Teachings of Christ Mind

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

Well, big subject:

Well, first of all, it might be a good idea to consider what the word “salvation” means. You throw it around a lot.

Well, salvation is going to mean something to you, right? It’s not salvation hanging out in the ethers. It’s something that will be an experience. And at the bottom line, salvation means you never having to strive to become anything anymore. It means you not being behind the eight ball anymore. It means you never having to try to be right. It means you never having to prove anything.

Salvation is the experience of you being in your right Mind and knowing it. It means you being in your right Mind, never again subject to doubt or the invitation to discouragement. It means you at peace and being able to be from your peace in all respects.

Salvation is the absence of fear—the total, complete absence of fear. It’s you being able to be whole, to be wholly involved in being, where there’s no reservation of any part of yourself that you’re keeping safe from threat, where the saying is really true, “What you see is what you get,” because what everyone will see will be you wholly present, without reservation, without withholding yourself in any way. Salvation is the unobscured experience of safety—which is another way of saying it is the direct experience of omnipotence, not power over anything, but the presence of wholeness that finds no threat, no suggestion of threat, nothing unlike itself. It is the experience of utter peace and utter safety.

So what is God’s Plan for this experience for you? Is it a plan He had to come up with? Or is the plan for your salvation simply the Way things are, the Way things unalterably are that you are simply going to let yourselves back into the experience of?

Remember, you’re not advancing toward your salvation; you’re not advancing toward your perfection; you’re not improving yourselves in order to earn salvation. But you have these imaginative ideas that you have come up with and that others have provided to you that you are not already there; you’re not already at the Point of Perfection. And so you operate not on the basis of the Way things are, but on the basis of the way you think things are. Period. Your salvation lies in abandoning the way you think things are, so that you might yield into the Way things are—in other words, the Way God has set it up, the Way God is being it/you at every moment—so that you let go of the something extra that you’ve added to the equation.

Salvation is yours. Salvation is already yours. And what all of this is that we’ve been talking about amounts to your yielding to It, your yielding into It, your relaxing into It. God’s Plan for salvation is utter simplicity.

Let’s go into the book.

In other words, because it is not real.

So:

If you want to believe in error, you would have to do something. You would have to engage in acts that attempt to make it real so that you would have something to believe in. And the reason is that it doesn’t exist in its own right.

Now:

Whatever that response might be …

Well, that’s what all of the mutually-agreed-upon definitions are—the interpretations of Reality that you’ve come up with. And the mutually-agreed-upon definitions that you operate according to, become the justifications for your responses. And so as a result, you are very seldom original with a Brother or a Sister, with each other. You’re always doing this two-step, bouncing off of each other so as to be able to do things but not violate the mutually-agreed-upon definitions, the interpretations that have been placed between you and Reality itself.

Naturally, [laughing] it’s not the most comfortable thing for the ones you’re analyzing.

But:

This is really quite obvious, and really quite simple. However you perceive your Brother, however you interpret his actions and him, will govern how you’re going to behave toward him. And if your interpretation of your Brother, or of his actions, takes precedence over an actual connection with him, then you are operating in a fantasy. You are in imagination land, and you’re out of touch. You’re not connected. You’re unable to be real, appropriate, pertinent. And you’re going to trip and fall flat on your face, and you’re going to wonder why.

You don’t usually run into problems until you have to relate to your Brothers and Sisters, right? If you’re on a mountaintop all by yourself, or on a deserted beach all by yourself, you can be there without any problems. But let there be one other person who comes along, and there is the potential for them to behave in a way that is offensive to you, or distracting to you, or bothersome to you, and the problem begins. Why? Because you must be involved, and you don’t know how to be involved with your Brothers and Sisters.

Now, you may argue with me and say, “I sure do. And I get along with them well and I have good working relationships. I am, along with others, able to be quite productive and am able to help others be productive.” But what you don’t understand is that if you are not gathering your perception of your Brother from a prior connectedness with Truth, you are operating in the realm of imagination land. And so although all of you are being able to function together with very little friction, you are not in touch with the Truth, and you haven’t learned how to be with your Brother rightly. You haven’t learned how to be with your Brother from your right Mind—a real connection with what is really there where your Brother is.

… which is what all of you do when you look at your Brothers and Sisters. You evaluate where they’re coming [from]. “I wonder where she’s coming from? Mm. She’s behaving in such-and-such a way. She must have blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” And you come up with an imaginary assessment. And then you approach her on the basis of that assessment.

… obscuring of what? Of the Truth. Your imagination obscures the Truth when you give preference to what you have imagined.

You see? Instead of a joint understanding of what you perceive, which you have when you abandon your independence, your autonomy, and you say, “Father, or Holy Spirit, what’s really going on here? What do I need to know here? What is really going on?” so that you might respond on the basis of a joined clarity.

… and I’m going to say, independent …

What does that mean? [small laugh] It means that even though you come up with your own conclusions and they’re false and they are disturbing to you, you, for the most part, control your behavior and you don’t behave consistent with the perception you have. But when it comes to your emotions, oh boy! Do they go wild! And in your head, you concoct stories, you concoct scenarios about your Brother’s behavior and what you can expect and what they’re likely to do. And the longer you do this, the angrier you get. And you know what? You haven’t even had your first word with this person for the day.

So you …

You see? You’re going to control yourself properly here, but you’re not going to control yourself at all here, and so you’re attempting to be inconsistent within yourself. And that’s called the human condition.

You also do this with the world. You do this with spiders and snakes and centipedes, and butterflies and hummingbirds. A hummingbird comes along and there’s no fear in you. And you stand very still in hopes that it will stay in your vicinity and maybe get really close so you can get a good look at it. But you see a spider or a wasp or a snake, and whether it’s going to do anything to you or not, whether it even cares whether you’re there or not, you go through great fear, and a sweat will break out. Fear will reign. Why? Because of the interpretation you have about the spider, or the snake, or the wasp. So you’re reacting to your own interpretation. You’re off in la-la-land again—imagination land.

But you know what? You’re putting your body through all of the responses that would be called for, we’ll say, if indeed there was a threat. And you know what? When you live your life this way, you wear yourself out unconsciously, simply because you’re constantly on guard, one way or another, all day long.

Now the next section is called:

See, we’re talking about simplicity.

Here it is. Here’s the Holy Spirit’s judgment.

There are only two things going on in your behavior or in your Brother’s behavior.

Every loving thought you have is Real and eternal.

… you or your Brother engages in is an appeal for help.

That’s why it’s said that everything is either Love or a call for Love.

So if your Brother is behaving, or Sister, in a way that isn’t obviously love, then they’re engaging in what you can imaginatively call bad behavior—a call for correction. And you, at that point, are faced with a choice. Are you going to react to your perception of them and of their behavior? “Oh, they’re in a shitty mood. I had better steer clear of them if I don’t want to get caught up in a big mess.” Or are you going to see it for what it truly is—a call for Love, a call for help—and not react angrily?

It makes all the difference in the world how you interpret everything you see. And you’re going to interpret it in one of those two ways. You’re going to recognize it to be the Presence of Love, something to be grateful for, or a call for Love, which is something to be grateful for.

You see? You make your own definition up, and then you behave according to that definition as you see fit. And there’s been no connection with that Brother. You’ve inserted between your Brother and yourself a picture of him, and then you’re reacting to that picture of him. And then you’re coming to conclusions as to what is required in order for your picture of him to be pacified, settled down, dealt with. You see? And the problem is that you carry out this response to your very own picture, not where something can be done about it which is in your own mind, but you attempt to deal with the Brother who has made a call for Love, as though he hasn’t made a call for Love. And your behavior is recognized to be attack, an absence of communication, an absence of connection, and yet a coercive response from you that doesn’t make sense to the one calling for help.

… what does that mean, “the danger of this to your own mind”? The danger of it is that your mind is itself in a conflicted state. And you don’t even know it because it’s second nature to you to deal with your interpretations of things, instead of with the things themselves. And that’s a form of insanity. It’s certainly a concrete evidence of ignorance.

The danger.

… meaning an expression of hate. If you determine that the call for help is aggressive lack of respect directed toward you.

… and I’m going to put it this way.

… the …

[small laugh] Your response will be perfectly appropriate in your mind when it’s a response to your perception of what’s going on.

[small laugh] You hear that?

“What are you talking about? I’m not going around feeling a need to attack. I never think about attacking. I never engage in anything that comes anywhere near attack unless I’m really, really, really upset. What are you talking about?”

Well, you can understand it a little bit better if we change the words to, “your own perceived need to defend yourselves.”

And every day, in one way or another, you get up ready to defend yourself. Ready to defend yourself against traffic jams—inconsiderate drivers that are behaving poorly and causing slow-ups that will make you be late to work, and perhaps threaten your job security because you’ve been late three times already. You get up careful to see that you run into the least obstacles to having a successful day, which means that you expect obstacles, that you believe that you live in a hostile world—one that you have to be on guard for so that it won’t trip you up and leave you at a loss at the end of the day.

This attitude of being ready to defend yourself by all the means you use—having a good plan, thinking things through ahead of time so that you’re prepared, and so on—these defenses, even though you describe them in glowing terms of respect, constitute an approach to your day and your world as though it is against you, and you are prepared for it not to take you down. And so, that is an attitude of attack. It is not a state of mind that can be described as Love. Your very approach to your days is a call for Love. Your very own approaches are calls for Love.

Again, because it’s important.

Calls for help.

How do you make it unreal? You make the need for healing and you make the call for help unreal by naming it something else. “What can you expect? She’s a bitch. What else can you expect? He’s a chronically dishonest person.” You’ve made their behavior, which is a call for help, unreal/invalid by naming it something else, and then acting on the basis of what you have named it.

And do you see that every time you do this, you miss connection, even though on a camera it might appear that there’s involvement? And if you are missing the connection with your Brother, but are still having a mutual activity with him, what is going on? How would you describe what’s happening? Nonsense. Meaninglessness. And you know what? That’s what most of you see on the evening news.

… In other words, change the need for healing into something unreal.

… your unwillingness to perceive Reality …

[small laugh] You see? The truth sort of hits under the belt. It uncovers things that you’re doing that you didn’t know you were doing and that you would say you weren’t doing. “What do you mean, I have an unwillingness to perceive Reality?” Well, if you give preference to your definitions of everything in place of Reality—the thing you’re giving definitions to—you’re withholding the experience of Reality from yourself.

And of course, there’s a reason you’re doing it. And the reason is—which goes back to our initial problem—the reason is that it’s your task to practice the skill, which you believe your Father gave you, to be like your Father alongside Him. And so you engage in making up these definitions, and then behaving toward everything on the basis of these definitions because that is the way you are going to ultimately—you think—prove that you’re just like God, prove that you are an authority, and prove that you’re right, not wrong. And so it’s an emotionally-charged situation.

You all withhold Reality from yourself by trying to create an alternate reality right where Reality is and right with the stuff of Reality. And that’s why I keep talking about the need to look at everything with innocent eyes. You haven’t realized you’ve been doing this, but you have been doing it and you must break the cycle. And you break the cycle by being willing to assume that maybe you’re not seeing everything as it is, and that maybe you’re not seeing everything as it is, is what is causing discomfort, distress, suffering, and all the negatives that seem to be part of life.

Continuing.

“Oh, but I do understand. I know Joe so well. I grew up with him. I know all his idiosyncrasies. I understand him perfectly. You know, he came from a deprived home life, and he’s done really well in the face of it. Lifted himself up by his own bootstraps.” And blah, blah, blah. Got the whole picture down.

But wait a minute. Is he a product of his environment? Is his behavior predictable and understandable because of everything you know about all the physical aspects of his growing up? Or might there be more to him that he’s not aware of? Might there not be something divine about him? Might there not be another way to look at him besides through your perception, your definitions? Yes. You’ve go to dare to break the habit of perception. Or put another way, you’ve got to do whatever it takes to break your habits of misperception by being willing to look with new eyes, look with a willingness to see what is there that you have been overlooking.

You must be willing to risk the chance that there might be some benefit in looking at things that you’re sure of and saying to yourself, “I may not understand all there is to understand about this. There may be a lot more for me to understand.” Your scientists are doing that in spite of the power with which they declare what they already know. They are still digging or reaching beyond what they acknowledge is their present limited perception.

“Well, you know, I don’t want Joe to be in the situation he’s in. I don’t want to be unhappy because of what I see is going on with Joe.” But the question is, “Do you want to let go of the perceptions you have developed, the concepts, the definitions you have developed?” Are you willing to let your mind be changed—that’s the real question—so that Truth can be more than you want it to be from whatever your limited level of perception is?

Because the two are one and the same thing.

You see? They didn’t handle the problem where it lay, which was in their own mind in the criteria they were using to define the one they determined to be at fault—the one making a call for help who is being interpreted to be a malicious, law-breaking citizen calling for justice—punishment, in other words—instead of healing. And in this procedure, those analyzing him and then judging him according to their analysis and punishing him for what they analyzed him to be, saved themselves from having to become involved, I’m going to say, involved at a heart level, involved at a level where real connection occurred. It saved them the effort and the trouble. And so they could stand and look down on the poor soul, and come to their judgment, and send them on their way for their punishment, and not be disturbed.

… as a call for help …

Healing is a together thing. Healing is not something one does to another.

… which are real …

(PAUL: Just a moment.)

Paul is getting hung up because what’s being said and what I’m sharing creates a dilemma when someone who is expressing a call for help does not want to receive the help. When this happens and a response of love is not received, what happens? The temptation is provided by the ignorant behavior of the Brother not wanting to receive the love offered, the healing or the help offered, to … it provides the opportunity for the one offering the help to come to a judgment. “Wow, he (or she) really is a difficult person.” You see? The temptation is to succumb to creating a definition, even though originally a refusal to make a definition and operate according to it had been successfully accomplished. The refusal to accept the love provides the opportunity and truly the demand not to abandon staying with innocent Vision—not to formulate a definition and then make commitment to it and then behave toward that person as though the definition you’ve made up is true.

This is part of the involvement. This is part of giving the answer of Love. It is, you might say, part of what you would call the stickiness of involvement. Why? Because it appears then that a war is going on, a tug-of-war where you are being invited to abandon your innocent Vision in favor of making up a definition and behaving according to it, and thus moving into la-la-land, imagination land, where you’re lost. What it does is, this invitation to a tug-of-war, what it does is it gives you the opportunity to make commitment to seeing with innocence just because. In other words, not because there’s a payoff for you, not because there’s a quick payoff, but because it is what represents your Sane Mind. You see?

Making commitment to being Sane seems like hard work because you’ve been so used to doing something else. [laughing] And so you look for alternatives to the hard work, not realizing that to see with innocence is natural to you and is not the hard work it appears to be. There is a point at which you have to stand behind a commitment to see what’s Real, and not be distracted from it by another’s behavior or your very own inclination to move into the realm of imagination and live there where you cannot be conscious of Reality.

Continuing.

The Holy Spirit.

… your Brother’s. But hear your Brother’s call for the Help of God …

Unless, of course, you decide you are going to get back into your old habit of making definitions and behaving on the basis of them. But if you’re not going to make up a new definition that justifies your uninvolvement and makes you better than him, then you’re going to find yourself feeling at a loss because you don’t know what the answer is. And so you’re going to recognize you need God as much as the one calling for help recognizes that he or she needs something, even though it’s probably not God as far as they’re concerned, but just something that will reconfirm for them the rightness of what they’re doing, and that they shouldn’t be suffering for doing it the way they’re doing it. So this is very important.

… and I would say if you haven’t asked for it, you won’t have anything to give. So the two are inseparable.

… meaning truly want it to be as God’s Answer.

You see? So the question is, “Do you want to be able to make up a definition of a Brother who is calling for help by behaving badly, do you want to be able to make up a definition about it that provides you with a handy way to resolve it through judgment and no involvement, and continue to be ignorant of your own Place of Excellence—the Place of Excellence in you—and remain unconscious of your access to it, and continue on with your Brother where both of you are missing each other, where both of you are not connecting with each other, even though it appears that there is involvement? Do you want that? Or do you want what really heals?

… in the Name of your True Nature. In the Name of the Place of Excellence in you.

Why? Because you’re breaking the isolation, the bill of divorcement. And when you break it, the experience of family connection with your Father, your Source, immediately, it would seem, resurges in you and fills you up because you’re no longer blocking it.

… why?

Complicated? No. Simple to understand? Yes. Happifying? No. Relieving? No. Why? It’s a question you all need to ask yourselves.

Well, I’m going to tell you, it’s because you don’t think you can rise to the occasion. You don’t think you can really be this way. You don’t think you have what it takes. It will be too much work. Why? Because it’s not natural to you, you don’t think. And so, someone else’s definition of you has settled in you, and you’ve taken it to heart and you believe it. And so you never even begin to wriggle inside of the chrysalis you’re in, or stretch inside of the egg and peck away at it, when that’s what’s absolutely essential. Why? Because although you can manage to put up with the distresses of your daily life, the human condition, they’re not bad enough to motivate you to peck at the shell or strain at the confinement of the chrysalis so that the chrysalis might snap, so that your definitions might break and you can see that they had not the strength to confine the Christ that you are, the divine one that you are.

… away from Reality …

In the undoing of the habit pattern that you have adopted as your identity and the reason for your behavior and the justifications for your behavior, including your habit of giving definitions and evaluations to everyone else about them and using them as your criteria for behaving the way you do toward them.

Well, they will serve you very well.

This is not a spot, in terms of the unfoldment of the things needing to be understood, for me to tell you sweet things and to give you words of encouragement that would allow you to relax. Because the moment you feel relaxed, you’ll stop paying attention with earnestness at what you need to pay attention to. Which is, first of all, your inclination to approach your day as though it’s a hostile world with things you need to be guarded against so that you are in a dull mode of self-defense, which is really attack. And second, where you don’t just give preference to, but you make commitment to your defining everything without ever connecting with what it really is. And thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, your habit of defining your Brother’s, I’m just going to say, behavior, because none of you consistently express love so that it’s the predominant thing that everyone recognizes about you as they observe you as you go through your day.

Your behavior is a call for Love. That means anyone you look at, their behavior, for the most part, is a call for Love, a request for help, because so much of their day is approached from a feeling of ignorance that must somehow become equal to the demands of the day so as not to cause that one to feel depressed at the end of the day because everything went so badly. And so their behavior is not inspired with Love. Your behavior, for the most part, isn’t inspired with Love. But that’s your Birthright, for it to be inspired with Love.

So, you’ve got to be alert to your very definite inclination to interpret what a Brother is and what he is being as you are in relation to him, and your reluctance to step past the definition you create so as to perhaps really connect with that one and have the opportunity to find out whether their behavior truly is a call for Love, a call for help; or whether it was an expression of Love perhaps that pushed you beyond the limits you wanted to be pushed, and therefore you said, “That one is behaving badly,” and then you proceeded to treat that individual on the basis of the definition you gave.

We’re talking about being more conscious. You could say we’re talking about using a little more discipline of your mind. Oh, oh. Work, work, work, work. Discipline, discipline. You know what? [small laugh] What would you call it if you sat down one day and you neglected to worry? You just neglected to worry? Well, you would find you were in your peace the whole day. Were you in your peace because you used self-discipline? Yes, but not in terms of work. You expressed discipline by consistently neglecting to do what doesn’t work.

It’s simple. You aren’t going to abandon what doesn’t work without a conscious choice to do it. There’s going to have to be focus. The rewards are great. The rewards are your unchangeable Birthright, divine Birthright, beginning to register with you, because you’re neglecting to obscure it with your personal effort to be something on your own.

So, this week I invite you to conscientiously—which means consistently and persistently—observe how quickly, how spontaneously you bring definitions into play about your fellowman. And then watch how long it takes you to abandon them. Notice whether or not you spend an hour building on that definition, as I said, fabricating a scenario of events in your mind. Notice how much valuable conscious experience—I’m not going to say how much time—how much valuable conscious experience you’ve wasted in imagination land, so that you might see just how effectively you’re keeping yourself unconscious of Reality. Because once you see that, it will be much easier for you to make a choice for using your mind well.

And it will be that much easier to recognize that you don’t want to choose for what doesn’t work, so that you might more easily choose for God’s Plan for salvation, which is choosing for [small laugh] what works. Choosing for what works because that’s the way it’s been set up; it’s the setup that’s already in place unchangeably.

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