Teachings of Christ Mind

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

Well, how did things go this past week? Were you willing to get involved in your relationships? Were you willing to let the messiness, the time-consuming involvement that happens when you’re involved in a relationship? Did you let them happen without resistance? Did you let them happen without resentment?

Were some of you surprised to find just how much conditioned resistance you were holding within yourselves that not only kept you from accomplishing your goal easily, but illuminated to you that, let’s say, for the past year or two, for some time you have actually prohibited full and meaningful involvement because these conditioned resistances were in play the whole time and you hadn’t noticed—mainly because you weren’t trying to establish or confirm the relationship you were in?

It’s not necessarily an easy thing to look at and acknowledge. And especially because of the conditioning that you’ve been embodying, you have not been the kind and wonderful person you thought you had been being. Simply because you were not being unkind [chuckles] even though you weren’t being kind on purpose, you weren’t being kind by virtue of actual involvement. You weren’t being kind by virtue of taking the time to sense into what your partner or your children or your friends were experiencing. You see?

You inhibit Meaning by being in a relationship independently. In other words, when you’re being in a relationship but acting as though you’re not because your attention is primarily on yourself and the things you think you need to accomplish, and your attention is not on the ones you’re in relationship with so that they become a part of the context in which you engage in your activities which can be independent but don’t need to be. And taking it a step further, need not to be because if the independence is enforced, humaneness—humanity—goes out the window. Which means kindness goes out the window.

Now if you’ve had difficulty, it means change is called for … change on your part. The practice of this wonderful thing called the holy instant, which now might not appear to be such a wonderful thing because it’s going to involve labor, it’s going to involve commitment, it’s going to involve determination to be sensitive which hasn’t been your habit. To be present with the one you’re with, even though it hasn’t been your habit.

To care, initiating care, which it hasn’t been your habit to do, and which hasn’t bothered you because even though that has been absent, you have not been unkind, you have not behaved in a harmful way. Anyone observing you with your partner would say, “It must be wonderful for your partner to be in relationship with you,” even though your partner knows that you haven’t been present with him or her for quite a long time.

Oh yeah, you’ve been physically present, but you haven’t been mentally present. You haven’t been caring. Caring means putting someone else first. Caring means expressing kindness, thoughtfulness, love, attention to someone without their asking for it—providing it because it emerges from you as your valuing.

When you’re doing that, your partner, the one you’re in relationship with, knows you’re present … feels not alone. You see? And this is what is called for. The change of behavior is called for.

That is essential to Awakening. That is the call for every single one who is not Awake now. And it’s a call for actual response. It’s a call for you to engage in enacting affection, love, attention, presence. Not you distracted by a thousand things going on in your mind, but presence. You know that you recognize and value presence when someone else is being present with you.

It’s an experience of wholeness. It’s what you would call a genuine not artificial experience. And it hints of Home. It hints of being Awake. It hints of being once again in your right Mind, therefore constituting an improved experience of Being for you. It is the green light that allows the Movement of Awakening to proceed. And it will proceed when it isn’t objected to, when it isn’t resisted. It’s the Movement of Creation and it moves because it’s the Movement of Creation.

As you unblock that Movement, by changing your habit—by abandoning your habit and caring—it does something miraculous: It causes the scales to fall from your eyes. It causes the mutual agreements that have blinded you to fall away from your grasp. It allows you to let go of them so that they will of their own dead weight, fall away from you. And the material world and universe gives way to the Kingdom of Heaven. Not one thing disappearing and being replaced by something entirely different, but the misperceptions of the one and only thing going on—the Kingdom of Heaven—falls away, dissolves. And what is left is everything you’ve been seeing without the distortion, without the misunderstanding. You see?

The practice of the two-step, the holy instant, is imperative. And that it be practiced in the context of wanting to know the truth about someone other than yourself, wanting to know what there is about your someone else that makes him or her the most significant factor in your Awakening and is the most significant factor in the realization of truth—of what is Real—and being freed from the bondage of sin. Which simply means, being freed from the bondage of the attempt to do something that you can’t accomplish with such commitment that you will never abandon the attempt. You see? Becoming free of that is your Birthright. Becoming free of that is necessary in order for all the misery, all of the sin, disease and death that you encounter to disappear, never to haunt you again.

Now going into the book, you will note that I am not reading in the Sparkly book a paragraph and about two or three lines. It is on purpose. It is imagery that I used with Helen when I was dictating the Course to her, which had meaning to her and to her alone. So we ended up last week with this:

The mistake being, that you want to be divorced from the Father. You want to keep that hidden because you want to forget that you got a divorce from the Father because it’s imperative that you be an orphan who can pull himself up by his bootstraps and become something Real without a Father. You see? So you must keep it hidden or the jig is up! [chuckles] You have no cause to fight for because you’ve let yourself become conscious of the fact that you’re doing something impossible and that you do indeed have a Father and therefore, you have a Birthright—a divine Birthright—a Birthright of wholeness because all that the Father is He has expressed in You as in all of Creation. You see? So you don’t need to try to become something on your own. So:

Just as when correction is completed, the physical universe IS the Kingdom of Heaven without any of the impediments accompanying the physical universe. You see? Now that’s where we ended last time. And now a paragraph and two or three lines further, we continue …

… the Holy Spirit …

Why? Because sin is you not listening to the Holy Spirit. Sin is you not having a relationship with the Holy Spirit. Sin is you not having a relationship with the Father. As a result, there can be no communication of truth that would relieve you of your ignorance and inspire you with the truth about yourself.

… the Holy Spirit …

… your wonderful, imaginative perception …

Why? Because you’ve made it unchangeable. It’s got to be unchangeable so you have something solid to move toward, to accomplish, which is an impossibility, but you’ve got to make it solid to make it worthwhile going for it. And then, you develop a commitment to it and then you look at your experience while you’re ignorant and you feel the fear and the guilt that is ever present with it, and you know that you must compulsively “go for the goal!”

How do you do that? As I said last week, you do it by believing that you will die if you don’t! And that’s enough to frighten you into addiction to the goal. And it’s all fantasy. It’s all bullshit! It’s all nonsense.

And so I say it this way over and over. I say it in many ways over and over so that it will not be as foreign an idea to you. And it will be easier for you to embrace and explore the possibility of, with determination, with commitment.

Making commitment to the truth about yourself cannot become an addiction. It’s very simple. It is sanity, it is stability, it is groundedness embraced and embodied more and more consistently. And that constitutes the return of sanity—not the loss of sanity in uncompromisable addiction.

… by virtue of your very own edict …

… what it is told through your perceptions.

Even though addiction to accomplishing the impossible is what is insane.

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

… the Holy Spirit …

… well, wait a minute … why would you be tempted to believe that sin is real? Wow, because it’s going to bring you this grand prize of independent, self-established, self-worth and reality. That’s why you would be tempted to believe that sin is real and you made up the criteria!

… like every day …

… not only like every day, but like in every involvement with your partner, in every relationship you have with a Brother or Sister…

Look at it. You get a divorce from your Father. You say, “Father, I’m going to ignore you and I’m going to give my full attention to every single thought I have and every single meaning I apply to everything and every single discovery that I have come upon all by myself. And what happens? God, as a Reality disappears from your experience. You, as the Son of God or Daughter of God disappears from your experience. And what you’re left with is an imaginary self which you are expending every last ounce of energy in trying to make Real.

So God and you—the Son of God or Daughter of God that you Are—cannot be Real to you when you are committed to the unreal imaginary self you have created and committed yourself to. That’s what that means.

God is, what would you say, cohesive. God is integrated. God is inseparable.

Fantastic imagination, isn’t it?

I know by this time, after having come this far through the Course with me, it is actually easier to believe you have been mistaken than to believe that the impossible has occurred.

Until you make commitment to embracing the truth about you as being the holy Son or Daughter of God, you have work to do. You have a habit to break. You have a new behavior to bring into play. You are faced with change that can only occur at your own hand. Now the human condition: Your human existence is an example of being in a world created by your own hand. At your own hand you have decided to ignore the truth—to be insane. No one is going to come along and undo what your hand has done because no one has access to that ability. You will have to come back Home at your own hand, by your own decision, by your own commitment, by putting everything about you behind the endeavor to remember who you are by asking God or the Holy Spirit to reveal it to you.

And I’m going to say it the other way around: While you believe in sin you will believe that your reality and your Brother’s is bounded by a body.

… Oh-h … because it gives you such great control …

Now don’t let this be complicated. It’s a very important fact to understand, that before you said, “Father, I want to do things my way, I want a divorce,” before that, the experience of Being was the infinite experience of the Kingdom of Heaven, the experience that all the Father Sees and Knows and Be’s because you’re introducing nothing foreign to it—into the picture. Here in this state of mind, the substance of everything is not matter it is Spirit. It is the energy of Spirit. It is the substance of Love, because Life, Truth and Love are the tools the Father has to work with in expressing Himself.

Now there was no experience of separation even though there was the experience of infinity, and I mean by that, infinite expression, God, I will say, infinitely Individualized, infinitely expressed. But the infinity of Expression implied in no way separation, difference, because since you were not holding yourself separate and apart from the experience of the Mind of God that God placed in you, you experienced the Oneness of your Mind as the context in which the Oneness of infinite Expression actually exists.

And so, infinite Expression did not constitute a means of separating and seeing things distinctly different from each other in the sense of in any way being at odds with each other and therefore, in any way calling for defense or self-protection.

Now this is important. When you said, “Father, I would rather do things my way. I am going to get a divorce. I am going to ignore you completely and devote myself to my own mind,” when you said that, and as we’ve said before, fear and guilt came into the picture and the apparent call for defense swept over the infinite view of the Kingdom of Heaven that had heretofore been undivided, you saw for the first time, differentness, distinctness that constituted foreignness. And the substance of Spirit that constituted the Kingdom of Heaven became to you the substance called matter, capable of decay, death, injury, all things that one needs to protect himself against.

And so the very nature of the Kingdom of Heaven didn’t actually change but became a misperception in your mind. And thus your body became something that made you distinct over and against your Brother or your Sister. You see? And the substance of that body was no longer divine, being the substance of capital “S” Spirit, but matter, capable of injury, capable of decay, capable of dying. You see?

As a result, you could come up with the idea that you believe that bodies can unite, because of course, they’re separate and yet they can unite for opposing reasons. They can unite to bless or they can unite to harm or even kill. You see?

What the body is, as it was misperceived, as it is still misperceived, is a suffering experience brought about through a malicious thought, “Father, I don’t want to see things Your way,” except it was, “Father, I want to use the creative capacities you have instilled in me to do whatever in the hell I want to do.” And indeed, [chuckles] hell is what you created, hell is what you’re experiencing.

So as long as this is your frame of mind …

… you will…

For the belief that bodies limit mind, matter limits mind, and mind is just a matter of synapses, little electrical synapses that occur between pieces of meat in your head … quite, quite imaginative almost science “fiction-ee.”

Whereas, before you got your divorce, the universe in no way implied or provided proof of separation anywhere.

You see? Impossible. And so it hasn’t happened but everyone believes it has and everyone believes they can’t truly be the Sons or Daughters of God and cannot regain the experience of their divine status. Oh-h! Because sin is proving that …

… but it’s only apparently mightier than God when you’ve sniffed the last line of your drug of preference, which is, “I am somebody and I am going to prove it and I am not going to abandon the attempt for any reason.” Again:

Well it’s wonderful that we can even ask that question and have it be fairly understood. Because until someone points out in an intelligent way to you that you are something different from what you believe you are, and manages to express it in a way that makes enough sense that you’re willing to override your convictions as to what is true and what isn’t, that is wonderful. It’s wonderful to be able to say, “Is this humility or madness,” and have you with fairly reasonable mental attitudes say, “I think it’s madness,” and really mean it. This is a wonderful forward step.

Now:

… God’s …

… God’s …

Again, I must remind you, the only thing that seems to make it stronger is the insane presence of energy that comes from the use of the drug of preference that gives an unreal experience of something that seems quite actual and fools you into not abandoning the use of the drug of choice. That’s the only thing.

… indeed, that is the way it seems to be isn’t it? When you look at your Brother or Sister or mankind without joining with the Father first and looking at your Brother and Sister with His Perspective, it does indeed appear that mankind is lost in a web of willful contest that has lost the thirst for humanity, for humaneness, has lost the context in which to engage in the world, which is to do everything in terms of the meeting of human need.

You see? But now you know that’s not what you have to be bound to. Now you know that that was an illegitimate imposition upon the full conscious experience of your holiness.

And that’s why in addition to the practice of the two-step, the holy instant, in addition to that must be the acknowledgment of a holy relationship as being the one and only desirable element needing to be brought into play in order to facilitate and give impetus to the process of Awakening globally, like the falling of dominoes.

Why has its FOUNDATION gone? Because you’re reluctant to pick up your drug of choice and you actually do have a desire to experience what the truth is when you’re free of the effects of your drug of choice. And what is your drug of choice? It is the excitement of attempting to be something all by yourself without a Source.

Your commitment is not one hundred percent full anymore.

That’s the promise. That’s what the Movement does. And that’s the Movement each of you is engaged in as you refuse to indulge in relationships out of habit—unconsciously—and you say instead, “Father, what is the truth here in my relationship? Father, help me to want to be sensitive, help me to want to be present with, without being distracted by the masturbation of my mind with irrelevant illusions and enjoying it. Let me know how to be present with my fellowman, with my partner. Share with me Your Experience of my partner, of my fellowman.”

You look for it longingly, but there’s not the resolve to attempt to create it or bring it to pass. And this may feel depressing as though you have lost purpose. But it’s only the habit attracting you.

… for it …

The thing you’re looking for.

You see? That’s the Movement all of you are daring to engage in. And as I said, it’s the Movement that precipitates Awakening. It’s the Movement that precipitates the shift of perception from a material world and universe to the Kingdom of Heaven that you’ve actually been looking at and misinterpreting.

… what?

That’s what I’m engaging in, releasing you from the belief in sin.

Now as I said in the beginning, you may have found this past week difficult. You may have found yourself having to bring attention that you didn’t wish to bring, or an amount of attention that you didn’t wish to bring—you would have been much more satisfied had you needed to bring less attention—but persist, because it’s the threshold which the Course is facilitating and illuminating. And it’s the fact that your decisions will illuminate by the transformation of your mind wherein you let the Father’s Mind be in you, which is the only Mind there is to be in you.

Wow! Truth is wonderful. Be the place where it finds embodiment. Be the place where it finds expression. And don’t let your belief that all your Brothers and Sisters are bodies with a piece of meat in their head that somehow causes consciousness to occur. Stop looking at them and assuming that they must just be the sum of all of their meaty experiences of being conscious, and that they’re just habits and they can’t help but be what they are because of what they went through as they grew up.

Don’t let this definition of them, which appears to be real when you’ve forgotten that you’re the holy Son of God and your Brothers and Sisters are the holy Sons and Daughters of God who are present to be discerned through God’s eyes as what they truly Are—the visibility and tangibility of the Father’s Will, the substance of which or of Whom is Spirit in every aspect and therefore, it is impossible for them to be conditioned responses stored in meat.

You are all the holy Sons and Daughters of God not bound, period!

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