Teachings of Christ Mind

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

Well, everyone had an extra week of going to bed at night with the opportunity to ask, “Did virtue go out from me today?” And let me just suggest that because we’re now moving on in the book, it doesn’t mean that it’s not an excellent idea to continue to ask yourself that question each night, because I’ll tell you something, this is what’s going to make a difference for you, for your Brother, for the world.

For you to keep a conscious intent alive in you daily to be willing to really connect with your Brothers and Sisters, to really be present with them with the willingness to recognize God there, and to be willing to be receptive of God’s Perspective of them within you, is exactly what will bring about not only a shift of perception—a sudden shift of perception—it will bring about probably a gradual, rather than sudden, shift in your Being; a shift in the way you be present in the world; a shift in which you are not constantly coming from your memory with knee-jerk responses out of habit. It will remind you that each moment is the opportunity to be fresh; freshly; in a way you’ve never been before. You see?

If we are going to talk about a goal, what’s the goal? The goal is to not be the way you’ve been being; to not be subject to sin, sickness and death; to not be subject to fear; to not behave out of fear. You’re right in the middle of the Kingdom of Heaven right now. You’re not perceiving it as what it is. It’s your Birthright to be experiencing it exactly as it is. And so the call is for literally “something new” to happen in you that allows you, as I said, to be in a new way so that you begin to neglect to energize your old habits of thinking, your old habits of perceiving, and thereby make room for insight, even revelation.

Every day is your opportunity to have this experience. Every day is not the opportunity to have the experience you had yesterday. So like Captain Kirk and all those on the spaceship The Starship Enterprise, “Every day is the opportunity for you to go where no man has gone before.” I mean that literally. And I mean that you should expect to have experiences you haven’t had before, and to accept what I’m telling you is the fact that you have the capacity, and you have the capacity because you’re far more than you think you are.

You’re not this little piss-ant mortal, this little, physical, inconsequentially-small, physical body in the middle of a huge universe, physical universe. You are the Mind, the Conscious Awareness, in which all of these experiences of body, world and universe are going on. And this Mind that you are has no boundaries. At this moment, it has no boundaries.

But you know what? We talked last week about the blueprints for disease. You have blueprints in your mind that have become like a sieve through which you look at the Kingdom of Heaven and you see it in the configuration caused by the blueprint—the confident concepts you entertain about what everything is and how everything must work. And you know what? It’s time for you to become released from those blueprints.

And every time we talk I am helping you realize that you don’t have to abide by the blueprints. And I am reminding you to be curious beyond them, which means that you necessarily must be willing to invalidate them. At least to say to yourself, “Maybe the way I’m perceiving everything isn’t exactly right.”

I don’t require you to say to yourself that they are totally wrong or that you must do this all in one giant leap. But I am encouraging you not to be so damn sure that you know tomorrow basically how everything is going to be and how everything is going to behave—and that if certain events happen, certain consequent events will have to happen—so that you might be in each moment of tomorrow with innocent eyes; with a willingness to see what you’re not expecting; to see something that functions outside the blueprint you have established in your mind as the basis for perceiving correctly.

So please, continue to ask yourself each night, “Has virtue gone out from me?” And if it hasn’t, then avail yourself of the opportunity tomorrow so that you begin to be—not think about, not reason about—but you have reason to be a transformational presence in your world.

Your world is in need of healing, and the healing isn’t going to arise out of already-established blueprints. And your various countries are attempting, to the best of their ability, to correct problems according to existing blueprints—certain principles of law, certain principles of order, certain agreed-upon principles of behavior, even rules of war. You see? Blueprints.

How do you get free of blueprints? You get free of blueprints by being willing to be present with needs.

Are needs intellectual? Well, you can imagine needs like, “I want to become a successful person in the world. I want to become a millionaire. I want to be somebody who has enough money to do truly good works in the world.” You’ll say, “Well, these are wonderful ideas.” But it’s a head trip.

How do you do good things in the world? Well, you pay attention to needs.

For example: You’re in the army and you’re a potato peeler. And you realize that there needs to be a more effective way of peeling potatoes, and so you open yourself up to what the possibilities are. And in the act of inviting something more than the historical pattern [small laugh] through decades of military protocols of how to peel potatoes, you get an idea. And it’s a good idea and it meets the need, and you have been a transformational presence because for one thing “whatever you realized” is one day going to end up in the supermarket for the housewife to use. So it will reach far. It’s the little things that make the difference if you are willing to be present with the need.

The word “need” doesn’t really mean lack. It doesn’t mean “needy,” which is something you can have judgments about. “Oh, I don’t want to be a needy person.” You see? “Needy people are not respectable. Nobody respects a needy person.” And now we’ve gotten into ego dynamics about personality, and your picture of yourself and how you want the world to see you, and so on. We’re not in touch with need at all anymore.

Need is when you experience an inconvenience, we’ll say, that you don’t enjoy, that doesn’t need to be. Need can appear as lack presenting itself to you as a fact to be accepted, and accepting it is the way to deal with it. That’s one way it can be looked at. But need is always a form of pregnancy, if I can put it that way. Need is a pregnancy about to be fulfilled—which means it is an experience that brings to light the fact that something is incomplete, but the reason the awareness of its incompleteness occurs to you is because something is coming to fill it that is new.

So you’ve got to stop being afraid of the experience of need and the willingness to address needs, the willingness to be with a Brother or a Sister who is in need—who is interpreting the need as a lack and something that reflects poorly on him or her—and to be able to be with that Brother or Sister in a way that facilitates the birth, rather than confirming their perception of lack and what it has to say about them.

Transition from one mode of operation to an improved mode of operation is a movement of pregnancy and birth. And each day you want to be able to be present in your day with that kind of frame of mind in which you are willing to be, for lack of better words, … [pause] the word has escaped Paul. What is the name of a woman attending a mother delivering a child? [audience responses] A midwife. Yes. You have the opportunity to be the midwife of, in the delivery, the coming forth of clarification in you.

Some women on a delivery table behave in a way that certainly looks like there’s an emergency happening; that there’s a dire need. A dire need. [laughing] Well, there is, but it’s not dire. It’s wonderful. It’s birth. And if the mother can become unafraid of what’s happening, if she can relax to the best of her ability and not tense up, even though the delivery may be strenuous, it will be more comfortable. It will be more graceful. And I understand that the majority of the women listening who have given birth will say, “There ain’t nothing graceful about it at all!” But you do know what I mean.

Now as a mother, you have no choice but to hang in there with the movement, right? And what we’ve been talking about last week in terms of healing is that each of you has to be willing to hang in with the “movement of healing,” even though in the process, those you’re working with may be gnashing their teeth and may not at the moment be seeing what is happening as different from the way they’re perceiving it, with a different outcome than the one they’re expecting.

So it’s when you’re willing to be present with the needs, the simple human needs; not lofty ones. “I need to spiritualize myself.” Well, good luck. But if you want to have the experience of spiritualization then come down to earth and pay attention to the human needs. And be willing to be present with them with the Father at your side, or the Holy Spirit at your side, or me at your side, so that together we may look upon the need and watch the coming forth of the meeting of the need—which because of the perspective that is available with the Father or the Holy Spirit or me, the movement of need being met will be so obviously divine that you will feel the divinity of it and the extension of it, and you will know that virtue has gone out from you.

You will know that virtue has gone out from you because the experience will be recognizably holy. And this in itself will be confirmation for you that, indeed, there is really a God. And you’re not Him, and yet you’re inseparable from Him. And your partnership, if I may put it that way, with Him is enhanced. Your experience of your inseparability from Him is confirmed to you more firmly than ever before, which will inspire you the next day to, with more confidence, be willing to be present with your Brother and your world with actually the hope, the anticipation of experiencing virtue going out from you again.

The world’s needs might seem to you to be something you couldn’t possibly address, but I promise you that each time virtue goes out from you in your day where simple human needs have been successfully addressed, no matter how small they are, it is like the leaven that leavens the whole lump. It makes a difference.

Put a little, yellow sticky-note on your refrigerator with the word “leaven” on it. Just remind yourself that that’s what you’re here to be: the leaven. The little, inconsequential leaven that leavens the whole thing, not because it’s trying to, but because what? It does its job in this particular place in the dough. Give yourself reminders. Ask yourself at night, “Did I feel virtue go out from me today?” And in the morning when you get up and you go in the kitchen and you see the word “leaven,” it will be a reminder to you that you’re here to be “the leaven” during the day.

Keep reminders like this handy, because it’s so easy for you to get caught up in the old blueprints. They are such habits. And the habits need to be broken. They need to be broken because they constitute illegitimate bondages that it is not appropriate or fair for you to be experiencing. When it’s not your habit to be present in the world with the desire for virtue to go out from you, you won’t spontaneously think to do it. So provide yourself with reminders. Because it’s only by doing it—even if it’s only the intent brought into play many times a day whether there seems to be success or not—it’s only that act of bringing it into play consciously everyday that the habit that had been governing you, can begin to weaken and dissolve and make room for the new experience.

So, yes, use a little self-discipline. Be willing to be conscientious about it. You close the drawer on your finger real hard and it swells up and it’s very uncomfortable. I bet none of you have any trouble “being conscientious” about not banging that finger on anything. Now if you can be conscientious like that so that you don’t hurt, you can be conscientious in terms of an intent to be that which brings peace, that which brings transformation. The only thing is that you don’t have pain to drive your conscientiousness. So it takes a little bit more conscious direction.

You can do it. And I just encourage you to begin to do it. And bring all of this A Course in Miracles theory, or religious theory, or spiritual theory, out of your head and into your actions.

Now lots of Christian preachers have said much the same thing to their congregations. But you know what the difference is? I’m telling you that you’re doing this in “the here and now” not only meets the human needs that are part of the human experience, what I’m encouraging you to do has the ultimate purpose of moving you out of the frame of mind you are currently in, into a new one in which the Kingdom of Heaven can begin to appear to you right here, right now, today, tomorrow—not after you die, not for future generations.

Because as I’ve said, you’ve been behaving as though you’re orphans and you’re not. Now you have to bring some of your own gumption into play and actually begin to do this, because it’s in the doing of it and experiencing the actual healing, the actual transformation that results, that awakens you to the fact that what is divinely True about you, is true now, and is experiencable now, and is worth the effort that you have to bring into play.

Again none of what we’re talking about is a means of your finding bliss that allows you to endure the human condition without it changing. Correction isn’t punishment for wrongdoing. Correction is to become free of that which was false, but which you had been bound by.

Okay, let’s go to the book.

Very simply, if you look within and don’t see me, it’s because you’ve gone within to see yourself, to see what you think, to see what you’re confident about, to see what your skills are, so that you can see what you can do to make things better in the world, or even at times to make things worse for someone in your world. If you’ve gone in and you’ve gone in to see yourself, you haven’t decided to manifest Truth. You’ve decided to manifest your arrogance. You’ve gone within because you’ve decided to be the authority here and to do it well.

And yet this one who’s going to be an authority and do things well, thinks it’s an orphan; thinks it has no connection with God; thinks it has no divine Source. It just thinks it is an organism, a body. “Here today, gone tomorrow. While you’re here, make the best of everything that you can.” You see?

So …

… in other words, out there …

The messengers you send out “by your intent” will always come back confirming to you what you sent them out to find, whether there is something else there or not. It’s called “self-deception.”

But if your desire is to see Truth, and the messengers you send out are a willingness to see Truth—what is Really True—they will come back confirming to you what is True, because you saw it first within, because that was your desire first within.

… out there, without having seen it first within.

If you haven’t gone within to ask of God what a thing is, you’ve gone within to ask what your best judgments say a thing is, or what the educated say a thing is, or what history says a thing is. And that can only constitute a judgment; an appraisal of what a thing is; the best appraisal that history or the educated ones or you have come to. You see?

See, judgment is not your function. It’s not your function to assess and come to conclusions about things.

But if you think you’re an orphan, you think that is your primary function, because if you don’t get a handle on your world and if you don’t get a handle on your Brother’s behavior or his attitude or what’s making him tick, you will be at a disadvantage because you have no natural safety, you have no inherent invulnerability. And so your basic function is to engage in constant judgments to stay abreast of things in this hostile world that this “poor little orphan that you are” lives in.

Before we go on, what is your function if judgment isn’t your function? Your function is to be conscious. Your function is to be aware. Your function is to experience what is happening and recognize God in it. Your function is to recognize God in it and experience the natural awe that spontaneously arises out of the clear awareness of the movement of Creation. That’s your function.

It is your function to joy in the conscious experience of Reality right here in Kingston, Washington, right there in Bellingham, Washington, right there on the east coast, and right there in Iraq. You see? That’s your function and your Birthright—to have the joy of recognizing it, truly seeing it, and having it truly represent the Presence of God in movement.

Again …

The Holy Spirit looks and sees God. The Holy Spirit, which is nothing more than your right Mind, sees everything and recognizes God in it, and joys in the awesome experience of it. That’s what your right Mind actually is doing right now, even though you are conscientiously ignoring it because you’re giving preference to this little “blueprint of a mind” that you’ve concocted that’s part of an organism that’s here today and gone tomorrow, and better make the best of everything. You see? Okay.

… the Holy Spirit’s …

Well, you can only judge as He does by choosing not to validate your own judgments anymore or to engage in making them anymore.

Meaning neglecting to bother to exercise a right you think you have to come to your own conclusions.

Now the way I said that, makes it sound like your right to come to your own conclusions is, you know, not that big a deal. But as an orphan, your right to make, to come to your conclusions is your primary function. It’s what ultimately makes you stand out from someone else. It’s what makes you valid—you think.

So your right to make judgments for yourself is something you place a very high value on, and you work constantly to increase its value. And so, to say, “Abandon your right to come to your own conclusions,” well, we’re talking about abandoning something that is seemingly of ultimate importance to you. It’s like abandoning yourself. It’s like letting yourself slip through the cracks.

It’s like annihilation of you—when all it is, is a letting go of “a blueprint” that you put into place overlaying what you Really Are, which is therefore covered up to you—what you Really Are. It therefore doesn’t constitute any real loss at all, but it does constitute true gain.

… which means only as you let Him do it, and let His doing of it register with you as your own doing of it truly.

Again, abandoning any right you think you have to come to judgments on your own.

The truth of this and the value of it become apparent to you every time you manage to have even the smallest experience of virtue going out from you. It confirms you to yourself in a new light, and you begin to apparently change—which means you experience healing. You experience being lifted out of the orphan blueprint, out of the orphanage—beginning to realize you have a Birthright that you don’t have to create for yourselves, and it’s a wonderful Birthright, more awesome than anything you could have imagined. You see?

Wow. Where did that come from? This is heavy stuff, right?

[small laugh] You say, “I never did that!” No, you did it but you’ve covered up the fact that you did it. And now the fact that you did it, comes to you in very oblique ways, like in the saying:

“There are only two sure things.”

“What?”

“Death and taxes. Right?”

“Oh, wow!”

That’s deeply ingrained. Everybody, whether they are familiar with that phrase or not, there is some other phrase or some feeling that conveys that meaning.

“There’s only one sure thing and that’s death.”

And you don’t challenge it. You accept and you await it, don’t you? You don’t like it, but you think you know that there’s nothing you can do about it.

You see, the minute you pull the cord out of the wall that’s connected to the light bulb, the light goes out. Right? The minute you unplug yourself from the Father, the Light of the Father apparently goes out and what’s left has no means of supporting itself or of performing its function. And so, no matter what you imagine you’re doing while you are unplugged, if you aren’t doing anything to become plugged in again, nothing will come of the effort. Zero will be the result. That’s death. Nothing will work. And the fact that “nothing is working” will ultimately become apparent. That’s all it means.

So when you’ve claimed that “you’re an orphan”—and I know you say, “I never claimed that”—but you have claimed that “you’re just a physical organism that arose out of physical evolution.” That blueprint, that idea, that concept with all of its ramifications and your confirmation of them, constitutes an active disconnection from the plug. And so you are, thereby, making the choice for death, making the choice for the experience of nothing working, of everything coming to nothing.

… and remember I’ve referred to the ego as the “orphan mentality” in the last few weeks. So the orphan mentality, the unplugged light bulb has “its incapacity to light up” as its ultimate goal to be finally realized—[laugh] which means that “that which finally realizes it” realizes that “its capacity to realize it” is nonexistent, and therefore, even that “seeming capacity” will be acknowledged, accepted, and it will be snuffed out—if such a thing were possible.

So …

… or the orphan’s …

… it.

You all know, in other words, that you cannot ultimately succeed at being independent of the Father. The only thing is that while you’re still trying, that’s bad news. Once you’ve stopped trying and you’re willing to re-embrace your Father, it’s the good news and it supports you in your walk Home.

… you know, if you had no concept of the things we’ve been talking about, you would walk around and although you wouldn’t think about it, the fact that “one day you’re going to die” would be present in your sense of your existence today. When you’re eighteen years old or twenty-five years old, or fifty or sixty years old, and if you don’t die a … —isn’t it a funny word?—a “natural” death … if you don’t die a “natural” death, well, there could be tomorrow an “accidental” death. Right? That’s how devoted you are “to death,” or that’s how devoted to “things not working” the orphan mentality is (or the ego).

To endure the experience of living until the inevitable happens.

… what if you woke up in the morning aware that you couldn’t die—literally truly aware that you couldn’t die—and the experience of invulnerability was yours? I promise you your sense of the coming day would be entirely different. And the way you got out of bed might be [laughing] that you would leap out of bed, instead of cautiously and sleepily putting your feet on the floor with your hands still on the bed hoping that maybe you can lie back down and not face the inevitable. You see?

So that’s the torment. When you don’t know and you don’t seem to have the experience of invulnerability available to you, the way you live your days is in torment. It might not be overwhelming, but it’s a drudge. It’s not fulfilling. You are tormented.

… you will live in a tormented state.

I tell you that right now your life is eternal. Now it’s eternal whether you seem to put yourself through an experience called “death,” or not. But I’m saying that you are eternal and there does not have to be any form of the experience of death. And remember last week I pointed out that “sickness in its various degrees of seriousness” are just “lesser degrees of death.” It’s your Birthright not to be experiencing any of that.

You don’t have to play the ego’s game. You don’t have to play the game of being an orphan. And you no longer have to be confident, excruciatingly confident that you will die. You don’t have to do it. You hear that? You don’t have to do it. You don’t have to be devoted to that idea.

Now why am I saying this? I’m saying this because in my telling you that there’s a way for you to experience your eternality and your invulnerability, you are inclined to say: “That’s going to be far too hard for me. You are asking me to stand taller than I can possibly stand. You’re asking me to be something I can’t possibly be without a great deal of energy and effort. And you know what? I probably don’t have enough years left in which to succeed. I think I would rather stick with my present conviction and let the process of death come upon me, because that I can make commitment to, that I can justify.” [Raj is laughing] “I can’t justify being in the world in a way that no one but you, Jesus, have managed to be. I can’t justify it. I can’t fathom it. I don’t believe that I can be only the second one ever to do it.”

You see? And what are you saying? You’re saying, “It’s easier for me to stay committed to death, and just let this terminal disease called ‘life’ play itself out.” So you’ve taken the ego’s bait, hook, line and sinker.

Again, earlier I said …

And at that point I said, well, you would say, “I haven’t done that!” But now you can see that at this very moment you’re willing to do that. You’re willing to say, “I can’t justify being only the second person in history, ever, to not die. I can’t believe it. It’s just too impossible for me to wrap my mind around.” And so you’re still condemning yourself to death right this minute.

Now that’s not punishable because [small laugh] the ignorant experience of torment is hell enough, is punishment enough, but nobody is laying it upon you. You’re laying upon yourself by means of your unwillingness to conceive of something greater than what you already believe. That’s all. And so, the Father isn’t judging you, and I’m not judging you.

And I’m not saying “you’re wrong” and “what’s wrong with you” and so on. I’m just saying here is what you’re doing, and you can do something different. And I am encouraging you to do the something different, even though it may make you stand out separate and apart from everyone else until they get it. And they may get it because you stood out and did it second. You see? But you’ve got to stop condemning yourself to death by being willing to conceive of yourself as being the second, third, fourth, or fifth one to not apparently go through a death process.

For many of you on the globe, it’s already Easter morning. For some of you, it’s close to Easter morning. You could say that the Truth that I’ve been sharing with you, are the first rays of light shining on you consciously—you know, in a way that is registering with you. And it’s a time that you can dare to not reconfirm your commitment to death, and to come out of the tomb, to come out of the orphanage, to come out of the ignorance.

Easter is about shifting your operating system. Easter is about you being willing to conceive of yourself anew—not making up a “new you” yourself, not being an orphan who has a more creative way of not looking like an orphan—but you coming into a “newness of Mind” which is an ancient or eternal awareness of what you never really stopped being.

Now if you come out of the [tomb] early this coming morning, don’t worry. You are not going to appear to be an oddball. Nobody will shriek when they see you, because you will naturally be utterly appropriate in every situation. But I will tell you something, people will feel your presence and feel safe. They will find in your presence, without even being aware of it, that it’s easier for them to love themselves. And that will make them love you, except that they’ll just say, “It is such a pleasure to be around so-and-so.”

And virtue will go out from you. And the blessing that you give, you will keep, because you let it in first by being willing to conceive that you really can be and really are at this moment more than you think you are. And that the blueprint of definitions, which you have wrapped around yourselves, isn’t true and therefore has no capacity to bind you, although you have the capacity to hold it tightly to you.

So you can get up and be the meaning of Easter tomorrow morning. You really can. [speaking to each person present] You … and you … and you … and you … and you … and you … and you … and you … and you … and you … and you. You no longer have to judge yourself unworthy and condemn yourself to death.

I think it was probably a surprise to you to realize that tonight you all have a commitment to death, or you have had, because it has been inconceivable to you, an overwhelming un-embrace-able idea that you could be the second one not to die and not to be subject to “accidental” death. And therefore, you won’t embrace … you won’t … you’ll play with the idea. Oh, your minds are the biggest playgrounds that exist, where play and nothing of consequence happens. You play with the idea, but that’s the way you confirm your commitment to death.

And so I encourage you this Easter morning to be willing to embrace the impossible, to embrace the thing that you have thought was impossible, and begin to let it in with some conscious, self-disciplined intent. And renew that intent every morning by looking at the yellow sticky-note on your refrigerator: leaven. And by asking when you go to bed at night, “Was there any point in the day where I experienced virtue go out from me, where I was present in the world in a way that I didn’t use to be present in the world, in which a communion, a transactional energetic involvement, movement of Love occurred, which blessed them and blessed me and confirmed to me the divinity of Being?” Because if you have just one incident like that, you’ve begun to move mountains. You have begun to be the leaven that makes a much bigger transformation than just the little one that it seemed it was for you. And you begin to topple the first domino.

Happy Easter!