Teachings of Christ Mind

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

To make things easier, I’m not going to begin reading at the beginning of the section, but the second to the last paragraph in the section just before, The Holy Instant and Real Relationships. What we will be reading from the beginning of the section will be stated as a preamble to what I’m going to read right now. Reading this now will help the preamble settle better, digest more easily… make more sense.

… this is the key …

This section is entitled, The Holy Instant and Communication. Communication is key to Awakening and it’s the opposite of damnation.

Why would the Holy Spirit need to teach …

Under what circumstances would one think that communication would constitute damnation?

It’s very simple. Communication takes away the supposed authority or capacity to act powerfully but autonomously. It takes that away. It takes power away. Better stated: It takes false power away.

Anyone who has been enjoying any degree of success in their life is for the most part, enjoying it because of the successful practice of power. The success has not been the result of communication. It has not been the result of communion. It has not been the result of allowing for and desiring to have, or shall I say, desiring to have and allowing for the holy instant in which joining occurs with the Father—with That which Moves and by its Movement, constitutes Creation, including every single one of you and everything.

Now communication is obviously damnation if one’s power and authority is usurped or taken away, if one’s ability to be successful as the direct result of his own actions. That’s dangerous. That’s the loss of everything essential. It will curse you—the one who does it—to no longer being able to exercise authority and create success. Create … what is it? Not just respectability but reality for himself—to be a puppet without strings who is a real boy now, or a real girl now.

So that’s why communication can be seen as damnation. It would take away every opportunity you have to become a real boy and a real girl—to become actual instead of orphans.

So again …

Guilt … well, if in order to be successful, you must not engage in real communication, you must instead, pretend to communicate by means of your bodies which can’t actually communicate at all, as we discussed last week. If you are caught in this context, where you must use your body to communicate for the purpose of authenticating yourself, you are assuming a position you don’t have. And the attempt to assume it and get others to believe you is a frightful task. It’s one that makes any good ego nervous.

And, as we also have discussed, when you got your divorce from your Father, when you said, “Father, I’d rather see it my way, I would rather do it my way, I would rather define what everything is,” you lost the conscious awareness of your indestructible eternality—your sovereignty—and what replaced it were the two partners again: Fear and guilt. And because, as we’ve also discussed before, it’s too hard to bear the burden of guilt for assuming a state of existence that the Father didn’t give you and that you’re having to create out of whole cloth, that guilt is too hard to bear. So it gets projected out: “It’s her fault! It’s his fault! It’s the circumstance’s fault! It’s the President’s fault! It’s the fault of whoever is in authority and has jurisdiction over me.”

And so, in the projection of guilt “out there,” blaming everyone and everything else, you have to have some means of exercising some control so that your vulnerability is lessened. And the only tool you really have to use to coerce and manipulate your brothers is guilt.

Now, since fear and guilt go together, you can also use fear but always in the end, the reason you’re using it is to affirm and substantiate the experience of guilt in your brother, so that your brother will acquiesce to you and behave the way you want him to behave.

So that’s why it says here …

You see, it’s no small task, because it’s not just an idea … “Oh… oh, well … communication doesn’t have to be damnation, communication can be salvation … my goodness, what a concept! I get it!”

No … it’s not an idea to be “gotten.” It’s a way of being that has to shift. It’s a whole way of being that has to shift. So the Holy Spirit’s task, we will say, is not an easy one because you’re not just shifting ideas, you’re having to abandon values that you have brought into play that your assertion of authority through the skillful use of guilt brings credibility to you, brings respect to you.

And if you exercise the laying on of guilt subtly enough and skillfully enough, your brother will think that you have loved him, your sister will think you have loved her and that the reason he or she is standing in support of you is certainly not because you’re a skillful employer of guilt, which, at the bottom line, is usury and is only for self-protection. Nevertheless, that is the way it’s working. That is the way it works outside of the holy instant … outside of communication … outside of communion.

So …

Now I promise you that every single one of you, as you step up to this point of learning, will find yourself feeling that this shift is impossible. Don’t be surprised by it.

Don’t take it seriously … don’t take it seriously!

You are going to have to stand in the face of a very clear inner conviction that it’s impossible, and a fear that comes along with the intent to get past this impasse. And it would be very hard to do if there were no one here to tell you that what you’re facing is a bluff—a bluff period, nothing else. And that you must be willing to hang in there with your intent to establish communication, to have the joining, to absolutely neglect to fall back upon your habits of thinking. Because you don’t want a single thought you’ve had that hasn’t Wakened you, when you can have an idea from the Mind of God in your mind that constitutes an experience of Oneness with the Father—with your Source.

And in that experience of unity, you find yourself unified with every single one of your brothers and sisters and everything as well throughout the Universe.

Now I’m going to give you a little hint: If you simply sit down and do a meditation and move into your peace, if you had been experiencing guilt, you’ll find that in that peace—in your meditation—it’s gone, whether it seems to you as though you have established communication with anything or not.

That should be helpful in conveying to you from an experience that you’ve had, that guilt is not fixed. Guilt is not absolute. Guilt can disappear without the cause of the guilt having been corrected. And I’m going to say, without the cause of the guilt trip that has been laid upon you, has been corrected. If the one laying the guilt trip upon you has not stopped, that cannot inhibit you from meditating—moving into your peace and finding the guilt gone.

Now, if the guilt is something you have been employing and you are feeling guilty because some degree of conscience has come into play, and it’s beginning to wear you down, it’s beginning to cause you to be ineffective—immobilized—once again, if you will meditate and move into your peace, you will find the guilt gone, you will find that which has been immobilizing you, gone. That’s not the end of it though, because joining, communication has to be established, else you’re still in the orphanage, you’re still claiming to be an orphan and you will still behave as though you are one.

You must join with the Holy Spirit. You must join with that which is nothing more than your right Mind. In that joining peace comes. In that joining guilt disappears. In that joining the experience of vulnerability vanishes. And, you can either get stuck there in peace that is just being immobilized in ignorance, or it can be the place where you step across the threshold and actually, as a result of inquiry made by you to the Father or to the Holy Spirit—inquiry is made—and you listen with rapt attention for the answer, until you hear the answer. Then communication is established and then the immobilization vanishes.

Movement in your mind, movement of you and your experience occurs free of your false beliefs, free of your mutually-agreed-upon-definitions that all of you have used to keep each other in control. And because you are experiencing everything as it is, and experiencing it clearly, you are able to, for lack of better words, dance with Life because you can see It and you can move with It, and you can respond to and with It in a dance, in an involvement that is pure because no concepts or mutual agreements are getting in the way anymore.

Again …

Interesting? Guilt’s only function is to disrupt communication. And you thought that its purpose was to get people in line, to get them straightened out, to do the only thing that would work, to get them to knuckle under and stop doing what disturbs you, or even do something altruistic, “You’ll rot in hell if you don’t do something altruistic! Man if you don’t be kind to her, I won’t ever speak to you again.”

No, communication is very important here, because communication is the evidence that you have embraced and embodied the truth that you’re not alone.

Oh-h, you did that damned thing … that thing that damned you. You gave up the right to be alone. You gave up the right to be the authorizer. You gave up what made you able to create success for yourself. And what was the awful result? That you found, that in your union with everything—beyond your belief—you found that you fit in. You found that you belonged. No small thing. You found yourself being and not having the sensation of being out of your skin, or a stranger on a strange planet—somebody who didn’t belong, somebody who just needs to wait it out and put up with “this lifetime,” where you shouldn’t be at all until you get back where you’re supposed to be. Misery-misery-misery.

… in the holy instant …

… in communion …

That’s your salvation. That’s what you’re looking for.

Now I’m going to back up to the previous page in the Sparkly Book, the second full paragraph:

Again …

… who are willing to learn, who are receptive to the fact …

“Well, hell, why shouldn’t it look attractive to me? It’s worked very well for me for years … course, I don’t call it guilt. But it is easy for me to play on other people’s inclination to think that there’s something wrong with them, to get them to do things that benefit them so that they will do things that benefit me, or if I can’t manage to set something up that benefits them, I can at least get them to do things that benefit me.”

Now, we’re going to go back to the beginning of this section:

Now that last sentence may not make much sense to you.

Well you can imagine that maybe it might be fully given to you, but the part about being fully returned … ummm … what’s that? How’s that work?

Well it doesn’t work from the orphan mentality. And that’s why it seems unclear to you at the moment. This is a statement of the ultimate and the primitive truth:

When you are in communion, when you are in communication with the Holy Spirit, the Father, the Father’s Love is received and returned. It’s a mutual admiration society, if you will. And it isn’t one that you engage in out of choice, really, where you could say, “Oh, today I’ll return it and tomorrow I won’t.” It’s just purely spontaneous eternal Love.

This is the only true Love. It always has been the only true Love. And while you are experiencing what seems to be love and hate, but no such thing as pure eternal Love, it’s still the only true Love there is. And you will come back into the conscious experience of it. That is the whole point.

You see, this is why communication is not damnation but salvation. Because everyone joined in it has everything. Not in the sense of possession, but in the sense of unseparated presence with everything and experiencing the unseparated presence of everything with you, so that it is a mutual sharing that really constitutes a conscious experience of integrity, meaning, inseparability—togetherness. And again, a togetherness in Movement—a dance—a universal dance. That’s why it’s salvation and not really damnation.

You may have lost the apparent capacity to act autonomously, but you also lost your unconciousness of your wholeness and your inseparability from everything in which you lacked nothing, in which you lack nothing.

Really lousy, huh … really unkind … really a miserable state of existence to be in for the “getter” and the “giver,” because you’re both stuck in a state of lack that it isn’t your Birthright to be experiencing. And whatever hit or thrill you get from playing the part of the “getter” and the “giver” is empty—doesn’t stand with any meaning whatsoever in the face of the universal conscious experience of Being, which is part of communication.

Now when it’s put in those words you all understand it … you really do all understand it.

Guilt is a truly effective means of getting things done or getting what you want. And if you don’t think that guilt is the only means you use to get something done, no matter how subtly or with great finesse you employ the use of guilt, just ask yourself … [chuckle] just ask yourself how often do you actually sit down and go into the holy instant and ask of the Father what the truth is, so that you might give from there?

Oh, I know, you do that all the time—and it’s only once in awhile that you employ guilt—cause it’s so easy … it’s so easy to go into the holy instant, right? You do it all the time.

If you’re not doing that, there’s only one other way to make anything happen and that’s through guilt. And so if you’re not doing the holy instant, if I may put it that way, then you are doing guilt!

Now, you could feel really guilty about that. But that’s not my point. My point is to just express simple clarity, so you can say, “Wow, I had no idea that that’s what I was doing, but I can see that I must be doing that, because I’m very seldom going into the holy instant and inquiring of God and hearing—which is proof of communication—and having my whole perspective change so that everything I do is a blessing, a true blessing.”

So if you can see that you’re not doing that, then you can back-off and not make as heavy an investment in the use of guilt and you can find greater justification for doing the “two-step,” for stopping before you act and saying, “Father, what’s the truth here? Father, what is appropriate here? Father, what is really happening here? Father, what will nullify ignorance and its effects right here?”

So when you read:

… and you say, “Well, that’s ridiculous, many relationships I get into without anger …”

And then, that it says …

Well, what jerk believes that? None of you! No one.

Don’t feel bad about this, just decide to give your attention in new directions, the direction of the holy instant—the willingness to become present in the now and back-off from your spontaneous assumptions and all of your collected thoughts that you use to justify behaving so as to convey to everyone who you are now.

… that the ego …

I mean, when I started reading this paragraph no one recognized it. Now you can see, you can at least recognize it even if you forget an hour from now. You have recognized it and you’re no longer totally ignorant, and therefore, you’re a step closer to freedom from it and its effects.

In other words, if you see what’s going on, you’re not attracted to it. If you don’t see what is going on, and your heartstrings are pulled—which I’m going to say are your guilt-strings—your guilt-strings are pulled and you acquiesce, and because it was so skillfully done that you thought it was your heartstrings, you yield and you become a puppet of a user. And you suffer from your ignorance.

This all sounds very heavy handed and that’s why I wanted to begin with the next to the last paragraph so that you might understand that this is a contrast to the goal—the ultimate goal of communication or communion—because it’s the blockage of communication that keeps you from the holy instant and keeps you in the orphanage, keeps you suffering.

See, if it said, “The great attraction to the wonders that guilt can perform, are …” you would all be listening. You might waver a little bit in your enthusiasm, but you would listen just in case you might hear something useful. You really would. But to say:

Wow, that’s depressing isn’t it. The attraction of guilt is sick. It’s mentally deranged. It’s insane. And to be attracted to it is not to be in your right Mind. So call a spade a spade.

Sick!

In other words, to begin to make the shift in the way you’re being.

You see, everybody’s been doing it. And as you grew up, everybody helped you understand how to do it. Everyone showed you how somebody else was doing it to you. And they showed you how to do it to them. And all the while nothing occurred to cause you to question whether the premise for your conscious awareness of being was correct or not—at least not immediately—and so being an orphan and using guilt to accomplish things, and becoming a better and better independent authoritative presence, all of that seemed unquestionably natural and not worthy of challenge.

So guilt had value for you. And it didn’t make you feel guilty, because it was the standard operating procedure.

But the point is, that it left you empty of your Birthright, empty of your freedom, empty of the experience of your wholeness, and mostly, absent the experience of invulnerability. And without the experience of invulnerability available to you—even though it’s your Birthright—you exist in a state of fear and guilt that generate the use of fear and guilt in order to survive, which actually secures you more and more solidly in ignorance.

We’re just undoing that. We are constantly … I am constantly confronting you with a different view, another way of looking at it. And not just another way of looking at it, but the way of stepping out of ignorance entirely, so that you’re able to experience everything from innate intelligence, flawless intelligence established in you by That which formed you and withheld nothing of what It was from you in Its forming you: The Father, God, the Life Principle … whatever you want to call It.

… the value of guilt, or your belief in its value.

Now, I must touch on something that we discussed last week … bring it forward again: If you use the body for communication when it is not a means of communication, because it isn’t matter, you cause it to be experienced as matter—governed by laws of physics, apparently capable of sin, disease and death.

As long as you think that you are a body with a mind somewhere inside it, you are trapped. You are literally immobilized and you try to use the body to communicate. You use it to communicate and you also use it to secure its ongoing existence. In other words, you will use your body to defend it against it being damaged by someone else attempting to damage it.

Now the actual fact which we discussed last week is, that there is no matter whatsoever, whether we’re talking about a table, a piece of wood, a toenail, a thumb, a body, a planet. It’s all idea. They are all ideas—the present manifestation of Living Mind being Conscious, and by virtue of being Conscious, having All to be Conscious of.

The Holy Instant and Communication is being discussed because it is only the communication of ideas that constitutes communication. And ideas are of God and are therefore, holy. And so, part of this shift of Being that you are moving into involves shifting from body identification to Mind identification. It’s only as Mind that everything can function without the governance of the laws of physics in which entropy¹ is inherent and unavoidable. Entropy is impossible to Mind. Entropy is impossible to Creation. So if you don’t want to experience the various forms of entropy that you seem to suffer from now, you must be willing to make this shift from body identification to Mind identification.

Remember The Holy Instant and Communication. There is now, as opposed to past, present, and future. You let your attention be in the now. And then you let it be in the instant of now, which means you abandon thinking about tomorrow, you abandon thinking about what happened yesterday, and you let yourself be totally present in the instant you’re in. Without all the thinking going on, you’re confronted with a sizeless experience of peace.

The experience is one of Mind. You can still hear everything that is going on. If you move your hands you can feel your fingers. But there’s perfect peace and there is an awareness that your environment is Mind and that all form is embraced within the conscious awareness that you are experiencing.

This is the groundwork for communication, the communication that this section is about, which primes you for the influx of, we’ll say, the divine Will, the Father’s perspective and not damnation, but the Father’s Love embracing you, surrounding you, supporting you, blessing you, calling you Its own and presenting you with an undeniable experience of belonging and of fitting in with nothing lacking, and again, at the threshold of being able to engage in the dance of Life, infinite, moving conscious involvement.

Continuing …

That’s right, you think that if you make everyone else guilty you escape the experience of guilt for believing that you are something you’re not—believing that you’re an orphan, believing that you have a capacity to act independently and that you don’t need anyone.

Certainly, the ego wishes no one unconditionally well, that would be a little bit too much intimacy. You wish everyone well a little bit, if it suits you, if it meets your need … but don’t get too close, don’t let your privacy be interfered with or disrupted, because it’s through the practice of it that you manage to become a real boy or a real girl.

And mind you, remember again, that the only way any of this works or makes sense or seems functional, is within the context of your believing that you are a body and that the body is matter, and that Mind just happens to be the peak evolutionary result, which of course, man is the epitome of, you see.

Bullshit! It’s not working! It’s not really working for you! You don’t have to keep honoring it, and reinforcing it by honoring it.

… the ego …

Now, can you do anything to improve the situation? Is there anyway for you to continue to be or conceive of yourself as a body that communicates with other bodies by means of being a body?

(Paul: I’m sorry. I lost it.)

There simply is no benefit in continuing to operate in a context that is flawed, in which there is no truth.

The Son of God’s holy Mind.

… the Holy Spirit …

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

I’m going to say, “If you’re willing to perceive first, that you have made of them what they are.”

You see, because you think you are thinkers you have thought about everything, at least everything that’s gotten your attention. And you have, through the use of your thinking, arrived at an opinion, or an evaluation, or a definition about whatever it was that you gave your attention to. And then you have believed that your definition was what the thing was, or who the brother was. And you have gone through your life, as I’ve said before, apparently responding to your world, but actually responding to the definition of your world that you have set in place, for it.

That’s just the way you thought it worked. And so that’s just what you did. So, now someone says, “You must be willing to look at what you made of them.” You say, “Well, I didn’t make anything of them.” But you did. And if you’re willing to look at what you made of them, or if you’re willing to look at just the fact that you made them up, and used your definition instead of them as the thing you respond to, you have been out of touch with Life. And correction of your perception needs to occur so that you’re not stumbling where dancing ought to be happening.

Again, referring to the Son of God:

… now, that doesn’t mean, let’s study the awful facts. It means, here is a wonderful thing to do, here is a wonderful avenue to move down that is an avenue of release. And it will be an avenue of release because it will not convict you of anything and incarcerate you and immobilize you from the dance of Life. By being willing to go down this avenue and …

… it will be a joyous thing that will result … in what? Salvation, rather than damnation.

So … so, when you read this, read it with a friendly attitude, read it as though it’s good news … because it is.

Now we’re going to stop there. But I want to end with what we started with, so that it feels like what we’re talking about is a blessing.

… and I will say, it is the Holy Spirit’s glad teaching function …

Communication is you, no longer being in isolation. Communication is you, knowing to the core of your Being, that you’re not alone. Communication is you experiencing the fact that you fit in, that you belong, and that fulfillment, not damnation is yours to be experienced—not a pipe dream, not a fantasy.

I look forward to being with you next week.

And don’t shy away from this. Don’t become immobilized for fear of loss of something, or for fear of becoming in receipt of something that you’re not sure you want. And don’t let the ego suggest that whatever it is, because it will be so grand, it will be totally overwhelming to you and drive you insane.

Embrace the holy instant.

Last week I suggested you read this section that we started reading tonight. This week I’m going to ask you to go back to the beginning of the Chapter we’re reading and read it from the beginning to this point. You’re going to find it so much fuller of meaning than it did a few months ago when we started reading it. And it will be confirming and reassuring to you that you are learning. And I want you to have that experience.