Teachings of Christ Mind

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

We’re reading from a section entitled, The Holy Instant and Communication from a chapter entitled, The Purpose of Time. The purpose of time is to give you the opportunity to abandon time—to get out of time back into eternity, your Home, your starting Place, your forever existing Place, and the apparently future Place which you will experience as you abandon your intent to try to be independent from your Source.

Now, I’m going to put it this way: There is a transition that occurs. Because you experience yourself as separate from God, because you have intended to be separate by being an independent autonomous agent, you’re in a position where, if you want to return Home and reconnect with your Father, you have to do it by means of communication because your sense of separateness is so definite. So you, from over here all by yourself, are going to communicate with your Father over here in the Kingdom of Heaven—somewhere else than where you are.

When you use or utilize the holy instant for reestablishing communication and you allow that reestablishment to occur so that communication is happening— apparently two-way dialogue—that’s the beginning of a transition. You will not, however, forever stay in communication—two way dialogue—because as you communicate by means of the Holy Spirit, or by means of your connection with your Guide, a shift occurs and communication becomes communion—simultaneous inseparable Oneness. Communion … communion. It’s a shift into that place where, as the Bible says, you “Let that mind be in you which was also in me.”¹

Communication transitions into communion. Communion becomes, for lack of better words, non-disintegrated conscious experience: integrated conscious experience.

Now, we started out the last time we met with the beginning of the Lord’s Prayer and tonight I want to begin with the beginning of the Ten Commandments. The first one says, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.”² “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.”

Now, in light of what we’ve been learning, that means: Listen to no other voice but Mine. “Thou shalt not listen to any other voice than Mine.”

That means, thou shalt not listen first to your mother’s voice, or your father’s voice or your sister’s voice or your brother’s voice or your son’s or daughter’s voice, or your guru’s voice. You will not listen to any of those first.

“Thou shalt not listen to any other voice than Mine.” That choice and the experience of fulfilling that choice is what we’ve been talking about as the proper use of the holy instant, or the purpose of the holy instant to reunite that which was always One, which you, for a time, have believed was two.

I need to reiterate that the word, “communication” here, which is referred to as Salvation, is something far more than just you communicating with your brother, sister, mother, father, daughter, son, boss, relative, guru. It’s far more than communication with a body. That’s not what it’s talking about.

That kind of communication which you have been engaged in, we’ll say, for your whole life, does not constitute Salvation and you all know it hasn’t. How do you know? You’re not Awake. You’re not free from sin, sickness and death. You’re not truly and uninterruptedly happy and you don’t feel like you’re at Home.

Now, God is divine Mind. So the first Commandment means, “Thou shalt have no other mind but Mine”—God being the speaker. Your having the Mind of God as the forever-healed experience of your mind is the result of the holy instant in which communication transitions into communion.

Now the key here is, that the communication that constitutes Salvation is your ongoing conscious connection with the Father in which, no matter what is going on, you’re always asking for, you’re always desiring first to experience the Father’s Perspective about whatever it is that is going on, so that when you interact with what is going on, the interaction arises from your conscious connection, your conscious communication, your conscious communion with God. It’s this that constitutes Salvation. And it’s simply this that is your goal, no matter how intellectually complicated or spiritually technically detailed you want to get.

So what we’re saying is, that healing, the correction of illusions, arises out of communion, which arises out of communication in the holy instant to begin with.

Now, you can pray for that to happen and it is well to pray for that to happen. It is well for you to ask the Father or the Holy Spirit or me to fill you up with clear mental atmosphere, clear mental environment and to ask to be filled with the truth that heals. But you know what? It’s not going happen by magic. It’s not going to happen without your involvement.

Important: It’s not going to happen without your involvement. Healing will not be done unto you.

You see, as we go into the book here, we start with this paragraph I read at the end last time that doesn’t paint a very pretty picture:

If you’re not Awake, then you are constantly under the gun, so to speak, you are constantly vulnerable, you’re constantly insecure, and you’re constantly in need of somehow securing stability. And the only means that you have to accomplish that is through the communication of guilt.

You have to weasel your good out of your brother. It’s that simple. And you do it because you’re afraid. You’re afraid because you’re in the middle of insanity. You think that you’re alone. You think you’re independent. You think you have a God-given right, a Birthright, to make decisions for yourself and succeed all by yourself. That isn’t true. And embracing that state and embellishing it causes fear. It also makes you feel guilty, because at the bottom line you know what you’re trying to do isn’t possible and you know that the accomplishment would constitute a lie about Creation, and absolute denial of your Father, of your Source, and that will never be comfortable.

So, all you little orphans work each other over so as to secure stability. It hasn’t worked. But there is a way that works. And the way it works is that you have to abandon the idea that the only thing you have to work with are bodies, and that bodies communicate and that the purpose of communication is to coerce behavior that represents stability and safety for you.

From first to last, it’s unkindness. It’s an unkind behavior.

Now why am I saying this? Because there comes a point where you have to do something different and the “something different” is what we’re reading about. It is engaging in and utilizing the holy instant.

If you want to see the correction of an illusion, whether it’s illness, whether it’s injury, whether it’s blind obedience to drugs or alcohol, you’re going to have to want to experience no other mind than God’s Mind. You’re going to have to want to have no other gods before God. And, I’m going to tell you flat out, that that is going to feel like an absolutely independent act—a very lonely act. But it will only seem that way by comparison with the environment that you will be emerging from.

Now, it’s a time of year when there are many baby birds that are past the stage of being baby birds and they are still insisting upon pestering mommy to put food in their mouth. And even if mom is on a lawn or in an area where there’s bird-seed and there’s abundance of food, those babies have their eyes only on one place: Mommy’s mouth. Why? Because from the first moment they think they can remember, that’s how they were nurtured, that’s how they felt good. And so here they are, perhaps walking around in half an inch of bird-seed on the ground, not seeing it because their eyes are focused on mom’s beak and they’re making raucous noise pestering her to feed them, which she does slowly … and manages to do evermore slowly.

Now, you know from watching them, that the time is going to have to come where they decide to notice what mom is doing and look down and see all this food, the seeds, or look down and here are the worms or the bugs, and take a bite themselves without relating that act of, I’m going to say sovereignty, to mom. It’s like abandoning everything that’s meaningful. It’s like abandoning mom … abandoning all the feelings associated with mom.

To decide to take the bite yourself feels like abandoning mom. It’s not easy and it feels like you’re trying to be independent. It feels like you’re doing something that’s going to make you be lonely because mom won’t be there … because you’re gonna feed yourself? It doesn’t make sense.

Now, the simple fact is, that when we’re talking about the holy instant and when we’re talking about hesitating and doing the two-step so that you say, “Father, what’s the truth here?” what are you doing?

Well you’re doing a few things: You’re abandoning checking with your friends, or your guru or your mom … or whoever has explained life to you; your professor. And you are leaning into the answer from a direction that doesn’t involve a relationship with those that you can see—all these bodies around you. It feels like an act of independence. It feels like doing something that makes you be alone. But mind you, this act that you’re engaging in is a conscious act of joining with Something that you have not experienced communication with, much less communion with.

There comes a point in this apparent process of waking up, of coming back into your right Mind—your divine Sanity—and your rightful place in the Movement of Creation … there’s comes a point at which you must stop leaning on and manipulating your brothers and sisters into being the source of your answers—the source of your reason for feeling stable.

If you’ve chosen well among your brothers and sisters, among those bodies with whom there seems to be communication, you will have been involved with those who point you in the direction that I’m pointing you in at this moment, that point you within to that very intimate, and we could say private, but I’m going to say, very intimate place of connection with your Source, where you lean into this Source and dare to entrust yourself to this action where you have no external proof of the validity or the dependability of what you’re doing.

Until you, like the baby bird, get your own food for your own reasons, and that act doesn’t put any of your brothers or sisters or mothers into a position of obligation to you that fulfills your dependence on them … until you do that, the full meaning and impact of the holy instant will elude you and you will not get out of the orphanage! “But I don’t know how to do it.” Then persist in doing a very simple thing: Persist in asking for help!

Now you notice that this communication that I’m describing isn’t communication between bodies, is it? It’s between you and God. It’s between you and the Holy Ghost—you and the Holy Spirit—which is nothing more than your right Mind. It’s all Mind. Communication, real communication, is all Mind.

Well you’re not used to that. You don’t think it happens. You think it only happens body to body. Or shall I say, body over body—bodies controlling bodies, bodies making bodies behave in a way that provides safety and security and, hopefully, self-respect.

Now, just as with the baby bird abandoning his mother as that which identifies his completeness, you will find yourself uncomfortable in abandoning your allegiance to your brothers and your misuse of them to provide you with a feeling of security and wholeness. And it will feel like a reckless and dangerous thing to do that will increase the vulnerability that you have used as justification for misusing your brothers and sisters.

That feeling of vulnerability that caused you to mistreat your brothers and sisters was a result of abandoning your Father, of getting a divorce, emancipating yourself from your Source and developing a sense of security from strange behaviors as an orphan.

“Thou shalt not listen to any other voice but Mine. Thou shalt not have any other mind but Mine.” These, at this point, are strange experiences, unfamiliar experiences. But you know what? You’re not going to shift into the actuality of them until you emancipate yourself from dependence upon your brothers and sisters to provide you with something that you already have by virtue of your Birthright, by virtue of what you truly Are.

Once the baby bird finds out that he can have more worms by going after them himself than he can have if he waits for mom to get one for him and one for his brother and one for his sister and one for his other brother, he’s going to go after the worms and to hell with mom [chuckle]. He found he doesn’t need her for that, he doesn’t need to make her function in that way.

Likewise, when you will dare to lean into the holy instant to establish communication with That which is bodyless—That which is not primarily a body—and you have the unfolding experience of the fact that you really are the Son or Daughter of Something Else, that you have a Source that you’re in inseparable relationship with already, a relationship which means that you’re whole, a relationship which means that you’re not subject to sin, disease and death, you will be glad to abandon what the Course speaks of as “special relationships.” And the abandoning of them will not seem like a loss to you at all.

And when that happens, you will apparently become an agent for change in the world, or shall I say, in the orphanage—not that the orphanage will be remodeled and revamped and made more spectacular for orphans to live in—but an agent for change in the sense that you say to the other orphans, “Hey, stop leaning on each other that way. You’re not orphans. Come on out of the orphanage and abandon all of the well-established activities that identify orphanhood—meaning abusing each other, meaning living in a constant state of fear, meaning seeming to be vulnerable, able to become sick, die, experience uncorrectable injury.

“Come on out from that. Stop bickering with each other. Stop trying to communicate with each other, just because you can see bodies, and that means that that’s what you must communicate with. Come out of that mindset and invite the holy instant, utilize the holy instant. Reach to that which is actually in you that is infinity, that is God, that is you in your infinite right Mind, in your infinite Sanity.

“And if it seems scary to you, persist anyway. Just like the baby bird arrives at a point where it must get its worm on its own and persist in it, even though the urge is absolute, it would seem, to run to mom and pester her to death … pester the heck out of her to get her to feed you.”

You will not discover your omnipotence, you will not discover your omnipresence, you will not discover your omniscience until you completely abandon leaning upon external sources for omniscience and omnipotence. But when you do abandon leaning on everything out there, omnipotence will become yours, omniscience—knowing everything—will become yours, omnipresence will become yours.

What will omnipresence mean? Well, it’ll mean peace, because there’s nothing outside of omnipresence to be at odds with it. Omnipresence means everything fits: You fit with everything, everything fits with you, you’re all it and its all you, infinitely. It means everything and more that’s embodied in the word “Home”—everything you can imagine about the ultimate of “coming Home.” It means that and infinitely more.

You know, you’re cautioned not to lean unto your own understanding. And yet, you must, all by yourself, decide to lean into your right Mind—the Holy Spirit—and not renege on that decision, so that the Allness of what you Are might infill you and replace the sense of private, intimate aloneness that you’re having to bring to bear in order not to be distracted by all the input you can get from everything out there, nor the relief that you might feel by being able to make everyone else and everything else responsible.

Hey, baby bird would love to make mom responsible for feeding him for the rest of his life, but he would never come into the conscious experience of what he Is. He’s a bird not a baby. He didn’t show up in order to forever be a baby, a permanent dependent. And neither have you.

So, if you want to see healing, if you want to see the correction of illusions that you are suffering from, you must be willing to do one thing: Don’t pray to have things fixed, still being unconscious yourself of any relationship with God, still not having experienced the holy instant because you never for a moment said, “Father, what’s the truth here? What’s the truth that shows the problem to be nonexistent because my fulfillment has never been altered in any way? What’s the truth?”

If you ask for healing, if you desire healing, you’re going to have to stop listening to other voices than God’s Voice. That means that you’re going to have to stop listening to the voice for fear in you, and you’re going to have to stop letting it ramble, and you’re going to have to stop stoking it with more and more bad news and more and more doubt and more and more personal energy of yours to rev it up. It means that you’ve got to use some self-discipline and stop doing what doesn’t work, stop letting all these voices speak and register with you and cause you to get into a reaction with all of them. It’s hell; plain, pure and simple!

And if you ask for healing, but you’re not willing to change your mind, you’re not willing to change your behavior, you’re not willing to say, “I choose not to listen to these voice’s” and then you stop describing what you’re doing and you ask a question that requires a response. Stop talking about what you’re going to do, what you’re going to need to do, and how things really work to the best of your understanding. Stop it all and say, “Father what is the Truth here.” Open up dialogue and stick with it.

A Comforter was sent to everyone. The Comforter is your right Mind. The Comforter is the Holy Spirit. The Comforter was sent to you the moment you decided to try to be independent and to become a puppet without strings—a real boy in your own right. The moment you abandoned your right Mind, It was held in trust, ever present with you and forever insinuating Itself into your awareness to get your attention and bring you back into your full conscious awareness of what you divinely Are.

All we’re talking about here is you making the choice to let your right Mind back in … by what? Having no other gods before God. Listening to no other voice than the Voice for Truth—God’s Voice. Having no other mind but the Mind that is God. And hanging in there with doing that until you hear. And then invest your trust in what you’re hearing, so that you’re not going and checking with others to get validation. You see?

There comes a point at which the baby bird has to stop going to mother for validation of its ongoingness.

Now, you all know—any of you who have attempted this—that it feels very lonely and it feels like you’re leaving everyone behind or pushing them away, shutting them out, not valuing them. It feels like the opposite of embrace.

Why, the Course talks about holy relationships as well as special relationships, so why not get busy developing holy relationships with each other. Well, any relationship that you develop with someone else, while you’re still not experiencing the conscious connection with God, is just another special relationship dressed up in spiritual finery … “Lookin’ g-o-o-d” … but still false, still not valid.

What the baby bird abandons is a special relationship with the bird called its mother. But the relationship with that bird doesn’t end. Hey, the United States broke away from England, took its independence in the sense of standing on its own ground, being responsible for its own decisions, emancipated itself from its mother country and in the process it ceased to be a dependent and it opened up the door for England and the United States to be brothers, to relate to each other without dependence.

Now, we’ve been talking for quite some time now about where we’re going, what it is that what we’re studying is all about. We’ve been talking about what does it mean today, here, in your daily life. This is what it means: In communication lies salvation.

The communication that constitutes salvation is communication between you and God’s Voice, which happens to be the Holy Spirit, which happens to be your right Mind. We’re talking about That which is One, but seems to be two being brought back into Oneness. And that act has to arise out of some sort of basic self-respect that doesn’t involve abusing your brothers and sisters, doesn’t allow your brothers and sisters to abuse you, does not attempt to engage in communication as though it’s bodies that communicate, and instead finds in the reunion of that which was always One, infinite Brotherhood that has nothing to do with bodies relating to each other, but which has to do with Mind infinitely experienced and infinitely expressed, experiencing its all-inclusive unity and Brotherhood and wholeness and peace and invulnerability and omnipotence and omniscience and omnipresence … and on and on.

Now I want to end tonight with a statement that comes at the end of the Manual for Teachers. Right at the very end there’s a two or three page section called:

After all of this, then …

And this is very important, because it relates most specifically to what we’re reading and what we’re discussing. It says …

I’m going to read it again:

And because guilt always has a partner, fear, it means being released from fear as well. And since guilt and fear, prolonged, cause anger, then it means moving into an arena of being, you might say, in which anger is not only absent, it isn’t even considered, you might say, as a use for manipulation and control.

I’m going to begin again.

Here it is:

Mind you, this is right at the end of the Course in the Teachers Manual, in a little section called:

This little point is the essence of the Atonement and it’s the core of the curriculum.

If you usurp functions that aren’t your own, it’s going to cause fear. When you say, “Father, I’d rather see it my way. Father, I’d rather do it my way,” and you take on functions that aren’t yours, it’s going to do what? It’s going to cause fear. It’s also going to cause guilt and eventually it’s going to cause anger, which will be used as the means for running life miserably.

Now …

[Raj didn’t read this sentence:] The whole world you see reflects the illusion that you have done so, making fear inevitable.

And I’m going to add, and guilt and the need to use anger or feel it for any reason.

Now, it’s important to see this. It’s like these steps bring Reality back into focus for you—for everyone. When you pray for something, that’s what you need to be praying for. When you do the two-step, that is what you’re asking for. When you say, “Father, what is the truth here?” that is what you’re asking for. If you say, “Father, make that mean man stop doing what he’s doing.” “Father, get me a fantastic well-paying job,” these aren’t the questions to be asking. This isn’t what to be asking for. What you want is what answers those questions by perhaps showing that they don’t need to be answered at all because fulfillment constitutes something far more wonderful.

Now, again …

… that you usurped …

[In other words, the escape from fear occurs] when you say, “Father, Thy will be done,” and then you say, “Father, what is Your will?” and you listen until you get the answer even though you would so much love to go ask somebody else what the answer is without having to go to the trouble and the effort of hanging in there with your desire until you get the answer, and entrust yourself to the process and value the answer and dare to embrace it.

It lets your function register with you consciously once again. It lets your invulnerability register with you so that you feel no need for protection and defense. And in the absence of maintaining defense the love that you Are spills out and defines you as you watch it defining you. You see?

And that sits there in a little section called:

The holy instant as communication … the holy instant—period—is as it said, the essence of the Atonement. It is the core of the curriculum.

You will go into the holy instant alone with your own commitment, which the Holy Spirit will have inspired in you in one way or another. And you will persist because that’s the way the Atonement works, that’s the way your coming back into your right Mind works. And it’s really the one and only thing that needs to occur in order to Wake up—no matter how long this book, A Course in Miracles, is, no matter how many words or pages.

At the bottom line, you must stop doing what doesn’t work. You must stop listening to other voices. You must stop listening to your voice, because until you listen and ask for God to reveal to you the Truth, until you ask for the Holy Spirit to reveal to you the Truth, your Real Voice won’t be heard yet. And it’s your Real Voice that you want. And it’s your Real Voice that you are going to determine to listen for no matter how long it takes, whether you can get confirmation from any other source or not.

God insists on your knowing yourself for who you truly Are. And that’s why the Holy Spirit, which is your right Mind, is present to respond to you when you’re willing to lean into It and rely upon It. The Holy Spirit is your right Mind and It is in place in you because you have a Father and you’re not an orphan. And your reconnection with It is inevitable, unavoidable, because you haven’t stopped being what you divinely Are.

Be willing to do the hard work. Be willing to do the diligent, intimate, private work, where you lean into God for the confirmation of your divinity, lean into that place where God’s laws prevail, so that you might have the evidence of it. And do it without continuing to look outside yourself to find out whether you’re doing the right thing.

I love you very much. I love you enough to tell you not to lean on the wrong thing.

And I look forward to being with you all next time.