Teachings of Christ Mind

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

Is everyone having an interesting time with the section of the Course that we’re reading and discussing? Or let me put it this way, are you having an interesting time observing your behavior and your mental habits? Are you becoming aware of how self-centered you are and how little of the time you really are willing to let your brother be the focus of your attention even though we have discussed the fact that it’s the function of your Being to look into your brother’s eyes and remember God?

It’s your function to look at any aspect of Creation and remember God. I don’t believe we’ve read anything in here that says, “You are supposed to take a look at yourself and you are supposed to focus in on yourself most definitely and make commitment to paying attention only to what you want and to what you feel.” Even though we’ve read nothing like that here, it’s something you’re all really familiar with.

Now, as we begin tonight it says …

That’s like looking into your brother’s eyes or looking at any part of Creation and remembering God.

We don’t need to embellish that. It’s a simple fact.

In fact, their darkness is what you complain about.

You know, you have movies which are called dark comedies. Well, the ego’s life is a dark comedy. It’s asinine. It is not the purpose or function of your existence to be experiencing darkness. And the answer to the darkness; the release from the darkness is accomplished by a very simple act: An act of inclusion; by seeing outward and by being conscious of what is there.

Consciousness is an act of embrace. Creation is described as God creating everything and at the end God saw everything that He had made. It was an act of embrace—an act of inclusion and it was an act of Self-recognition.

It’s time to give up selfishness. It’s time to learn to give up selfishness. It’s time to recognize when you’re practicing selfishness. And one of the things that you might not recognize and identify as selfishness is the experience of suffering: “I’m not feeling well today,” or “I’m having a real hard time being anything other than absolutely angry with so and so!”

This is an indication to you—it can be an indication to you that you’re engaged in selfishness—that you are practicing the opposite of embrace. And it can, as I said last week, serve to remind you to change what you’re doing—to change from self-serving interests to an act of recognition and embrace of your brother with the intent of finding God there Being all there is to your brother. So that in your willingness to recognize and acknowledge It in your brother, that acknowledgement will come through you provided by the Father and bless you with the awareness that it’s the truth about you as well. This is a very simple principle. It’s the way it works and it’s the solution to the human condition.

Continuing …

… in other words, the thoughts he made …

Again, the thoughts you share with God are beyond your belief. But those you make are your beliefs.

… he …

That’s always the case when you’re in the mode of selfishness—of self-serving, of doing things for yourself; of making a profit for yourself especially at the expense of a brother.

… God’s Son …

Now this is very important:

Your beliefs and your insane treasures will not be taken from you.

… by you …

Is in you. They won’t be taken away from you. But you can put them down any time you’re sick and tired of the results of selfishness of the pain that you experience; of the discomfort you experience, all as a result of having everything backwards and being self-centered, when seeing is always outward.

Now, the Source of their undoing is in you. What is it? It’s the Holy Spirit. It’s that which is nothing more than your right Mind. It’s the Presence of God in you that you couldn’t get rid of even though you chose to ignore It and claim a different, shall I say, list of ingredients that constituted you. Nevertheless, the Source of their undoing is in you.

… in you …

Well, I know it would be nice for you to think that it was the Father or the Son or the Holy Spirit—Somebody different from you but very close to you. Because then you wouldn’t have to take responsibility for what you’re experiencing and you wouldn’t have to take responsibility for changing. You wouldn’t have to take responsibility for giving up what doesn’t really work.

You could talk about the need to give them up. You could talk about the need for change. But you could be like the people at the pool spoken of in the Bible, who waited for an Angel to come and move the waters and then be the first one to get into the waters after the movement occurred. And in the meantime when the movement didn’t occur, “Well, here I am, things aren’t going too well, I’m suffering, yes but you know, I am steadfast in my intent to be here the very next moment the Angel touches the water and causes it to move. I’m very devoted to my healing. I’m very devoted to my improvement.”

But you see, it’s really convenient to have the improvement be at the hand of something other than yourself. It also means that, because you put the responsibility off on somebody else or something else or circumstances; you never get your freedom right away, when you could have it right away, because the culprit is a decision you have made in your mind that you are abiding by.

So we’re talking about doing something different with your thoughts. At the bottom line, we’re not saying improve your thoughts. At the bottom line, I’m saying abandon your thoughts. I’m saying become still. Go within to the Altar and ask of God or the Holy Spirit what the truth is that will uncover what is not true to you so that you might spontaneously stop valuing it, since seeing the truth of it will make it valueless to you.

Again:

Being in second gear, neutral—being in this place where you in your own right and on your own are thinking your own thoughts—being in that place and acting from that place is to go in a direction which will lead you where the Holy Spirit is not leading you. And it will not go anywhere even though you have thought it has been leading you somewhere important.

And this is perhaps the most difficult lesson to learn in the process of Awakening because you have to realize that the basic premise for your actions has been faulty. But there is a correct one which is available to you. It is a Source called the Holy Spirit, which you now have learned is nothing more than your right Mind and is therefore very intimately connected with you. And in fact, constitutes you in your integrity, meaning that you have an integrity that was set in place, you might say, in the act of Creation—the Movement of God—and is therefore unalterable. And what that means in practical terms, is what you will begin to experience as you wake up.

Again:

… remember again, the thoughts which the mind of God’s Son projects have all the power that he gives to them. So anything you deny, which the Holy Spirit knows to be true, you have denied yourself. And you have denied it with all the power that you give to it by virtue of actually being the Son of God.

… the Holy Spirit …

… the Holy Spirit …

“Oh-h, but denying it is essential to my being who I am and what I am. And it’s essential to my becoming what I plan on becoming. And it’s essential in order for me to be able to arrive at the position in the world that I have chosen for myself. So, Holy Spirit, you’re going to teach me how to deny it? And you’re going to expect me to embrace what you’re saying willingly, easily? You think I am a fool? I know too much about how things work to attempt what you’re asking.”

Again:

Remember, I mentioned last week that the ego is a defense mechanism. A frontal attack against the ego will always fail, because the ego is an expert at avoiding truth because it denies truth and that is its function.

Now, as a result, the undoing of the ego will always be indirect. And the Holy Spirit knows perfectly how to do that.

In other words, you were not created for the purpose of making your mark on the world. You were not created to do big things. You were not created to see.

You were created to be conscious. And to be conscious of what? The Movement of Mind which is God in the act of Creation—to acknowledge It and recognize It for what It is.

You’re not created to do Creation, but to be the awareness of It and the acknowledgement of It. God is making His mark on the world, you might say. That would be a description of Creation. You have no such function.

Now, to “see” and “do” …

In your dream, in your fantasy of being an independent entity, it has become your function to do things. It embodies, in a distorted way, the will to live, which could be described divinely as the urge, the impulse of Mind to be conscious, and, in that impulse, creating, forming something to be aware of—an idea, which to the mind that forms it, as I’ve said before, is perfectly tangible and substantial and real, even though it is pure Spirit.

The impulse to Be is also the impulse to be conscious. And when you abandon second gear—when you abandon the orphanage, when you abandon the idea of being an orphan yourself—you will find that there’s nothing for you to do except embrace everything and recognize God in it. And know that your embrace and recognition of it is part of the movement of Creation Itself—an act which you are involved in because you are the offspring of God, from whom God has withheld nothing of what He Is.

And in this realization, you will abandon the idea that you must do things. And that doing things are what give identity to you and give you credibility and give you respectability and give you substance and give you reality on your own. You’ll give that up. Your function will be different, which is part of the reason that, as you hear more and more what constitutes Awakening, it sounds perhaps, less and less interesting. Why? Because you see that there will be no ego hit gotten from it. And at this moment ego hits are crucial to your meaningful existence.

Nevertheless, this is part of the essential learning that you will learn—that you will move through.

In other words, your ideas; your slant on things; your definitions of things. And of course, always the definitions you give to everything will relate back to you and your sense of your importance or your lack of importance because you are the center of your attention in second gear—in neutral.

In neutral everything revolves around you. And every aspect of your conscious awareness is colored by that fundamental basis for understanding yourself. 


When you are in first gear, God is the Center of Attention. ”Oh, dear, leaves poor little orphan out.” Well, that’s the way little orphan would see it. But the fact is that when you shift to first gear—where God is the center of attention—you, as God’s Son or Daughter, appear in the picture in a way that can’t be violated; in a way that can’t be altered; in a way where you can’t misunderstand the fullness and wholeness and divinity of your Be-ing in any way. 


And so, you regain your Self in the act of letting God be the center of attention. Why? Because you’re inseparable from God. You are not God, but God is All There Is to you. You are inseparable from God. 


I promise you, all of your goals for yourself, no matter how grand you think they are, are infinitesimal relative to what you could learn if you chose to learn from God, instead of from your puny imagination.

I promise you that even your best concepts of yourself are nothing in the face of what your Self actually Is. 
Now, I can tell you this and you can say, “Well, you’ll have to show me.”

No, that isn’t the way it works. I can tell you about it. I can point your attention in the right direction. But you are the one who has to arrive at a point of devaluing your commitment to your best definitions and your best creations. You’re going to have to arrive at a point where you are clear enough in your mind that you’re sick and tired of suffering, that it just isn’t worth it anymore to experience a low-grade pain or a low-grade suffering, even though it’s not killing you.

What is the point? Why hold on to your best pet theories, if all they’re going to do is keep you experiencing like a low-grade fever, low-grade suffering.

You will have to arrive at a point where you actually say to yourself… No, where you don’t say anything to yourself again and you say something to the Father. You say, “Father, reveal to me the more of what is here for me to experience than what I’ve been allowing myself to experience by virtue of holding on to my own imaginative definitions of everything. I want to have the experience of wholeness. I want to have the experience of harmony. I want to experience the absence of stress, not just for an afternoon, but forever.”

Continuing:

Yet, nobody likes to become disillusioned. “Let me wrap myself up in my illusions and let me keep them. Don’t snatch them away from me!”

Now, you might look at this and say, “Why Raj, why Jesus do you have to speak so negatively about me? You say,”

“I didn’t choose to be deceived. Why cast me in such a negative light?” There’s the self-defense, the self-centered ego activity, as though it’s all about puny little you instead of about the truth.

Well, you do choose to be deceived. It’s not enough for me to say that though. How are you deceiving yourselves? You are deceiving yourselves by ignoring that you have a Source beyond you, that you didn’t make yourself, that you have always been in partnership—if I may put it that way—with the Source of your Be-ing, which the Course speaks of as being co-creators.

And you deceive yourselves by refusing to let a different point of view in.

You see… The correction of the fact that you choose to be deceived, lies in your abandoning your aloneness, abandoning your orphanhood, abandoning neutral—second gear. And in abandoning it, discovering that third gear will vanish as well because you have shifted your attention to first gear—to that which is nothing more than your right Mind; to that which is nothing more than the wholeness of you that is perfectly sane and has always been.

So I must tell you, so that you’re not deceived, that you in fact deceive yourselves and there’s a way to prove it. The way to prove it is to consciously shift to first gear and find out for yourself.

I’m waiting. The Holy Spirit, that is nothing more than your right Mind, is waiting for you to relent as well, and yield to It/your Self.

Well, you see, I’ve been very direct. I’ve said you are deceiving yourselves whether you meant to or not you are and you have been. And it’s important and absolutely necessary for you to understand that. But you see, I’m not attacking it, I’m just shining the light on it so that you may look at it.

I’m not going to try to get you to stop. There’s no way I could force you to stop. But I can invite you to do something which you, through the use of your will, can act upon. And, of course, the will that acts upon it won’t be the ego in you or the ego sense of yourself. That which will will to act upon it, will be That of you which is experiencing Its Sanity, and It will risk the chance that in abandoning second gear, the real you will not disappear and you will not lose everything that is meaningful but you will in fact gain Meaning in its infinite fullness and the experience will be awesome and it will be worth it.

But you will have to do it. And you won’t do it if I don’t say,

… like you.

I’ve got to tell you that there’s a different experience awaiting you. Your Birthright is different from what you’re experiencing.

And it’s time to test the spirits, whether they are of God or not—the spirit of deception, the spirit of loneliness, the spirit of orphanhood, the spirit of independence, the spirit of autonomy. Check these out and see whether they are of God or not.

How do you check them out? Well, you don’t go and examine them. You do something irrelevant to them. Here’s where the indirectness is, you do something irrelevant to them—you do something irrelevant to orphanhood, you do something irrelevant to establishing new and better mutually agreed upon definitions between you and the other orphans. And you give your attention to first gear.

And you give your attention to first gear with the intent of letting God be the center of interest—the focal point. How? By going on a quest to find God, or by looking at each and everything that’s in your experience with a curiosity to see ultimacy in it, because ultimacy is there, because if there’s anything there at all it has to be God.

And like a hologram, all of what is in the hologram is in every part of the hologram. And all of what God is, is in what appears to be every part of Creation.

And as we said last week, your reason for doing this has to be a blessing, it has to be as a gift you’re giving to a brother—the willingness to look into your brothers eyes and remember God. Now, I have included all of Creation and said to look at any aspect of it for the purpose of remembering God.

But you know what? The one and only most important thing for you to look at and remember God—as a result of looking at it—is your brother or sister. Why your brother or your sister and not just a flower, or a tree, or a planet, or a universe? Very simply: The fundamental, the basis, the underlying ground of neutral, second gear, is what?—self-centeredness, egotism, self-aggrandizement.

Now I ask you, who of you who is hearing My Voice is in competition with the wall in your bedroom? Who of you asserts your superiority over the carpet on your floor? Who do you compete with for position? [Chuckling] Well, whoever it is, that’s the one you’ve got to look in his eyes and remember God, because that’s the one that will keep you from waking up.

The gift of love to your brother is the gift that will invalidate neutral gear, the independent place.

So this week I invite you all to continue to persist and notice when you’re being self-centered, notice when you’re being selfish, notice when you want everything to revolve around you. And likewise, take time to notice when you’re uncomfortable, or when you’re experiencing distress. And take a look and see whether or not at that moment you’re being self-centered.

You might be saying, “Damn her, she’s pissing me off!” Well, [chuckling] look at important you! “Huh?” She shouldn’t piss you off? Oh dear, important one. You don’t think it’s self-centered, even when you’re bitching at someone else? Catch it! You really need to pay attention, because it’s all these tiny little, chicken shit habits that keep you bound because you enact them, [snapping fingers] just like that, without a thought, even though you’re sitting there saying, “I want to wake up and I want to abandon second gear.”

You’re going to abandon your wish to shift to first gear, because its habit. And other people trigger your habit. And circumstances trigger your habit. Because you’ve set the traps up! You’ve put the triggers there. And if anybody trips that trigger, you’re going to react. It’s not because they did it. It’s because those are the particular triggers you said you valued and you laid out, just waiting for someone to trip.

So, am I being mean? No. I’m telling you the way it is, so that you might easily look at it and say, “Okay. I’m not really going to attack those habits. But you know what? Today I’m going on vacation from those habits. And I’m going to do something irrelevant over here. I really am going to—for as long as I’m able—I’m going to look at everything and constantly ask my Guide or the Holy Spirit or the Father, ‘What is the Truth here? What is the more of reality that’s here that I’m not seeing?’” You see?

Don’t confront the habits. Disregard them for as long as you can. And then when you notice that you’re uncomfortable or you’re distressed or you’re put out or you’re pissed off, say, “Oops, okay, I’m squarely back in second gear. I’m squarely back where I cannot be anything but uncomfortable. And I don’t have to be here.”

So, you abandon, you disregard the habits you suddenly reinstated and you shift back to asking, “God, Holy Spirit, what is the more of reality that’s here than what I’m seeing?”

Why? So that you might become full of knowledge ahead of everyone else? No. So that you might be filled with the experience of truth that constitutes Knowing, that causes you to be nothing other than the Presence of acknowledgement! “Wow! This is incredible. Reality is unspeakably incredible. And it has filled me. And even if I should lose the experience of It, I will be changed forever because of the experience of It.”

You do it because you want to know the truth. Persist with Me. And persist with the Holy Spirit—that is nothing more than your right Mind. And turn to It often, everyday. And do what Paul has done.

When Paul got up this morning, his voice wasn’t working. He spoke, but there was only whispers. And many times during the day—from second gear—he said, “Well, I can’t do this. I can’t do this. I’m not going to be where everyone can see and hear me with my voice sounding like this? What kind of an impression will that make? Everyone will say, ‘You see how second gearish [chuckling] it is.’ Oh yes. So they’re very self-centered, right?

“What will everyone think of me? I will be making a fool of myself. Why would I do that in the name of truth? Why would I expose myself to ridicule?” That’s what Paul in second gear thought like. But there was a point at which something of Paul that wasn’t in second gear, came into play.

There was something of Paul that wasn’t in second gear, that came into play. And it was this Awareness: “More than anything else I wish to give voice to the Voice for truth no matter what my voice sounds like.” And although habit kicked back into play and he fussed with Me and he argued against doing what would be obviously unwise, like, “Well what kind of a demonstration is this, that I’m in touch with Jesus? What kind of a demonstration of credibility? What kind of demonstration of integrity is this? Why expose what appears to be an inconsistency?

Well, let Me tell you something. He didn’t come to this conclusion in so many words, but what he realized was that it was inconsistent. The inconsistency would have come into play if he had said, “I do not wish to give voice to the Voice for truth because my voice sounds so awful.” Mm-m, egos everywhere could understand that. Why make a public asshole of yourself if you don’t have to. Just cancel the meeting. Next week your voice will be fine! 
What? And let a week go by without giving voice to the Voice for truth because of how it will look? Again, how second gearish! Do you see?

So, be willing to be the Place where truth comes through your awareness no matter how well or how polished you might be at expressing It, no matter what it might look like to someone else.

There are some people who may never have tuned in before or may never have heard any other CD of a meeting, who will listen to Paul’s voice tonight and say, “My goodness, what a voice that man has.” You see? [a little chuckle]

So remember, your brother is worth every effort you bring to giving voice to the Voice for truth.

I Love You. And I look forward to being with you next week.