Teachings of Christ Mind

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

A new section:

Let’s remember what a miracle is. A miracle is a sudden shift of perception. We could say, it’s a shift of perception from perception with deceit to perception without deceit. And to flesh it out a little bit more, it’s a shift from the orphan mentality—second gear—to that which is nothing more than your right Mind, which is the Holy Spirit, which is first gear, which is you experiencing reality through God’s eyes as God is experiencing it.

Now, has it ever occurred to you that every single moment is the perfect opportunity for a miracle? Every single moment is a perfect opportunity to wake-up! “Oh-h …” but you say, “Well, I’m in a state of emergency! There was just a car accident, this is not an opportune time to wake up … There are things to be taken care of, I can’t give my attention to a sudden shift of perception, come-on, uh-h … this is not the perfect moment for a sudden shift of perception …” And what you’re saying is, my mind-set will not allow for me to see this as a perfect moment for a miracle—a perfect moment for a sudden shift of perception. And yet, what better time for a miracle than when a miracle is needed? What better time than when there is a call for healing?

You see, you’re not, for lack of better words, conditioned in your mind to respond to needs with a clear call for clarity in your mind. You’re conditioned to react. You’re conditioned to be alarmed and feel the alarm and use the alarm to motivate you to get busy and fix things up, not one of the times when you would naturally think to ask the Holy Spirit, “What’s going on here? What is really going on here? What is God’s truth right here?”

You’re not inclined to have something come to your attention, let’s say, as you’re driving along and you see a dead animal in the road, you’re not conditioned or primed to [snaps fingers] instantaneously say, “That’s a lie! That is not God’s truth. I don’t accept it!” No. You say, “Oh-h boy, these damn drivers, they can’t stop for a minute to let a simple little critter get across the street. They just gotta go-go-go and kill-kill-kill! I have the right to sit here in this car and react and be mad because it’s unfair!”

Oh, hell, if it’s so unfair, heal it by using your mind in it’s healing capacity. Use your mind to immediately reach to the Holy Spirit, “What is the healing truth that needs to be known here? Help me see this critter not exhibiting something that God could not have created and a condition that God couldn’t possibly be manifesting right there where I see it.”

Again, what better time for a miracle than when a miracle is needed? Any moment is a perfect time for a sudden shift of perception.

Yeah, I know, you’re eating dinner, the whole family’s there. It’s been a hard day for both you and your wife at work. The kids are tired and cranky. It was a busy day at school and they had baseball and piano lessons and everybody’s at each other’s throat and it’s not a pleasant time. “You know, this is not the best time, this is not the perfect time for me to have a sudden shift of perception because I’m upset along with everybody else and we all have a right to be upset. Let us get it out of our system, we have a right to do that.”

Well, yeah, you can do that. But you have missed what, nevertheless, is a perfect opportunity for a sudden shift of perception.

You know, you are never faced with complicated circumstances. You’re always faced with one of two things: The experience of truth or the experience of illusion. No matter how it’s fleshed out, you’re either faced with the experience of truth or the experience of illusion. And the experience of illusion is simply a distorted perception of truth, because you have nothing else available to you to be experiencing but truth seen clearly or seen through a glass darkly.

What I want to convey tonight is, how simple it is, how uncomplicated it is, that a sudden shift of perception is not one of an infilling of grand and complicated and drawn out improvement of your mind. It’s simply a shift from a distorted perception to a real perception. Like holding your camera up and adjusting the focus. You’re either seeing reality out of focus or you’re seeing it in focus. It doesn’t matter what the scenario is. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a war. It doesn’t matter if there’s gun-fighting going on. It doesn’t matter if people are beating each other up. It doesn’t matter. Because you’re either seeing reality out of focus or in focus. And the call is not for improving the circumstances, but by improving the focus.

That’s why any moment is a perfect moment for a sudden shift of perception. Any moment is a perfect moment for bringing things into focus. Another way of putting it is, that any moment is a perfect moment to abandon second gear—to abandon autonomous private authority and yield to your desire to feel your Sonship or Daughtership with your Father and your Brotherhood with your brothers and sisters—and consciously choose to see everything as your Father sees it—as your Father is Being it.

Mind you, when you’re looking through the camera and everything is out of focus, it doesn’t mean that what you’re seeing is false. It doesn’t mean that what you’re seeing is an illusion even though you can’t make sense out of it. It’s just reality, truth you might say, out of focus. Turn the lens, bring it into focus. Now everything makes sense. A shift of perception has occurred, not a shift of reality and not actually an undoing of unreality. Because unreality was never going on, it was always reality misperceived. It was always perception with deceit.

Now, why suddenly bring in such a word as deceit? Because it implies dishonesty. Well, we’re using the word because it is important to be honest [chuckle] and uncover when you’re being dishonest so that you’re not fooled. There is deceit when you’re looking at everything and saying, “But Father, I’d rather see it my way. In other words, I’d rather change the setting on the lens so that what’s perfectly clear becomes unclear and susceptible to misinterpretation so that I can apply an interpretation (which is actually a misinterpretation) to it and join with my brothers and sisters in a mutual misunderstanding of it that we’re going to call, an explanation of the reality of everything. And it will be called, ‘science.’ And we will live according to the precepts of science. We will live according to a definition that has been given to a distorted image of what’s real and what it really is will forever escape us because of our commitment to the definition we’re giving it. And so, we’re going to say it’s ‘this’ when it isn’t.” And that is where the deceit comes in. You see? “We are going to pretend that it’s not the Presence of God, that ‘it’ is something else. It’s the presence of ‘matter.’ The presence of matter that came from a ‘Big Bang’ that had nothing to do with God.” And on and on and on.

So, when you shift from the authority you love to think you have as an orphan, as an independent agent, when you shift from that to an attitude of saying, “Father, what are You really Being here? Father, show me what this thing really is.” When you make that shift, you abandon your desire to practice deceit. And you have what is called, a sudden shift of perception—a miracle. Healing injuries from an accident, gone. Someone dying in a hospital bed revived fully, instantaneously, immediately free of the need of life-support systems.

Every one of you needs to begin to think—I’m going to say that cautiously—every one of you needs to begin to think in a new way. Everyone of you needs to begin to condition yourself to respond to emergencies not with reaction first, but with an immediate call to the Father—an immediate call to your innate divine wisdom, an immediate call to the Holy Spirit, which is nothing more than your right Mind—to reveal to you what’s really going on, with an expectation of seeing illusion (out-of-focus-fuzziness) shifting into perfect clarity where there’s no question what-so-ever about what it is, and no room for anyone to come to a misperception or a misunderstanding of what it is, an experience of it which, because it’s the true experience of it, is so compelling to you that you would not choose to see it any other way any longer.

And when that happens, there will be instantaneous healing. There may even be gradual healing, we’re not going to quibble. The evidence will be healing. But it can be instantaneous. And you can learn to instantaneously respond to a call for love with a desire to know what love is and what love needs to be expressed as by you in that moment, instead of reacting and being governed by fear, which is the opposite of love.

So, going into the book …

Again …

We could say, what do you want, first gear or second gear? Sonship or orphanhood? They’re yours, but not both. You either have one or the other. You have one or the other, right now, already. There aren’t any other choices. So you have one or the other, right now.

But the question is …

… and I’m adding, first gear or second gear is yours, Sonship or orphanhood is yours, but not both.

Well, what in the heck does that mean?

Well, waking up is shifting from a sense of you’re having your own mind, something which you say is in your skull, in a hunk of meat called a brain, unknown to you because things that are kept apart cannot be had at the same time, cannot be experienced at the same time. Unbeknownst to you, as you’re making this claim of a mind that’s in a skull, in a brain, you the divine one that you are that you’ve been unconscious of, and your right Mind which is the only real Mind there is which is yours, isn’t being experienced by you, but it’s there and as you know now, it’s called the Holy Spirit. It’s your identity. It’s your Being held in trust while you imaginatively play with the ego–dally with the ego, pretend to be an ego, have fun being scared to death by the experience of being an ego, and so on and so on. Okay.

Now, Someone has come along. The Course has come along, I have come along, and you’ve been told that contrary to your belief that your mind is in your brain and that it’s a physical thing, there is a real you, one that isn’t imagined, one that can’t be described the way you’re describing yourself. And the experience of it can be achieved or taken hold of, the experience can be had by desiring to connect with God by embracing with what to you in the beginning, is an idea of God. But in your willingness to reach for the experience of God, what are you doing? You’re abandoning the autonomy of second gear. You’re abandoning the commitment to being an independent agent.

You are bringing the illusion to truth. You are uniting what seemed to be separate by bringing them together. The puny little orphan that you thought you were has begun to change it’s goal and brings itself, by virtue of desire, to an experience of joining with Something you didn’t even know was there. You didn’t know what truth was and you didn’t know how to bring yourself to it.

But now you are beginning to understand. And you are beginning to have a feel for engaging in this … well, what had been an unknown practice, even an unknowable practice, because your orphanhood was so exclusive that it didn’t allow for such a thing.

So …

What you think you are must be brought to what you actually Are.

You are reconciled by the uniting of who you thought you were, with who you really Are.

In other words, truth is union. Union is the truth of Being and therefore, disintegration, the opposite of union, has to disappear because it’s not truth. And in the experience of truth, it becomes obvious—untruth becomes obvious. “Gee whiz, I always thought two times two is five. And now you come along and you show me two apples and two apples two times two is what? One, two, three, four… my God, it isn’t five.” Ignorance has been replaced by the comprehension of truth. Never again will you think that two times two is five.

… ignorance …

Okay. Eventually, you’re not going to perceive anything at all any longer. Perception and misperception will vanish. They’ll vanish in the experience of Knowing. They will vanish in the experience of understanding truth experientially. The experience of what a thing really is will be a direct experience not a perception of it. A perception of it is like a snapshot of it or an idea of it. But the truth of what a thing is will be experienced by you directly. But in the meantime, since you’re operating in the realm of perception, because that’s how you come up with illusions, we’re going to use perceptions.

How do you have a new perception? How do you have a perception without deceit? You have a perception without deceit by abandoning the self that used thought processes to define reality different from what the Father created it as. That’s perception without deceit. It requires you to go within and ask of the Father, “What is the reality here? What are You Being in that orchid, what are You Being in that table, what are You Being in my fingernail… what is true here?” Because as I said earlier, every moment is a perfect moment for a sudden shift of perception to occur. And since there aren’t two realities, there’s either reality experienced in focus, or there is reality experienced out of focus. Then whatever you’re calling a fingernail in the out-of-focus view, is something that’s really there to be seen in focus. All you have to do is turn the lens to bring it into focus.

When you ask, “What is really going on here? What are You Being here, God? What is it that’s really here in front of me, no matter how I’m perceiving it at the moment? That desire genuinely felt, genuinely extended to the Father, or to the Holy Spirit, or to me, will elicit a response in Answer, not a misdirection, not a distraction, but the Answer will be forth-coming. The turning of the lens will happen. You’ll say, “My God, two plus two is four!” You see?

So, waking up is a matter of abandoning perception with deceit. Which means it’s a matter of abandoning the orphan mentality in which you made up the definitions of everything—made up definitions about everything real that defined them incorrectly—defined what was real falsely. And that’s how the deceit came into play. And you let go of the deceit by desiring once again to know what truth is. “What’s the truth of the fingernail? What’s the truth of the glass? What’s the truth of the book? What’s the truth of the paper? What is going on here that I’m currently seeing in a blurred fashion, which I know I will be able to see if the focus is returned to the picture. What is it?”

… to the experience of Knowing.

If you’re not asking to know what a thing truly is, so that you might perceive it without misperception being introduced, then misperception will be maintained. Misperception will continue to be established and you will continue to be ignorant.

So, perception either leads you into temptation and illusion, or perception leads you into the experience of truth depending on what voice you are using in order to be told what truth is. If you’re going to continue to use your puny little voice, from the puny little mind and your puny little head, you’re going to stay with illusion. But you’re not bound to that anymore, cause you know better. And tonight it’s clearer than ever, because I’ve said it so clearly to you, that there’s only one thing going on and it’s Reality, which you’re either seeing clearly or out of focus.

So there’s nothing complicated. You don’t have to get rid of a material world and you don’t have to rise above a material world. You just have to stop keeping that lens in a position where Reality is out of focus, that’s all. Put it into focus and the Reality that was present all along, that you were misinterpreting and misunderstanding, will be clearly seen for what it is in such a compelling way that you will recognize that it’s Heaven.

Now …

You have to be careful with this. The best way to search out that which interferes with the experience of truth, is to desire to know what the truth is about anything and everything. Because the moment you do that, you will find out what conditionings are present in you that you use to keep yourself ignorant of the truth.

If you begin to desire to know the truth about so-and-so, you will find yourself automatically being caught up short if you don’t like so-and-so and never have, or if so-and-so hurt you, or abused you. Your desire to know the truth—God’s truth about them—will be blocked by your reluctance to know the truth about them because you don’t want to abandon your self-righteous, negative appraisal of them. And you will say, “This is not a perfect moment for a sudden shift of perception.” And you will have a direct experience of what interferes with truth, with the experience of truth, without having gone on an internal witch hunt.

I promise you something: If you do an honest searching, what you might call an honest searching out of everything that interferes with truth, your ego can lead you on a merry little self-righteous chase. “Oh, you wouldn’t believe what I learned about myself as I’ve begun to [chuckling] honestly search out everything that interferes with truth. My God, I found that I’ve been doing this and I’ve found that I’ve been doing that and, wow, what an eye opener. You can’t believe the shift it’s caused in my mind.” [Loud chuckling] And no shift has occurred at all. You’ve just developed new wonderful things to praise yourself about.

And you know what? You will never have found out that you were resistant to acknowledging the truth about so-and-so, which you would have found out if you decided you wanted to know what the truth was about so-and-so.

So keep yourself grounded in this searching out of everything that interferes with truth. Don’t look for errors in you, look for the truth in everything. Desire for there to be this sudden shift of perception, called a miracle, the movement from blurred to in-focus. Desire that. And that will automatically bring up to you the means you are employing for staying ignorant and being unconscious of the truth. And then that which uncovered it, because of your desire to know the truth, will help you set it aside by showing you the truth that undoes your conviction and your commitment to the misperception you had created by virtue of wanting to live in a world of blur.

It just is.

Even though it’s wherever you are and within you …

… depending upon whether you are functioning in first gear or second gear, whether you are creating a split mind, you know, your right Mind and your orphan mentality.

… truth …

So, that which is nothing but your right Mind, which is the Holy Spirit, which you have a hard time believing, you have a hard time believing because you hid your right Mind from yourself when you said, “But Father, I’d rather see it my way. I would rather use my mind in a way You did not design it, for a purpose You did not make it—that purpose being, to call everything that You’ve made something different from what You made. I will put my stamp of approval on creation in a slightly distorted way.” You see, that’s where the deceit came in.

And so, when you decided to function as a mentality that wasn’t the Father’s mind, that wasn’t the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit became unknowable to you. It’s something you could think about. It’s something that a word could be applied to and everybody could talk about, “Oh, the Holy Trinity: The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit … wow,” never for a moment realizing that the third part of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, is nothing more than your right Mind—You, as you experience yourself, when you stop trying to be the personal, private author of the definitions and meanings of creation.

So you hid It and It became unreal to you, in fact, unknown to you as being You.

… because of course, fear accompanies everything you do from second gear. Second gear is always accompanied by fear.

Behind every fuzzy perception lies Reality, perfect. Reality lies hidden behind out of focusness.

Now, again we must be clear here, because it’s very impractical just to look at fear, and to look at it consistently. You must look at fear with One Who is Awake, the Holy Spirit, that which is nothing more than your right Mind, whose task, if you will, is to reconcile you with it so that you might experience your Sanity once again. And the more you look at fear with your Guide or with the Holy spirit or with me, the less you see it, and the clearer what it conceals becomes, the clearer the Reality behind the blur becomes as the blur shifts into focus.

It’s impossible for me to convince you that your right Mind is the Holy Spirit. But I can tell you over and over again in so many different ways that you might begin to experience curiosity and begin to do the essential thing, which is to reach for It, to dare to embrace It as though It’s actually there. But I can’t convince you—the unknowing, that which doesn’t know of it’s divinity—that you know. I can’t convince the orphan that you think you are, that you are the Holy Spirit.

… from your point of view …

This is important …

And you know it, if you were in your right Mind.

Viewpoints are like vantage points. Viewpoints are perceptions, aren’t they. “Well, my perception of the accident was this, and someone else’s perception of the accident was that.” Or “My perception of the meaning of the movie was this, and your perception of the meaning of the movie was something else.”

Viewpoints are different from knowing. [repeats] Viewpoints are different from knowing.

… the ignorant …

… you have defined yourselves …

As you were not created.

… your creation …

Uncertainty, which is characteristic of the orphan mentality and of gear number two, brought to first gear with the desire to know the truth here, does not retain any conviction of Reality because the truth is so compelling that there is no way to hold on to the illusion any longer with any belief.

Now, there’s a saying, “You believe what you see, and you see what you believe.” The implication of that statement is: If you want to see something different, believe something different. And it’s as though that is the answer, that’s the solution, that’s the way you correct things. But I’m here to tell you that something had to happen before you had a belief to believe. You had to abandon the experience of knowing. You had to say, “But, Father, I’d rather not know it. I would rather create an experience of it that I have made up, that I have created through the use of my mind. And so, I’m going to call this such-and-such a thing and I’m going to say that it has such-and-such a purpose, and that will be my belief. And I will believe what I see and I will see what I believe.”

If you understand this, then you will also understand that the solution to a better experience is not to have a better belief, but to abandon belief and yield to your capacity to know, which you abandoned in favor of having beliefs, and governing yourself according to beliefs and being governed by your beliefs.

So the answer is, and the freedom from belief comes from asking, “Father, what is the truth here? What is really going on there? What is really going on where it looks like there was an accident at this intersection? What is really going on?” Because again, no matter how gory it looks, in other words, no matter how fuzzy it gets, it’s still a fuzzy unfocussed experience of something that’s utterly clear, utterly flawless, utterly perfect. And so, in spite of what you’re seeing, all that is needed is a sudden shift of perception, because the fuzzy picture, the distorted picture, the gory picture that you’re seeing is nothing more than an altered perception of something utterly perfect.

Ah, but I’m telling you something that you don’t know. I’m telling you something I cannot convince you of. I understand that. I must tell you what you cannot believe, so that you might open your mind up and let your belief be replaced by a new experience that eradicates the value of beliefs and allows actual sudden shifts of perception to occur that will be called miraculous.

Again, let’s be careful. What you do want, what you do truly want, is what the Father or the Holy Spirit reveals to you. If you just go after what you want as you perceive yourself to be at the moment—a handy-dandy little orphan—then wanting what you do want is just going to keep you in the orphanage.

So …

Hm-m, two systems of belief … Oh, first gear, second gear … Son or Daughter of God … orphan. Those are two systems of belief. Why am I calling a Son or Daughter of God a belief? Because right now you don’t believe it. [Chuckling] And so to you that is a belief. Fine. Once you have the experience of it though, you won’t call it a belief any longer.

Nevertheless …

… fuzzy, out of focus …

They sure are, aren’t they. You don’t experience your divinity while you’re being as orphan. And when you experience your divinity you won’t experience being an orphan. But you are demonstrating right now, the fact that your belief that you’re an orphan is keeping you absolutely blinded to your being the Holy Spirit, to your right Mind being nothing more than the Holy Spirit.

So the two are being maintained, even though they can’t actually exist in your mind at the same time.

In other words, you couldn’t believe both of them. You get that? You couldn’t believe both of them. Belief would not make sense. The practice of believing wouldn’t make sense, because the truth would be so obvious.

… if second gear is kept in the darkness from the first, or if first gear is kept in darkness from second…

Mind you, this is all nonsense, but this is the way dissociation works.

And you all know [chuckling] that acceptance will have to be withdrawn from the belief of orphanhood. And you don’t want to do that yet. “Oh, but I do, but I do!” No, if you wanted to you would have done it, and you’d be saying, “I’ve done it,” you wouldn’t be saying, “Oh, I want to, I want to.” Okay.

… that each denies the other …

You see. You can even read the Course and you can listen to what I’m saying and you can think about the Holy Spirit being nothing more than your right Mind and accepting that as a fact, and of being an orphan and accepting that as a fact, and they can both sit there side-by-side. Why? Because you’re not making commitment to both of them. You’re making commitment to one. You’re making commitment to being the orphan.

The necessity here, is for you to dare to make commitment to that which is nothing more than your right Mind, and stop thinking and stop reasoning and stop coming to your own conclusions. And in every instance where you would’ve come to your own conclusions, you lean into the Holy Spirit demanding a response from that which is nothing more than your right Mind, because you want to know the truth.

… as that would amount to …

Simple.

… defenses …

… the truth.

So, how have I described tonight the practice of defending truth? I’ve described it by saying that if you see a dead animal on the road, you [snaps fingers] immediately say, “That’s a lie,” or instead of reacting to an accident or an injury or illness, you say, “Father what is the truth here.” That’s how you defend the truth. You defend the lie by becoming upset, by justifying anger, by justifying thinking that comes to conclusions that are false and believing the conclusions and acting on the basis of them.

So, again, since you’re used to practicing defense, the Holy Spirit—when you listen to the Holy Spirit—will guide you to use defense on behalf of truth.

Now you notice that I didn’t describe setting up shields against everything that would attack truth. The way you defend truth is by wanting to know the truth, and not expressing or practicing any other desire. You defend truth by letting your intent be fully on having the experience of what truth is. You defend the experience of truth by not allowing yourself to be distracted by anything but truth. That’s the way, through the Holy Spirit’s help, that you defend truth and make the shift more easily from second gear to first gear, and have a sudden shift of perception in which deceit is absent.

Now, we’re going to stop here for this evening, because I want you to remember during this coming week to defend the truth. And to remember that the way you defend the truth is to wish to know what the truth is, and by not allowing yourself to be distracted from hearing the answer, especially not being distracted from hearing the answer by spontaneously indulging in the habit of thinking. You will know by desiring to know, not by figuring out an answer.

Remember, every moment is a perfect moment to have a sudden shift of perception. Every experience of a call for love is a perfect moment to find a way to let love through you. Every call for a miracle does not constitute a moment which is not perfect for a miracle because it is too upsetting, it is a perfect moment for a miracle, because that’s when the miracle is needed. And if miracles are not for the moments in which they are really needed they are useless.

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