Teachings of Christ Mind

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

You are all going to find out, that as you’re willing to leave second gear, that when you’re ready and willing to abandon the orphan mindset and shift back to first gear, you’re going to give up something that you didn’t think you were going to give up. I’m clueing you into it tonight.

What it is that you’ll be giving up is your personality—the face you present to the world—the face you present to yourself to establish your belief in yourself.

The simple fact is, that what you call your identity which is mostly personality, is the defense mechanism you developed for self-protection “in the world.” In other words, it’s not that great or that magnanimous a thing. It’s really a shield. It’s really a defense. It’s really the way you protect yourself against all the threat that exists “out there” as you grew up in the orphanage in the world.

You tried out different behaviors. You tried out different physical behaviors, different mental behaviors, different interactive behaviors to see what worked for you. And some of you have defense mechanisms that look like being a wimp—your defense mechanism is a matter of constantly saying in one way or another, “Poor me… poor me… can’t you see how poor I am… can’t you see how much I need help…won’t you help me?” If you get really good at this, you can command quite a bit of authority over those around you, who, out of pity for you, will give you exactly what you want—exactly what you did all of this for. And yet, you weren’t like the bully who says, “Damn it! Give me what I want. If you don’t give me what I want I’m going to punch you out! I’m going to hurt you!”

And that’s the way control is exercised for the purpose of protecting one’s self. And so, everybody gets to know your personality. And if your personality is pretty consistent, they will call it, “your individuality.” When all along, all it is, is a style of behavior, which you have created for self-protection.

Now, some of you use styles of behavior that are “very civilized” that appear to be almost flawless and appear to be entirely generous, thoughtful, caring. And yet the fact is, that you behave in this way because you know the people will respond in a way that meets your needs. And so it’s a way you survive—it’s a way you protect yourself and doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with having connected with and related to the person you are manipulating by your “civilized behavior.”

Now, if you didn’t know this, you might get stuck quite a long time in making the shift from second gear to first gear, because you would try to bring your personality/individuality along with you from second gear to first gear—from the orphanage to Home. And you would find yourself becoming frustrated because the shift won’t occur even though you’re expecting it.

You’re not an orphan. And everything you’ve believed about yourself from within the orphan mindset is not true. This is why there is something absolutely essential to Waking up, and that is, yielding to Something different from you. The Holy Spirit is that which is nothing more than your right Mind. But you do not recognize yourself as that. You have disowned that. You have put it on the back burner: “Out of sight, out of mind.” No. But out of sight, ignoring it, you don’t remember it.

In order to wake up, you have to become re-united with that which is nothing more than your right Mind. And in order for that to happen, you’re going to have to abandon what you call your identity—what you currently call your identity. You’re going to have to be willing to let go of your personality.

You’re going to have to let in that which is not recognizable to you at the moment even though it is utterly you. And that’s why you must dare to become silent and listen with the desire to hear the Holy Spirit, or your Guide. You must transfer your attention from selfishness, to what we’ll call, otherness, because the Holy Spirit seems to be something not you.

You can’t take who you think you are with you into the Kingdom of Heaven. Another way of saying that is, you can’t take who you think you are with you into the conscious experience of what you really Are.

Now, I want you to tuck that information away, but don’t forget it. We’re not going to discuss it further at the present time. But remain aware of it.

Now the simple fact is, that fear and love cannot occupy the same space.

Love is essential to healing. Love is essential to the experience to right-mindedness. Love is essential to waking up. Love, which is the opposite of isolation, is essential to your making the shift from second gear to first gear.

Some of you, as you have been doing the practice over the last three weeks now, may have found it difficult to acknowledge the guiltlessness of your brother or sister and be willing to hold your brother or sister up to the Father in acknowledgement of what is true about them. The reason being, that for one reason or another, you’re in a state of fear. And you found that in the state of fear, when you did remember about the practice and tried to do it, you not only weren’t able to, you quite adamantly didn’t want to. Why? Because when you are afraid, it is essential to behave in aggressive self-protection—you see, defensiveness, isolation. And in that state of fear, you can’t be too sure which one of your brothers or sisters is safe to be defenseless with and which ones are not safe to be defenseless with. And so you’re not about to let down your guard because you’re overcome with fear. You see?

You’ve had the experience, if you’ve tried to do the practice when fear has a grip on you, that it’s impossible and you don’t even want to do it because it’s inconsistent with your need to be protected. And you didn’t know that. You didn’t know that that was an aspect of the dynamic of fear. You didn’t know that when you are afraid and you’re not challenging the fear you’re feeling, you automatically block that which would relieve the fear. You automatically block that which would alter the circumstances which seem to be calling for the fear.

Now that you’ve had that experience, and you understand it experientially, you can in the future, when fear arises, challenge it. Don’t just sit there nurturing it. Don’t roll it over in your mind and feel all of the awfulness of it and how justified it is, and what a miserable state of affairs it is for you to be caught in fear and stuck there.

If you know that love and fear cannot occupy the same space at the same time, then bring into the space of your experience, that which fear can’t be in the presence of. Simple. Bring Love in.

Well, here’s a simple way you can do it. It’s not an ultimate way, but it’s a beginning: When you find yourself consumed with fear, immobilized by fear, find things to appreciate. Let there be little acknowledgements of gratitude for this or that or the other thing. “I’m so grateful I’m not freezing to death like I was during the winter. I’m so glad it’s cloudy but not raining because I have some things I need to do.” See, these are not even totally positive appreciations or gratitudes, but they are expressions of gratitude and they shift the attention—they shift the energy in you.

Ultimately, what you need to do is to find in your experience, a brother to love—a brother to appreciate—not just someone who did a kind thing for you last week that you really appreciate. That’s a wonderful thing to appreciate, but I want it to go further than that. Because you see, when you say, “I really appreciate that Joe knew something about cars and was able to reset something in my car that I didn’t know how to do—how to fix.” When that kind of gratitude is still just between the two of you, it doesn’t lift your brother up to the Father. And without lifting your brother up to the Father in acknowledgment of his value and his worth, the experience of Family, the experience of unity in the context of Reality, isn’t occurring.

If you don’t lift your brother up to the Father, if you don’t love your brother as an expression of gratitude and acknowledgement of truth about him to your Father, it leaves the inseparable oneness of Creation un-illumined. It leaves it in the shadows where it can’t be seen. And if you do not lift your brother into the conscious sense of Family—of your both having a common Father/Mother—you leave yourself out as well. If you leave yourself out, you’re still in second gear, not where you really want to be.

So, you must do what relieves you of fear when fear has a grip on you, and you must do it in a way that not only relieves you of the experience of fear, but that which introduces Love into the arena and in the presence of Love, re-unites you, your brother and your Father/Mother once again. Because that is what will promote the sudden shift of perception, called a miracle, in which you suddenly find yourself in first gear, absent fear, absent loneliness, absent vulnerability, present with your brother’s guiltlessness and your own guiltlessness, and absent the personality that you so lovingly created for yourself as you grew up in the orphanage, thus allowing you to be in a new way, arising not out of practiced habits, but out of present ongoing communion with the Father in which you let His perspective fill you and be the ground from which you behave.

Some people move from one country to another and take out citizenship in the new country and give up their original citizenship. That is a pretty dynamic step—a pretty emotional step, a pretty significant step—because you are letting what used to identify you to you and everyone else, go, and you are embracing something new that will identify you to you and to everyone else.

Waking up is sort of like that. It’s giving up citizenship in orphanland, which means giving up who you thought you were, and giving up how you behaved in that particular context. Oh-h, is that a little scary? Or is that, perhaps, something you can think of more positively? Might that not be rebirth? Might that not be redemption, where old things have passed away and all things have become new? You like those phrases—“Where old things have passed away and all things have become new.” Now you know it means including you.

Let’s go into the book.

… the sudden shift of awareness, the sudden shift of perception …

If you’re in need of healing, somewhere along the line you must have denied your guiltlessness. Well, you say, [chuckling] “Well, yeah, of course I did. I made an ass out of myself. I was a fool. I deserve everything I got.” Wrong! Change your behavior by letting that Mind be in you, which is your real Mind—the Holy Spirit.

What glad acknowledgement? Did it talk about… oh yeah, the miracle acknowledges the guiltlessness. Hm-m… the miracle acknowledges… A sudden shift of perception is an acknowledgement of something new isn’t it! The miracle acknowledges guiltlessness. The miracle acknowledges perfection. The miracle acknowledges who you really Are. The miracle acknowledges who your brother or sister really Is. Ah-h… the miracle acknowledges what the Universe is: The Kingdom of Heaven.

… the glad acknowledgement that the miracle is.

Now you know that the miracle—the sudden shift of perception—involves a sudden shift in how you recognize yourself, not the personality you thought you were, not the character that you carefully developed. That’s part of the glad acknowledgement of who you really Are.

The miracle, the glad acknowledgment.

Everyone. Right? Everyone.

And you could read it with reference to yourself: You may not yet have learned how to exchange your guilt for innocence, nor realize that only in this exchange can freedom from pain be yours.

… what? …

… fail to learn from them …

Well, that certainly seems to imply that if you’re attacking someone who is in need of teaching, you are there to be the one to do the teaching. But you thought all you had to do was have a reaction—perhaps a self-righteous reaction. “Yeah, well what can you expect?” The same kind of self-righteous reaction you apply to yourself: “What could I expect? I was an ass-hole. I deserve everything I got.” You don’t think that’s self-righteous but it is. It’s a little strange isn’t it… that you self-righteously stand there and judge yourself? “Well I deserve everything I get—I deserve the suffering I’m having!” [Chuckling] And you believe yourself. You say that and you don’t even recognize how ridiculous that is. You self-righteously judge the unrighteous bastard that you’re defining yourself as. And you don’t even wince at the lack of logic. You would rather wince at the suffering that you deserve because you were so stupid!

Oh-h …

You’re here, you’re here, you’re here to learn how to let go of your personality. You’re here to learn how to let go of the individuality that you have created such a wonderful presentation of. And you’re here to do it by not relating to each other self-righteously, not relating to each other on the basis of principles that you mentally apply to each other and to your own behavior toward each other.

You’re to let go of your personality by becoming defenseless with your brother. Ah-h, that means that when you are in a state of fear you’ve got to become defenseless enough to connect with them so that you might feel their need, so that you might be able to experience the influx of clarity that allows you to answer their need, because you’ve really connected with what they divinely are, and can provide them with the acknowledgement of their innocence of their guiltlessness. And you do it. And so you learn from them. And you teach by loving. You teach by extending the acknowledgement of their value and their worth and their Meaning.

Well, teachers of innocence… that’s you, that’s you, that’s you, you, you, you, you, everyone. Why are you teachers of innocence? Not because it’s a glorious thing to do, but because you are nothing less than the Mind of God extending Itself in acknowledgement of the value and worth of everything that allows you to see all of creation without distortion, without conflict or polarization, with absolute utter harmony and beauty.

You’re here to teach innocence, because experiencing innocence is your Birthright. It’s the only thing God gave you the capacity to do because you are His offspring and you reflect Him.

No matter what words the aim might come out in, no matter what language it is expressed in, there’s no conflict in it.

I know, those words are once again grand and nebulous in terms of meaning. But you know what? At times each one of you—maybe only twice, maybe only once—each one of you has had the experience of being touched. You would call it being touched in a relationship with another, or in a relationship with an environment, or in relationship with nature. It was a moment of release from guilt in which what you would call illumination occurred, totally unasked for, but incredible. It constituted a release from guilt into an experience of holiness. It was a divine experience that you could apply no other word to other than divine. You’ve had it at least once. And you’ll never forget it. And you haven’t forgotten it.

So that’s a taste of the experience of the eternal glory of God and His creation. What I’m trying to bring out to you is that, that taste occurred right here on planet Earth, right here in your relationships with each other. You had a taste of the Kingdom of Heaven right where the Kingdom of Heaven is, even though you have called it something else, a material universe—relationships with other egos, relationships with organisms. You know, just things that came spontaneously, generated physically by physicality, a sperm and an egg, you know. And it happened while you were relating to nothing but a bunch of other conditioned responses that you call a personality and that they call their personalities, and they’re responding to your conditioned responses that you call your personality. You see?

How awful, how short-sighted, how shallow, how depthless and meaningless an experience you’re generally having of Reality, of the Kingdom of Heaven, of the other Sons and Daughters of God’s that are your brothers and sisters because you’re one of God’s Children too.

So, it’s a wonderful thing to be reminded that you are teachers of innocence. You’re teachers of innocence because the acknowledgement of innocence is the one capacity that God has given you. And the capacity to think that you think God gave you, God didn’t give you.

So you see, we’re learning of shifts of different kinds as you move from second gear to first gear.

… the Atonement …

Which is nothing more than an incredibly clear experience of the reality of everything that’s going on in your face at this moment.

“Yeah… yeah… yeah… right! ‘Guarantees its limitless results.’ I’ll tell you, last week I didn’t experience any limitless results. I didn’t have time to have limitless results because I was so upset with so-and-so. And I had a right to be. He’s such a bastard that I had to use every bit of my energy and all of my time to defend myself against his abusing me, taking advantage of me, hurting me. [Chuckling] You want me to hold him up to God and acknowledge something of value in him? Oh yeah, I know, you want me… to hell with him… you want me to use my mind well. That’s a real mind-fuck that you’re trying to pull on me. You want me to watch how I’m using my mind, when that bastard out there is intent upon taking advantage of me? Hell no, that’s asinine.”

Well, there you have an example of somebody securely stuck in second gear—that’s all, that’s all. You’ve just watched and heard an expression of being second gearish. And that’s all, that’s all it was.

Now if somebody else were the one behaving like that and you were watching and I was with you and I said, “Look at that example of being stuck in second gear.” You would say, “Wow, yeah, it’s clear as a bell to me.” But let me point at you and say, “Look at yourself doing that,” and you’ll bristle immediately. You won’t be able to see it, because you know better than anyone else how threatened you are and how essential it is to be defended. And you will fixate on your brother out there as the reason for your needing to be defended. And you will refuse to bother to notice how you’re using your mind. You will refuse to abandon the highly focused attention on your brother so that you might bring some focused attention upon how you’re using your mind. But until you’re willing to take a look at how you’re using your mind and until you’re willing to look at it with a certain degree of logic, you won’t be able to notice that you are refusing to allow that which will remove the fear that you’re experiencing into the place or space where the fear is occurring. You won’t let Love in. You won’t let It in by daring to engage in an act of love and employing your mind in a different mode and energy. And so you will be stuck.

I’m telling this to you right now when, hopefully, you’re not upset and not deeply in a state of fear so that you’ll say, “I see what he’s saying. I am grasping the meaning in a contextual way within me.” And if you’re getting it now it will be easier to remember this the next time you begin to be controlled by fear and justify self-protection and a refusal to lift your brother up and consequently lift yourself up. And you will be able to shift back into being a teacher of innocence.

The simple fact is that if you bring Love into the space where fear is immobilizing you, the immobilization and the fear will leave. And you will not be immobilized and healing will absolutely occur. It’s a Law! It’s the Truth!

Now, this is an invitation. It’s also a command. If you want to wake up be obedient to this command and nothing will stand in your way. So it’s not a command in the terms of coercion, it’s just a command of guidance—very clear, very true, very simple guidance.

What power is that?

… that …

So, right in the thick of it, right when you’re caught in fear and right when you’re defending yourself against your brother, or so defended by something else that a call for Love from a brother can’t be responded to, because you’ve got to be so busy defending yourself over in this other arena. Right in the thick of it …

What is the right of God’s creation that will be restored to you? Your Birthright, your Inheritance by virtue of Whom your Source is.

Why? Because when you accord innocence to a brother, it means you have extended love. And if you have extended love, you’ve done that which eradicated the presence of fear that governed you and caused you to develop a personality, which was nothing but a stylized form of self-defense. And in your extension of love you began to use your mind differently. And as a result of using your mind differently and being undefended… what? A sudden shift of perception could occur, a miracle. And you were blessed by your encounter with your brother.

Again, because it’s the wonderful truth, from everyone whom you accord release from guilt you will inevitably learn your innocence.

Now, you know what? You don’t have to go out… you don’t have to begin your day tomorrow examining the personality that you’ve created and study it to find the fine lines of defense that have been covered over in very particular expressions of kindness and thoughtfulness and dignity and respect for your brother. No. All you have to do is find a reason to extend love to your brother, by acknowledging to God what is of value in your brother. Not a bad idea. The only thing is that, if you will begin to do that on purpose, you’ll find there are times that you really don’t want to do that. And those are the places where the miracle is called for. Those are the places where you need to assume your position “as a teacher of innocence.” And by engaging in that, you will provide the environment for learning to occur. You will provide the environment for shifting from second gear to first gear to occur.

So you see, this isn’t an intellectual process of self-examination by means of which you will arrive at enlightenment. No. It’s more down-to-earth than that and it’s less selfish and self-centered than that. It means involvement with your brother and your sister—involving yourself with your brother and sister in a way that brings out the one capacity that God has given you and lets it find expression in the world.

This is how you wake up. This is how you contribute to the transformation from one culture to another culture, right here. You’re invited to be what you Really Are here, not in the “sweet-by-and-by.” You are invited by this book and everything in it. You’re invited by the truth to have the ultimate revealed to you here and now, about everything you’re already aware of and more. But don’t go for the more. You go for that carrot and you’ll miss that of which you’re already aware, and its renewal in your mind, and its transformation in your mind.

Lets have a week of limitless results. And lets be willing to let go of all the cherished personalities. And let the new you come forth—the you that has always been—that which is nothing more than your right Mind, the Holy Spirit.

Okay. I look forward to being with you next week.