Teachings of Christ Mind

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

Well, we’re talking about the holy instant and special relationships. We’ve especially been discussing the fact that the holy instant is when you say “Yes” to God. It’s not really so much you’re saying yes to God, it’s really more a matter of your not saying “No” to God. More than affirmatively saying “Yes,” it’s a matter of gently, calmly and quietly being still with an inquisitive attitude because you want to know something. The inquisitiveness is the act of “Yes-ness.” The openness and the desire to learn is what says “Yes.”

I must reiterate, that because you’re so used to thinking, and it’s been your habit to always be able to come up with better ideas, you automatically think that the answer to a problem is a better idea, or is a better thought than what you’ve thought before. But when you’re thinking a thought, when you’re asserting an idea in your mind, there’s no attentiveness, it’s an exertion, an outward moving act. It isn’t an emptiness in which something can fill. And this is why it seems to be difficult to Wake up or to find the path Home, because it’s the opposite of what you’ve been conditioned to believe you need, or need to do. It’s really not a need to do anything, it’s a need to be something. And mostly it’s a need to be still.

When you, let’s say… (it’s a poor use of words) when you initiate a holy instant, you do it by empting yourself because you want to know more than you presently know, you want to know other than you presently know. And at the bottom line, what motivates any of you to engage in this act is a need. You don’t usually do it when everything is going smoothly or to your liking.

And so, when you choose to become still and listen because there is a need and you hear and the need is answered, you learn something of the nature of Life, the nature of Being. You actually learn that all of the doing that you had been engaged in was not connecting you with the nature of Being and the way things work, and you were not making any progress.

Now, if listening and hearing an answer to a problem constitutes the meeting of a need, it constitutes the correcting of a problem. And what have we been learning about ever since we started reading this book? We’ve been reading about the need for correction … the call for correction and, I’m going to say, correction accomplished. None of you are supposed to be satisfied with limitation, satisfied with pain or discomfort, satisfied with lack. Any of those things are a call for correction. All of those things are a call for a holy instant.

Now the reason it is practical to become still is because in the silence God speaks—in the silence you can feel the Movement of God in you. And that’s why there is insight. That’s why there is revelation. That’s why there is the presence of Love that illuminates your perfection in the most practical ways.

All of you, at one time or another, have had an experience of the sort that I’m talking about.

Now when you’re faced with a problem today, when you listen to the news or you have a physical situation that is bothersome and is dragging you down, here is a call for correction. And here is a call for you to be willing to become still rather than to have a better idea—something that you can put your will behind in order to heal this situation, handle the devil, get rid of the evil.

It’s very simple. There is a God. God is omnipresent, omnipotence, which means that God is Presencing Himself, God is being all that there Is omnipotently—which means without contradiction.

What you must understand is that this omnipotent Self-expression is always in action and is always being everything there Is of you. You could call it your safety net, as long as you think you’re some little, tiny, separate entity.

As a separate entity, you’re frightened, you’re doubtful, you’re egotistical and on and on and on. And it’s very difficult for you to relax and trust, to relax and actually be still, because you think that if you aren’t exercising your will by virtue of your ideas that you will be vulnerable—increasingly vulnerable.

This is when you have to recognize that the problems you’re experiencing—those things which are frightening—are calls for correction. They are calls for the holy instant, which means they are calls for you to withdraw your attention from aggravating the negativity and abandoning the mental activity that generates it so that you become still. But it’s difficult to do this when you’re afraid. And that is why you must remember that there is a God—there is an underlying omnipotent Presence that constitutes your invulnerability, or what you might call by reflection, your omnipotence—not your power over anything but your incapacity to be overpowered by anything.

Many of you, in spite of your study of the Course, do not watch the use to which you put your mind. I’m very aware that circumstances presently, whether it’s national, whether it’s economic, whether it’s international, whether it’s physical, whether it’s health issues, there are things which are alarming and you feel a perfect right to be reactive to—to be frightened by. And you just let yourself be swept along by a wave of emotion and you don’t realize that there’s a necessity for you to be diligent, to be alert, to recognize when you are willy-nilly letting your mind be used poorly.

Now it’s very simple. Whatever the apparent circumstances are in your life, it’s very easy for you to have difficulty hoping. Hope is not present. Faith is difficult to come by. Well, you know what? It’s not as important to have hope and it’s not as important to have faith, as it is not to have faithlessness and not to have hopelessness. And that you can do something about!

You may not be able to drum up and generate hope and faith, but you can monitor your minds. And when you’re inclined to say, “Nothing is working out … nothing that I do helps … things are getting worse and worse and worse and I feel like giving up—not only do I feel like giving up, [chuckle] I really feel like cursing God! And I really feel like cursing the people that are running our country … and I really feel like abandoning this person or that person …”

And your self-righteousness gets in there and begins to have a field day and it generates more and more turmoil and emotion. And it feels good, like you’re doing something.

But all the time that you’re doing that you are absolutely inhibiting the holy instant, you are not providing the environment in which you can even be conscious of God—except perhaps to hate Him under the circumstances. And so you are getting satisfaction out of being pissed off at everyone and everything, but you’re not attending to the one thing that would make a difference. That is, shutting up!

You can stop practicing doubt. You can abandon indulging in fear. You can abandon hopelessness. How? Well one thing you can do is simply hum a song, say a poem, count to ten—anything that you give your attention to will constitute doing something other than practicing fear and doubt and energizing it. 
You know, you can have a pretty good day and you can sit down in the evening, in the TV room, and watch a movie. And as you watch it, you realize you’ve made a mistake when you chose that movie, “What a bummer this movie is.” But you keep hoping that it will get better. You watch it right through to the end. And when you get to the end, you don’t want to go to bed feeling like you’re feeling—your whole mental attitude has been adjusted, you might say, against your will, it’s been adjusted in a direction that isn’t comfortable. And you say, “Well, I’m gonna have to watch another movie before I go to bed that lifts me up again.” And so you look for a comedy … right?

Well, you all know that happens. And you all know that you can adjust and shift the overriding attitude in your mind by changing the externals. You can do the same thing just by the use you put your mind to. And you can talk yourself into the pits of hell.

Now, circumstances might say to you that you can’t talk yourself into Heaven, even though you can quite ably talk yourself into the pits of hell. Okay, so you can’t talk yourself into Heaven, but you can stop talking yourself into the pits of hell. So do what you can do! Stop practicing faithlessness, even if you can’t have faith.

Now you really need to grasp the idea that Waking up isn’t a matter of having better ideas. It isn’t a more skillful use of your mind than the use you’ve been putting it to, unless it’s that you use your mind to simply pay attention, to simply be present with everything, with inquisitiveness—a desire to see more of what God is Being right there in front of you, than what you’ve seen before.

And in that absence of thinking, you know what it all means. And your desire to know what it really means, as God is being It, you provide the environment of the holy instant.

Now, you have all got to stop arguing for limitations. You’ve got to stop arguing for the worst. Because, you know what? You can make yourself absolutely miserable. But you can’t get rid of God!

And so what’s true and what’s Real will continue to be true and Real, and it will stare you in the face with all the Love that God is Being in all of what is Real. And it will Love you unequivocally and unconditionally, and bless you with Its Love. And you will miss it until you decide to be curious, inquisitive and empty enough for something to infill you.

Now I’ve been saying this for a long time and especially over the last few weeks. But as you look back over this past week, I want each of you—and I’m not excluding any of you—I want each of you to look at your week and see whether … or how many times you have absolutely denied yourself the experience of the holy instant because you were so insistent upon declaring your doubt, upon declaring your self-righteous indignation at the injustice of this or that or the other thing.

Or maybe it would be easier for you to see how many times you actually did shut up and become still, with the desire to know the truth. Not to come up with a truth for yourself to think, but to desire to know what the truth really is, by becoming still enough for the Father to infill you or for the Holy Spirit to reveal to you the experience of truth—which, as I’ve said before, is far more than an idea or a thought—so that the experience of it caused you to relax and feel whole and feel well, not by virtue of anything you’ve done, but by virtue of the truth about you … what the truth is. 
Everybody would like to have healing. But very few of you are willing to watch the use to which you’re putting your mind, to see to it that you’re providing the environment in which the healing can occur, in which the correction can occur, in which the transformation can actually occur.

You’re not helpless victims. And you’re not here to look at circumstances and say, “Well, ultimately they’re not really Real and therefore, they’re not really affecting me. And one day I’ll see the truth of that and I’ll laugh about my misperception.” Well, to hell with one day … how about now? How about seeing the truth now and not having to laugh about how you saw things before the truth dawned on you? How about not delaying the holy instant?

Let’s go into the book.

… you might say, [chuckling] His workshop without—beyond the realm of judgment.

… the Self of God …

Oh, wait a minute, what is this Self of God? We just read last week:

… all of you, all of us …

You could say, that God being the Christ, is the Christ being Man. And although it appears to be stated in steps, it’s one action, it’s one event … infinite, though it is.

So when it says …

… it means, do you think that you can judge your Self? Do you think you can judge your brother’s Self? Your brother’s Self is the Christ and the Self of the Christ is God.

Oh, but how much of your time this last week was spent judging the Self of God that was a brother or a sister? Or how much of the time was spent judging the Self of God that’s you? “Oh, I just don’t get it! I’m never gonna get this! I’m gonna die before I Wake up. And it will probably be ten thousand more lifetimes before I Wake up.”

How do you judge anything? You judge it by thinking about it … right? You have a thought … a judgmental thought, sometimes very creative cutting thoughts, that give you great satisfaction because they cut so well … right? The only thing is that you’re the victim of the cut. Not because the cut could hurt you, but because the use you’re putting your mind to. You are using your mind to deprive yourself of the environment in which the holy instant can occur—in which a miracle can occur.

So you are engaging in an activity that’s actually depriving you of your heart’s desire. Because none of you would be listening to me or reading this book if you didn’t want to Wake up, if there wasn’t more of Reality that you wanted to experience and that you believe is there to experience, than what you’re presently experiencing.

So learn to be alert so that you don’t inadvertently, with great ego satisfaction, deprive yourself of your greatest love.

… unless you need to be angry [laughing] or unless you need to be really self-righteous. But if you don’t have a need to be angry or self-righteous, then …

I’m going to tell you that it’s a heck of a lot easier to extend love than it is to practice jealousy or hate or fear or self-righteousness.

And you know what? That need isn’t even felt as a need. You ordinarily think of a need as a lack—a perceived lack. You say: “I don’t have this, so therefore, I need this. I need this something that I don’t have.” But in the holy instant, you have only one need and it is experienced as a “having.” It’s experienced as the having of the capacity to look at your brother and see God. It’s the capacity to be present in a situation without judgment and therefore be an agent for change of harmony—of harmonious change. It’s the experience of having, that in no way conveys lack at all. You see?

So …

Of course it does, because the holy instant was an instant in which you turned your attention toward God and said, “Father, what is the truth here?” and then said “Yes” to His answering you and “Yes” to your receiving the answer.

So of course…

And again, I’m going to reiterate that the understanding isn’t the understanding of thoughts or ideas. When you taste chocolate, I’m going to say you understand what chocolate tastes like. But you would be hard-put to explain it to anyone else. So it’s not a matter of ideas. But you know … you just know … what chocolate tastes like.

Now …

That’s because relationships aren’t there to be used. And it’s an activity that doesn’t fit with Reality. And when you engage in that which doesn’t fit with Reality, you experience dissonance, you experience your sanity saying, “You can’t do this and be comfortable.” You can’t go against your nature, period. And if you try to, if you imagine that you are, the experience is going to be accompanied with imaginary pain. But it will be equal to the degree of imagination you’ve brought into play, in order to go at odds with Reality. And so it will feel as uncomfortable, imaginatively speaking, as the force which you’re bringing to bear upon Life—to be at odds with it.

So …

And remember that relationships aren’t just between human beings. There are relationships between you and the floor, you and the water that buoys you up when you are swimming, and so on.

Mind you, to use a relationship or to condemn a part of a relationship means that you’re doing something other than abiding in the silence with an inquisitiveness to experience the truth of whatever the circumstances are that you’re in the middle of. It means that you have abandoned attentive inquisitiveness and a quietly receptive attitude. It’s that simple and it’s that absolute. You do that, you will not experience the holy instant. Stop doing that with a curious, inquisitive, quiet, attentive mind and you will.

And I want to take this opportunity to cast doubt, if you will, on the impractical idea that when everyone Wakes up there will be no distinguishable individualities, no distinguishable identities. That it will all become the Oneness of God.

… plural …

… if you have total commitment to all relationships—relationships, plural—are not going to blur and blend into each other and become one indistinguishable for another. If that happens, it means commitment has been lost. But it says here:

This is very important. It’s important because it means that you, individually, are eternal and you will not become someone else, or you will not dissolve into an amorphous blob. You will have total commitment to every other expression of God as every other expression of God will have total commitment to you. And that absolute harmony, that absolute committedness or connectedness will not allow in any way for dissonance or conflict of any kind. Why? Because you will have invited and nurtured the holy instant, in which, in the silence in the middle of you, you find your connection with All That Is, and find it not different from you in nature and character, but different in the sense of the infinite capacity of God to infinitely express Himself.

… in each relationship …

Well, that brings us back to: What use did you put your mind to this past week? Did you have perfect faith in yourself or did you doubt yourself? And did you berate yourself and did you kick yourself around the block? And did you, without even turning on a bad movie, depress yourself with your own negative filmstrip in your mind, and your satisfaction in being pissed-off at this, that or the other thing?

You know what? As I said, you might not be able to have perfect faith in yourself, but you can stop practicing faithlessness relative to yourself. You can stop saying, “Nothing’s going to work out. The economy is such that at this moment there’s really no way that I can get out of the hole.”

Remember the story I told you about the two shoe salesmen that went to Africa? One of them made no sales and they asked him why. He says, “Because no one wears shoes here.” The other one made humongous sales and they said, “What accounts for your success?” He says, “Nobody wears shoes here.”

If you will shut up … if you will become still … if you will say a favorite poem to yourself over and over, when you’ve found yourself being very busy condemning yourself or criticizing others and justifying your negative feelings about your bad situation, you will find that you will come to a place of equilibrium. And when you’re in that place of equilibrium, then in the absence of severe depression that you’ve managed to get yourself out of by a better use of your mind, you can then say, “Father,” . . you can turn to the Father, you can take the first part of the two-step and turn to the Father and say, “Father, what is the truth here? I want to know the truth.” And then the second part: Listen … and maintain the silence … maintain the space that you haven’t filled up yourself, for the Father to fill.

If you will go within like that, you will find the encouragement you need. You will find the Father in you. You will find the Holy Spirit in you. You will find your Guide. You will find me there to encourage you.

And yeah, occasionally you will get very incensed at me, and say, “Yeah, right! Well, what about this? And what about that? And what about that time?” And you will begin thinking again. And you’ll begin doing that which causes your mind not to be quiet any longer, and takes you out of the position where you can hear because you’re enjoying listening to yourself so much.

And I will wait until you turn your attention back. And I will reassure you again. The Holy Spirit will reassure you again. The Father will reassure you again. Why? Because no matter how much you grouse, you can’t get rid of God, you can’t change Reality.

And so, your wholeness and your well-being and your transformation stands unchanged in front of you, awaiting your acceptance of it. It’s absolutely certain, because it’s been yours since the beginning.

… each relationship …

Or I’m going to say, the perfect practice and the absence of the practice of faithlessness.

You can’t get into the quiet as long as guilt remains. Well, there you go. That means that guilt is something you’re always introducing. It isn’t actual. And the moment you stop introducing it, the moment it no longer remains because you’ve let that little bit of business in your mind go as well so that now your mind is quiet, the moment is gone. Being satisfied completely by your relationships can happen.

Let me read that again:

Oh, you would love for your brother to be responsible for your bad luck. You would love for the CEO’s of the big company to be responsible for your inability to experience wholeness. You would love somebody to be the scapegoat. You would love to turn them into the justification for your lack and for the call for you to practice self-righteousness.

The word, “CHERISH,” … there is the key:

You know what? Your wholeness has to do with one thing and one thing only, and that’s your direct relationship with your Father—He, Whom your Birthright comes from.

And as soon as you abandon trying to make your brother what he cannot be, the culprit, the bastard that took your good from you, and you realize that there’s nothing that can actually break your relationship with your Source, then it becomes easy for you to turn to the Father and say, “Father, what’s the truth about me? I wish to experience my wholeness that isn’t dependent upon or affected by what anyone else does or doesn’t do. I would like my wholeness to be manifest for me, because You haven’t withheld it from me. And You know my brothers and sisters need to see an example of that so that they might be inspired as well to turn to You and abandon their self-righteous indignation and make room for the holy instant.”

Continuing …

Well, it’s easy for you to be …

Because nobody has really ever taught you that it was. And when everyone teaches you that such a thing isn’t there, and because it isn’t there you must become a conniving, smart, ego and human being, then you could say there is justification for your current behavior. But now you know the truth and you don’t have to continue the behavior. You don’t have to continue having so little faith in yourself. But in order to find that the love is in you, you do have to stop practicing faithlessness. And you do have to, in the space that’s left after you’ve abandoned faithlessness, ask God, because you want to know the truth and be willing to let the truth in.

… out there …

… out there.

… it’s really that simple.

[addresses each one present]… in you … in you … in you … in you … in you … in you … in you … in you. I have no doubt whatsoever.

And I’m going to add: That would turn it into an unholy relationship—a special relationship. And I will not do that with you. And I want you to learn not to do that with your brothers and sisters.

… no matter which one we’re looking at.

Now we talked earlier about the fact that there’s only one need and the fact that the experience of that need is an experience of having something. It’s not an experience of a lack.

And so here it is. Here’s what you find yourself having:

And I’m saying that we recognize it together, for lack of better words, spontaneously. Not as a result of figuring it out, we have the experience of recognizing it …

Well, not only can you not doubt it, it doesn’t even occur to you to doubt it. It is clear that it is undoubtable. And that experience, that together, joint experience, is an experience of something you have. The need to be the presence of love is experienced as having the love and extending it, because there’s nothing else to do. It’s an experience of wholeness.

During this coming week, be more diligent and know that I’m present with you in support of it, every moment, even when you feel like you do not have the capacity to do anything other than actively, aggressively practice faithlessness … I’m sorry, remember that no matter how committed you are to that, I stand with you not in support of that, because it isn’t the truth. And I stand in support of you feeling the influx of your capacity to have faith, because the truth spontaneously makes more sense to you than your faithlessness did.

Use every moment that you can for a holy instant. And understand that whatever is unlike God is meant to be corrected. You are meant to have a corrected experience in which that is no longer going on. And persist with it. Persist with the invitation to, and the nurturing of the holy instant, by, at the least, ceasing to practice faithlessness. And then turning to the Father and desiring to know the truth.

And when your addiction to self-righteous indignation rears its head, recognize it for what it is and trash it. Don’t give it another moment of your attention. Shift your attention. Shift it to a mantra. Shift it to, “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.” And say if over and over. Say anything that’s even nonsensical. But do it with focus, because all the time that you’re doing that, you’re not practicing faithlessness. And you’re setting the scene for a correction of the problem and your freedom from your ignorance as to your Birthright, and that it’s for you to be experiencing now.

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