Teachings of Christ Mind

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

So, last week we talked about, “The Inheritance of God’s Son.” In other words, your Birthright. Now we’re going to talk about the flip side—what you get [laughing] as an orphan, as one who has gotten a divorce from his Father—and it’s called:

One might think that the best thing you could do would be to constantly give your attention to the Truth about you and what your Inheritance truly is. But the fact is that if you’re not willing to look at the habits you have employed in order to remain unconscious of your Birthright, they will persist. They will spontaneously continue.

So, it begins:

… there’s a key here …

… it will do you no good to go on an internal witch-hunt, looking for the ego flaws while using the ego frame of reference to do so. Such an endeavor will be discouraging, depressing, and will further confirm your lost-ness, because there’s nothing in the frame of reference that has access to more than the ego frame of reference which you have all carefully created and developed and practiced.

So, when you wish to conscientiously and constructively move out of the box you’ve been in, you must take the time, first of all, to establish a connection with me or with the Holy Spirit. It does not have to be a full-fledged connection. It does not have to be as well-established as it is with Paul. But you have to turn your attention away from all of your conditioned responses. You have to be willing to be less interested in what you already know, what you already think, and what you already believe, and turn to that which you at least assume has a greater vantage point to look from, and be curious to hear whatever grander view may be provided. And you must invite that provision. Don’t try to do it by yourself.

Continuing.

You see? That’s the difference. When you join with the Holy Spirit or with your Guide or with me, it is to join in, endeavor, to uncover Truth. If you look to see what the ego habits and flaws are, with the ego, it will be to uncover flaws in you, errors in you—not the Truth.

… in quotes …

Now I’m not going to ask you to answer this, but when it became obvious that we were now going to start talking about “the dynamics of the ego,” how many of you felt a little uncomfortable? Like last week we were talking about the Inheritance of the Son of God which was a very pleasant thing to contemplate discussing, but now it’s like we’re going to get down to business. No. We were down to business last week. Now we’re down to the nonsense. [some audience laughter]

So don’t cast a shadow in front of you and get all uptight, as though we’re going to uncover the terribleness, the ugliness, the flaws, the miserableness of you. Because remember, after all this time, are you an ego? No! So this isn’t about you. You are, each of you, the Christ. You have no existence except for God Expressing Himself right where you are. And we’ve been talking for years now about this fact.

So now we’re going to look at what isn’t true about you, so that you might discover whether you’re employing untruths, and so that you might see more clearly that they are untrue, and therefore there’s no value for you in holding onto them, or basing your judgments and conclusions on things that aren’t true about you. We’re going to look at nonsense that you thought was not nonsense, so that you might see the nonsensicalness, and find the total valuelessness of it.

… no fanfare. No rah-rah hoop-de-doo. No contest. No conflict.

We will uncover nonsense quietly. And its nonsensicalness will register with you quietly, and you will lay it to rest quietly.

In effect, we will look beyond it to the Truth that we have been discussing for a great length of time.

Or as I have said, Knowing.

“Well, what does that mean? How do you look at them directly without protecting them? And what are we going to be looking at directly?” Well, let me put it this way. If somebody seeing the Truth about you says to you, “You know, today, you’re really off the beam. And what you just said is an example of it. Do you see it?” Oh, boy! The hackles on the back of your neck rise and you say, “Who do you think you are? You think you’re my teacher? What right do you have to approach me this way?” Wow! If that isn’t protecting them instead of being willing to look at them directly, I don’t know what it is.

And to tell you the truth, looking at them directly without protecting them describes something this basic: watch yourself. And I said this last week, watch yourself during this coming week and pay attention to when you become defensive. Because when you become defensive, you lose your mind. What I mean by that is that when you become defensive, you move into boilerplate responses. And you will find yourself throwing out barbs. In order to get the other one who is trying to help you see that you’ve gotten off the beam, you will throw out barbs that you know will hit their mark. It will be mean-spirited as a distraction to keep that person from pursuing greater clarity for you.

The moment you become defensive, you move out of being conscious into nothing more but a lot of recorded sound bites—little recorded retorts, little recorded responses. You will have gone unconscious. Why? So that you will not have to look at a need for change. Part of your habit is to think that, if change really is called for, you are doing something wrong and therefore you are guilty, and therefore there is a penalty waiting for you, and therefore you had better deny it and you had better find ways to justify not looking at it, because you don’t want to experience the penalty of finding out that you’re guilty.

You all have found that out, even though you don’t practice dispelling them merely by denying their reality consistently enough.

Fear has no reality because it finds no place in God. If it finds no place in God, it has no place in you because God is All There Is of you.

(PAUL: Excuse me.)

God Being All—being actively, dynamically Being All—is the nonexistence of fear in you, and is the nonexistence of anything unlike Him in you. And that state is the State of your Being at this very moment, even if at this moment you are seeming to experience fear.

… which has a capital “E”.

Creation is the Extension of God. God extends Himself; the Extension is Creation.

Extension is experienceable. Extension, as I’ve said before, is perfectly tangible to the Mind that formed it. There is Creation. It is what is meant by the word “Extension.” If there were no Conscious Experience of Being as what you call Creation, there would be no God. And conversely, if there is no ego as a fact, then what it thinks it extends is nothing.

Again.

… such as the ego …

That’s the miracle of being willing to look at what seems to be fearful to you, because when you look at it, when you honestly look at it without trying to hide it from yourself, without trying to avoid it, you find nothing there. And that is when you experience healing of whatever the effects seemed to be of your belief that it was there and that it was real.

You see, remember you are to look at your lack of clarity, let’s say, you are to look at your fears, you are to look at your spontaneous defense with the help of the Holy Spirit or your Guide. One thing is for sure—when you do that, your Guide will help you to be honest and will not let you use your standard habits for covering up and avoiding seeing what it is that you’re doing that doesn’t work and that doesn’t accomplish anything.

It’s like talking about dry water.

The fly in the ointment is that the ego has no power to do anything because there is no ego.

What is there to the ego? It amounts to a decision that each of you made somewhere along the way that said, “But, Father, I’d rather see it my way.” It was an act of self-assertion—an act of assertion that did not arise out of the Father’s Movement in you as you. And as we’ve said before, the moment you did that, the moment you claimed a right to be able to see things without the Father, you lost your Identity. If you lose your Identity, you don’t know Who You Are.

Anyone who is experiencing amnesia, does not remember who they are. And they have to develop a new identity based upon whatever experiences they’re having in the middle of their amnesia. And so you created a definition for yourself—a self-concept. And your Brothers and Sisters—whom we learned last week are part of the Infinitude of your Being, all of them included in the Infinite Oneness of You—all of them are now strangers to you, too, and so you have to make definitions for them. And pretty soon because they’re not asleep either and they’re making definitions for themselves, it amounts to a bunch of definitions trying to relate to each other, instead of the Real Ones That They Are knowing that they are all One because they are their Father’s Son or Daughter.

So the ego isn’t a presence. It is, for lack of better words, the Christ That You Are behaving as though you’re not the Christ, behaving as though you’re something else. You see? You lose your Inheritance and you lose Conscious Awareness of your Inheritance. You become unknown to yourself, and your Brothers and Sisters become strangers to you. And then, with all the Power of the Christ That You Are, you begin behaving on the basis of lack of information, and you have to make-up definitions of what is going on. And then you begin to think that this inadequate state of mind is what you are. And then you have the task of making something more adequate out of this inadequateness that you are. And because you are the Christ and the Power of God—the Power of Being is still in you and you can’t forget It—you think that you, in this inadequate state, have power to make things happen based upon lack of knowing, lack of knowledge. And you exist, you might say, in a state of unconsciousness, thinking that you are Conscious.

Now:

Now listen.

This little, inadequate sense of presence insists on stating that it has the power to be autonomously inadequate and become something of significance and actually accomplish things. And that is its goal—to actually accomplish things on its own, thus declaring itself and proving its presence.

… what?

You see, it’s not a thing. It’s just a symbol.

It’s a symbol representing what? An act, a decision on your part to look at and see things by yourself and determine what they are by yourself, instead of staying with the Meaning they have because of What God Is Extending or Expressing of Himself right there.

And if you think you are the ego, then you will think that is your purpose. I cannot state it too often that no matter what you think you are, you haven’t stopped being the Full Representation of God, the Christ, right here and right now. And you cannot have become anything less than that, no matter how much you try to ignore It. So this ego that you may think you are, is only a symbol of a decision you made. That’s all. And who is this “you” that made the decision? I will tell you it’s the Christ, because that’s the only thing there is sitting here right now, listening. That’s the only thing that’s here, right now, as you are listening.

… ideas are purpose embodied. You might say that purpose emerges, impetus emerges, and its reason for emerging is its purpose.

You see? It’s just an imagination. And nothing is accomplished whenever any attempt is made to will contrary to God.

“Oh, but, Father, I’d rather go this way. Oh, but, Father, I don’t want to go so fast. Oh, but, Father … ” You see? And you dig in your heels. But, you know what? You can’t delay the Movement, and you can’t become unattached from the Movement, and so all you’re engaged in is insane wishful thinking—that’s all—and not Real Willing.

… God’s Will …

That Which is One has absolute Integrity. That which is fragmented, if there could be such a thing, would be a state of disintegration.

But …

And therefore isn’t.

And so you haven’t stopped being What God Is Being right there where you are. You haven’t become an ego. And you haven’t become the thoughts and the definitions that you have made-up while trying to imagine that you can make-up things on your own.

You see? So what happens when we take a look at this awful thing called the ego, that’s not your friend and that does not have your best interests at heart, and is all these awful things that we’ve discussed from time to time? What happens when you take a look at it directly? You find out that it’s nothing more than a bunch of idle wishes. You see? We find out that everything it engages in is nothing more than wishful thinking. Well, how scary is that? Not scary at all.

And on top of it, the ego engaging in wishful thinking is not you. You are the Christ, who can’t stop being the Christ, being the Presence of God, even if you’re ignoring It. And that’s part of the clarity that comes out of looking squarely at what the ego is. Everything we’ve been discussing since our first get-together has been uncovering this fact to you.

Can there be conflict between Something and nothing? Not really.

The problem is that the nothing, which you discover is nothing, seems to you very clearly to be something at the moment. You think you are just an organism that has a brain in its head that is nothing more than a bunch of electrical synapses that cause an experience called consciousness, and that as this “hunk of thinking meat,” you have, through a process of evolution, arrived at a point of dominating your planet and on its way to expand out into the universe and embrace it, envelop it. You see? But that’s not true. That’s just the best definitions you’ve been able to come up with without experiencing a connection with your Real Source.

Now what I’ve just said, you’re well familiar with because we’ve discussed it before. And that amounts to our looking at the illusion, and looking through it and beyond it and arriving at the Truth. Why? So that the Truth becomes more pronounced in your awareness, making it easier for you to shift your allegiance from your old definitions, your old well-established and habitual definitions into the Truth that will lift you out of the experiences of limits that you have been inappropriately bound by. In other words, so that you might move into the freedom that is already naturally yours, but which you haven’t availed yourself of because you didn’t know it existed. You thought you were just “hunks of thinking meat” doing your best, and doing incredibly well, at that.

Continuing.

Now early it says:

But yours, now that you have forgotten the act of separation, now that you have forgotten that you said, “Father, I want a divorce,” and as a “hunk of thinking meat,” your goal is the independence of creation. In other words, you’re not busy denying the Father anymore. You have conveniently tucked out of sight that you are ignoring your bond with the Father, and you are engaged in enjoying being independently creative. Your goal is to create a better world. Your goal is to create a better self. Your goal is to improve the situation, whatever the situation is, thinking that you have a capacity all by yourself to accomplish this.

So:

And autonomy is the goal of the ego.

But … (And I’m adding this word “but” and then continuing.)

You see, that’s the fact that you can arrive at with clarity when you’re willing to look at the illusion.

The illusion is that you have a capacity to be independently creative. And so each one of you, to one degree or another, is always trying to find creative ways to deal with situations—of course, without ever including the Father in it.

But …

God’s Function is the Movement of Being that is best described by the word “Creation.” You are to be co-creators with God. You are to be present with God, not claiming any separation, not claiming any independence from being the Conscious Experience of that Movement, so that you might experience the Movement and recognize God in It, and confirm God to God by performing the Function God has placed in you to glorify Him, by recognizing Him in Creation and recognizing your part in that Movement of Creation, knowing as a result of the experience that you’re inseparable from It.

… God’s …

Now it isn’t that God created you and then gave you a purpose to fulfill that fulfilled Him. It’s just the way it has worked forever, because you and God are inseparable and have always engaged in being the Movement and Recognition of Creation.

But this helps. Using these words helps you to grasp that you have a Function beyond making up your own creative solutions to the “dilemma of being” that you’re faced with as a result of your having said, “But, Father, I’d rather do it my way.”

Again.

God is Autonomous. Yes. There is nothing He must refer back to. There is nothing He must cooperate with. He is Infinite and All-inclusive. Being is Infinite and All-inclusive. Life is Infinite and All-inclusive—a Singularity. There is nothing outside of It for It to defer to, or refer to, or get permission from.

When you look at it this way, you can’t. “Autonomy apart from Him” would mean being something not All-inclusive. It would mean Creation was divided up into parts—little autonomous parts. But Autonomy is something that can only be, is something that can only exist in a Singularity that is boundaryless.

And so if you want to experience True Autonomy, you must say, “Father, I would like to join with You and fulfill my Function of recognizing You in everything, and experiencing the Joy of seeing only What You Are and Its Perfection, instead of the awfulness that I’ve been excitedly trying to cope with as a result of my looking at everything on my own.”

… what?

Where do you think the energy and the desire comes from to improve yourself and to improve your world, and to come up with a better mousetrap, and to become a bigger success, and on, and on, and on? It comes from an inherent Knowing of your Singularity, your Infinite Wholeness, from which nothing is excluded and everything is included. And your Wholeness is Infinitely Bountiful, if I may put it that way. And that Knowing which you can’t get rid of, even if you have denied its Source, it remains with you, and you seek for it at your own hand, but you seek it in the name of the ego’s goal—which is to assert, to establish, and to succeed at being absolutely independent and actual.

Now if you try to consider everything that I have said in some objective, intellectual manner, you will miss the point, because the actuality of what I’ve been saying, and what the Course says, comes into play in the way you all relate to each other. There are only two voices—the Voice for Love and the voice for fear—or you could say, the Voice for Truth and the voice for fear. The Voice for Truth has as its motivation extension, caring. The voice for fear is always to achieve self-protection, defense. One is self-oriented; the other is other-oriented.

And you want to know something? The quickest way to uncover your ingrained habits of self-protection, that you might not be aware that you’re employing, is to dare to let yourself become conscious of others’ needs, as well as your own. I know, needs are messy. I’ve discussed them before. To get into dealing with needs is not clean and simple. But Love, compassion, enriched affections in you, find natural extension into addressing needs, not wants.

I’ve said it before and I’m saying it again tonight: You need to value needs more than you do. And you need to give needs your attention more than you do. And you need to be willing to address needs, rather than addressing an intellectual concept that says, “Well, your needs aren’t actual. Your needs are imagined. Your needs are the result of your ignorance and they’re not real.”

You have an adorable little baby with snot running down its lip. What do you do? You get a Kleenex and you wipe his nose. And while you’re doing it, you coo with him and play with him, and make him be at peace—comfort him. You don’t say, “Well, you’re not really a body, you know. [audience amused] And if you did know that you were a body, snot wouldn’t be running down your lip. [audience amused] Now get with it!”

Nor would you say to someone whose house has just been blown away in a hurricane, “Well, you know, there really isn’t any such thing as loss. It’s just a concept you have that you possessed something in the first place, when you never possessed it at all.” No. You first of all say, “Are you warm? Are you hungry? Are you thirsty? Are you dry? Do you have a place to rest? Do you have shelter of some sort?” You pay attention to the need—the needs in the moment. And you just love them enough to address the need. You don’t say, “Well, you know, someday when you’re awake, you’re gonna look back at this and laugh”—and they’re sitting there on the curb where their house used to be, with a little rag-doll that belonged to their child who they don’t know where she is at the moment. You don’t, you just don’t do this.

Love addresses and meets needs. And God is expressed, is extended, in the Acts of Love that meet needs. And just like the child whose diapers you would change because they’re wet, you help the adult whose house is gone, to get dry, to feel comfort, to feel safety. You meet the needs, because in meeting the needs, the meaning of “God with us” is extended. And when that is extended, healing occurs, and grief is assuaged, and miracles happen.

“Well, you know, the South is just, generally speaking, corrupt. It’s no surprise that it was wiped out by a hurricane so that things could be addressed that needed to be addressed.” That is such a hateful thought. It says that the ego is real. It says that the ego’s perception of life is actual, and that it constitutes a sound basis for hateful judgment to be practiced. It says that suffering is deserved. Now you tell me where freedom lies in that?

Don’t value your current ego-definitions so much that you neglect in the face of need, to say, “Father, what am I called upon to do here? What am I called upon to be here that will be recognizable as the Evidence of Love?”—the Evidence of Love that inspires in the one receiving the Love, to experience more than just another person loving them, but a connection with the fact that Love universally is actual; that there is a God; that there is something beyond little egos helping other little egos.

Every Idea has a Purpose, and its Purpose is always the natural extension of What It Is. Love’s Purpose is the natural extension of What It Is.

I will say this: The Extension of Love during this last week needed to be more instant, more instantaneous than it was. And the means to do it was present. And the means for all of you to extend it to each other is always present. But if you are engaged in analyzing, psychologically and physically, all of the elements of things that are transpiring in your experience so as to come to an educated conclusion as to appropriate action, your Extension of Love that triggers an Illumination of God in the awareness of the one you’re extending it to, will be delayed unnecessarily and with just as negative and harsh effects as what you saw during this past week—harsh because anything you engage in that doesn’t remind your Brother of the Infiniteness of Good is an unnecessary extension of ignorance and a delay of a miracle.

So, watch how during this coming week you relate to your Brother and Sisters. Watch to see whether you recoil or politely step back so as to avoid the messy involvement of responding to a need, because it might make you late to a meeting, or for whatever reason. Watch the ways you use to keep a distance between your Brothers and Sisters where the connection would count. Watch the ways you refuse to blend. Watch the ways you refuse to fit in—because every time you do that, what you’re trying to do is to assert your independence and your autonomy and your capacity to not to be governed by circumstances—your capacity to govern yourself, first and last.

Watch and see how much of your behavior is an expression of righteousness, “goodness”—a state of being that causes you not to have to relate to your Brother, not to have to have compassion on your Brother. And then I want you to realize that what you withhold from your Brother, you withhold from yourself—and that’s not Love. That’s not the Nature of your Being and it’s not your Function, even though you absolutely believe it is.

So, what’s the wonderful Truth that we arrive at from daring to look at the illusion? The wonderful Truth is a clearer realization, hopefully, that right now you are the Christ, right now you are the Ultimate, and there are ways for you to extend it. There are ways for you to embody it quote “in the world” that everyone says doesn’t exist, in ways that cause the things in your world to remember God and to have a transformed perception.

You have capacities that you haven’t been able to enjoy because you’ve been so busy defending your self-righteousness. Self-righteousness being activities and intents that you engage in for the purpose of establishing yourself as a successful independent entity who embodies the greatest excellence possible in the world, while not including God in the picture at all. And when you become defensive, you are protecting this image of yourself, this mask that you present—when as I’ve said before, what’s underneath the mask is the Ultimate, the Christ, the Conscious Experience of Being in which All of Reality is available to you—not excluded from your Conscious Awareness, not excluded from your experience.

You don’t have to be afraid of your habits of ignorance. Just be aware that they are there and that they are nonsense, so that on the basis of their nonsensicalness you can let them go in preference to finding all of the ways that you can relate to your Brother and Sister, meeting real needs, because you’ve been defenseless enough to be sensitive to them—no longer treating them as though they are beneath you because they are so base, they are so un-lofty.

Until you’ve been without water, without electricity, without anything to provide comfort, you have no idea how Divinely Significant something as simple as a hot bath is, or even a cold one. Needs are simple. And I promise you, I cannot appreciate or validate or honor lofty, disconnected spiritual theories and thoughts that discount the call for the ability to have a bath and dry clothes and something to eat. Don’t become disconnected from needs, and the fact that your Divinity, if it is going to find expression or extension, is going to come forth in the form of humaneness meeting the needs. As I said to Paul a long time ago, keep your feet on the ground and your head not too far away. The place for God to be found, the place for Reality to be experienced, is in the simplicity of the life you are living.

I love you all. And I look forward to being with you all next week, perhaps a little more sober and a little bit happier, a little more fulfilled.

The call isn’t for you to somehow stand tall to some majestic proportions, but to be present, really present with each other, sensibly present with each other, taking the time to be aware of needs and doing what you can to fulfill them because you care. And because you’re constantly asking the Holy Spirit or your Guide or your Father, “What can I do? What fulfills Purpose for me to do?” Do. Do.

Okay.