Teachings of Christ Mind

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

You know, every once in awhile it’s necessary for me to refresh a point … that point being: That you will not understand your way into the Kingdom of Heaven. And to be even more pointed about it, you cannot understand your way into the Kingdom of Heaven.

As I’ve said, you will feel your way in.

Now the reason it’s necessary to remind everyone of this is because you are educated with the purpose in mind of understanding. Why? Because understanding gives you control. Understanding, you think, allows you to function in an orderly manner that has orderly results. Because you believe that the universe functions according to orderly laws, which when understood allow you to be a presence of power—a presence of power that makes you safe. And if you are generous, it’s a presence of power that you can use to help others be safe.

As a result, you find a wonderful book like A Course In Miracles or many other books—spiritual books—and you devour them for the purpose of digesting what is being said so that you might learn and therefore understand.

What does learning mean? It means that something has come to your attention that was unknown to you before and you digest it, you embrace it and you commit it to memory. That’s really what it means. It becomes a bit of information, which when added to other bits of information, constitute an intelligent configuration of ideas that allow you to function in the future dependably, intelligently, successfully and beneficially.

Now, learning is a process that ends up with a result. The result is called, “What you have learned.” And “What you have learned” is a memory—is stored away for future use.

To the degree that you depend upon the learning, to the degree that you live in the present based upon what you learned in the past, you are not present in the moment you are in with innocent eyes. In other words, with eyes capable of seeing the newness of Creation, of seeing what is actually going on instead of the concept you have about what is going on.

This section that we’re beginning to read tonight is difficult to understand because it’s going to explain that you cannot understand your way into the Kingdom of Heaven. It is going to illuminate the fact that in order to understand, you have to abandon understanding.

Now, what makes it more difficult, we could say, what makes it worse is that it makes it very clear that you don’t have a capacity to understand and you must be willing to abandon the idea that you do. In other words, you must arrive at a point where you understand that you are incompetent. Not a pleasant thing to do. Not a thing one would dig into. Definitely something one would avoid—distract themself from.

Now, until you are willing to acknowledge that you in your own right, you as an orphan, as we have been speaking, have no capacity to understand Reality, you have no capacity to grasp your Father’s Point of View—God’s Point of View—because you have abandoned it, avoided it, denied it and disowned it, that’s what causes you to be an orphan or to have an experience of orphanhood when you are actually the holy Son of God.

Until you arrive at the humiliated place of acknowledging that you don’t know, you won’t genuinely ask to Know the truth. Until you arrive at the point where you’re willing to consider the possibility that you don’t know and that you, as puny little you can’t know, not until you reach that point will a miracle occur. Not until that point will the influx of the Father’s Point of View, the truth, enter in your mind and dawn on you. Not until that point will your Sonship register with you. Not until that point will you know that you belong, that you fit in, but not as an independent separate entity.

Now, this section, which we actually started the last time we were together, is entitled:

And I’m going to start back at the beginning and I will do a lot of reading tonight with perhaps not as much talk, at least the part we’ve discussed.

Now, that is not a criticism. That is a fact. You, as you presently experience yourself, do not understand. You as the orphan, the dissociated one, do not understand. But it’s not a criticism. It’s a point to accept as though it is a constructive building block toward an intelligent realization that will remind you of the truth of you because you’ve let the Father reveal your Mind to you which is His Mind, in a manner that registers with you and that you can “understand,” grasp the meaning of without misinterpreting it.

… from your present narrow-minded perspective …

… miracles. But you have done them. But the fact that they were so much more extensive, so much more all-inclusive in incredible ways that you would never have thought to pull together as part of the “miracle.” That’s what demonstrates you did not do them.

Miraculous. What does that mean? You might say it means, surprising—magnificently surprising, not negatively surprising.

Now, there is a tendency to fragment and then to be concerned about the truth of just a little part of the whole. Let’s say that you’re confronted with a problem and you’ve been listening to me and you actually practice the two-step—you hesitate before you act on your best spontaneous memorized judgments and you reach beyond your memory banks and you ask, “Father, what’s the truth here? Father, what needs to be known here?” And then, as you’re listening quite openly, you get the feeling that the answer is going to be far more inclusive than you thought and therefore, probably not understandable.

“Where should I take my wife out to dinner for our anniversary?” And as you begin to listen … wide open … including the possibility of catching a plane and flying to Paris to go to a special restaurant—I mean, that open. And as you listen, you think, “Uh-oh, she’s been having a little indigestion lately and so whoever’s going to answer me, you might better take that into consideration when you tell me where the appropriate place is … Oh-h, and maybe, you know, it might mean we have to get some new clothes for her if we’re going to a really nice place.”

And you begin to fragment it. And the purpose is to pull the answer down to a smaller and smaller size, embracing less and less because it will be easier to understand the little part and by considering all the little factors—all the piss-ant little factors—that you can, rather than listening for the big answer, for the simple answer that the Father knows fits and would bless and would be enjoyed and would make for a wonderful loving anniversary. Instead of that, you try to take care of all the little parts to make sure that they are right. Why? So that your wife won’t be disappointed with you when you say, “I would like to take you out to dinner at such-and-such a place on our anniversary.”

The description I gave could be applied to many things. It’s a tendency that you have to not let in the whole. But guardedly let in the little parts that will build up to the whole.

You know what? It’s an exercise of control. It’s still an assertion of the tiny orphan sense of self. It isn’t an abandonment to the Father. It isn’t really saying, “Father, what is the truth here?” You say, “What is the truth about what she will like? What is the truth about what she won’t like?” You see? Not like, you know, “What is the wonderful truth that we will enjoy beyond anything I could come up with as a result of being careful … careful … careful … careful?”

You see? You want to be the “understand-er.” You want to be the one who has the understanding. You want to be the one who came up with the understanding. You see? You want to keep it to yourself. You want to keep it as a personal possession because then it becomes part of your personal authority in being successful by the intelligent use of your understanding—the intelligent use of your memory banks.

When you listen for the truth, the Father isn’t going to give you an intellectual process. The Father isn’t going to give you a string of words that express certain concepts that will be the answer to that question for all time—forever permanently the answer.

You see, the Father’s answer to everything is Love. I mean by that, that the Movement of Love that the Father Is, has meaning. And the meaning elicits words. It is as though the Movement of Love clothes meaning with words. But the words aren’t the point. It’s the Meaning that’s the point. It’s the Love that has been given form at that point.

But I want you to understand that the Movement of Love is like a breeze that moves through the hills and the valleys and graces the blades of grass or the leaves on the trees or the boughs—the branches of the trees—in different ways. It’s the same Movement of Love with different meanings, because the tweaking of a leaf is not the answer as opposed to the bending of the grass being the answer, even though in both cases it’s the breeze—it’s the Movement of Love. You see?

I may be approaching this obliquely, but I must get past your intellect subtly.

What I’m talking about here has to do with the magnitude of holiness and why you don’t understand the magnitude of holiness. It’s because you’re taking holiness as you might take love—the Movement of Love—and you’re taking the way that Movement drapes itself in words so as to take the words as though they are the point.

You take the word, and like the breeze moving through the hills and the valleys, it’s like the tweak of the leaf. You take the tweak of the leaf as though that movement, that sharpness is the answer. And as a result, you don’t see that it’s the same Meaning as the bending of the grasses—the tall grasses. Because the bending of the tall grasses isn’t the point either. You see?

The minute you focus in on the tweaking of a leaf or the graceful bending of a blade of grass, and you focus in on that, you lose the magnitude. The magnitude of what? Of the breeze … of the Movement that clothes its presence in all of these various, we’re going to say, effects. You see?

The minute you narrow it down to this or that, you’ve lost the magnitude. And therefore, you don’t grasp the magnitude. And when it’s presented to you, you don’t see it. Magnitude is moving. And you say, “Oh-h, it’s a tweaking of a leaf. . ” and somebody else says, “Oh-h, it’s the bending of a blade of grass . .” and you’ve missed what’s actually happening.

Why? Because you tried to understand instead of feel.

Bear with me because this needs to be understood, [chuckle] it’s meaning needs to be grasped so that you will ultimately be willing to abandon the gathering of and the memorizing of “understanding.” You see?

You say, “Oh-h, the Movement of Love is the tweaking of a leaf. And now I know, whenever I see the tweaking of a leaf, it will be Love.” You see, “Tweaking, that’s the Love.” No. The Love is the Movement of Presence that moves kindly, that moves infinitely and is touching everything in every hill and valley in all of the vastness of space and all of the various environments, you might say, of different planets.

Mind you, right now what’s happening? Is it Paul speaking? Is it Raj speaking through Paul? Or is it a Movement of Love that has magnitude? Am I speaking to those of you who have tuned in and are listening? Am I speaking to those of you who, at this moment, are listening to a recording that you downloaded, and is that it? No. While I’m speaking at this very moment, I am speaking wholly. I mean by that, that all of the Brotherhood is experiencing the Movement of Love together with the specific intent of everything I’m sharing. And it is a joyous thing for all of Them to be experiencing.

Mind you, at the same time that all of the Brotherhood, everywhere infinitely, is experiencing the Movement of Love that is specifically identified as me speaking right now, they are also fully aware of all the Movements of Love that everyone of the Brotherhood is engaged in at this moment, infinitely.

So, those of you on your planet who didn’t tune in tonight who never heard of Raj, are blessed by and touched by the Movement—the breeze—of the Movement of Love that I am being. There’s the magnitude. You do not have to understand how it happens. But you do need to know it happens. And you do need to know that letting yourself be the place that Love infills so that you can share it, is much greater than you think. It has magnitude. It is omnipresent.

You may not understand how it works, but I am expressing it intelligently enough for you to dare to experiment, for you to dare to embrace and embody and we’ll say, practice the two-step, practice what I’m talking about, so that you might, along with those you are caring about, be blessed by a miracle—be blessed by healing. And as a result, discover that indeed, miracles happen without your understanding them from the orphan mind-set.

Now let’s continue here:

miracles …

Not as complicated as it sounds. The something in you that does understand is the Holy Spirit. It’s that which is nothing more than your right Mind, which you are currently ignoring in its entirety in favor of having this tiny private selfhood that is a small circumscribed part of the totality of you. You see?

You see, the difference though is, that the orphan you—the orphan that you pretend to be—wants to be the creator of a miracle. And you want to be the creator of a miracle by having an understanding of how things work—a concept that you can endorse by your will, and hold to, and cause to happen. But a miracle only happens when that sense of yourself that tries to accomplish its sense of what a miracle ought to be is set aside—is abandoned temporarily—and you are willing to reach beyond this sense of self that you have of yourself and you ask for that which has greater knowledge than you to reveal it to you.

Now you can ask the Father, but the Father has already answered by providing the Holy Spirit—which is nothing more than your right Mind. And the Father provided it before you decided to be an orphan. You’re not going to get something that you never had before, called your right Mind, you’re simply going to be re-minded, you’re going to be re-introduced to your Mind, to your Wholeness.

And when you do that, miracles will occur. But you won’t ask, “How did I do that?” You will glory in the miracle. You will rejoice along with those who shared in it. And you will not say, “I’d better find out how I did that so I can do it again,” you know, and therefore, create a little bit of knowledge, a little bit of learning that gets stored away for future use. Because you see, the breeze blows, and at this moment the leaf moves that way and the next movement, perhaps it bends like the long blade of grass. You see?

And so, you want to know the truth now, now, now, now. And so you’re going to have to listen, listen, listen, listen, with innocence, innocence, innocence, innocence.

The moment you say, “I’m going to pull this from my memory and use it as the appropriate response now,” you’ve lost innocence. Your mind is not clear, it’s being cluttered by things you’ve collected and the things you’ve collected are like dust on a window that inhibit your seeing clearly, the view—what’s really going on.

You see? You become very committed to the gathering of information and knowledge and understanding and storing it away as though what was the answer yesterday is the answer today … is the answer now, is the answer now, is the answer now. No. The answer is an actual connectedness with now, which is the Movement of Creation as God is being it now—forever fresh.

Now, I know that right now what I’m saying is not understandable to some of you. “I don’t understand it. It doesn’t make sense.” Okay … okay, that’s good. But don’t feel bad about it. Let yourself be in that “not knowing place.” Because in that not knowing place that you accept for yourself—instead of fuss about—you will become susceptible to insight, you will become susceptible to revelation, you will become susceptible to inspiration. You see?

You can understand that in this way: In terms of holograms, because you can have a picture … a holographic picture, where you can see everything in three-dimensional relief and you’re looking at, like a film strip—a large acetate picture. Now, if you take and cut the corner out of that picture and look at it, you’ll see everything that’s in the large picture—in the large hologram, in this little tiny part that you just cut out away from the hologram—the whole is in the part and the part is the whole. You can understand that experientially, but maybe not intellectually.

The point is this: You’re not alone. The point is, that if you’re part of the whole, the whole is in you and you are in the whole and that is why, when you know the truth, when you allow the Movement of Love—the breeze—to move through you and you rejoice in it, all of the Brotherhood rejoices.

And I’ll tell you something else, every leaf, every tree, every rabbit, every porcupine, every thing, even the rocks rejoice. [chuckling] I’ll tell you, the rocks haven’t forgotten the Movement of Love. The rocks haven’t forgotten the magnitude of the holiness of All.

I invited everyone the last time we spoke, to participate in an act of unity in the expression of help for those in Haiti. I invited you to be part of the addressing of a situation through an actual act of giving that you might otherwise have felt unable to be an effective contributor to. “It’s too overwhelming. What can I do—hundreds of thousands of people homeless, hundreds of thousands of people suffering anguish, loss, lack of peace, fear for having no food, fear for after shocks … fear … fear … fear.”

What can you do? Well, as an orphan, nothing. And as long as you see yourself as an orphan, not only will you think you can do nothing, you will be inclined to neglect to do what you could actually do. And that’s missing the whole point.

The Magnitude Of Holiness—I’m going to say the power of the wholeness of Creation—will only be illuminated when Love is expressed, when extension is made. And so the call is for every one of you to get in that frame of mind, I’m going to say, where you feel the rightness of making extension, no matter how incompetent you feel.

The situation has been so grave and so great that not only the people in Haiti feel powerless, but anyone else who cares feels powerless. But I’m going to tell you something: That feeling of powerlessness is the threshold of a miracle because the minute you say, “I do not have the means as a puny little orphan to help in anyway,” and you believe it and you abide with it rather than kicking against the pricks and fussing about it and being upset about it and jumbling up your mind with anger, you will find in that awful sense of incapacity, which feels like humiliation, that you’re actually in a state of humility. And in that state of humility the Father can act, the miracle can happen, the sudden shift of perception can occur, because you in your accepted incapacity, are bringing no force of personal will into play.

This is very important and it has to do with the magnitude of holiness. Because you will not experience the magnitude of holiness until you abandon, and I will say, the inconsequentiality of tininess, even though to you tininess is extremely stimulating and gives you the gumption to get bigger.

It’s happened whenever you cared enough to connect without bringing your will into play for whatever reason. It’s usually accidental. And that’s just fine.

But, please understand, this is not talking about two minds joining as one and sharing an idea that you came up with or an idea that the other fellow came up with independently. It’s talking about sharing an idea together that was insightful, that was what was revealed as a result of engaging in the two-step and saying, “Father, what is the truth here?”

You see? Two little orphans joining with each other doesn’t bring about a link in the awareness of the Oneness of the Sonship. It’s just a partnership of two lonely little orphans. You see?

… because you’ve stopped, you’ve hesitated, you’ve done the two-step, and you’ve asked, “What is the truth here?” …

the Holy Spirit …

listen to this …

the Holy Spirit’s …

… not you, it enables the Holy Spirit to understand it because it’s been a gift without strings from you—nothing to interfere.

Do you see that all the way through this you never arrive at a point where you’ve got a little bit of understanding that gives you a little bit of an edge in the future? No. Right up to this point:

Sort of puts you in second place, doesn’t it? You can carry out His orders. You can carry out His clarity. Yes, that’s the good news. That’s the point. The point is to Know the truth. The point is to not be distracted by the twitch of the leaf or the graceful bending of the grass, but to experience the Movement of Love—the breeze—and know that that’s the Movement of God—the Presence of God. That’s the point.

… not through any skill you have, not through any power—personal, private power you exercised—but that it’s clearly been accomplished only through your willingness.

You see? This is so insulting to the ego. You don’t have to understand anything in order for it to be real. What is real is real whether you understand it or not.

You’re unwilling to believe that the miracle that happened is true. Why? Because you haven’t been able to glean from it the fact that will constitute a little bit of understanding that you can file away for future use, in order to have control and power and stability in your private little selfhood and in the conflicted world you see because of your private stance, even though it’s the Kingdom of Heaven, unconflicted.

Oh, maybe you think it’s real, but it was a fluke. And you can’t afford to go through life waiting for flukes to happen. [Laughing] You need to be able to take positive control through the use of learning. And when you say that, and you identify a miracle as a fluke … oh wow, you missed the understanding that’s there to be had, which was, that understanding has nothing to do with it. And the miraculous—the wonderful, glorious miraculous—that it’s your pleasure to be experiencing, is available to you and your understanding not only has nothing to do with it, you need to stop bringing the intent to understand into the picture.

Again:

It’s a good question.

You claim it all the time. You say, “It didn’t happen.” It didn’t happen in the significant way that I’m talking about. “Oh, it was significant. The transformational healing was incredible, but nothing dependable. At the moment it’s easy for me to grasp that there may be a God. But you know what, it also could have just been the turn of events, fate could have been just stacked that way in this instant.”

And you undermine and undo the miracle. And you keep yourself searching for more understandings that you can tuck away to use in the future.

You see? Oh, I know, you’re willing … you think you’re willing to acknowledge what He would teach to you. But you can’t really dare to honor it fully, because if you’re going to take what He teaches you, you’re going to have to abandon what you’ve learned and what you’ve taught yourself. And that’s going to put you in a position of second-class-citizen who exercises no competence of his own. And that’s awful. That’s unacceptable.

You see? You can accept the tweaking of the leaf and the graceful bending of the long grasses, not as answers in themselves, not as ultimate things in themselves, but as indicators of the presence of the Movement of the breeze—as evidence of the Movement of Love because the evidence is there—which means, because there is a God.

It is so important for you to understand that studying this Course or any other system of religious education is not for the purpose of acquiring knowledge to be stored away as permanent answers. It’s to be used to abandon your committed practice of gathering information so that you might become respectable and all of the other good things an orphan tries to become. And be willing instead to say, “Father, what’s the truth here? Father, help me to feel the Movement of Love that looks like this. Because I know that the Movement of Love is the Meaning, is the Presence of You Being Creation.

“I am willing to abandon my competence as a puny little orphan so that I might come into a clear awareness of myself as the holy Son of God, whose holiness is of great magnitude that embraces and includes everything in All of Creation. I want to have that experience of what I truly already am. And I want to have that instead of what I think I might be able to create as an identity for myself in the absence of being the holy Son of God and in the absence of being holy at all and therefore, in the mental frame of mind in which magnitude cannot be experienced and will not exist because of my infatuation with inconsequential tininess.”

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

And now you know that that was a universal sharing of appreciation and love. Absolutely everything in the universe, because of the magnitude of holiness, was embraced by that expression of Love and felt it whether some parts of that universe were willing to acknowledge and accept it or not. And your Presence, your very Being in this very moment, your existing in this moment is a universal event … as is mine.