Teachings of Christ Mind

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

Well, we’re going to jump right in …

Guilt is an act of insanity that all of you engage in because you have forgotten who you Are.

That means that guilt is an illusion. Guilt is an imagination. Guilt is a figment of the imagination. And yet, you all employ it as though it’s an actuality. And you bring it into play with vigor against yourself and against each other. And you think that its excellent employment is what will give you credibility and respectability.

But of course, the key is, that this self that is going to get respectability is an orphan—something else imagined; something else, not actual.

And to get free of the insanity of the practice of guilt, one has to finally become willing to abandon the stance of orphan. And of course, in order to do that, one has to not only, let’s say, remember who you Are, you have to accept who you Are—the offspring or expression of Something else not yourself; God.

And then you have to be willing as we said last week, to go into partnership [chuckles] or to re-assume a partnership that was never absolved or never dissolved except in the imagination.

Now, before we continue on, there is an aspect of guilt that really needs to be not only understood, but felt by each of you. You think guilt is actual and so you employ it. So far so good, unless you’re employing it against yourself. If you’re employing it against your Brother, so far so good, you think, because you’re not called upon to feel guilty when you’re calling upon your Brother to feel guilty. But just wait until your Brother does the same thing to you and calls upon you to feel guilty. Um-m … now you’re getting into hot water. And you, if you pay attention to the experience of guilt, find that it is always accompanied by fear. Always. And the thing you don’t realize is, that fear is always accompanied by guilt.

You might think, “Oh, well, I’m afraid if I see a truck bearing down on me or I’m afraid if I see somebody about to attack me and that has nothing to do with guilt.”

Oh, it does, it does. Because you cannot avoid feeling guilty for what you’re incompetent to respond to.

If you’re incompetent to deal with a diesel truck bearing down on you that you can’t get out of the way of, or if you feel incompetent to deal with a bully; you’re five-foot-two and this six-foot tall macho guy is bearing down on you with no respect for your puny self, you feel fear, you say. But no, you feel incompetent to cope with the situation. And that always introduces guilt.

Guilt is the experience of dissonance that you have when you think that you are an orphan; when you think, first of all, that you are a definition you’ve given yourself that is not the truth about you.

To be an orphan is to feel incompetent. It’s a fearful experience. And because it involves, at the bottom line, a denial of your heritage; a denial of your Birthright because it’s a denial of your having a Source other than yourself, or processes of evolution, the experience of guilt and fear always accompany each other. And it’s not your Birthright to be experiencing them.

Now, here’s what happens. Here’s the actuality of the experience—the apparent experience of guilt and fear: Guilt or fear presents itself, always with its partner, no matter which one seems to present itself first. And then, fear and guilt create a continuous loop—a continuous loop that responds to itself over and over and over and over and feeds on itself and seems to become greater and greater and more fascinating and more fascinating and more compelling.

It actually becomes mesmeric; hypnotic. And you lose your capacity to be in balance. You lose your capacity to experience with perspective. And ultimately, you will exert guilt upon your Brother in whatever ultimate form you can come up with. And of course, you lay the dirtiest of the dirt about your Brother on him last—you save the best for last; the thing that will make him buckle and fall to his knees, you know. “If you don’t yield to me, I’m going to tell your wife that you had an affair with Pricilla. I’ll make it very public. I’ll ruin your marriage, I’ll ruin your life, I’ll foul things up for you at your job.” You see? Oh boy, more guilt, more fear.

And why do you do this? Because you have become mesmerized. You have been caught in this loop. When you get caught in the loop, you’re always rehearsing the same information over and over and over again; the same distorted insane information over and over again with more and more gusto, more and more commitment. And it seems to become impossible for you to even want to know the truth.

You’re not the least bit interested in knowing whatever it is that might allow you to calm down and not feel this way anymore. Why? Because you want justice!

For you to have been put in a position where you’re having to acknowledge your incompetence, you want justice because that was so unkind—so not nice.

Competence cannot be gained by the skillful employment of guilt and fear.

Now, don’t be so spiritual that you’re not willing to look at your behavior and examine it honestly within yourself because you all know when you’ve gotten angry and angrier and angrier and you’ve finally flown off the handle at the expense of your Brother or your Sister and you just couldn’t help yourself.

Now, you can fool yourself by saying that this response is a survival response; that, in terms of survival, you have two choices: Fight or flight. And of course, if you’re not going to be a wimp, you’re not going to use flight as the option, you’re going to fight. You’re going to stand and aggressively protect yourself. Get your credibility back. Get it established in the mind of your enemy—your opponent; the one you’re attempting to make feel guilty enough to back down.

What you haven’t known is, that this insistence that you feel, upon following through with all of your might to inflict guilt so as to bring about “a good result” is a result of mesmerism; is an example of your behavior not being controlled by your innate intelligence, but rather from you’re getting caught in a continuous loop that feeds on itself and literally embodies no intelligence at all. And literally, therefore, cannot lead you to a solution of the problem that started it.

Now, I’ve brought this up before, because you all talk about wanting to wake up—you’re all reading the Course because you want to wake up—or you want to experience enlightenment and something in you knows that there is really such a thing as enlightenment. And you know what? In order for you to experience this, you’re going to need to experience healing. And you’re going to need for your Brothers and Sisters to experience healing. And you’re going to need to contribute to the experience of healing. And if what one needs to be healed from can be justified as real, and the result of that one’s failure in some area of his life to deal with himself or his experience intelligently, then that justification simply negates completely the opportunity for healing to be experienced.

Whatever standards of reasoning are being used to justify a problem, exist in the different realm, I’m going to say, than the realm of reality where that thing that needs correction doesn’t exist. Because, for lack of better words, God didn’t create it. God did not create you to suffer. God didn’t create your Brother to suffer. God didn’t create you to have diseases. God didn’t create your Brother to have diseases. God didn’t create you or your Brother to have a capacity to mistreat yourself and thereby actually cause justifiable damage or disease that you must therefore suffer through, because you must pay for your flaws and your failure.

God didn’t do it. Therefore, whether it’s cancer or whether it’s a sudden injury from accident, you are not bound. You are not bound to suffer from it for more than an instant. If God didn’t set it into motion, it hasn’t been set into motion and the experience you’re having is not going on in your right Mind.

Because there is another arena, we will say, in which reality is going on and is governed by God, there is awaiting you, escape from whatever mindset you have bound yourself to or whatever false interpretations you have placed upon all of Creation, so that you are misunderstanding it and misbehaving with it in a way that’s causing you discomfort.

You all deserve to be healed. You hear that? You all deserve to be healed. There is nothing that exists that can justify your suffering, no matter what. And if you want to experience waking up, if you want to experience enlightenment, you’re going to have to stop employing what keeps you from experiencing it.

Now, in metaphysical lingo, let’s say, over the last hundred and fifty years, a phrase has come into play and it’s not a very kind phrase. But it’s one that gets used over and over: “There’s a reason for everything.” Now, when this is used, metaphysically speaking, it can be used in the most nebulous of ways to imply that if you’re having this problem or that problem, well there’s a reason for it: “Maybe it’s Karma. Maybe it’s something that’s fouled up in your mind. But there’s a reason for everything.” Not true.

Let’s go into the Book.

Remember, we talked about the fact that when you look within, where you think you are going to find absolute evidence of your guilt, when you actually look within, you will not find it there. You will find love there; the love that is your Be-ing because it is the Presence of God in you. And it is there to be extended to everything you are aware of. And it is natural for it to be extended to everything you are aware of. If you will look within, you will ALWAYS find Atonement.

Oh-h, well, the orphan says, [chuckles] “That is insane! How can there be no reason for guilt? To believe that is insane.” But remember, guilt is an act of insanity employed by one who doesn’t remember who he Is. Guilt is the active insanity because there is no reason for it.

What would constitute a reason for guilt? The only thing that would constitute a reason for guilt would be God saying, “You are guilty!” Then guilt would be eternally real and actual. But God has yet to have said that. And therefore, guilt has not been set into place as a part of Creation. It doesn’t exist as an actuality, only as an insane practice in your minds which means its just a thought—a thought which you don’t have to employ.

And it’s this simple clarity that you can embrace and remind yourself of every time you feel inclined to get upset and to employ guilt.

Now, you understand that the employment of guilt is not an act of reason. The employment of guilt is not an act of reason. Not only that, it sets into place this continuous loop that you become subject to because you feed it with your attention and your emotion.

And you become blinder and blinder and blinder to any capacity you have to employ perspective—broad perspective that goes beyond the details of your justifications for guilt; that goes beyond your inclination to harangue your Brother or your Sister and insist upon their being miserable because they’re guilty.

Again, as long as you do this, you stay in that continuous loop blind to the broader perspective that shows you the insanity of that continuous loop and the fact that it is not a valid basis for any conclusions to be arrived at from.

You don’t want to engage in an insane act that causes you to appear to be insane and causes you to experience yourself as being insane. Why? Because you deserve peace. You deserve the clarity of a balanced perspective and the peace of mind that comes from Knowing who you Are. And that comes from Knowing who your Brother is because you know who you Are.

And likewise, the end of disease and injury will never come as long as you believe there is a REASON for it.

“What do you mean? I just saw that bus hit that fellow and severed his arm. What do you mean his arm wasn’t severed? What do you mean there wasn’t any reason for it?”

What I mean is, that if God did not enact that drama, it hasn’t happened. And in the realization that it hasn’t happened, instantaneous healing can occur … instantaneous healing can occur. Would you not like to be an agent for change for that kind of experience? You can be. But you have to be willing to look at things and not take them the way you have determined them to be by the definitions you have been employing.

A Course In Miracles came into existence, we’ll say, because someone said, “There must be a different way to look at this.” And there is. But as long as you continue to look the old way and hold onto it with all vigor, you will not see the different way; you will not see the healing; you will not see the transformation and you will not see release and restoration, the subject of this section that we’re reading.

Dare to be radical here. But realize that if you’re going to be radical and experience transformation, you’re going to have to stop doing the thing that keeps you from experiencing the transformation. And the one thing that is going to make that difference is your neglecting to practice guilt; your neglecting to employ guilt and your neglecting to justify yourself or your brother or sister as deserving of the experience of guilt and the penalty that necessarily accompanies it. That choice is yours every moment. You’re not bound to suffer, you’re not bound to employ guilt, you’re not bound to continue to do what doesn’t work and what doesn’t serve you.

Again …

… what?

… not just a little bit, but …

How do you dispel illusions when you think illusions are actualities? How do you dispel your justifications for employing guilt when you think that it’s part of the survival mechanism of your being—something as inseparable from you as your existence? How do you dispel that? Well, you don’t until someone comes along and says, “Hey, this is not something inseparable from your existence. This is a behavior that you have acquired through ignorance. And you can abandon it.”

It’s like you’ve grown up. And every moment of your life, except when you’re asleep, is one of constant streaming of thoughts and you think that being conscious is inseparable from thinking. You think that thinking and being are one and the same thing, until one day you learn how to meditate. And then you find that you can experience periods of quiet—pure conscious awareness without a single thought—an experience of being totally aware of everything without thinking a thought about everything; an experience of connection with everything in the silence to a much fuller and deeper degree without any thought processes whatsoever, without any examination of anything, but just by virtue of being conscious.

And then you realize that something that you thought was absolutely inseparable from your existence that was absolutely inseparable from being aware wasn’t absolutely inseparable from being aware.

Thinking is not essential to being conscious—fully conscious, and I’m going to say, infinitely conscious. Likewise, guilt is not a part of your very existence. It’s not a part of the fiber of your being that is essential for your survival. It is an illusion employed by a delusion. And the delusion that employs guilt is called an orphan. And that’s what you have thought you are. But the you that you are is not an orphan. The orphan is just a thought you had about yourself, that you’ve taken hold of and fleshed out and given more and more definitions to—fleshed your orphanhood out until you thought it was undeniable. But it’s not the truth about you either.

… u-mm, that which is nothing more than your right Mind …

What He has saved you from is that which He has uncovered an awareness of in you that it never existed—that it was an imagination.

Now that is a sentence that needs to be on every bumper on every automobile in the world, or at the least on everyone’s refrigerator.

That is the answer.

… the Holy Spirit …

That which is nothing more than your right Mind …

That which is nothing more than your right Mind …

What does that mean? It means that the Holy Spirit—that which is nothing more than your right Mind—like Me, says healing is what you should be experiencing even though you, in your right Mind, together with Me, know that you’ve never been less than what God created you as, that you are nothing less than what God is being right where you are right now, and therefore there literally is nothing occurring that needs healing. You see?

You and I know this. At the moment, I’m the only one of us who believes it. But the knowing is in you awaiting your discovery by virtue of your becoming alert enough and having enough broad perspective to see the mechanism of guilt—the insane thought processes that cause this continuous loop to be initiated and to expand until it has consumed you—so that you can let it go because of the perspective you now have.

[Raj did not read this: He …

… the Holy Spirit, that which is nothing more than your right Mind …

In other words, the Holy Spirit would have you come into your right Mind, so that your right Mind is no longer the Holy Spirit that you’re listening to, but yourself that you’ve recognized and embraced and are willing to embody.

What your right Mind knows you do not at the moment know, feel, recognize, experience because you’re so confident about the way you’re seeing things. And you think that your awakening is going to be built on the way you’re currently seeing things. Therefore, it is difficult for you to be willing to let go of what you currently believe because you think what you currently believe is part of the stepping-stone process of arriving where you’re going.

No, there is a point where you’re going to have to walk to the foyer of the orphanage and step outside and abandon the whole concept of orphanhood and everything associated with it, so that you might remember who you really Are. Your experience of orphanhood is not the stepping-stone to your discovery of yourself as the Son or Daughter of God. It’s not.

Now, this does not mean to bring the future into the now. It means to bring the ultimate that is the fact now but which you’re not conscious of, which makes it something awaiting you in your future. It means bringing the ultimate into the now.

… you …

That’s the typical orphan experience.

When you actually take time to be silent, to go within, and you find that your thinking has been abandoned and you are experiencing the peace of your being, there is something else accompanying it. It is the experience of Love and the experience of Joy. And the Love is loving you. But you also know that the Love that’s loving you is the Love that you Are. And the Love that’s loving you is infinite, not confined to what you thought you are; that everything in all of Creation is extending you Love. And this Love that’s coming from all of Creation is the Love that you Are. And there is inseparable Oneness.

… the orphan has …

… now this is a statement of fact:

Listen to this:

You who have been unmerciful unto yourself and unto each other do not remember your Father’s Love. And that’s why you’ve been unmerciful to each other. But your Father’s Love has been present. And you know what? You have been your Father’s Son or your Father’s Daughter all along. But you thought you were an orphan and so the word, “Father” was nonsensical, meaningless. That was an insane concept.

God. Because you haven’t looked into your brother’s eyes yet and remembered God.

Here’s the truth. Here’s the truth about each one of you guilty bastards and each one of you guilty bitches, who do nothing but make life miserable. And who deserve to be drawn and quartered, slowly, so that you experience agony for as long as possible.

That’s a different world from reality. And it’s all imagination. It’s all mean-spirited imagination. And it’s mean-spirited imagination that feeds upon itself and grows itself into terrible proportions and consumes you and deprives you of your capacity to be sane and to experience the joy and the fulfillment that is a natural accompaniment of sanity. We’ll say, healing that is a natural accompaniment of sanity.

… cloud, nebulous, effervescent, intangible.

… and here’s the hooker …

For the third time in a row, I’m going to go back to this. This is the good news that’s been the only news, the only thing that’s real.

And that holy sign of perfect faith, as I said last week, is the Holy Spirit, that which is nothing more than your right Mind.

… the Father …

… or does not devalue you as you do.

Well, the orphan says, “Perfect innocence! [Laughing loudly] Crap! There’s no innocence there. There’s nothing but guilt. And the guilty must pay! And I will see to it that they pay, and pay, and pay, and pay…” until what? “Until I say justice has been served.”

Let me ask something. All of you have felt this compulsive need for justice, but if something has happened to interrupt your demand for justice, let’s say, a little bit of real life comes into the picture and the argument has to stop because one of you has to go to work. So you have to continue the argument at the end of the day after work. And the day goes by and after work you come back home and you just can’t get the rev up that you had this morning.

This, the continuous loop, got interrupted and the unreality of the intensity, the insane, non-cohesive, unintelligent nature of the repetition because it’s not an actuality, hasn’t the capacity to reestablish itself. And by the end of the day you have a new perspective—ah, what?—the larger perspective that’s more than just the data contained in the continuous loop. And in the absence of the insanity, it’s possible to reconnect in a new and fresh way that allows for restoration of harmony to occur. Why? Because what was disrupting the harmony, never was real.

I entrust you to a wonderful new week, in which you may choose to see that the continuous loop gets interrupted almost [snaps his fingers] instantly when it has first become established by an intent you have to protect yourself by proving another’s guilt and scaring him enough to get him to yield and not present you with your incompetence anymore.

Your competence and your incompetence are both aspects of the orphan mentality. And you interrupt the continuous loop by walking out of the orphanage and abandoning the frame of reference. It’s that simple. But you have to do it.

And like any nightmare, if you want to step out of the obsessive, compulsive intent to practice guilt, you may well have to wrench yourself awake and do the thing that seems absolutely unjustifiable to you in your fit of anger, which is to interrupt your fit of anger. And by interrupting it, dispel it. Not save it for later when they’re not expecting it.

I love you. I love you all. And I want you to have a happier week.