Teachings of Christ Mind

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

We’re really in the middle of a subject that is wonderful: “Waking up, a return to sanity.” And I know everyone at this particular juncture in time, with the world situation as it is, would love for me to say things to inspire you—to speak positively, to put things in words that are assuring and allow you to believe that everything will be alright—to raise your spirits.

But even though everything is going to be alright, even though as I shared last week everyone is faced with transformation, not chaos, not great problems, just believing that is not enough.

Instead of saying things that are inspiring, I need to talk to you about the things that take your inspiration away. Because if you don’t recognize the things that will take away your inspiration, you will be subject to them and you will lack inspiration.

I could speak for an hour and have you floating in heaven, so to speak, in your mind. But if you don’t recognize what takes away your inspiration, it will be gone. The high I might leave you with will disappear quickly.

Now, there aren’t really a whole lot of things that take your inspiration away. So it isn’t complicated.

Arrogance is what takes your inspiration away and it’s the only thing that will take your inspiration away. Arrogance is the giving of directions or orders without having authority to do so.

The opposite, the presence of which secures your inspiration, is humility. And humility is when you are willing to take orders from One who has authority.

When you’re attempting to exercise authority that you don’t have, you set up a situation in which there is immediate negative feedback—discouragement, anger, frustration.

You have no authority all by yourself and you never have. If you get enough people to agree with you and to support you in whatever authority you might express, you might for awhile seem to be successful—inspired, you might say, confident. But that exists only because of a group of you who have a mutual agreement with each other, and it isn’t a stability that arises out of the way things work, fundamentally aside from mutual agreements.

Now we ended last week with the sentence:

The reason being, that the host of God—meaning that one who is the place where God is expressing Himself—that one is whole and does not need to look for anything, does not need to gain anything, and therefore, doesn’t have to have a capacity to exercise authority, you see. Wholeness and authority simply don’t co-exist.

Humility can be had by choice or through [chuckle] difficult learning called “humiliation.”

When any of you have gone to the uttermost length that you can possibly go in order to exercise authority and be in charge and create a situation in which there will be peace, because everybody is not disagreeing with each other, you are experiencing a false peace. And sooner or later it will collapse. When it collapses, you are going to feel complete failure. Because after all, you, by your so-called exercise of authority, were the one holding it together and your holding it together gave you credibility—respectability—and ability for you to see yourself and think well of yourself and be at peace with yourself.

So when that crumbles, it’s very humiliating because you are faced with the fact that you couldn’t hold it together and therefore, you hadn’t been able to make that security become a universal absolute which could never change.

Now, where we are in the Course and what we’re talking about, involves your arriving at a point where you willingly abandon authority, where you willingly consider the possibility that you’re not in charge of anything, where you consider the possibility that in order for you to actually be sane, you must be unequivocally willing to cooperate with “the way things work.” In other words, you must allow yourself to be the puppet of the way things work—to be that which doesn’t stand out in any way by virtue of any exertion of personal, private force, who chooses not to attempt to stand out from everything and everyone else by virtue of being assertive.

To the ego this is very humiliating. To the divine one that you Are, it amounts to your setting the ground work for coming back into your right Mind where you find the way you fit in with God, where you find the way you fit in with the way things work and by virtue of the experience of fitting in, coming into the full conscious awareness of and experience of your universality, your all inclusiveness. The fact that since God has withheld nothing of what He is from you, you embrace and are constituted of all that God is—that you are universal being with none of what has been created being unavailable to you: Full open consciousness inclusive of all, infinitely speaking.

Now, continuing …

Um-m … you probably say, “Well, if I’m wholly willing to leave salvation to the plan of God… nice words, but … uh …[chuckle] c’mon, what in the heck is the plan of God? Why don’t you, instead of talking about the plan of God and telling me that if I’m willing to leave salvation to the plan of God, it will be given me, why don’t you tell me what it is?”

Well, of course you don’t know the plan of salvation that God has because you won’t have it until you ask God what it is. You won’t have it until you abandon your arrogance and your attempts to express authority that you don’t have, and become still. Do the “two-step” as we’ve said, to step back and say, “What is the truth here, Father?” You see, join with the Father instead of being independently authoritative.

God’s plan for salvation has been expressed in the words, “Looking into your brother’s eyes and remembering God.” I’ve expressed it also as looking at anything in your world and being curious to know what the more of reality is there than what you’re experiencing. In other words, wanting to experience God there.

But you see, you won’t have that experience until you stop and abandon the definitions you’ve given to everything, and have a completely innocent and pure and uncluttered desire to know the truth.

You’ve got to bring your innocence into the process. And when I’m speaking of innocence right now, I’m speaking of your capacity to bring a willingness to know, that isn’t cluttered up with previous concepts, that isn’t stuffed with preconceptions and preferences of yours.

Now, you’re supposed to be Awake. You’re supposed to be experiencing your sanity, the full open consciousness as Mind undifferentiated from God. That’s your Birthright. That is what you’re supposed to be experiencing. So it’s inevitable that you will be experiencing that when you do this one terrible ugly thing called: Abandoning personal authority that you think you have. When you’re willing to be humble without having to go through a process of humiliation that brings you to your knees, where you are willing to say, “God, I don’t have the answer. I need the answer. I’m going to stop trying to create it for myself and I’m going to ask God for help.”

You don’t have to go through that process of humiliation. But I do want to say something: If you do go through it, don’t resist it and don’t get haughty about it—embrace it. To be forced by what you would call circumstances, to abandon the idea that you ought to be able to control life, is pure wisdom registering with you—the wisdom of your being, the wisdom that allows you to come into an experience of peace and harmony that’s not threatened by things you’re afraid of, things that you have determined to be enemies, things that you have determined you must be in charge of because if you’re not, they will “get you!”

Humility, whether it’s been arrived at voluntarily or through processes of humiliation, is your Birthright. It’s what is utterly natural to you. It’s the state of your being when you’ve abandoned arrogance, when you’ve abandoned willfulness, when you’ve abandoned authority that you don’t really have, and you’ve been willing to embrace the possibility that in the absence of that, you are valid, you are valuable, you are the holy Son of God Himself.

Why am I bringing this up? Because all of you go through your day with an attempt to have an agenda for it that you bring to bear upon it on terms that you have determined to be principled or right, or justified, or whatever. And you, at no point, have really allowed yourself to blend with the movements, the currents of Creation that are appearing as the day you are going through, where you’re never finding out how you might fit in to an order that you forgot to provide in your agenda, and that if you will yield into that order and abandon your agenda, you will have an experience of harmony, originality, not originality you created but originality that goes far beyond anything you would have thought up—joy, delight—all in the context of peace that you find includes you being blessed, your brother being blessed, the other people on the freeway being blessed in ways that are obvious, but in ways that you couldn’t possibly have caused all by yourself by virtue of your plan.

Now, humility, although most of you think of it positively, humility is not really attractive. People who are humble you might identify as “yes-men,” “toadies,” people without integrity because they can be pushed all over the place … they cooperate … and they cooperate … and they cooperate. And so, to find yourself in a position of either willingly or unwillingly being faced with becoming humble, you find that whatever inspiration you might have been experiencing fades because there’s nothing inspiring to a “go-get-it-ego” about abandoning the “get-go.” And you must understand this so that your inspiration doesn’t disappear, doesn’t fade when you dare to consciously choose to be humble.

This is important. And it’s important in this particular time all of you are living in because the situation seems to call for assertiveness—taking hold of the situation. Well I’ll tell you something: If everyone takes hold of the situation the way it’s been held in the past, there will be no transformation and there will be further disintegration, if I can put it that way, there will be further stress and distress. Because what is called for here is Vision that goes beyond the way things have been done in the past, that go beyond the mutually agreed upon definitions of what is right and so on and so forth.

And one of the fundamental reasons that things aren’t working is because the basic premise that has been used is, “I will act in a way that benefits me and that’s what life is about.” And you teach others to take that stance relative to themselves. And so then you end up with everyone serving themselves and only fitting in to whatever degree that act of fitting in supports they’re getting what they want.

There is no love in it. There is no fundamental premise of fitting together and of everyone being blessed. And that’s the Vision that’s called for now. It’s the Vision that’s been called for ever since there have been wise men, who themselves have done the two-step and have asked “What is the truth here?”

If you’re discouraged, it’s because you’re looking at the situation and you’re recognizing that you don’t have the answer. And in addition to that, you’re thinking, “This problem is too complex—too great for me to handle, therefore I can’t possibly have the answer.” You see, [chuckle] that’s only half of the two-step, that’s you stepping back saying, “I don’t know the answer.” The second half of the two step is saying, “Father, what is the answer?” It’s letting God’s plan of salvation be revealed to you because you’ve had the gumption to ask, “Father, what is your plan of salvation?”… and then abandoning all assertiveness on your part so that you are the most wonderful blank blackboard for God to write upon His truth that’s your truth, that will be the answer and will involve the Vision that is required that will constitute real transformation that blesses everyone and ultimately amounts to looking into your brother’s eyes and remembering God.

You see, the only reason you don’t have the answer is, that you haven’t been willing to abandon an inner urgency within you that says, “You can come up with the answer and you must come up with the answer because that’s what God created you for.” That’s your modus operandi but it’s something that can’t bear fruit.

When you realize that, it’s going to be discouraging, it’s going to take away whatever inspiration you gleaned from a wonderful talk somebody gave. Unless you realize that, your willingness to become silent and not assert authority is the only way you can find yourself fitting in, blending in, being that which is fluid enough to cooperate with the way things work—with the way Creation works, with the way the Kingdom of Heaven moves—which at the bottom line, constitutes you coming back into your right Mind, into your sanity again.

So you see, I’ve said many things over the years that are inspiring. And if you want to go back and read them and refresh yourselves, you’re welcome to. But the real key thing right now is that you need to be able to look at the things that take away your inspiration and look at them closely enough to see that the reason the inspiration is fading is because you are upset, because you really are realizing that you’re not in control and you don’t really have the authority to correct the situation all by yourself. And because of your ego structures, that is not a happy state of affairs.

However, I’m pointing out to you that it is an inevitable state of affairs in the process of Waking up. It is inevitable that you will arrive at this realization that you don’t have the authority, together with an inspiration to do something totally crazy—to abandon your attempt to be authoritative and to become utterly still so that you become a void, a void that is an invitation to be filled, in which no little bits of assertiveness are present anywhere—a void that is an invitation to be filled that becomes pregnant with the conscious experience of truth.

You see, again, it’s simple. If you want to experience or know what God’s plan for your salvation is, you’ve got to stop trying to figure out what it is. And you’ve got to shut up. And you’ve got to be willing to turn to the Father and say, “Father, what is your plan for salvation? What is it I need to know?” And then don’t do it as a test, because to whatever degree you say, “Well, I’m going to give God 30 days. I think I can manage to not control things for 30 days without everything going totally to ruin. And so, I will be very willing for 30 days. I will be very unassertive for 30 days.” But you see, this little plan that you’ve got behind your back is part of what’s supposed to be the void, the emptiness that’s the invitation and it’s not empty is it.

I know, people say they’d give their right arm to experience salvation. Maybe you would. But what you need to be willing to give for your salvation is the last vestiges of any attempt or any intent on your part to be a self-existent, self-created authority. So that you might be the presence of pure awareness in which God’s thoughts and God’s meanings and truth itself can be illuminated and show you your right Mind and your Birthright.

Now, I am saying things that could be considered inspiring. But what I really want you to bring your attention to and what it’s really important to bring your attention to are the times and the places in your day where inspiration goes out the window and you find yourself tense, uncomfortable, experiencing an undercurrent of one sort or another—where there’s lack of inspiration. And notice it! Because these are the places where you’re still holding out for the exercise of control as though you had authority, and they are standing in the way of your experiencing your right Mind. And you need to recognize them so that you say, “By damn it, I’m not going to let these things take my inspiration away. I’m going to stop asserting this personal, private authority. I’m going to stop trying to control things myself and I’m going to join with the Father.” It’s that simple.

And so, instead of letting the absence of inspiration get worse and worse until you’re experiencing utter humiliation, notice it in it’s earlier stages that aren’t quite so rugged, so that you might say about this or that or the other thing that seems to be taking away your inspiration, “Father, what is the truth here? Father, I don’t want to explore my personal potential for coming up with answers any further. I wish to abandon my independence and join with You. I would like to put my arm around You and I would like You to put Your arm around me, so that we might move forward together in harmony and cooperation. And I will let You fill my mind with the only thing that could possibly be in my Mind, because I am the host to God. I am the host to You. And I’m going to let myself be the host to You instead of trying to be something separate and independent all by myself.”

Coming back to the book:

Now …

… because it’s already yours. You never did stop being what you ultimately will be or what you were to begin with before you decided to take this little vacation into orphanland. So, when it said it would be given you, it means it will be returned to you, it will be illuminated as having constituted your presence forever and ever, even though for awhile you chose to close your eyes and forcibly ignore it.

Continuing …

You see. [Chuckling] Don’t keep an ace up your sleeve. Don’t give yourself a backup plan. Don’t give yourself a safety, an out from this experiment in [chuckling] being a puppet, in being that which fits in.

… by virtue of their choice to be independent …

… meaning God. You see, there’s a clue about God’s plan for salvation.

… God’s plan …

… all those who are still choosing to dream dreams, proclaiming together, you and I together, that the Son of God, every Son of God is host to God.

You’re here to teach your brother the truth. You’re here to be willing to ignore his presentation of himself, to ignore the concepts he governs himself by that cause him to be bound to an untrue perception of himself, and instead, be willing to bring to him the clarity of what is true about him in such a way that makes such sense that he will say, “Wow, I’ve been a fool to hold on to this misperception. Thank you … thank you for having the patience and taking the time and bringing with you the clarity of just exactly the perfect words that allowed me to see the nonsense I was holding myself to. I’m going to let it go.”

You see, there’s that clue about the Father’s plan for your salvation.

Continuing …

Interesting way to put it, isn’t it? We will …

When you say, “Father, what’s the truth here?” And the Father reveals the truth, it is revealed to you so that you can share it. The clarity you find yourself having, you have for the purpose of sharing with another.

And as a result what you give you get to keep. You secure it for yourself because you didn’t indulge in further privacy. You listened. You joined with the Father. You wanted to know the truth and you were willing to abandon any authority you thought you had in the process and you shared it.

What you give becomes yours.

… in your brother.

Don’t join with him in his puny, small minded assessment of himself. Don’t belittle him for it. But provide a Vision that allows him to see beyond it and recognize that it’s not something he needs to be bound by any longer, that he can choose to abandon it. That’s it.

If someone is behaving as though he is your enemy, don’t assign the label “enemy” to him. Recognize that he’s a brother misunderstanding himself and misunderstanding you. And then don’t act as an enemy to him, act as a brother. And your insistence upon behaving as a brother who loves his brother, or a brother who loves his sister, you will provide by your actions, your behavior and your words, the assurance that your brother or sister needs to know that he doesn’t or she doesn’t have to distrust you and can be willing to abandon it and feel safe.

… meaning only the remembrance of what is divinely true about him.

And that’s a fact.

If you think your brother’s a bastard … if you think he’s lived his life in a way that is unprincipled and harmful and unkind and hateful and so-on-and-so-forth, and that he behaves this way because of life circumstances that he went through, that will be where you think you are. You will see yourself as like him, but having had better circumstances or been more fortunate than him. But still you were vulnerable as he was, but you by your own hand and your own intelligence managed to live your life a little bit better and so you’re a little bit more respectable and you like yourself a little bit more and your demeaning attitude towards your brother is justified, even though you are as vulnerable to what he has experienced, as he was.

See, if you would help your brother be in a state of being a bastard, who is judgable and who is appropriate to demean …

You’ll think you’re there too, but just a little bit more fortunate for the time being.

So be aware of this. And don’t help your brother be where you don’t want to be. Don’t help your brother by demonstrating that he truly is vulnerable to life circumstances, and he truly is vulnerable to insane thinking, because you’ll be teaching the same thing to yourself about yourself.

That’s why you want to know the truth. That’s why you want to abandon your own independent authoritative mental activities, because you want to stop before you think small-minded thoughts and say, “Father, what’s the truth here?” … so that the truth might fill you, so that you might share that with your brother and thus help your brother be where you will think you are. See, you reinforce the truth for both of you that way.

Don’t let his behavior define him on his small-minded terms to you.

You know something? Whenever you or your brother says, “Ouch,” whenever you or your brother say or express, “I’m in pain,” you’re not declaring your mortality, you’re not declaring your undivine humaneness, you are expressing a very deep awareness that is absolutely unjust for you to be in pain. Your “ouch” or whatever form of voicing your distress or expressing your distress, is a call for Heaven, is a call for truth.

So …

… your brother’s call …

… in what seems to be his call for hell and littleness …

You see? Don’t answer him all by yourself. Don’t resort to your knee-jerk mental reactions. Respond to …

… that looks like a call for hell and littleness and answer it with me—join with me. Do the “two-step” and ask me or ask the Father so that you can respond with Us and not in some mutual agreement with your brother and his current point of view. Join with One who has the Vision of truth and then respond to your brother.

Again …

… which you and your brothers and sisters are.

… God’s power …

… God …

God dwells in the peace that is the fundamental context of your being. And God’s power protects it.

… God’s holy altar …

… the altar which is in you, which is the abiding place of God’s love …

This is what you want the experience of. And this is what you do not want to lose the inspiration to experience, just because you’re faced with an inevitable demand to abandon the very things that made you feel good about yourself, which were all ego dynamics and didn’t reflect the truth about you and kept you out of your right Mind and not experiencing your sanity.

Don’t let the call for humility be interpreted as justification for losing your inspiration.

I look forward to being with you all next week.