Teachings of Christ Mind

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

Well, I hope everyone took the occasion of the last week to watch to see when self-righteousness came into play, because if you did, it provided you with the opportunity to learn more about it. It seems to be a positive thing, but at the bottom line, it is vicious; it is demeaning. It is demoralizing to the one employing it.

And if one pays close attention to the experience of it, it becomes perfectly obvious that it absolutely inhibits and is the absolute opposite of miracle-mindedness. The reason is that it is a statement that miracles can’t happen. It is a statement that life is not fertile soil for miracles. It’s fertile soil for inequity. It’s fertile soil for sacrifice. It’s fertile soil for the worst to come to pass.

Self-righteousness only rears its head in the face of threat. It only rears its head in the face of what I’ll call an overt expression or an overt event of inequity that puts the one who is going to use self-righteousness at a disadvantage, at a real disadvantage. Now, such a perception of being, such a perception of life only happens to orphans, and it’s always coupled with the unrighteous.

Self-righteousness. I know you’d love to drop the word “self” from the front of “righteousness.” But I’m going to tell you something: only orphans are interested in righteousness of any kind—self-righteousness or pure righteousness. One who is Awake doesn’t conceptualize such a thing as righteousness, and value it and revere it and nourish it and practice it.

Righteousness is half of a conflicted pair: righteousness and unrighteousness. When you feel called upon to employ righteousness, it’s because someone unrighteous is behaving in a way that’s putting you to a real disadvantage; one in which actual harm can occur. Well, think about it. To whom can harm come? It can only seem to come to one who’s forgotten his Birthright. It can only seem to occur to an orphan. And yet, none of you are orphans.

If you want a miracle, you’ve got to abandon the idea that a miracle can’t happen. And in order to abandon the idea that a miracle can’t happen, you’ve got to abandon your employment of self-righteousness. You have to put down both sides of conflict.

Now I’m going to give you something new to be with, during this coming week. It’s a statement: God is in His Holy Place and all is well. Again: God is in His Holy Place and all is well.

This is what orphans have forgotten. And when threat arises—and threat can be anything that causes you in your ego state of mind to be thrown for a curve, thrown off-balance—the tendency, the knee-jerk response is to stand in opposition to it; to use force and will power to bring about equality, still within the orphanage, of course.

And because everyone has forgotten that God is in His Holy Place and all is well and therefore no real threat has occurred, it is essential to remember that there is a different arena in which to be; a larger arena than the orphanage. That is the only thing that will lay the groundwork for miracle-mindedness. The conviction that each of you has—and each of you does have it if your employing self-righteousness—is that you are vulnerable, and if you don’t stand up for yourself through the application of will, you will suffer actual damage, whether it’s mental or psychological or physical. That conviction is what absolutely disallows for a miracle.

Now, there’s another aspect to self-righteousness, and that is that it is mesmeric. Once you get into a self-righteous mode, your mind when it determines that there is justification for fear because there is actual threat because you’re actually vulnerable, your mind coming to that conclusion, immediately calls into play in your body, sensations that support it. Ripping in the solar plexus. Tension. Muscular tension. And you say, “Oh, yes. I’m feeling afraid. Ah, fight or flight is what is called for.” And you move right into it.

And if you move into it and you’re not successful in equalizing things, your physical sensations will increase, occupying other areas of your body. And you will be convinced that if it weren’t for the unrighteous one who’s causing you to be defended, you wouldn’t be feeling this. You’re feeling it, you say, you’re feeling the physical sensations because your body’s natural instinctive intelligence is telling you a truth. And you get hooked into a self-fulfilling negative loop. That’s what I mean by “mesmerizing.”

And you build the case against yourself. But you know what you build it on? You build it on the sensation that has occurred because, first of all, you made a mental decision to be committed to the idea that you are actually a mortal and that you are actually vulnerable; capable of experiencing irrevocable damage, or damage so severe that it will be very difficult to recover. And you are committed to that sense of inability to be whole.

As long as you are committed to an inability to be whole, miracles cannot happen. That should be very clear and very easy to understand.

And you, if you’re going to get out of the trap when it occurs, if you’re going to break free of the mesmerism, you’re going to have to do something like remember that God is in His Holy Place and all is well. God is in His Holy Place—place of Wholeness, place of infinite all-inclusive presence as Wholeness, which you cannot be outside of. God being in His Holy Place means that every aspect of your Being is embraced by God being in His Holy Place. And therefore if all is well because God is in His Holy Place, all is well for you. And the suggestion that you are vulnerable and susceptible to damage is not true, and you do not have to validate it. And you do not have to, thereby, start a mesmeric loop in which you get trapped until something finally happens where you come back into your right Mind.

Self-righteousness is not your friend. Self-righteousness has no benefit for you. As with any form of mesmerism, it narrows your attention down to a very fine point, excluding everything else. And in the absence of the perspective that whole vision provides, it becomes easy to believe lies. And to believe them so completely that you cannot see any way out of it, and therefore it is justifiable to you to bring into play every ounce of force you can muster up to save yourself, while still being in the orphanage. And that’s the key point.

Okay, let’s go to the book.

… the orphan mindset, in other words.

It isn’t that it’s really teaching you how to lose your Soul. The “orphan mentality” is a denial of Soul itself.

When you said, “But, Father, I’d rather see it my way,” and you got a divorce, you abandoned your experience of your connection with your Father and therefore the essential—and I’m using the word “essential” there in the context of the word “essence”—the essential Awareness of your inseparability from the Whole, your inseparability from God, your inseparability from your Brothers and Sisters, your inseparability from every aspect of Creation. You could say that your Soul is your innate capacity to be consciously one with all; recognizing all as inseparable from your Identity, inseparable from your Being, and you inseparable from all of it.

When you said you’d rather see it your way, you’d rather make up the definitions, you abandoned that. And as long as you stay in the orphanage, you’re in a constant state of denial of it. You’re not letting it in.

Well, there is no “world of itself,” but that’s the way you’ve defined it as an orphan.

There’s no “world of itself.” There’s no independent universe. There’s Creation. And Creation is inseparable from That which is being It forever.

So …

You could reverse this. By your denying your Reality by saying, “Father, I’d rather get a divorce and be an orphan,” it costs you the world’s Reality. It costs you the experience of the Reality of Creation. When you deny your Reality by claiming to be an independent authorizer, you lose the conscious experience of the world’s Reality as the Kingdom of Heaven. It’s that simple.

Except the nothing … [laughing] the nothing that you get in return, you haven’t had enough sense to realize is nothing. And you’ve decided to make something out of it by making up all kinds of definitions and mutual agreements.

Now …

You cannot change What You Are, but you can ignore What You Are. You cannot change What You Are, but you can believe that you’re something else.

But you can’t become something else—and that’s the whole point. Because you can’t become something else, you haven’t become something else. And that’s why you’re still neither behind the Point of Perfection nor advancing toward it.

Now …

Now the reason you can’t perceive your Soul is because Soul is not perceptible. It is not capable of being turned into a perception. Soul is a direct experience of the nature and substance of your Being, when you’re not preoccupied with anything else.

It’s like you can say, “I am a man,” or “I am a woman,” or “I am an attorney,” or “I’m a schoolteacher,” or “I’m a parent,” or “I’m old,” or “I’m young”—those are all perceptions. But when you abandon perceptions that are always the result of thinking, and you go into the void, when you become still and go into the silence, in that silence there’s one thing that you’re perfectly aware of, even if you don’t put words to it.

You find that the experience of Being means “I am.” That is not a perception. That’s a Knowing, with a capital “K”. That is Knowing. Likewise, you cannot perceive your Soul, but you can “Know” it in the absence of all thoughts and all other perceptions.

You see, in the process of waking up, you have a tendency to think that enlightenment is going to give you new information, new strings of words, that you can use to think about, or think with, or base your evaluations and judgments upon through intellectual processes. But when you take the time to still the “thinking mind,” to abandon the opinions and the theories and all the unique little characteristics of your orphan mindset, and you move into the silence, you don’t find yourself provided with bits of information. You find yourself provided with experiences that seem to you to be nonspecific. And they only seem to be nonspecific because there aren’t any words breaking the experience down into bits and pieces that are definable and usable.

And because it’s [the] little bits of and pieces of information that you have found to be of ultimate value to you, it seems like the nonspecific experience of, let’s say, Peace and Love and Joy are not valuable and are not particularly meaningful. In other words, they’re relatively useless. And so you don’t hang out there very much, and you don’t abide just paying attention to the experience of Knowing that you’re having. You don’t pay attention as though what you’re experiencing is, for the first time, a true experience of you, holding—within all of its apparent nonspecificity—infinite, substantial, meaningful, and illuminating experiences of Reality.

You like little rests from the trials of the day, and so you’ll meditate and enjoy a little bit of this peace and quiet. “Oh, yes. I’m worth twenty minutes a day, taking time out. I will justify setting everything aside for twenty minutes. After all, I’ve been told that it will reduce my blood pressure and there will be other physical benefits from it. Therefore, I can afford not to attend to the emergencies and the real demands of my life, to have a little bit of quietness.” But you have to justify it in your own mind as though what you’re doing is an aside to what’s real; something irrelevant to the “real” demands of your day.

And yet what I’m telling you is that what you’re calling the “relevant demands of your day” are what are irrelevant to your conscious experience of What You Truly Are—so that if you value the experience, you will opt for the experience more often, paying closer attention to it without conceptualizing it—so that the experience of what Love is and Peace is and Joy is, and so on, might reveal themselves to you more and more clearly so that what you experience in that conscious Awareness becomes “the means” by which you live in this world.

It’s only in this way that the real world is going to be uncovered to you more and more clearly. It’s only in this way that you will find that the orphanage doesn’t exist, and that there’s a larger, unlimited arena of Being that it’s your Birthright to be experiencing.

… that which is nothing more than your right Mind …

… it is your strength because It is nothing more than your right Mind.

… you …

… you …

Because of the Holy Spirit. And because the Holy Spirit is, bottom line, nothing more than your right Mind.

“I’d rather do it my way. I want a divorce.”

You see, you couldn’t possibly will to forget your Father. You can’t use the only Will there is, which is God’s, to actually successfully deny God. So all you could do was decide to camouflage your awareness with God by/through the use of your own definitions, your own fascinations, your own resulting fears. And so you have forgotten that God is in His Holy Place and all is well.

You do not want what is illusion. You do not want what is illusory. You do not want what you have made up, if what you have made up is nonsense, meaningless.

… the world …

Why is that? Because what you’re calling “creation” by using the words “the world,” is Creation. And any moment you choose to look upon what you’re calling “the world” with love, Creation will light up and be reflected back to you, because you’ve said, “I wish to see the evidence of Love.”

You’re the key.

The ego says, “Seek and do not find.” And the reason is, that from that orphan mindset you are not looking from the place of your Wholeness with a desire to see Love; you’re looking from a place where you desire to see the definition you have made.

Now it doesn’t mean that in the world there is nothing of value. It means that when you are looking … [laughing] when you are looking with your eyes shut, you’re not going to see anything there. But when you say, “I wish to see the evidence of Love,” whatever part of Creation you’re looking at that you had called “the world,” will reveal itself to you because you will not be blocking what it is from your sight.

Again, you are the key.

Why? Not because you’re “giving it” the only reality it will ever have, but because you’re not blocking from your experience the only Reality it ever had, which was that it is the evidence of the movement of God. It’s Creation.

… making the gift.

For you to be seeing the Kingdom of Heaven right here and right now, is your Birthright. It is what is supposed to be being experienced.

Again, this is another reason it’s so important not to say, “There is no world. It’s all an illusion.” No. What the orphan has “defined it as” is an illusion, but what the orphan has been looking at and defining incorrectly is Creation.

… by looking at it with love and wishing to see the evidence of Love.

… to open the eyes of the orphans …

What does that mean? It just means that all the while you are experiencing being conscious, you are, because of the biases you have applied to your perceptions, unconscious of what everything really is—which is why I keep saying that the essential element to waking up is curiosity; not great deep intellectual studies, but momentary curiosity brought into play daily. The wish to see more of what is really there than what you’re seeing. That’s the way you break it. That’s the way you break the slumber, the ignorance.

… the Holy Spirit …

And again, let’s keep all of this grounded. The “remembering of God” amounts to seeing the trees and the flowers and the buds that are about to spring forth in a context of divinity, rather than one of materiality. “Remembering God” is to look and see Creation, the actual alive Presence of God in everything you are confronted by every day.

You are constantly confronted with the opportunity to see God. It isn’t as though once a year on the third Thursday of February there is a ten-minute opportunity to see God and wake up—where if you miss your chance, you don’t have another opportunity for another year, and even then you’ll only have ten minutes in which to accomplish it. Absolutely anything that your eyes fall upon at any moment is the Presence of God, and the opportunity to experience God right there is what you are confronted with, and the opportunity doesn’t go away. And so you’re never at a loss. And every moment can offer you the promise of delight.

But you need to start taking advantage of it. And you will not take advantage of it if you “love” to be self-righteous. Because at the bottom line, self-righteousness says, “I am a vulnerable mortal who has developed some significant power to survive in this awful state. And I am committed to existing this way and continuing to overcome the odds.” That is an absolute statement of unwillingness to recognize God anywhere. No, you need to recognize the simplicity and the truth of that.

I understand completely that when you are feeling threatened, it seems absolutely clear to you that there’s no redemption [laughing] possible for this unrighteous one who’s causing you the problem. They are guilty of what they are doing, and you cannot afford to think any better of them than to acknowledge their mean-spiritedness and their intent to do you harm. That’s why I said that self-righteousness is mesmeric. I am aware that it seems totally unreasonable to you to make a shift, to remember that here is one more opportunity, amongst thousands of opportunities in that very moment with all of the other things that are there to experience, to be willing to acknowledge the Presence of God there. I know it seems difficult.

But, you know what? The truth we’re talking about is not irrelevant to your daily lives. It isn’t something wonderful to mull over in your mind and soothe yourself with, while you’re suffering through this existence. It calls for you to be decisive.

To “be decisive” is not the same as being willful. To “be decisive” is to recognize what works and what doesn’t, and to do what works. And if you have been doing what doesn’t work, and something new comes to your attention, try it. Do the something new, test the spirits, if you will, and find out. Be willing to abandon the negative loop that you’ve created—by introducing a new thought, a new idea.

“Oh, God is in His Holy Place and all is well.”

“Oh, I’m neither behind the Point of Perfection nor advancing toward it.”

“Oh, my Brother isn’t behind the Point of Perfection or advancing toward it. We’re at that Point, and that’s where I must be looking from.”

You’ve got to do it.

The Holy Spirit …

… you, the orphans …

It’s important, what I just read.

Some of you might have not understood fully what it means that, “you are neither behind the Point of Perfection nor advancing toward it; that you are at that Point and must understand yourself therefrom.” You might have thought that I meant that that was to be the new postulate in your mind, and that you were to think up a new understanding of yourself based upon that truth that, “you’re neither behind the Point of Perfection nor advancing toward it.”

But this has nothing to do with your thinking. The experience of “not being behind the Point of Perfection nor advancing toward it,” is something that you will not experience until you abandon orphanhood. It is something you will not experience until you abandon your independence. In order to have the experience and the illumination and the transformation associated with the truth of that statement, you will have to quiet “your own thinking.” You will have to devalue it and set it aside. And what? Join with one who knows: the Holy Spirit, or me, or the Father. And your capacity, your divine capacity to experience the truth of that statement, the meaning of that statement so that you are “understanding yourself therefrom,” will be revealed to you in the partnership you have established by virtue of having abandoned your independence.

So I am not saying that now, instead of saying that you are a mortal, you’re a physical body that came through physical processes in a physical universe, blah, blah, blah—I’m not saying that instead of that, you’re now to say, “I am a divine Idea. And I’m neither behind the Point of Perfection and I’m not advancing toward it; I’m at that Point and from now on I’m going to begin to understand myself therefrom. Let’s see now. If I’m not behind the Point of Perfection and not advancing toward it, well, it must mean this, and this, and this, and this, and this.”—and listen to the running stream of thoughts, of thinking. Well, you’re still an orphan doing your own good thinking and your own good reasoning, so that you without ever having to join, you still firmly ensconced in your independence, can now embody what I’ve been saying and the truth of what the Course is saying, all by yourself. No. No.

That’s what this means.

If you will invite my Vision in, if you will invite the Holy Spirit’s Vision in, so that you are filled with, for you, a new experience of Being, different from being an orphan.

… keeps it. Keeps it intact. Holds it secure for you while you dally with the ego.

… you …

Your right Mind longs to share itself with you because it’s yours, and it is actually impossible for you not to be including it, for it not to be your full conscious experience of Being. And because it’s impossible, then every attempt you make to do the impossible will end up not working, because What You Are—since it can’t be annihilated—will constantly presence itself as you until you finally let it in, until you finally stop denying it, until you finally find no value in independent self-righteousness.

This is so important. And it should be encouraging, and it should give you faith to have enough trust to let go and invite in help.

What could that mean, “re-invest in HIMSELF”? What would it mean for you to reinvest in yourself? It would mean to give your energy and attention and fascination and love to the Real One that you are, to the Holy Spirit in you, to that which is nothing more than your right Mind, which is the Presence of the Mind of God.

… mind you, [laughing] this “real world” that you’re going to see is going to look like the community you live in. That’s where it’s going to become illuminated. We’re not talking la-la-land. We’re talking about transformed experience right here and right now.

And conversely, when you remember us and invite us in, you will begin to see the real world.

This exercise this past week of observing when self-righteousness comes into play, and observing the detrimental effects it has on you, and observing how it causes your awareness to shut down, excluding almost everything except the one offensive thing you’ve become fascinated with, you can’t help but realize how much it’s costing you, and that it is not useful at all. And that you have an alternative, and you can decide for the alternative, no matter how unintelligent it seems, no matter how irrational it seems from within your mesmerized state of seeing things, to change your mind, to abandon the self-protection that you’re engaged in.

Now, continue to be alert for the occasions of self-righteousness, because it’s really essential for you to find out just how much it’s costing you. You can end up immobilized in your living room where the TV is playing, with the sun shining outside, life going on in your community, everyone else you know going on about their business—and you, mesmerized by the offensiveness of what’s happening and how unfair it is. It keeps you so focused that you do nothing, except sit in the middle of what seems to you to be a self-satisfying expression of disgust at the situation and how unfair it is. It costs you your capacity to go about your daily activities that you really want to do. And it costs you your capacity to feel joy. It costs you your capacity to feel light and buoyant. It costs you your freedom to even just live a normal, in quotes “human life” unquote. That’s what it cost you.

But even more, it costs you your capacity to experience miracle-mindedness. And so, it’s completely self-defeating to everything you say you’re interested in, which is to wake up.

… I …

… where is that? Right in the middle of you.

Everything about you really, everything about what you really are, is, at this very moment and at every moment, geared for, for lack of better words, the reunification of you, the singularizing of you, the defragmenting of you—not the defragmenting of the poor little orphan you are, but the defragmenting of the you that you really are so that you’re experiencing What You Really Are totally, and therefore without confusion and without conflict.

We’ve talked in the past about the fact that you walk with mighty companions. Being itself, at this moment, has one goal for all orphans, and that is that they realize there ain’t no orphanage, there ain’t no orphans, and you are not alone. You never could be alone. There’s no value in trying to be alone. You’re accomplishing nothing by believing that you are and that you can survive that way. And that a lot of nothing has been happening. And you’ve been missing out on the real thing, while you’ve been in the middle of the real thing, not seeing it because you’ve decided to see it a little bit differently from the way it really is.

Again, you walk with mighty companions. You are constantly supported in realization. You are constantly supported in light bulbs going on, aha’s occurring, right here and right now. And it’s not impossible. It’s not even hard.

To make commitment to the impossibility of a miracle is silly. But until you abandon the employment of it, it will seem to be absolutely real, and it will seem to be frightening, and it will seem to be limiting.

So this week, let there be a little bit of buoyancy, a little bit of willingness to be curious. Refresh … refresh your mind with the intent to be curious to see the more of God that is right here in front of you, knowing that you have, well, universal support for it. Let the support in.

Be willing to acknowledge, “I am not an orphan who has to lift himself up by his own bootstraps. And so I’m going to abandon that endeavor, and I’m going to invite my Brothers and the Holy Spirit and all those who are Awake to help me. I’m going to let you in. I’m willing to not be so private anymore.” And keep this intent alive in your mind. It will provide you with a brand-new week—I mean by that, with new things that haven’t happened before.

I look forward to being with you all next week.