Teachings of Christ Mind

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

You know, there was a reason that something came upon a midnight clear. There was a reason that the Christ child was born. And it was for something more than conveying to everyone that there was a God that loved them while they were experiencing relative misery. There was more reason to it than to make it halfway comfortable without changing the miserable ongoing experience called, “the human condition.”

Everyone has used the Christmas story. Everyone has used my life as a way to make the human condition more comfortable without realizing that the whole point of my showing up was to convey something that would cause an “ah-ha”—a realization that the human condition was not your Birthright and was not what was natural to you and that it was to come to an end. That it was to be transformed—that your experience of being was to be transformed.

You know, I said, “If you have seen me, you have seen the Father.”¹

And I conveyed that “Those things that I have done you would do and greater things.”² Why? A special gift to a poor mortal? No! Because you’re my Brothers and your my Sisters. We are family and we have the same Father. We have the same inheritance. You were not short-changed by the Father while I was given everything.

I came to transform your minds by presenting something that the experiences of your ancestors weren’t able to give you. They weren’t able to give you the steps out of the dream—the steps out of the human condition—and yet, that’s your Birthright. And I came to present you with it … to change your minds.

Now, what we are going to be talking about tonight describes the Christmas Gift … describes the Gift I came to give. It tells you how to step out of the dream. It helps you understand that you’re not bound, and how to step out of the dream.

It wasn’t meant for you to not get the point for two thousand and twelve years. It was meant for you to get the point when I was there—when I was with you on the planet, while I was talking with you. And it is the message that was supposed to get through with anyone who managed to become defenseless enough to hear my voice down through the two thousand and twelve years … so that what? [snaps fingers] you didn’t have to wait until two thousand twelve to Wake up! You see?

The reason I came was to promote change. The reason I came was to help inspire in you the desire to change, and not just continue to repeat your ancestors’ patterns and thoughts and concepts.

Now, if indeed I came to teach you something, it means that you were capable of being taught. It means that you have always been capable of grasping what I am saying. It’s always been possible for you to grasp the Meaning of the Love you are embraced with by the Father. A Love which, when you let yourself feel It, inspires you out of your limited concepts—out of your willingness to just suffer through the human condition with the inspiration that you let yourself have by virtue of thinking about Christmas … thinking about the birth of the Christ … thinking about the things that I said.

You’re not to make suffering more palatable by means of what I shared. You’re supposed to let the things I shared [snaps fingers] lift you out of it—out of the suffering, out the human condition—and into the conscious experience of what? The Kingdom of Heaven and your holiness, that’s what.

And you know what? You don’t have to wait until two thousand twelve to do It. It can be tonight. It can be tomorrow night.

The Gift of Awakening isn’t going to be given to you in two thousand twelve. The Gift of Awakening was given to you by the Father, in His Creation of You. And it was emphasized, it was embellished, it was shared more completely when I joined you, apparently in your dream, and gave you what it took to Wake up. And I’m here tonight and the Course is with you every day, every night for you to refer to and remind yourself.

So let’s remember, you might say, that what we’re going to discuss tonight was the whole reason there was a manger scene … the whole reason there were wise men … the whole reason that there was my life and my teaching and my involvement with my Brothers and Sisters.

This is a holy instant. This is an instant in which the holiness of Being, which it was my purpose to remind you of two thousand eleven years ago. So let’s not let the holiness of the instant we’re in escape us.

Now, just a moment … we’re in a new section called:

Well, without reading, after all the discussions we’ve had together, what do you think the basis of the dream would be? What is the basis of the experience of illusion that you have been taught you are in the middle of?

The basis of the dream is the decision you made to get a divorce from your Father. In other words, the basis for the dream is an imagination that you can exist independently in your own right, coupled with a decision to enact that with commitment. Such commitment, that it caused you to neglect to remember, in other words, to forget your holiness, your Birthright, Who your Father/Mother is, and the experience of the Kingdom of Heaven.

In its place, as we’ve discussed many times, you found the Kingdom of Heaven, which was the only thing available to you to experience … you found yourself experiencing it as the world and universe—the material world and universe—you found it to be all of the definitions you chose to give to it.

And so it moved you into a very active conscious experience that was based in ignorance, that was based in nothingness, which you then filled with the definitions you wanted to give everything because you thought that making those definitions and making them real would make you real in your own right, independent from who you really Were and unconscious of Reality.

Now, that’s the basis of the dream.

In that enactment you seemed to create a duality. Reality was one—the Kingdom of Heaven. And alongside it, an imaginative state of being in which through imagination, meanings were given to everything in the Kingdom of Heaven, while ignoring that it was the Kingdom of Heaven.

So there was the conscious experience of Reality, was one state of Being, and the unconsciousness of Reality as another state of being. Those are the only two choices that could possibly seem to have been made. And it’s Awakening from the two of them back into the conscious awareness of the only one that is Real that constitutes your Salvation.

Doing that is the whole reason that there was a first Christmas. Do you understand?

So, it’s not a complicated problem. The only complexity there is to it is, all of the little intellectual defenses and beliefs and confidences with which you have wrapped up all of your meanings that you have given to the Kingdom of Heaven that make it seem to be something else.

And it’s getting you to release all these little definitions and meanings and convictions and confidences that it is my task to do. And the means of doing it is simple. It’s the two-step, it’s the holy instant.

Therefore, you could say that the whole reason there was a first Christmas, the whole reason the Christ showed up, was to reveal the holy instant as the way Home—as the way out of the dreams and illusions that you were bound by. That’s the simplicity. That is the Message of Christmas.

Now …

… night dreams.

Meaning, during the daytime before you went to bed.

You see? In the daytime when you’re awake in the real world, things happen that make you feel vulnerable, that take advantage of you that hurt you and you can’t seem to do anything about it. But boy, the moment you fall asleep, you have free reign over everything. You can make everything be the way you want it.

… in other words, a tribute to your ego which was outraged by the attack …

… the ego—this one that is looking at everything and giving definitions to it all by himself. You know, it’s not an ego “out there” different from you. It’s just you behaving inconsistently with what you Are and who you Are, ignoring your holiness and defending yourself against all the misery you see when what you’re seeing isn’t embraced by your holiness, but is embraced by the fear you experience because you’re ignoring your holiness. You see?

Really relatively simple. Now…

… that you have at night …

You see? “I’m afraid … I feel vulnerable. And so I choose to see everything as though it’s against me—my wish is to see that everything is against me. But at the same time, there’s something in me that I don’t have a whole lot of control over, called ‘Love.’ And so it wants equality and it wants to generate balance without abandoning the need to assert oneself to protect himself.

So these are conflicted needs which are embraced side-by-side. And there are many extenuations of that.

… in other words, dreams are …

When you compare your daytime life to the dreams you have at night, the dreams at night provide wonderful illustrations of the ego and of how the ego works—how your mind works when it has chosen to ignore its divinity, to ignore your Birthright.

… dreams …

In other words, the reality of your daytime activities when you wake up, it’s so obvious that what happened in the dream outrageously violates the daytime reality, that becomes apparent and frees you from whatever hold they had on you while you were having the dream.

… the dreams are …

… in other words, they are a way for you to look at the world different from the way you’re looking at it during the daytime and suffering from what you can’t control.

… to suit the you who wants to govern and determine what everything is better.

… the dreams …

… reality of the daytime. How do you know it can’t tolerate it? Because at nighttime it changes reality around to make you not guilty, to make you not vulnerable, to put the blame “out there,” to make the conflict seem to be not your responsibility, while at the same time getting justice in your dreams.

During your dreamtime, you change all of the characteristics of the reality going on in the daytime to suit you and to suit your purposes, which are not at all in alignment with your Father or with your holiness.

So dreams provide you … your night-dreams provide you with a clarity about the ego and a clarity about the human condition.

You don’t. Sometimes a nightmare lingers. Sometimes a very fearful experience in the dream lingers. But you know it was a dream. You know it was different from the reality of your being awake during the day.

Let’s understand that.

… the reality of daytime …

… that because it was blotted out in your dreams, it will be gone when you wake up. You see?

Again …

Obviously.

Now pay attention as you read through this because you can understand this and can see the actuality of it. And it’s just a description of the night-dream. Don’t make it more complicated by trying to apply it in other areas. This is a very simple explanation of the experience of dreaming night dreams.

You can make that guy the worst bastard there ever was or the greatest saint there ever was, or any degree in between. And you can even imagine that that one is schizophrenic and he can be the greatest guy one minute and the worst guy the next minute. And you can make anything out of him. You can make substitutions of what he is freely, with care-free abandon.

When you’re having the dream, you do not realize that you are attacking the world you were living in the daytime by determining that it was something different, with different meanings that did not make you guilty of anything, but made you the innocent one which justified trying to achieve justice and make someone else guilty so you would be exonerated, not realizing that the only way to be exonerated from what’s going on in the dream is to have your alarm clock go off or have something in you rouse you so that you wake up on your bed and realize you didn’t need to be exonerated from anything because the whole thing was a dream. You see?

… night dreams, we’re still just talking about simple night-dreaming…

You see? “I’m going to take charge here. I’m going to make things be the way they ought to be!”

What’s the origin of the dream? The origin of the dream is “Father, I’d rather see things my way. Father, I want a divorce. Father, I am going to determine for myself what everything is.” That’s the origin of the dream. That’s the point at which you have convinced yourself that you became the authority and that all the meanings you give to everything are the meanings they have.

… the dream …

Your dreams are never dependable. They’re never stable, they never ever provide a constant unchanging perspective, and when things change suddenly, having no connection with what went before, you don’t even question it.

… which is why you got the divorce in the first place …

You remember that we’ve discussed the fact that the moment you did that, two things came into play: Fear and guilt. Fear and guilt are the flavor of everything that follows. They are the flavor and the context of all of your dreams. You see?

… by giving it your own meanings and definitions …

That you do during the daytime …

… your daily life …

In other words, what you would do to it is not what is fearful to you, even though that is what makes it fearful.

When you said, “Father, I would rather see it myself, I’d rather do it my way, I’d rather give definitions to everything, I want a divorce,” God’s reality became a fearful thing to you because it tended to get in the way of your ability to determine what everything is on your own. And it, coupled with fear and guilt, caused you to perceive your situation as calling for defense on your part against the God’s honest truth—Reality, the Kingdom of Heaven. When you said in response to that, “The suffering I’m experiencing is not because of anything I did, but because of all the fearful things I see going on in the world as I look at it through my independent stance,” you hid from yourself the conscious awareness of what is Real. You established yourself in the state of independence, which is flavored of fear and guilt. And in the blotting out of your experience of what everything truly Is, you made guilt real for you. You made the guilt that was inseparable from independence, substantial and actual for yourself, because you blocked from your view the way out. Simple as that.

Now, these are night dreams. They prove that to you. It happens with every dream you have.

Right? When you’re in the middle of the dream you do not doubt that it is real.

Right? You find yourself in the middle of a world that you are ordering around, that you are creating with your mind and it seems to be outside of the you, you experience in the dream. And it’s a hostile world, which you’re getting the better of, and there’s nothing to stop you getting the better of one way or another, unless you wake up prematurely and don’t have a chance to get justice. [Chuckles] Oh-h-h!

Mind you, we’re still just talking about every night, every day … we’re just talking about ordinary dreams that you experience at night or whenever you’re sleeping and having a dream.

You’d be stuck with the conscious awareness of what was promoting all of this and you would not be able to blame anything else and you would realize that a change in you is what is called for.

Now here’s the key point.

The pieces of the dream that you had at night has not gone along with the dream when you wake up in the morning.

Now I’m adding this: It remains with you because it was present before you went to sleep. It was part and parcel of the way you were experiencing the daytime the day before you had the night dreams. And it’s still there.

Now here’s where the whole reason for the first Christmas becomes crystallized because this is the message that I came to share to promote Awakening out of the dream then—that was the point then. Let that sink in. Because if you realize that that was the point then, you will realize that it is still the point. And you will begin to engage or participate in the meaning of Christmas in a fuller way than you have in the past.

Listen again:

… when you wake up in the morning.

… your daily life …

So it’s saying that you wake up from your night dream and in the daytime when you thought you weren’t dreaming at all, you’re still dreaming. And ultimately what you can glean from your night dream, which is so utterly clear to you as to its meaning, you can transfer to your day dream, which you call normal, awake mentality.

Here is the point of release that could seem to be difficult to accept:

… whether it’s at night or in the daytime. That’s good news because once you accept that, once you consider it as a real possibility, it is possible for you to be spontaneously released from your way of perceiving everything that causes you to suffer and keeps you bound to suffering. And the point is [snaps fingers] the release! And the point of Christmas, [snaps fingers] that first Christmas, was to cause that release!

… your night dream and your day time life, which is actually a day dream.

… and let me say this: Don’t listen to what I’m saying and consider the reality of it and then say, “Wow, I must really be insane! Wow, I’m a lost soul! Wow …” and image all kinds of negative definitions about you that would simply cause you to neglect to take a simple intelligent look, dispassionate look at the nature of a night dream and then consider looking at your daytime activities and see similarities in it and realize that just as there is something to wake up to from your night dream there is something to Wake up to from your day dream! That’s the message of Christmas.

Listen again:

… and what’s a special relationship? It’s a relationship you engage in with another while leaving God out. In other words, it is a focused unintelligent practice which, at the bottom line, hidden out of sight, has as its purpose keeping you unconscious of God, keeping you unconscious of your divinity, keeping you unconscious of your partners or the divinity of the one you’re in relationship with. You see? That’s what a special relationship is. It has, as its bottom line function, the purpose of keeping you absolutely unconscious of what it takes to Wake up. Simple. Don’t let it get more complicated than that. In that clarity it’s easy to change your mind.

That’s destructive! That’s destructive!

The answer to that is the two-step, the holy instant, which is the means of letting in the experience of a holy relationship because you’ve chosen to abandon your independence and say, “Father, what is the truth here? Holy Spirit, help me look at this one I’m in relationship with and remember … not what he did yesterday, not what he did ten years ago, not what his whole family has done to my family for generations, but what is the truth about him now? Help me have the experience of who he truly Is, free of my definitions and confidences and arrogant judgments of him. I want to know the truth. I want to look at him or her and I want to remember God.”

Now:

… and brings it into focus more specifically as you insist on remaining true to the revealing of what is Real that the Holy Spirit brings to you.

Of course:

You see? The human condition: That which called forth the “midnight clear” and the “manger” and the “wise men” … that which brought it forth was that the correction of your divorce from your Father and your insistence upon independence would be corrected and you would be freed of undeserved misery and an undeserved, unconsciousness of your holiness as an experience.

“Peace on Earth, goodwill toward men.” A change of perception, a change of behavior, a change in which you consider and experience your Brother and Sister that doesn’t call on anything other than peace on Earth, goodwill toward men. Goodwill … that thing that happens when you look in your Brother’s eyes and remember God. That’s the meaning of “Goodwill toward men …” toward your Brother, toward your Sister, toward your enemy.

… having been given over to the Holy Spirit by your practice of the holy instant …

Blessed by your getting the Christmas message, by your getting the point today, here, now.

You know, when you see something clearly and when you’re filled with joy, you can’t help but share it, it just happens. And sometimes it’s your lack of speaking, your lack of doing something in a circumstance that another recognizes you ordinarily would have had great reaction with, great volatility and they are blessed because they know the difference and they are glad to have been with you in that moment and not experienced “the old you.”

It’s not a special gift. It’s not something you’re getting exclusively. Man, when you get His gift, when you feel the truth of God’s Perspective, everyone is touched by it. It’s that simple.

For what you give you get to keep. You are blessed by that which you bless others … that you are blessed by having received because you chose to abandon your independence and say, “Father, what’s the truth here? Holy Spirit, help me look in my Brother’s eyes and remember what’s really there—remember God.”

And what if it’s not just you, but you … and you … and you … and you … and everyone doing this?

… or the rest of the Brotherhood who is experiencing the transformation of you.

… the dream, the day dream that you are experiencing as a result of not having fallen asleep at night but as a result of having claimed independence from your Father.

… the day dream …

That’s not strange.

The wish to make a world that is unreal is what’s insane, is what’s impossible to accomplish, making it incredible, not credible, and outlandish.

… when you engage in the holy instant and establish a holy relationship and let it infill you. When you do …

… to make a world that is unreal.

Now, when it happens, you are not sure of this because you think it may be this “the happy dream” when everything seems to be going beautifully and it has new meaning for you.

Because that isn’t clear to you, it’s possible to think that the transition itself is a dream and that you haven’t really begun to Awaken.

… the conditions of Heaven. You’ve let your relationship meet its conditions because you’ve said, “I want to know the truth, Father. I want to have the experience of the Reality, the holiness of my Brother, Holy Spirit. Help me.” You see? When you do that, you are relaxing, you are yielding up your control so that your relationship might meet the conditions of Heaven blessing you, blessing your Brother and blessing everything and everyone.

… where you have grasped the meaning of Christmas, engaged in the holy instant…

… in your relationship. And think about it: If your relationship isn’t exclusive but shared with the whole Brotherhood, then it’s in that universal context that the Holy Spirit has gently laid the real world, and more unity is experienced and more joy is felt because more of the Brotherhood is joined and loneliness, for lack of contact, is no longer being felt by those who were Awake.

… the God’s honest Real world, the Kingdom of Heaven …

What does that mean? It means you are neither behind the point of perfection, nor advancing toward it. You are at that point and must understand yourself therefrom. And that is the meaning of Christmas.

Let it bless this Holiday Season. I love you all. And I look forward to being with you next time.