Teachings of Christ Mind

Good evening, and welcome to everyone who’s joining us on the Internet.

Well, the Course says, “There is no order of difficulty in miracles.” And I’m going to say, there are not orders of reality. And what I mean by that is, that as we meet every week and I’m sharing these ideas with you, I’m aware that it seems to you that my assessment of each of you—my definition, if you will, of each of you—describes someone you don’t know.

I tell you that you are the direct expression of God, right now. And, therefore, you are each the Christ. But you don’t believe me, you don’t think so. At least, for the most part, as you go through your day, you don’t behave like the Christ and you find it very difficult to put into practice the things I have suggested that you bring into play. It’s just too easy to slip back into your old habits of thinking, and they seem fully justified. But, the one to whom they seem justified, is not the one I have described as you. It’s the orphan, it’s the one who feels separated from his Father. It’s the one who feels isolated and alone.

Well, those words don’t describe you, even though you believe they do. And so, it can seem as though I am describing two different orders of reality. There’s the Kingdom of Heaven and the Sons and Daughters of God, And I’m talking about you and I’m talking about everything that you experience—Holy ones. Awesome … Awesome because the very substance of your Being is divine Love, which has not only the capacity but the intent to bless everything It sees with the Love that It is.

“Well,” you say, “that isn’t what I find myself engaged in as I go through my day. You’re describing some ultimate me, not a here-and-now me. Here’s my experience, and I’m very upset about it. And here’s why I’m upset about it.” And you can spell off all the justifications and you are firmly convinced in the picture you draw. So, you’re talking about a different order of reality, and it seems at times to be something you cannot pull together. And yet, you know what? As we continue, I am not going to stop confronting you with the truth about you that stands at odds with the way you perceive yourselves.

Now, part of the problem is that you think that you have to reconcile the way you see everything, and the way you think of yourself, with what I’m talking about. And they can’t be reconciled. The two will never meet, because one is Real and one is unreal. One is the direct conscious experience of Reality as it is and the other is a preoccupation with a fantasy about what everything is. The fantasy goes on, so to speak, in your head. To engage in it, you have to withdraw from everything and go inside to formulate and maintain the picture you have drawn.

In this way, you are not really present with everything or anyone. You are staying solidly joined to the picture you are maintaining in your mind. That doesn’t constitute a different order of reality. It simply constitutes a misunderstanding which you’re trying to abide in with great diligence. Because in some way you feel that by staying with the picture you’re maintaining, you are going to manage to survive. And that’s why it is of great importance.

The imaginative description of yourself that you have made up will not become, or refine itself into the Christ that you are. What will happen is, that you will finally arrive at a point where you’re willing to withdraw your investment in your imagination and abandon it—let it go. And, you want to know something? The reason the Course presents such difficulty to you is because you read it so that you can get a better hold on the world by means of your definitions, and the Course is saying, abandon them.

“Oh, abandon them? That will leave me floating, insecure. That will make me very vulnerable. I cannot afford to lose control, chaos will follow. I am convinced of it. I am convinced that my very definite definitions and opinions and judgments are what are keeping me safe. I live in a hostile world. It’s obvious to anyone with half a brain.” And that’s an argument in favor of not letting go and providing yourself with the opportunity to discover that there is a permanent, eternal, abiding order to the experience of existing that you are not responsible for, and that you can lean into and rely upon totally.

Oh, but if you do that, that will put your ego out of a job. You say, “Well, I won’t have anything to do, then.” But really, it’s saying that your ego will be without a job, and you will have to glean the value of your presence from some other source than the “excellent effort” you bring to getting control of your life and your world, so that you can fulfill dreams that you have made up—the fulfillment of which, if you were to let go, you would find you have already been gifted with and are part of your intrinsic wholeness right now.

So, in some ways what I’m here to share with you is the motivation to let go of control, the motivation to give up trying to improve this puny little self you think you are. Well, you know, I hear this often: “I’ve been trying. I have been honestly and earnestly doing my best, and nothing has changed.” And I said this a couple of weeks ago. And what you’re saying is, that you are not finding any real justification for persisting. But, if you go to the doctor tomorrow and he examines you and he says, “You have a terminal disease,” now you’ll have justification. Now you’ll have motivation, even if you’re not sure that there really is a God. And even though you’re not sure that if you dare to let go of control and yield into the underlying, universal order of Being, that there will be an eradication of the problem that the doctor described—you’ll do it anyway.

I’m suggesting that you do this before you have some ultimate reason for doing it, when there isn’t fear attending it. One doesn’t have to end up being crucified, or “on the way to the cross,” before trying something new.

When I describe you as the holy Son or Daughter of God—right now, right as you sit here—and that where you’re sitting is the middle of the Kingdom of Heaven, I’m not talking about some other order of reality, some other dimension. There is no other dimension. There is no other thing to be experiencing. Don’t let fear be what brings you to the resolve to look with fresh eyes. Don’t let a dire circumstance drive you to what we might call a “negative inspiration,” or a negatively impulsed inspiration to let God in, or let Reality in. Be willing to accept that Reality and the Kingdom of Heaven—the only Kingdom of Heaven there is, and what you have meant whenever you used those words, “the Kingdom of Heaven”—is what you’re in the middle of, right this moment. Hold on to that one conscious thought.

Now, don’t hold on to that conscious thought as a mental practice that will accomplish something. It’s only purpose is to help you become so single-minded that you will dare to let go control, and you will dare to listen, and you will dare to be receptive to the influx of new vision that will radically change your perception of everything, uncovering what is truly present and has always been truly present.

Now, as I’m talking, it must be becoming obvious to you that the circumstance you find yourself in is really only an experience of mental aberration—distorted perception. Another way of saying it is, you must be beginning to realize that you’re having an episode of insanity.

Now, wasn’t very nice of me to say that, was it? But, you want to know something? Insanity is not terminal. Insanity is correctable. To be able to say—or think, even—that you are not seeing things clearly, and that it is foolish for you to believe what you think you’re seeing, is the kind of simple logic that can be all the impetus you need, all the push you need, to become genuinely curious to look at everything you think you’re familiar with and see something you haven’t seen before.

Again, if you don’t know that you are seeing in a distorted fashion, there will never be any reason for looking with new eyes, or with new curiosity, or with a new sense of adventure.

There are not orders of reality. There is only one. You’re in It. It constitutes you, and It awaits your conscious experience of It. It desires you to be having the conscious experience of It. And, the function of the Holy Spirit, which is nothing more than your right Mind, is to reveal It to you. Your very own right Mind desires to reveal to you what you, in your right Mind, already know.

You simply must stop distancing yourself from the state of being Awake, the state of being enlightened, by insisting upon reinforcing your unenlightened thinking. And this means stepping out into unknown territory. It means, in a way, from your present point of perception, that you must be willing to think in a “new order of reality,” in a different order of reality, because Reality seems so foreign to you when I talk about It. And so, it will seem to you as though you’re having to move into a new order of reality. It will only seem that way. I am putting it that way, so that as long as it seems that way, you will find more reason to pursue It, too lean into It, to abandon what you’re sure of in order to make room for the conscious experience of what It—everything—Is.

Now, let’s go into the book:

Remember, last week we were talking about pictures and photo albums, and freeze-dried frames of moments, and then treating those freeze-dried frames as though they were, in and of themselves, something actual, you—you at an earlier time, you doing this, etc.—when you are the Mind, the conscious awareness in which the experience of looking at a picture book is going on.

… a definition …

H-m-mm. What was the crucifixion? The crucifixion was a penalty, wasn’t it? A penalty for being guilty, right? Now, the crucifixion—my crucifixion, if you will—was an example of being found guilty of something that hadn’t occurred. I was found guilty for doing or being something I was not, and then penalized for it. Now, when it says that …

… it’s referring to each one of you, and everyone else you know and that you run into in the process of your day. And you each crucify each other, as well as yourself. You crucify yourself, the Son of God that you Are, by defining yourself in less than lovely terms [chuckling], self-critical terms, or even falsely positive terms.

The orphan mentality is a mentality unconscious of its divinity, unconscious of its connection with everything and everyone at, I’m going to say, a level of divinity, absolute divinity. How many times, during your day … and I can safely say that none of you goes through one day without at least once falsely judging a brother and being upset with that brother—claiming his guilt, confronting him with his guilt, confirming his guilt, not letting him weasel out of his guilt. But, of course, that’s what orphans do. That’s not what the Christ does, but that is what orphans do.

If each one of you is God’s Son or Daughter, you are at this moment guiltless. You are innocent, pure, right now. You must get this through your head, because I’m speaking to the pure, innocent one that each of you are. That’s who I’m speaking to, no matter how you’re conceiving of it. And until you let yourself off the hook and dare to believe that that is what you are and therefore you do not need to behave the way you’ve been behaving, you will not find transformation occurring. You will not find a miracle happening—a sudden shift of perception. You won’t find it happening for yourself and you won’t find it happening for your brother.

And so, you really have to be willing to take what seems to you to be a radical position that, in spite of everything you know you’ve done, and in spite of the meanness with which you’ve done a lot of it, that’s not part of your true character. That is not part of your being. And because it isn’t, you cannot be forever influenced by it, and you do not have to forever embody it.

Everyone—not everyone, but many—who have heard me say that Hitler is Awake, got very incensed. How could he be Awake? He only did the atrocious things he did 60 years ago. That’s not nearly enough time to suffer for what he did. Well, then, by comparison, how long do each of you have to suffer?

Probably you don’t even deserve to be here listening to me right now. It’s too soon. You haven’t paid enough. Some of your indiscretions or sins just occurred the day before yesterday. Well, are you an orphan or not? If you’re not an orphan, then the rules governing orphans do not apply to you, and you have the means to step out of that mentality into your right Mind at any moment. The answer to the problem is not paying the penalty, but stepping out of the frame of mind in which the penalty seems to be justified.

Now, does that mean you just say, “Well, yes, I did it, but I’m innocent, I’m innocent, I’m innocent, I’m innocent.” No, because if a shift in you hasn’t occurred so that that kind of behavior finds no abiding place in you ever again, and you are a new man, we might say, or a new woman … unless that has happened, then your perfection is still at a distance from you.

… until you realize that you cannot be an orphan and never have been one, until you realize that your very Being is occurring at what seems to you to be another level of reality, you will not be in a position of being able to abandon the perceptions you’re currently employing that cover up Reality to you.

Oh, dear! There we go, stepping into that other order of reality.

You cannot be guilty for something you have never been. And you cannot be guilty for something that someone-who-has-never-been apparently acted out.

… you …

… that God’s Son, your brother, your sister, your employer—whoever the bloke might be—is not guilty. None of you are guilty because none of you are what you are currently defining yourselves as. But as long as you continue to use the same definitions, you will not have the experience of your guiltlessness, of your innocence. And part of the experience of your innocence is the disappearing of a terminal disease, the disappearance of an injury, the disappearance of anything and everything that doesn’t express the awesomeness of life, and the beauty and the harmony of being.

Again …

Which means, anything that you’ve expressed that wasn’t loving, you didn’t express, and it wasn’t expressed. You’re like the gentleman in the institution who says, “I am Napoleon, and yesterday I cursed the water cooler, and it is going to forevermore spew forth black coal water.” Well, should he be penalized for cursing the water cooler? No, because in the first place he isn’t Napoleon to curse the water cooler. He isn’t who he thinks he is. And what he thinks he’s done, he hasn’t done.

Likewise, you just have never managed to stop being the Christ, and any loving thing you have done has been Real and is eternal. And any unloving thing you have done, you haven’t done. You see, this is a radical position. It seems radical to you, but it’s just the difference between clarity and confusion. That’s all it is. It’s the difference between clarity and confusion.

… the Son of God …

“Well,” you say, “I sure condemned President Bush yesterday,” or whoever it might have been. Well, if you did, know that you didn’t, because you’re not an orphan, you’re not Napoleon. You’re not who you think you are.

Now, you’ve got to be very clear here. As long as you think you are an orphan, there is insanity, there is confusion that must necessarily be replaced by the conscious experience of truth. And until that has occurred, you are in need of salvation. You are in need of release from a false bondage. But the reason you can get the release is because you are not Napoleon. You are not something that doesn’t exist, having done something that couldn’t have been done by something that doesn’t exist, that you must pay the penalty for, because, in the Court of Napoleon the rules are that blah, blah, blah, blah—whatever the rules are—and you did not abide by the rules.

The ignorance, the insanity gets ever more complex and harder to extricate yourself from if you indulge in believing them. You must be willing to take this radical position that I’m telling you is your normality, the truth about you right now, which is that in spite of what you think, you are the presence of God being expressed by God perfectly, and it is your Birthright to be experiencing that. Until you’re experiencing that, there is something needed. There is a correction that is called for.

Well, once again you must remember that the Holy Spirit is nothing more than your right Mind. And certainly you’re right Mind is intent upon you not overlooking It [chuckling], not missing out on the experience of It. It is Its intent for you not to believe things that are absolutely inconsistent with the truth about you. And It is constantly present, moving you, moving you, moving you to let It in, to let It register with you. And most of you do, to one degree or another. The only thing is that you listen to It as though you’re still the orphan, instead of That which is speaking to you. You see? And so you think you’re getting tidbits of truth, to better be an orphan with, when the fact is that the tidbits, as you think of them, are realizations that uncover to you the fact that you’re not an orphan at all. You see?

You are God presencing Himself right where you are. You are what God is presencing Himself as right there where you are. You can’t be anything else. Therefore you can’t be guilty of anything else. And therefore no crucifixion can await you. But, in order to avoid the false experience of crucifixion, you’re going to have to dare to embrace the truth that’s being revealed to you that you’re not an orphan. You’re going to have to abandon that stance. You’re going to have to let yourself be flooded with the conscious experience of being the Christ, willing to be and do what the Christ is and does in the Kingdom of Heaven for his brothers and sisters.

And so, when you do find yourself judging a brother, you’ve got to realize that that act denies love. It denies love entrance into your awareness of yourself and your capacity to be. And it denies it to all that it would be shared with if you weren’t denying it in yourself.

If you don’t want to feel guilty, you’ve got to stop employing guilt to manipulate your brothers and sisters. Because if you find guilt to be a valuable tool, you will know that there are others who find it a valuable tool as well, who will use it on you. And guilt is very attractive—negatively attractive, but attractive nevertheless. If you let guilt in, it’s very difficult to set it down, because you feel so guilty. I mean, you feel it in your stomach, you feel it in your chest, and it’s very difficult not to be consumed by it. It’s as though you have a natural proclivity toward feeling guilty.

Because it’s very difficult to set down, you and your brothers and sisters, you and your fellow man need an advocate who will stand there on behalf of him or her, doing everything possible to demonstrate that the experience of guilt is invalid, and that it must be seen for what it is and set down. And this takes education. This takes a willingness to stand with your brother or sister and present the truth of it. And this is where involvement comes in. And this is where the messiness comes in, that I have spoken of, and that all of you would love to avoid—hm-m-m, like the Pharisee, walking by on the other side of the road: “Oh, poor soul. If you had followed the rules, you wouldn’t be having this problem. If you had been a “good orphan” and you had abided by the rules that all of us have set up for the purpose of not having this kind of experience, you wouldn’t have had this kind of experience. And I wouldn’t have been confronted by an invitation to be involved. So, work it out yourself. I’ve got to be on my way.” You see?

Guilt is mesmerizing, just as self-righteousness is mesmerizing. But guilt couldn’t catch you for a second if you knew who you were. People lay guilt trips on other people. Why? To keep them in their place and to get them to behave in a way that makes no significant demands on the person laying the guilt trip on them. Mutual definitions, agreements as to codes of behavior and conduct, are all means of being in control, and being as uninvolved as possible, with the least amount of demands being placed on anybody. And why no demands? Because, “That keeps my independent self undisturbed. That keeps my independent self independent.” Involvement spoils independence.

All of you hate being held in a position of guilt, and yet, in one way or another, you all employ guilt against others so as not to have to be outside the box you operate in. Well, your salvation lies in stepping outside the box, outside the state of orphanhood. You’ve got to step out of the box into the experience of your Christ-hood.

How do you do that? There’s only one way to do it, and it isn’t thinking about it, and it isn’t reasoning about it. The only way is to become still and listen. For what? The Good Humor ice cream truck? No. For the Father’s voice, for the Holy Spirit’s voice, for That which conveys to you the true perception of everything and of yourself.

Well, again, that’s stepping out, isn’t it, into the out-of-control place. Anything outside the box that’s truly outside the box is, for you, an out-of-control place. But that out-of-control place simply means it’s out of the control of an orphan, or it’s out of the control of Napoleon. Big loss, huh? That which didn’t exist lost control [chuckling].

You’ve got to be willing to step into, for lack of better words, another order of reality, even though there is no other order of reality, and the movement constitutes letting yourself back into the only Order of Reality there is, and the only true experience of yourself that there is.

If you’re a member of a group—it could be a religious group, it could be a political group, it could be a group of mothers whose daughters engage in fashion shows, it could be a chess player who spends his life engaged with other chess players doing the chess tournament rounds. Whatever group you might belong to, there are rules of conduct. There are ways to behave. And if at any point you decide not to behave according to the rules, the keepers of the rules—which are all the other members—will come down on you and lay a guilt trip on you. “Well, if you don’t want to abide by the rules of our church, you know, you’re likely to end up at an insane asylum along with all the other members of our church who left. Hm-m-m. Well, if you abandon this chess game, right in the middle of the chess game, you will be banned forever from participating in any other chess tournament. We’ll see to it that your whole life is taken away from you.”

And they make you feel guilty, and pressure you into “proper behavior.” And in each case, in each of these groups, the rules that they abide by are treated as though they are The Rules of Life—real, actual rules of life—when the fact is that the majority of the world outside of that group doesn’t give a shit whether you left the game in the middle of the game or not, or whether you abided by this particular doctrine of this particular church. And this group is not God Almighty. But, oh, if they can catch you with a little bit of a guilt, they will make you miserable until you realize that the whole guilt trip is set up, established and maintained by only a handful of idiots, and that it’s absolutely asinine for you to be feeling bad at all. You see?

But, oh boy, they’ll get you one way or another, if they can, with a little bit of a guilt. And then, of course, once you’ve felt a little bit of guilt, then you feed it the rest. You become mesmerized by it, and caught. And so, what I’m saying is that right now, in one way or another, you’re all caught. But you’re caught in the grip of a small handful of idiots called orphans, who are really the Christ having forgotten who they are. And so, are you going to avoid being radical because a group of idiots, of which you used to be a member [chuckling], are trying to keep you … from what? From making them grow.

You step outside the box. It doesn’t leave the status quo like it was. And if you end up having a better time, or a better experience, it’s going to be threatening to the cohesiveness of this group. And they do not want to be faced with it.

Well, isn’t this the way it is with each of you? Somebody in your experience behaves in a way that causes you to have to operate outside of your code of conduct for yourself. It stretches you, you know? Involvement. Messiness. A willingness to persist with your brother or sister while it’s messy, conveying the answer in spite of their resistance, and hanging in there because you love them, and because you know they don’t need to be suffering at the hand of a handful of idiots?

“Oh, no. You know, I had my schedule for the day. And, you know what? If I respond to this, it’s not just going to be this day. It’s going to be tomorrow and the next day. It might even be a few months. I mean, my life will be turned into chaos. My orderly little life that I have scheduled out, you know—it’s part of my five year plan.” Uh-huh. “I can’t afford to have any interruptions during the five-year plan. And, to tell you the truth, before those five years are up, I will already have the next five-year plan in place.”

Why? Why do you have a five-year plan? Because you do not want to be faced with the unknown. You don’t want to be faced with the unpredictable movement of a wave that your surfboard is on.

The least you could do would be to say, “I don’t know why I’m not guilty. I don’t know how to see myself as guiltless. But if my guilt is false, I have enough justification to become still and ask, of a source that Knows, what the truth is here. I don’t know why my brother isn’t guilty, but I know that there’s more to him than what I’m seeing. And that is justification enough for me to go into the Silence, right here, right now—not in the privacy of my home when I’m not confronted with my brother, but right here, while I’m in the way with him—to go into the silence within and listen for the words and the meanings that will convey his guiltlessness to him in a way that he might comprehend.”

And remember, just because someone comprehends it, doesn’t mean they will immediately appreciate it. And so, you must be willing to be there the next day, and the next day, and the next day, or whenever the occasion arises, to re-present that truth, to re-present whatever, in that moment, is being revealed to you to share.

We’ve been getting together for what? Over two years. I’m not getting tired of continuing to tell you the truth, because you deserve not to be suffering from your ignorance of the truth.

Again …

… the world that’s the picture of the crucifixion of God’s Son.

… the eternal fact …

… like the Son of God who thought he was Napoleon and cursed the water cooler, nothing happened. No curse occurred. The water cooler doesn’t have to worry, because there was no “Napoleon.” There was only the Son of God. And whatever the Son of God does, does occur.

… the Son of God … you …

… you …

… because you can’t turn into a figment of your imagination and cause anything to happen that would justify your condemnation.

And down a little further:

Therefore, they don’t coexist. They are like two different orders of reality, but one isn’t real. And what isn’t real cannot coexist with what is Real.

… your true being …

So, tonight we’re simply illuminating the fact that each one of you, at this moment, is blameless, and you do not have to wait until you’ve paid your appropriate penance before you can have the conscious experience of what you divinely Are. Guilt says, “your freedom cannot be had until a certain point, and that point follows a certain appropriate amount of suffering.”

If you’re going to have an instantaneous healing, or if you are going to Awaken, you’ve got to lay down the concept of guilt and your devotion to it, your validation of it, because your validation of it does one thing only: It confirms your orphanhood to you a little longer. And yet, you are not Fatherless. You are not Motherless. You are not absent a Source, and never have been. So, the idea that you’re a separated orphan, on your own, all by yourself, is pure imagination. It is pure imagination. Remind yourself of that this week.

Write on your sticky note: “Your orphanhood is pure imagination.” Your “Napoleon-hood” is pure imagination. You can see it when I talk about the fellow in the institution who says he’s Napoleon. And what you can see about that, you can apply equally to yourself. And that will help to open the door. That will help you to, with a little bit more insistence, invite in greater clarity, greater sanity than you are currently experiencing.

Now, I’m going to finish up with a simple point: What I’m suggesting to you that you do is not something impossible. And it is also something that you do not have to do all by yourself. Why? Because that which is nothing more than your right mind, which is called the Holy Spirit—because you couldn’t get away from it—is still present as your divine Sanity, nudging, pressuring, cajoling you into recognizing the truth about you. And your Guide is doing the same thing. And I am doing the same thing. And you could say that the Father, being the nonexistence of this whole fantasy that you’re having, is ultimately supporting you in your new realizations.

So, how do you let this in? All this help? You just stop being so damned independent, and stop valuing your independence so greatly.

Want not to be alone, and ask for the Father, or the Holy Spirit or me to be with you. And then, let us be. It’s like you’re standing outside the door of your Home, and unbeknownst to you, all of your friends are inside waiting for you to open up the door so they can say, “Surprise! We love you and we’re having a party for you. We are welcoming you Home.”

I love you all, and I look forward to being with you next week.