “Good.”

And it will not harbor a right to define anything as bad, and then cope with it.

To see the Presence of Good and to be the Presence of Good will be the whole ball of wax for you. It will be the alpha and the omega. And you will devote yourself to it wholly, because that’s where the suffering ends, and that’s where the Joy is felt.

Already!

And it cannot be taken away from you, and it has not been taken from you.

You ignore it by giving preference to your lesser definitions, your more limited definitions and concepts, and your attempt to have conditioned responses that clearly identify you-as-you-and-not-anyone-else behaviors that are peculiarly different from the behaviors that are peculiarly embodied in your Brother. You see?

You see, when we’re talking about healing, when we’re talking about illumination and transformation, we’re talking about not only having your mind transformed by virtue of sudden shifts of perception, but we’re also talking about your letting your behavior arise from a new place—of your behavior not arising from your conditioned responses, but arising out of the Clarity of the Truth that you’re now knowing because you cared enough to inquire about What The Truth Is of a thing. And you’re willing to have innocent, intimate moments with it, with a thing, so that you might experience the more of What Is There than what your current, limited concepts allow you to see.

You know, it’s very easy when you move along in your life and you have a major “Aha!”—an epiphany—and nothing is the same after that, and you say to yourself, “Wow, I must have really been doing something right to have arrived at that experience of an epiphany. Therefore, there’s nothing about the way I have been being prior to it that I need to call into question.” No. It wasn’t everything you knew before that led you, because of its great correctness, to a point of an epiphany. I will tell you, an epiphany happens because there was a weakness in your commitment to your behavior before the epiphany happened, or you arrived at a point where the way things were, because of the way you were behaving and thinking, got absolutely untenable for you, and you had a moment of openness to something better.

So just because you find yourself experiencing a transformed awareness of What Everything Is, well, it doesn’t mean that everything about the way you saw yourself before can be left as it is without being challenged. You must be alert. You must care enough to watch for the spontaneous habit to re-establish old conditioned thinking.

You don’t want to re-establish old conditioned thinking. You want to establish your capacity to stand innocently in the moment you’re in, innocently paying attention to what is going on around you so that you may see it as you have never seen it before. Why? So that you can behave in a way you’ve never behaved before.

I love you all. And I love your willingness, even if you think you’re not doing too well. And I love you for your capacity to hear what I am Meaning, which you are, even though your rational mind says, “I can’t quite wrap my mind around it.” That’s the orphan talking. And you’re not the orphans—not any of you.

I look forward to being with you next week.