Teachings of Christ Mind

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

Not all of you, but many of you have had the experience of being on the social welfare roles, usually because of lack of employment or whatever. And you find that you’re grateful for the help you get. It manages to keep you barely alive, but it is help. And if and when you find the opportunity for work—and in many cases, the first opportunities are less than desirable or less than fulfilling job opportunities, but they are helpful in increasing the cash flow—you find out that if your cash flow increases too much, the social welfare cash flow decreases. And the more you get—the more you earn individually—even less is offered you by the social welfare system. And you begin to feel that the system is holding you down because it manages to always keep you in a position of not having quite enough to be comfortable.

And so it discourages one from attempting to reestablish himself independently. Some people get caught on the welfare roles because of that. But most everyone else arrives at a point where they realize they’ve got to screw up the courage, or get up enough gumption to break loose of the system and go ahead and become independent from that which is holding them back, while at the same time, helping them minimally.

For those who have been on welfare, you know exactly what I’m talking about. Others of you have had other kinds of experiences where the situation seems to hold you back, while at the same time helping you and causing you, perhaps, to become addicted to the help and afraid to let go of it.

Now why am I bringing this up? I’m bringing it up because I want to ask you all, “How did you do last week?” How many of you were able to say, “I know nothing,” “I don’t know anything,” and accept it graciously and listen? How many of you managed to spend any significant amount of time responding to your days from the joined place where you were sharing what was being unfolded to you by the Holy Spirit or your Guide?

Uh-h, not many? Not very much of the time? Well, might it have been because, like the person needing to get off the welfare system but gaining some benefit from it, you, needing to get off or out of the orphan mindset, found enough benefit from it to not be willing to let it go—not be willing to shift gears.

Indeed, when you finally get up the courage to break free of the social welfare system, it is like changing into a different paradigm, into an entirely different mindset—a non-welfare mindset. And when that happens it is really a leap of faith. And when you choose to shift from thinking that you know, into acknowledging that you don’t know and insisting on listening first before you respond, it takes courage and it is an act of faith.

Now you could ask the question, “Why didn’t you do it very much?” It’s easy to say, “Well, I’m familiar with thinking for myself. I’m familiar with thinking things through and resolving things through the use of logic. It’s second nature to me to think for myself. It feels natural. And what you’re asking me to do doesn’t feel natural. What you’re asking me to do is to jump out into the ‘deep blue’ with no security.”

Well, there’s another reason as we’ve discussed before, which is, that you rely upon your thinking, you rely upon the idea that you know something so that you can protect yourself—so that you can survive. And you feel that that’s a justifiable reason for not engaging in the idea that you don’t know, and then listening and hearing before you respond to the circumstances you’re in the middle of. You think you know the answer and you feel that you can rely upon your capacity to have the answers.

But I’m going to tell you there’s another reason, or there’s another factor here that you’re not paying any attention to, because if you did pay attention to it you would have more justification for abandoning your own best thinking.

And the other factor is one we’ve talked about before, some time ago, which may have slipped your mind. You see, you think that I am giving you the option to respond to Guidance that comes to you if you will abandon your own best capacities. You think I’m asking you to trade your capacity to do things yourself in order to become a puppet of the Holy Spirit—of that which is nothing more than your right Mind—but puppet nevertheless.

And what you’ve forgotten is, that when you’re doing your own thinking, you aren’t doing your own thinking. There isn’t one original thing that arises out of you doing your own thinking. Either you are listening to the Holy Spirit or one who is Awake or you’re listening to the ego—you’re listening to a collection of habits. You are the mouthpiece for patterns of thinking and patterns of behavior, which are never original. They are constant repetitions of that which is known. And on top of that, that which is known is false. It doesn’t reflect Reality. It doesn’t give you a capacity to engage in Being, in Real terms.

And so, what you have forgotten is that either way, you’re a puppet. Either way, you are going to be the puppet of the Holy Spirit or the Father, or you’re going to be the puppet of your memory and your survival techniques and ultimately of your ignorance of truth.

I’m sorry, when you think you went through your week this week and spent some time listening to Guidance and the rest of the time thinking for yourself, you’re wrong! Either you were listening for guidance from the Holy Spirit, or you were listening for guidance from the only other teacher there is and you were replicating ignorance all over the place … from memory. And you thought you were being original. And you thought you were doing things that were respectable, as opposed to listening for Guidance and becoming the puppet of something other than the orphan you think are.

So don’t feel too good about yourself in this sense, because the choice to do things on your own was an ignorant choice, because you weren’t doing anything on your own. You just were the puppet of another master—a puppet of a master that is incapable of recognizing what is Real and therefore is not your ally, and therefore is not something that you should feel that comfortable depending upon.

Now, what I’m attempting to illuminate here is, that which will allow you to put forth a little more faith and confidence in listening for guidance from the Holy Spirit. And I’m trying to do it by showing you that it’s a matter of shifting from one teacher to another teacher, from a teacher that draws from memory and ignorant perceptions of Reality only, to a teacher whose resource is God, a teacher whose resource is only capable of speaking truth and of illuminating Reality, the Kingdom of Heaven that you’re in, which your other teacher says is just the world and universe, matter, a result of a big bang, pure physical happenstance.

So, when you are not listening specifically for guidance from God, when you are not specifically asking to experience everything through my Vision, which is my gift to you from God, when you are not choosing to lean into the Holy Spirit, which is nothing more than your right Mind, you’re simply delaying an inevitable step that it might require a little bit of courage to take. A step that will shake you loose from the inertia caused by your addiction, whether it’s slight or great, to that which is meeting your need but at the same time keeping you from experiencing your needs fulfilled. You see the difference? You see the difference, yes!

When I say, and when the Course says, to acknowledge that you don’t know, and to really let that be truly the truth and okay with you, you are simply putting yourself in a position of being able to do something a little bit more intelligent than what you’ve been doing—thinking by yourself, solving things on your own, doing things yourself.

Put a note on your refrigerator this week: “I’m never doing anything all by myself. It’s impossible to do anything all by myself. I am going to stop fooling myself into thinking … thinking that I’m doing something all by myself. Either I am following an excellent teacher, or I’m following an ignorant teacher who is teaching ignorance and promoting the results of ignorance.”

Let those thoughts sit on your refrigerator where you can see them and remind yourself so that you don’t get too cocky and decide, “Oh, I know how to do this.”

Last week, Christopher says to Paul, “You know, when the meetings are so late, I find I’m tired. And when I’m tired, if there’s a problem, I can’t deal with it as well and I’m less patient. And I have to get up and go to work on Monday mornings, early. I really need the meetings to start earlier.”

Paul looked at him and agreed with him why… Paul understood. And so this week the meeting was scheduled for seven o’clock. And Chris couldn’t get here at seven o’clock. Why? Because the normalcy of life and helping a son get to his registration at college and get into his dorm rooms had to be taken care of, and other expressions of practical love that meets the need. These things had to be taken care of. Oh, but it didn’t fit into the plans. It didn’t fit into the intelligent ordering of the mind and the orderliness of doing things in a respectable way.

Creation—the Movement of Being—unfolds not from the voice for fear, the ego, the other teacher, the teacher other than the Holy Spirit, which is nothing more than your right Mind.

You know, the necessity is to acknowledge that you don’t know. And another necessity is to acknowledge that it will do you no good to establish a knowing! [said with great emphasis]

“We need to get these meetings started earlier. Yes, indeed, we’re going to start these meetings earlier.” Oh, they thought a knowing was being established, and an ordering of thoughts had occurred that would have to manifest, you see. No. You don’t know and you can’t establish knowing through the machinations of mental processes.

The only thing that works is yielding. Yielding to what? To the strings on the ends of the puppeteers fingers, to the strings on the end of God’s Hands. You have to be willing to yield to what you Are. You have to yield to your right Mind, instead of this imagined mind with the orphan mindset. It’s that simple.

We will go through the rest of this book, but nothing other than this will be said or learned. It will just be said in many different ways until finally someone gets it and says, “Okay! I’m going to get off the welfare roles. I’m going to step out into the void where I don’t have the security that I had with the welfare roles, even though that security constantly kept me in a state of fear, because it wasn’t ever really quite enough. But it was something … ” You see?

You’re going to have to arrive at a point where you say, “Okay, I’m a puppet of one of two puppeteers, which one do I want to be a puppet of? Which one am I going to commit to? Which one am I going to yield to?” And then do it. And you do it right in your business meeting. You do it right when you’re talking to the policeman who pulled you over cause you were going 45 in a 25 mile an hour zone.

Let’s go into the book. We’re in a Section called:

Well, you won’t learn anything, of course, until you start listening, because the only other thing you can do is to rehearse old tapes, go over your old hard drive, as it were. And there will be nothing new there to learn. You might find unique ways to put memories together to give you what you call “ah-ha” experiences. But they’re not real learning. It is not learning which uncovers what you have never seen before. That’s what learning is.

So there’s a test …

Well, what is it? Are there a lot of things to learn about? No. The only thing there is for you to learn is: How to see Reality: How to look at your brother and remember God: How to look at the tree and remember God: How to look at the worm and stand in awe of the divine splendor of its Being. There’s only one thing to learn and that is to see what’s Really going on.

Now, when you’ve learned that, will you have it under your belt? No. Because you will find that you’re going to be in an Eternal position of learning because the Movement of Creation is Eternal. And Being will be an Eternal “Ah-ha,” an Eternal declaration of wonder because that’s your function. That’s your purpose: To look with God as God is looking, and recognize God in all that is occurring.

And what I want you to understand is, that that experience can be had while you’re sitting behind the wheel of your car driving down the freeway. It’s not other-worldly. It awaits you right now.

Continuing …

Well, there’s not much wiggle room there, is there?

And of course, these dark lessons, like I mentioned last week, are simply, for lack of better words, beliefs that you have that don’t reflect the truth, that by your harboring them and implementing them, you keep yourself and your brothers unconscious of the truth—you keep the truth in the dark. Even if those beliefs have a very positive tone and you know, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Isn’t that wonderful?

So you say, “Okay, I can do that. I’ll be nice to him, so he’ll be nice to me. I’ll do things to him that I would like him to do to me, that would make me feel good and that will make him feel good, and then he’ll want to do things like that to me.” And you have what’s called a “mutual admiration society,” right?

Well, it won’t wake you up. That won’t cause you to look into your brother’s eyes and remember God. That won’t cause you to see divinity where just humanity seems to be. But it will seem to cause a lot of well-behaved humanity, right? Okay. Those are dark lessons that you would teach by teaching others this process, so that they can teach others that process and get a lot of mutual agreements and even national harmony. Well …

What does that mean? It means, you think you will for God’s Son what God’s Son wants to think—what you want to think. You’re willing for God’s Son—you—a capacity to think for yourself and do everything yourself as you go through your week. And in so doing, you’re saying that …

Closed God out of the loop. “It’s all me. I’m going to do it my way. I get to do it my way. And I can really accomplish doing something my way.” But remember the sign that you need to put on your refrigerator: “There is nothing I can do all by myself. It is impossible for me to do anything all by myself.” You can’t afford to forget these things. So put them up where you can see them.

In other words, every imaginative, privately created thought you have teaches that there is something more important to you than what God means by His every act of Creation.

You see? It’s very black and white. It’s like all or nothing. It’s like Reality or nothing.

The other teacher that teaches only from memory, and only rehearses memorized “canned” rehearsals of thoughts, is accomplishing nothing—is doing nothing. In spite of the apparent activity, nothing is actually happening.

So …

You wouldn’t. So don’t be concerned how you can learn a lesson so completely different from everything you have taught yourselves.

Oh, but you think you want it. And you think you’re going to hold on to it. And you’re going to do some things this next week on your own—by yourself—even though the sign that you hopefully put on your refrigerator says, “It is impossible for me to do anything all by myself.”

Well, at the least you could say, “In spite of everything I’ve learned, I want to learn more at a different level, in a different paradigm from the one I’m used to. And then …

… very important …

It’s very simple. Stop relying upon your experiences to confirm what you have learned when you have tried to be an independent agent. Stop using your past experience to color your present—to confirm things in the present—because the present is brand new and the past does not apply to it. And when you try to apply the past to something that is not a repetition of anything, you are going to end up with the only thing you can—misperception. So …

… don’t go into automatic. Don’t use what you learned to do at your mother’s knee or at the end of your father’s belt.

… do something new. Do something you’ve never done before.

Now, let’s be very careful here. Some will say that this is “New Age” nonsense, that it is encouraging you to become irresponsible. No. What it says is:

Now, if that was touted to be the solution to the problem, then that would be nonsense. But that’s not the end.

Okay, that’s still not an answer, but it crystallizes the fact.

Well, you think that means that it’s saying, “Well you can go out and do anything you want. You don’t have to follow the rules that you followed before. You will not use your own past learning as that which guides you now.” That isn’t what it says. All it says, “I won’t …

… but that still isn’t the culmination of this.

Anyone who genuinely does those three things will find himself in a void, in an apparently uncomfortable position of not knowing, but not experiencing resolution either. So, one is faced with need and no apparent resource with which to meet it. But none of you will stay in that position very long. Either you will opt for figuring it out yourself, or you will reach out beyond your present capacities and say, “Help! Father, help!” You may not even use a word. You’ll just say, “Help! Will the Powers That Be, help! If there is a Creator, will You please help!” You will reach out and you’ll break the isolation of orphanhood.

Now …

Who’s the Guide that God has given to speak to you? The Holy Spirit, that which is nothing more than your right Mind. In other words, God has provided the very integrity of your Being to guide you back into the conscious awareness of the integrity of your Being. Isn’t that neat? It’s so efficient! There are no loose ends. There’s nothing to get mixed up or confused in the process. So what you’re learning to let go into and rely into is nothing more than your right Mind. The Presence of God in you, as you, is your right Mind.

… the Guide Whom God has given you, Who will speak to you.

Abandon what? [Chuckling] His rightful place. You took over your right Mind’s rightful place. You sat yourself in that seat and took over. But the moment you turn it back to Him, He will take His rightful place.

You made miracles necessary by deciding to try to do things all by yourself, or to know things all by yourself.

The Holy Spirit.

… God, the Father …

… you …

Because God is not a dictator.

[addressing everyone individually] … you … you … you … you … you … you … you …

… you …

… yourself. Not the you, you would make up as your identity.

What you Are can’t change. Your guiltlessness cannot be turned into guilt by anything you imagine you can do. And therefore, you have never become guilty of anything that you must pay for. You have suffered from the belief that you could become guilty and have become guilty, but it is a false belief that governs you falsely.

… what?

You see. The only thing that keeps you on welfare is the belief that if you get off welfare you’re going to be more limited than the limitations that welfare imposes upon you.

Why? Because you don’t turn to the Holy Spirit. You say, “I can do it. I’ll take care of this myself. I’ll get back with the Holy Spirit after this meeting, or when I get home tonight, or when I say my prayers before I go to sleep.”

… the Holy Spirit …

What are the dark lessons again? They are the beliefs which don’t reflect truth that you’re holding onto … like, “I can do this myself.” You see?

As long as you think that you are at least as dependable as the Holy Spirit, if not more dependable than the Holy Spirit, you will not yield to the Holy Spirit. You will not yield to your right Mind. It’s like saying, if you have faith in your own capacity, you won’t reach outside of it.

I’m here to help you be willing to reach outside your capacity. I’m here to try to illustrate to you that what you call your capacity isn’t the capacity of yours at all, it’s simply a rehearsal of memory, a rehash of that which is unoriginal and doesn’t constitute being conscious and doesn’t constitute Life. In other words, there’s more available to you than what you’re experiencing.

Dare to devalue what you’re familiar with, at least enough so that you can begin to have as much curiosity as a baby has—gleeful curiosity to see what, and understand what you never understood before.

Again …

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

In other words, continuing to act on your own or attempt to.

Again, no wiggle room! Black and white.

… so, by …

And yet, that’s the whole reason you’ve persevered until we’ve gotten to page 344, because you want to be able to depend on miracles to answer all your problems for you. Well, if you do, then dare to do the work, so to speak. Dare to do the two-step all day long, every day. And if you’re going to rely upon yourself and try to do it yourself, at least while you’re doing it, be sane enough to say, “You know, I realize I’m doing this, but Raj says that as long as I’m doing this I’m not really doing anything, that this really isn’t Life and that I deserve the miracle—a sudden shift of perception—that uncovers Reality to me. At least be willing to acknowledge while you’re acting all by yourself, that you are engaging in a bit of foolishness.

Now, you may feel that I’m being pushy. Hey, don’t fool yourselves, you’re not going to be pushed into anything. You’re not going to allow yourself to be pushed into anything. So give me the right to speak clearly and unequivocally so that there’s no confusion, and you go ahead and do it exactly when you’re going to choose to do it anyway. I promise you in doing it, the payoff will be so great and so wonderful that you won’t be sorry.

And in the meantime, I will continue to support you from behind and also from in front of you to say, “Come forward, it’s safe.”

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