Teachings of Christ Mind

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

We’re almost exactly half way through the text of A Course In Miracles. And at this point I want to emphasize the first paragraph of the chapter that we’re reading, which surprisingly enough, since we have been discussing the holy instant, is called The Purpose of Time. I’m going to read that paragraph in just a moment.

As you become more committed to experiencing the holy instant, as you become more consciously and consistently committed to actually being Awake, not talking about it, not studying about it, but engaging in the inner act of that which facilitates the shift, you are going to find yourself experiencing distress. And when you do, for whatever reason, you will find it extremely valuable to come back to the first paragraph of Chapter Fifteen. It says:

Every one of you need to remind yourself of this often. To have that experience is what triggers Awakening. Therefore, when you find yourself highly committed to other goals, you may know that you are not doing the one essential thing—that you are being side tracked from the one essential thing—and that for all of your commitment to these other goals, you’re applying yourself in a foolish and impractical direction that you must come to recognize as such, so that you can consciously, purposely, begin to devalue those goals. They will not become devalued spontaneously and automatically because they are habits which you developed and which you value and which you will not spontaneously release until you find them no longer of value.

… the Holy Spirit … me…

… until His teaching becomes the only teaching you have interest in and choose to follow—choose to be consistently attentive to. Obviously, one who changes teachers frequently and changes from one teacher to another teacher, who is not consistent—teachers who are not consistent with each other—that one is not going to find the miracle occurring. That one is not going to find Awakening occurring. That one is not going to find his heart’s desire, which is to know who he Is and to be what he truly Is uninhibitedly. That will not happen. He will not find that.

If your Teacher will not be satisfied until what He’s teaching constitutes all you are learning, then obviously you are not going to find yourself satisfied until His teaching becomes all your learning. And although it’s purely logical, the reason is, that this Teacher is nothing but your right Mind revealing your Self to you as you truly Are.

That’s why satisfaction is the subject here.

… God’s Teacher…

You could call that devotion to truth. You could call it devotion to God. But at the bottom line, it’s a devotion to your sanity—a devotion that needs to become total. Because until your devotion to your sanity is total, you will continue to dally with the ego and you will not be able to experience your right Mind as your right Mind and you will not Wake up.

When this has happened, when you …

Now you won’t need a Teacher, because that which you need to learn of, which is your right Mind that you’re not fully connected with, will be your right Mind with you fully connected with It. No more teaching will be needed because you will have returned to your sanity.

Now the question is, “How are you going to return to your sanity?” You’ve got to remember what the means is. The means is the right use of time. The means is to avail yourself of the purpose of time.

Again, and you must remember this, because very often you get too serious—too serious in your dedication to your Waking up—so that you become quite intense and quite severe on yourself and there’s no peace. But listen:

To learn just that and nothing more means to arrive at a point where you’ve abandoned your own personal goals—where they’re not more important to you than being sane.

Now you’re going to find times when it’s hard to practice the holy instant. You’re going to find that somebody has ticked you off or a circumstance has arisen that is impacting you adversely, and you will feel the injustice of it, you will feel the fact that it’s not appropriate for you to be suffering from it, and you will, out of habit, forget to do the appropriate thing which is choose for your peace and not aggravate the symptoms by indulging in anger and frustration and self-righteousness and on and on.

You are going to have to be diligent. And when you are upset you’re going to have to consciously decline to participate in the upsetness. And you’re going to have to do that when you don’t feel like doing that. You’re going to have to dredge up from within you a remembrance of what we’ve been talking about, which won’t be on the surface when you’re in the midst of your reaction. And you’re going to have to be willing to remember what your function is.

Your function is to want to see God. Your function is to glorify God by recognizing God in each and every thing. Your function is to take any instant, no matter what is going on, and recognize that its potential is a holy instant. And then decide to take advantage of it as a holy instant. And you might have to stand there or sit there and in your mind, say: “I refuse to accept this invitation to be angry—to lose my balance, my emotional cool. I refuse to accept this invitation because my function is holier than that.” But mind you, when you dredge that up and bring it into the foreground, there’s not going to be much conviction behind it because at that moment you still will feel justified in your upsetness. And so, the words will ring hollow even though last Sunday or tonight they rang true and meaningful.

It’s at times like that, that you need to go back to this paragraph:

I’ll be honest with you, when you’re in the middle of turmoil, you probably won’t want to imagine what it means to have no cares because you will be so upset at having them. But it’s right in those circumstances that you have to be willing to bring to the foreground the truth that you know, the truth that you have learned, the revelations that have filled you, and you’re going to have to choose to stop doing what will inhibit you from your peace and exclude you from the holy instant that you’re in, period.

We’ve been reading about the holy instant in this, and the holy instant in that, and the holy instant in the other thing. Now we’re reading about The Holy Instant and the Laws of God. Why? Because interestingly enough, when you move into the holy instant, new rules come into play. You might say that God’s Values come into play. The way God “Be’s” and Knows things is different. And you will find that what you had valued before won’t have value for you, and in some instances, initially, that will be experienced as a loss by you.

But you must understand—you must be willing to understand—that as you let this shift occur that occurs in the holy instant, you do come under a new, an apparently new regime in which God’s laws govern, in which God’s laws govern you absolutely … govern you in perfect peace … govern you in perfect health … govern you in perfect joy … govern you in perfect freedom.

You are the holy Son of God. You are the holy Daughter of God. You are the holy Offspring of God. This is part of the new state of affairs. This is part of the new setup. It’s always been true but you’re at a point now of needing to embrace it and embody it—to own it. And to behave as though it’s true and to behave toward your brother as though what’s true of you is true of him. He or she is the holy Son or Daughter of God.

[slight chuckle] All separation increases as unholiness is shared. When you’re insistent upon sharing your incompleteness and the great need you have to compensate for your incompleteness at the expense of your brother, separation increases. But …

So this is part of your new function—to share your holiness. But I will tell you that there are going to be times, initially, where the idea of sharing your holiness is going to cause you to feel extremely vulnerable, as though doing that is extremely dangerous because there’s a defenselessness to it—there’s an intimacy to it that means you are being undefended as you are sharing your holiness.

Or we could say, someone must always lose if you perceive yourself as unholy—as not the Son or Daughter of God, as an orphan.

It also transcends the concept of gaining power because the relationship embodies something else.

Now …

In other words, your call on God for love is not diminished when another calls on God for love.

Another receiving healing, another having his life transformed as he turned his attention and willingness over to the Father, easily inspires you to believe that if you do the same thing, the same thing will happen to you. You do not think that God’s favors have been used and there are therefore, fewer favors available for you.

Now God is an Idea. But God is also Mind—the environment in which ideas take form. God is an Idea and God is also the Formulator—the Creator of Ideas.

Again …

… your brother’s …

See, this is the different makeup, constitution of relationships that transcends the concept of loss of power, or the gaining of power completely.

You see, these are the new rules—these are the new dynamics of the holy instant. And you’ve got to grasp the way it works so that you might have the courage to give yourself completely. Because in giving an idea completely through sharing, it is magnified, it is strengthened, it is substantiated. We could say, it is immortalized, it is infinitized.

But this doesn’t come naturally and spontaneously as you’re moving out of self-protection and orphanhood and all of the benefits that you thought you had brought together for yourself by being a successful orphan.

Being persistent about this may unsettle you. And you may have to go back to the first paragraph of Chapter Fifteen as you practice this part of Chapter Fifteen so as to give yourself courage to persist.

This is important:

You could say, you are an Idea of God: “I am an Idea of God, held eternal in His Mind, forever renewed and freshly expressed by Him in His ever-present expressing of Himself right where I am.”

So you’re an idea. So it doesn’t look like it … it looks like you’re a thing. It looks like you’re a body. Your body is an idea. And ideas are perfectly tangible and experienceable to the mind that formed it. And the fact that it’s tangible and experienceable hasn’t caused it to become a thing, hasn’t caused it to be less an idea and more a manifestation of an idea. An idea is itself the manifestation of the Mind that formed it. The idea is the evidence of the existence of God. It’s that simple.

So, Waking up is an experience of translating things into thoughts or ideas, of experiencing them more truly and, by virtue of experiencing them more truly, releasing them from the limits that were imposed upon them by a false interpretation of them as things—“material objects.”

But you will not find out that it will be only with gain until you do it. And let me just say this: If suffering is going on, then you haven’t done it yet, and what you are doing isn’t the answer to the release from pain.

… what?

… the capital “M” Mind …

… meaning God …

If you’re willing to hold all of your brothers in your mind … to hold them … to embrace them… it means you’re willing to share yourself with them—you’re not holding them outside your mind, separate from you, protected from them. It’s the demonstration of sharing. It’s the other interpretation of relationships, which transcends the concept of loss of power completely.

Now, you’re going to have to pay attention here, because you’re going to have to sort out what’s Real and what isn’t real … what is of value and what isn’t of value. And then stop doing what isn’t of value. You’re going to have to do it by paying conscious attention. It might seem to you like work, but, shall I say, it’s an adult thing, a mature thing to do—to be willing to look at what the answer is, even if it doesn’t fit your concepts of what right ought to be—and then choose for it, even though it means having to change your mind and do things in a new way for new reasons.

You have encouragement for it. You have encouragement in the book. You have encouragement from the Holy Spirit. You have encouragement from me. You have encouragement from the Father. You have encouragement from each of your Guides. You are companioned by many who have one intent, and that is, to help you make this shift with your fear reduced enough so that there is willingness to do it.

But you’re going to have to persist in remembering the first sentence of Chapter Fifteen …

So much of the time you have other more important things to do. You insist on the context of your life being something else and you attend to the needs of your daily affairs from a different place, not from a place of no cares and no worries and no anxieties, not a place where there is perfect calm and quiet all the time. But you don’t have to do it from there. You can choose to do it from the place that significantly ushers you into a new awareness of being, which is your original state of Being and is you coming back into your Sanity.

Wholly, whole … COMPLETION … to be complete is to be at rest. To be complete and to be at rest is to be the presence of Life, enjoying living.

… that’s a mighty statement.

This is where the confusing part comes in …

But the fact is that the laws of this world are pretty much the laws each of you has made up for yourselves, aside from the ones you mutually agree upon so as to have a certain amount of harmony. But the fact is that at the bottom line, all of the laws that you have made up have been self-seeking and they function at the disadvantage of others. It’s that simple.

… meaning the laws you made up …

And you experience that as a loss … a loss of identity, a loss of meaning, a loss of leverage, a loss of ability to cope … as though there were such disorder that it was essential for you to cope, instead of there being such infinite harmony that there’s nothing to cope with and only everything to experience with embrace and willingness to share.

Now that’s not just a truth for a future time, it’s a fact for you to be actively engaged in taking hold of, by choosing for the holy instant persistently, as though there were really no other way to be in any moment of your day than to be seeking to experience the holy instant.

Somewhere along the line, you’re going to have to mean the idea that you want to Wake up. And you need to understand that, so that you don’t think that you’ll sort of somehow slip into the Kingdom of Heaven inadvertently [chuckling]. You’ll do it consciously. You’ll do it by choice. And when you do it by choice, you own it, you set it deeply or allow it to be set deeply in you—where it actually already is—deeply enough that you no longer choose to try to see or do things differently or at odds with it.

How free would that be? Totally … completely?

The moment you refuse to be bound, you will not be bound. Refusing to be bound is a pro-active choice, nothing slipshod or lazy about that. Don’t be afraid to be pro-actively decisive.

Now what happens if you become pro-actively decisive and you succeed in actively paying attention to every moment with a desire to experience the holy instant, to experience God’s Perspective, to experience the truth of what things are that are in the instant you’re in, and there’s no transformation and you’re called upon to be persistent with patience, apparently without results? It’s simple. What will happen is sometimes you will get upset and you’ll say, “It’s not worth it,” or, “All of this must be a lie,” or some other excuse. And you might even claim that it’s unfair for anybody to expect you to have to go to these lengths.

Well, it’s just the way it is! Those are the lengths you have to go to. You have to go to the lengths wherein you have become consistent and not slipshod. You have to go to the lengths it takes not to switch teachers back and forth and confuse the issue. You’ve got to arrive at the point where you, like any good student, truly want to learn and pay dutiful and grateful attention to that one who can teach you what you need to know, without getting arrogant and self-righteous—deciding for yourself that you shouldn’t need to know that much in order to have that benefit, as though you know better than your teacher. And the fact is, that when you slip into that, you’ve switched teachers, and you’re listening to the teacher that is the voice for fear, the voice for the ongoing “human condition” that’s uncorrectable.

How much effort does it take? It takes however much effort it takes to arrive at a point where you’re not sabotaging yourself by valuing more than one teacher, teaching two different curriculums.

What has always been, ultimately, infinitely, truthfully? God, being the Movement of Creation, that is what has always been and that is what will always be, except now It will register with you as what it Is.

The distorting, graying affect that allows things not to be seen distinctly, and therefore, easily misinterpreted or misunderstood.

How is the veil of time pushed aside? By using time for its only purpose.

You know what? You all are already full of learning much more than that. And now you’re having to escape from your imaginations and your misinterpretations, and your interpretations that were made for selfish or unloving reasons that have tripped you up and bound you to an ongoing ignorance of the truth about you.

So accept that. And accept the fact that as you allow for the holy instant, as you invite it, as you provide the environment in which it can occur, fear is likely to accompany you. Just realize it. It will accompany you until you’ve moved far enough over the threshold … and then it will vanish. But you will have to persist.

And I will add, that in my accepting it, I accepted it for you. And so you’re not doing the work from scratch, and you’re not having to overcome all of what the first one had to overcome.

See, sharing … sharing … was shared with me, I share it with you, you will share it with others, because that’s the new paradigm of relationships. It’s not one of loss and gain. It’s one of having … it’s just one of having … it’s just one of having … having infinitely.

… like the need to get upset, and the need to be angry and the need to object.

What are the aspects of the Son of God? All of the Sons and Daughters of God are the aspects of the Son of God.

Now that’s quite a new paradigm isn’t it? That’s very different from loss and gain. That’s very different from “getting” what you need because you don’t have it and costing another in the process of your getting it, or vice versa, someone else in the process of getting what he needs causing you to experience loss.

Pay attention to this. And pretend if you must, that you are a graduate student and that your getting your degree is important. In other words, your learning what your studying is important. And be a diligent student by paying attention.

Remember not to switch teachers. Remain true to one. And then remember that all of this is to be done in the context of fulfilling the purpose of time, which is to be in your peace, to be in harmony, to be not anxious, and ultimately to be free to have Reality revealed to you so that you might enjoy it in your wholeness, which embraces and includes everything and with whom you share yourself without reservation.

Do the work this week. That is my wise counsel, because that is what will cause learning, and that is the point.

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