Teachings of Christ Mind

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

We’ll go right into the book.¹

… that doesn’t mean that I’m a product of the Holy Spirit; a tool that is being used for your benefit.

We can turn it around the other way: When you see me, it will be because you have invited in the Holy Spirit.

If you haven’t happened to ask to be in touch with the Holy Spirit but you have reached out to me—in other words, when you have decided to break your isolation and draw upon a Source beyond your best thinking, best reasoning, best judgments—and I respond, it means that you have also connected with the Holy Spirit; that which is nothing more than your right Mind.

If you seek the Holy Spirit, you get me. It is my task, it is my function to guide you Home when you have decided to abandon the orphanage.

And I will add: And you do find – it’s the way it works.

As we discussed last week:

… or, for clarity, the orphan mentality finds what it seeks.

“Whoa!” you say. “Even if I am ignorant, I still do seek love. I look for love everywhere.”

But the simple fact is that the orphan mentality is an unjoined, independent, unconnected mentality or thing—imagination actually. It doesn’t seek for joining because its premise, as we’ve been discussing all along, is that its task is to make something out of itself on its own. Its success can only be the result of independently validating itself and proving itself to be real even though it has no Source.

Now, love, on the other hand, is what? Love is the willingness to let in. Love is the willingness to be undefended, unguarded. Love is the willingess to not be independent; to not be a sole authority. It’s a willingness to be joined.

You know, the one thing that the orphan mentality, or the ego—whichever you want to call it—is outstanding at is being independent. Everything it does, it does for the purpose of confirming its independence and that its independence can be accomplished successfully. It avoids being in a state of need. In other words, it avoids being dependent.

And as we’ve discussed before, it does it with pride. It is proud not to have to lean on anyone. It is proud to promote the ethic of independent success. It takes what the Course says and points out to its “brother” or its “sister”—and of course, those words are very loosely used by an orphan, because, of course, an orphan can’t really have an actual brother or sister—but it’s a friendly choice of words to use to cover up the solitariness of being an orphan; to make it sound like there is “family.” It takes pride in pointing out to a brother or a sister that that brother or sister is creating his or her own circumstances, and that that brother or sister can make a different decision, but it’s up to that other brother. And there’s a willingness to stand and observe the brother, and report back to the brother how well or poorly he or she might be doing.

But you see, there’s never a joining with that brother or sister, because the minute joining occurs, independence becomes, or, shall I say, the lines, the boundaries of independence become fuzzy, and that’s very threatening. That’s very threatening to the orphan mentality. If the boundaries of independent selfhood become fuzzy, then the potential for successfully demonstrating independence and validity becomes fuzzy. And the purpose of being—from the orphan’s standpoint—becomes unclear, unfocused, and therefore dangerous to its health.

So the orphan mentality is never looking for love, because it disallows for joining, for being present with and for a Brother.

You will not find yourself at one with them. Recognition always means the experience of finding yourself in what you’re recognizing; finding unity where difference had been experienced.

As an orphan, as a solitary alone authorizer, entity, or whatever you want to call it, you can want something more than what you’re experiencing. The dissonance and the discomfort of orphanhood drives the orphan to want more.

And that orphan can arrive at a point where it realizes that maybe there is another option besides its own struggle to establish its good for itself. It hears others talk about a God. It even hears others talk about A Course in Miracles. And so it says, “Ah, I’ll look into that. Maybe there is some way I can use that too.” But it’s always used that in addition to “what I’m already employing;” to use it to make the attempt to be successfully and validly independent easier. And so it says, “I’ll look into this.” And it reads the ideas, it considers the ideas, and then incorporates it into the state of orphanhood.

And now where it had talked in the past about “brothers” and “sisters”—as I said using the terms loosely because there cannot be any such thing between orphans—it now talks about “fellow Christs,” but still sees his fellow Christs—just using new words for “brothers” and “sisters”—but still sees his fellow Christs as quite independent; capable of being more successful independent agents because of who they really are—the Christs.

And so this one can get on an elevator, or be in an audience with many other people, and be there all alone, along with all of the other Christs who are there all alone, creating their experiences all alone but together. And so there is an artificial sense of family which never bears fruit because no one ever really joins with any other one in the audience or on the elevator. No one ever really lets the other in. Sometimes one will appear to let another in, but ultimately it will only be so that he can pontificate to that brother to help set him straight in his independent task of validating himself because really he’s the Christ. Still there is no union. Still there is no communion. Still there is no joining of any sort.

And so this orphan who seems to have two goals—one, to authorize everything for himself; and the other, to let in some divine wisdom from apparently outside himself—this represents a split mind, a split purpose, a split want. But in the orphan’s mind, in your mind, you can fool yourself into believing that it is one desire, that it is one want, and that it represents the integrity, the integratedness of you. Because of this, you never see that the results you get from your attempting to authorize things on your own, and the things that you get when you try to incorporate letting in something bigger than you—you don’t see that those two things are actually different. And you feel that you are engaging in this split activity from your integrity, from your singularity.

… see, that’s how actually independent the orphan is. No matter which guide it chooses, it always seeks for a guide.

You look out and you see the messengers returning to you that you sent out to gather information to tell you how you are, to tell you how your world is, so that you might better be prepared to defend yourself against it, or utilize it to your advantage and to the disadvantage of everyone else, while at the same time attempting to fool the others into believing that they haven’t been screwed.

… that’s a fact. That’s a law.

Whether you like to acknowledge it or not, you have rules of conduct by which or according to which you behave, and according to which you interpret the world you’re looking at. And whatever the rules are that you hold yourself to in the process of attempting to turn yourself into a valid independent authority, you will have that experience. Those rules will govern what you see, whether what you’re seeing is what is really there or not.

You do not realize to what degree you are bound by your thoughts, your reasoning, and your justifications. You may not even think you’re bound. But I’m here to tell you that you are experiencing unjustifiable discomfort, unjustifiable suffering, and there’s a way out from it.

Now it’s not necessary to get into heavy psychology here. You say, “I do not want to suffer,” and yet you drive down the road and somebody screams past you at high speed, driving dangerously—and you look around for the cop that going to correct the situation, and there is none there. “Injustice! Injustice!” flashes in your mind. Red letters: “Injustice! Injustice!” A little further on the road, you happen to go five miles over the speed limit and “Whoa!!!”—red lights flashing behind you. Again, “Injustice! Injustice! How come he can get away with it and I can’t?”

You see, you don’t want, you don’t really want to be able to get away with it. You don’t really want to break the law. You don’t really want to drive in a way that’s unsafe or hazardous for others on the road. It’s not really in your nature.

But you give yourself misery, because you are choosing to look at your world through the lenses of conflict, through the lenses of polarity, opposition, opposition which calls for correction. You’re seeing through the lens of righteousness, ready to see “Injustice! Injustice! Injustice!” before the event occurs that seems to validate the cry for justice because injustice has just occurred. And so you have projected injustice into your world. You’ve sent out the messenger, and a messenger has come back to you confirming to you your righteous state, of which you are quite proud. And so you create for yourself suffering, when you say, “I don’t want to suffer.”

Many times you are suffering from something occurring in your world that your clear reasoning does not allow you to engage in. I’m not just talking about breaking the law. Sometimes you suffer because other people are experiencing more freedom and joy than you are, and it’s because they don’t hold themselves to the same principles you hold yourself. Ooh! Reeks of righteousness again.

You see, someone else is doing something that your mindset does not give you permission to do. And some of the things that your mindset does not give you permission to do, constitute illegitimate bondage—but you are bound to stay true to your rules, because staying true to your rules is the way you get to the point of successfully validating yourself as an independent authorizer.

And so you create for yourself experiences that you don’t want, but you really do want them—because if you didn’t experience the bondage, you would have to invalidate some of your pet rules, you would have to invalidate some of the mindset that you are using—and you don’t want to do that. You want to continue to see things the way you see them, even if they bring you experiences of conflict. And so you have experiences of conflict because you want them, or, below that is the fact, because you don’t want to release what brings them to you, because what brings them to you is part of the infrastructure of the successful independent authorizer that you are striving to become.

Again…

You see? You say, “My mind is perfectly aligned. My mind is perfectly consistent. My mind is singular. And I know I have integrity. And I value myself. I love myself. But it’s a pretty lousy world out there.”

… what?

Singular, in other words.

Now the important thing to understand is that, as an orphan engaged in the orphan mentality, you really don’t know the difference between what is true and what is not. You don’t know the difference between Creation or Reality as it really is and confronts you, and the world you have made up by applying different definitions to Creation than what it really is. You don’t know the difference. And so you can’t make a true choice between them as long as you continue to rely upon the orphan mentality that you have nurtured and built and continue to strive to establish as real in its own right.

It doesn’t mean you’re lost because you can’t tell the difference. It simply means that you have to be willing to accept the idea that what I’m telling you is true, and that there is indeed a different way of experiencing everything than the way you’re experiencing it. And then drum up enough curiosity, enough genuine curiosity to explore what it might really be by inviting in a perspective greater than the one you’re currently employing.

Continuing…

Now that is not something that the orphan mentality is capable of. It sees love as skillfully manipulating your Brother to get him to do what builds you up, and hopefully doing it in such a skillful way that he doesn’t realize you’ve taken advantage of him and demeaned him in the process. That’s what the orphan mentality designates. That is what the orphan mentality practices, calling it “love.”

But I’m telling you that you won’t want only love until you have arrived at a point where you’re willing to abandon the artificial boundary that you have placed around your mind, saying, “This little part of the infinitude of me, is all there is of me.” You won’t abandon what blocks you from the experience of love until you’re willing to reach out beyond your current mental state and invite something greater than you in.

However, when you do that, when that is what you want, that is what you will have. And the messengers will come back to you confirming what love is, and confirming your capacity to feel it, and to know that you are feeling it because you are included in something bigger than just tiny, little, authoritative you. And when you feel it, you can’t help but extend it to your Brother and Sister. How? Not in beautiful words, but in actual involvement.

… conflict. Polarization.

And you say, “Conflict’s normal. Polarization… oh, the universe runs on polarity.” You see?

You say, “I didn’t think a thing about it. I just looked out at the world, and it’s a mess. It’s totally polarized. It’s totally threatening.” But you’ve forgotten that something comes before what you see. And because you have forgotten that something comes before what you see, you end up bouncing around off of all of the high points of conflict that your world presents to you, like a ball in a pinball machine.

And what do you do to solve the problem of being bounced around? Why you learn to apply a little torque to the roll of the ball that you are, so that you can get down to the bottom end of the machine without bouncing off of high points of conflict. Or you learn to say, “Oh, I’m going to learn how to stay in my peace while I’m being bounced around. Peace is the nature of my Being, I’m told. And so I must be able to experience bliss no matter how many times I’m being bounced off high points of conflict.” No. You don’t learn how to skillfully not suffer while you’re still being bounced around by the high points of conflict. You do it by remembering that there is something that comes before your looking out at the world and seeing conflict. It is a choice you are making.

You have forgotten you made the choice. And you need to be reminded that you have made a choice. Why? So that you can feel guilty? No. So that you might recognize the power you have that you’re already employing negatively; the power you have to do something different; to send out different messengers; to want something different.

… because what love really is, is what you want, and you demonstrate that love is what you really want by becoming undefended against your Brother and Sister.

Because you invited them.

You always get what you want. And so the key is to start wanting something different from what you have been wanting, either consciously or unconsciously.

If [you’re] wanting to be a better and better independent authority, a more and more successful orphan, then you are going to get what comes along with it. You are going to get what is embedded in the very concept of being alone. And your world will reflect back to you that you are alone and, indeed, you are as vulnerable as you believe you are.

But all you need to do is ask yourself: “Do I really want to pursue this course that I have been committed to, to demonstrate that I am a valid orphan; that not having a Father and a Mother, not having a Source, does not mean I’m invalid? Do I want to remain committed to that course, knowing, as I’m now told, that it is what results in my interminable experience of polarities in my environment that I must constantly be on guard against, that for survival I must be able to be afraid of? Do I want to remain committed to this course, as respectable a course as I believe it is, when I don’t like the results?

“Or, shall I set a new course? Shall I abandon the orphan mentality? Shall I let in a perspective greater than mine, which at the bottom line you all know there is because you know you didn’t create all of this Universe and all of Creation? Shall I let that in? Shall I let my boundary become permeable? Shall I become actually undefended, even though all of my conditioning says it will make me vulnerable to the worst? Shall I dare to find a way to be fully present with my Brother, not based upon my best judgments about his character and his personality and what kind of person he really is? Shall I be undefended against a better perception of him? Shall I dare to be undefended and let in what God is being right there?”

See? You have to ask yourselves these questions, because whichever one you want, you will get. And aren’t you tired of what you’ve been getting? A new choice is called for.

… to you, at this moment, from the orphan mentality.

Your Brother or Sister. The daffodil or the slug.

Why? Because of what they really Are, and what they always have been, in spite of your misperception of them.

… where? In you…

… “But, Father, I’d rather see it my way. But, Father, I would rather say what a thing is. But, Father, I’d rather… I’d rather be Fatherless.”

… out there…

“But, Father, I’d rather see it my way.”

That was what you wanted. And that is what you have at the moment. And your world as you’re experiencing it, is the result of that choice. It will change in a twinkling of an eye when you change what you want. But the tough part of it is that you’ll have to give up everything that you’ve been taking pride in. And you have been taking pride in more and more clearly demonstrating the validity of your existence without a Source; made up entirely by you.

You see, as an orphan without a parent, there’s really nothing there. And as long as you insist that you are an orphan—just the effect of a sperm and an egg joining; a physical process—you have no reason to see anything beautiful there. You have no capacity to see anything beautiful there, because Creation is not what backs up your existence, for you. And so you look blindly. And what you see is your blindness.

I’m going to read this again.

Of your Father’s presencing of Himself, which you can’t see as long as you’ve disowned your Father.

… its present power and grandeur, because your blindness to what it is, hasn’t caused what it really is to go away.

You think you see polarity, because you think you have a personal private capacity to see polarity.

… that which I am, and that which you are.

… what? …

… your decision.

I’m going to come back to the simple point that your Brother is your savior.

Your Brother is your savior. The daffodil and the slug could be your savior, but life doesn’t invite you to be involved with slugs and daffodils quite as overtly as it calls upon you to relate to your Brother and Sisters. Your Brothers and Sisters need peace. Your Brothers and Sisters need not to be afraid. Your Brothers and Sisters need not to be suffering. And you know what? Your Brothers and Sisters need not to have to present a good face to the world in order to be embraced.

You need not to be afraid and you need not to be suffering. You need sin, sickness, and death to be rendered unreal; dissolved from the experience of Being because they are not valid parts of Being.

You are here to be Brothers and Sisters, not using each other to build yourselves up independently, but to communicate the embrace of love that wipes out the sense of threat; that doesn’t confirm threat that your Brother or Sister has sent messengers out to retrieve news about. Your Brothers and Sisters are your saviors because they give you the opportunity to be the Christ. They give you the opportunity, they actually present a demand upon you to be what you really Are, what you truly Are.

They demand of you involvement. They demand of you that you care enough to be present with them in their delusions, in their misunderstandings, in their misapprehensions, so that you might, without platitudes and boilerplate, recognize the crux of their misunderstanding so that you might be in a position to illustrate it so that it can be seen for the nonsense that it is, and so that that Brother can abandon it. It means having pitiful patience with your Brother or your Sister, and standing with them, whether it’s for a long time or for a short time, until the love that you are expressing registers with them enough to allow them to abandon the infrastructure of their attempts to be a successful and valid, independent authority.

It doesn’t mean standing at a distance “knowing the Truth about them.” Do you see me standing at a distance, “knowing the Truth about you”? The way you see me be with you, in this fashion is the way I am with each of you within yourselves when you reach out to me there.

And I’m being facetious here, but talk about “pitiful patience,” I’ve been with you for two thousand years. It is my joy to be here with you. It is my joy not to engage in self-righteousness, and wonder if it’s all worth it because you are so stuck in the love of your current reasonings that you don’t let go. I witness for you. I will witness for you forever.

And you know what? When you wake up, I will still witness for you forever, because it’s my function to see the glory of God right there where you are. When you wake up, it isn’t as though a job I had will be over; it’s just that we will join together in the activity, and you will be happy because you are no longer suffering.

Your willingness to be present with and for your Brother, wishing to see, wanting to see the Presence of God there, will inevitably cause the messengers to come back to you confirming what you want to see. Not because it will make you great, but because you’ve performed your function of wanting to glorify God, not yourself, and glorify It right there where your Brother is.

Do I sit back and not interfere or not, I’m going to say, coerce? No, I definitely coerce. I definitely brother you—like mother you. I am constantly there for you, presenting to you whatever illuminates your capacity to become free of whatever is binding you. I do not leave you to your own devices, because your own devices are “orphan” devices and they will not get you anywhere.

I must be involved with you. And you must be involved with your Brothers and Sisters.

And you will be influential. I am influential. I am influencing you. I am presenting ideas that cause you to reconsider things. I present ideas that you’re not anticipating. I present ideas that are outside of the box—the box you very carefully created to separate off the “little part of you that you’re identifying as yourself” from the Infiniteness of You that is unbounded because it is the Presence of God being All right there where you are.

But the one thing I’m not (and the one thing you dare not be) is someone helping you (is your helping someone) on the basis of your very best, most highly-developed, orphan mentality, because I promise you that in every act you engage in, it will be a self-serving act and not a gift at all. And it will be an act that takes away from your Brother, and depletes him and keeps you depleted.

Want something new. Decide to want something new. And then abandon self-reliance. Because I tell you that whatever your sense of self is at the moment, is not the whole of you. Reach out and invite that which is True and that which is Real in. Invite God in. Invite the Holy Spirit in. Invite me in. Invite your guide in. Invite in anyone who is Awake. And decide never to make any decisions by yourself, alone, again. And when you’re tempted to, catch yourself and say, “Father, Jesus, Holy Spirit, help me to see what is really needed here,” so that the joining occurs. So that the joining occurs.

It’s time to stop pretending… it’s time to stop pretending that you’re well on your spiritual path. It’s time to stop presenting a picture of yourself as successful, but still aloof from your Brother. You’re not managing to abandon thinking entirely, and you’re not always comfortable, and you’re not always in your peace. But even so, you persist in letting God in.

And you need to be more real with each other, because you all need each other’s support. Again, not your pontificating, not your repeating of biblical or spiritual boilerplate, but actually being present enough with your Brother or Sister that he or she can share his or her pain or hurt so that you, because you have experienced pain and hurt yourself, can recognize them, recognize yourself in them, and be with them in full expression of encouragement, because there will be days when you can encourage, where you are not so discouraged that you can’t muster up anything in you to encourage with. And there will be days when they are able to encourage when you are discouraged.

Being willing to genuinely be present with your Brother and Sister means being willing to be with them when they’re unstable, and not be frightened by it because you haven’t forgotten when you were unstable. You all need each other, but you will not be able to be present for each other until you can abandon this façade of perfection, this façade of stability, as though you never experienced instability before, and therefore you have no capacity to really understand them and be compassionate with them.

Why? Why do any of you get into that place? Because becoming involved with them in this way will take time—time that someone as “spiritually advanced as you” should no longer have to take, because you need to be about your Father’s business of glorifying Him in everything, and being an inspiration to everyone because you are an example of how well things can work when you love God. So you must decide what you want, and you must take a look at whether what you are presently wanting is the very thing that is keeping you in a state of lack, limitation, suffering, and on and on, because you’re getting what you’re asking for. And I’m inviting everyone to come off their high horse and acknowledge that you’re getting what you don’t want, no matter how easy it might be to pass off the picture of success to your Brothers or Sisters, Brothers and Sisters. It’s time to give your Brothers and Sisters your time.

A child can learn to ride a bicycle all by himself, or he can learn a little more easily with a little bit of help from someone who takes the time to steady the bike while the child grasps the experience of balance, because it’s the experience of balance that has to be discovered in order for him to ride without help. Don’t be too busy being so spiritual that, like the Pharisee, you pass by on the other side of the road and you miss out on what the experience is you could have if you were the Good Samaritan. I said the experience you could have, because the one the Good Samaritan helped was blessed, but it wasn’t a one-way street. The Good Samaritan was blessed, because he recognized himself in his Brother, and he was not employing a façade of superiority, of uppity-ness, snobbery. Let’s put it straight: self-righteousness. And humanity was embodied. And humanity always involves a joining, a unity.

If this world that you see that appears to be so chaotic is going to change, you/everyone is going to have to participate in its healing. By what? As we read last week, withdrawing the definitions you have overlaid upon it, by abandoning the boundary you have created around yourself making you separate and special, and taking the time to walk your Brother out of the cave he’s walked himself into; not because you’re so great, but because on that particular day you can do it. And on another particular day, someone will do it for you, because you’re not there yet. And there’s nothing to be proud of yet. There’s nothing to feed the orphan mentality.

Am I scolding you? No. I’m just being so clear with you, so down-to-earth clear, so feet-on-the-ground clear with you that it has to become obvious to you what you need to do to have a better experience, at the same time that I’m telling you that you’re totally responsible for what you’re experiencing, and because you are totally responsible for it, you are doing something skillfully. I’ve just said that the skill is being practiced in the negative, but the skill is there. It’s a well-practiced skill. And you can make a new decision and use the skill for waking up with your Brothers and Sisters.

I love you all very much.

Be with what I’ve said. Be less self-righteous. Be more genuine. Take the time to be humane in your actions. [said to each individual present] In your actions… in your actions… in your actions… in your actions… in your actions… in your actions… in your actions… and in your actions, all of you. It will take humility.

Okay.