Teachings of Christ Mind

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

Every year Time Magazine publishes an article entitled, “Man of the Year” or “Person of the Year” or “Woman of the Year.” And emergencies that occur that are handled very well by an individual, they may have a “Man of the Moment.”

And in that vein, I’m going to suggest that each of you ask yourself, “Are you a man of the moment?” Is the you that you present to the world, the “you of the moment” or “the eternal You?”

Are you the “you of the moment” or the “Eternal You?”

Where are your feet planted? Where are you being from? If you’re the man, the person or the woman of the moment, your measuring stick is the moment you’re in and the events that are happening in the moment you’re in. Or it’s the you that you have presented that everybody expects you to be … or it’s the you that you want to project and have everyone believe that you are, and all of it, without being joined, all of it without experiencing your connection with your Source – with your essential Being.

Same old subject, but it’s one we need to continue to look at so as to make it easier and more realistically desirable to shift where you have your feet planted.

The you of the moment is the You of the Now. Indeed, we’ve talked about being in the Now. But you know what? It’s not a matter of being in the intersection of “Now” with “Here.” Here is a place on a timeline as you are used to looking at it. Now is a place on a timeline as you are used to looking at it – a place between the past and the future.

But you know what? The you who is the eternal You is Being in the Here and the Now that is truly identified as your attention – your consciousness. The Here and the Now is the pure awareness that you are before you have a single thought, the You that is conscious of Creation before you have a single thought about Creation, or before you decide to come up with a personal definition of your own about Creation. The Here and the Now is the pure Awareness that you always Are, that you always have been.

And when you plant your feet there, you are in effect practicing the two-step, abandoning the thinking that conceptualizes and seems to give meaning or definition to the pure experience of Being – the infinite pure experience of Being that is called, “Creation Moving.”

That’s what you Are – that’s what the eternal You is. And that’s where, through the practice of the two-step of the holy instant, you plant your feet and make the shift from the “you of the moment.”

Now as the “you of the moment,” every one of you looks for patterns. Even your pets – even the animals – you notice find patterns and follow the patterns. And when you find patterns, you attempt to use them as, let’s say, identification markers for your identity, even when you’re thrown into a new experience that you have no identification markers for and you engage in being in this new arena, we’ll say, of your life. You don’t let it be forever new. You look for identification markers.

It’s like moving to a new town and trying to remember key intersections. And you follow certain paths as you go from place to place and you call that, “becoming familiar,” when all you’re really doing is establishing a pattern of behavior … a pattern of behavior that doesn’t need to be your pattern of behavior because you could pick any of an infinite other number of patterns and use them to identify your being familiar with the new territory.

Do you see what I’m saying?

The two-step – the planting your feet in the eternal Now as the eternal You – means never allowing the infinite Movement of Creation to become bound by identification markers that tell you who you are.

Being consciousness is who you Are – is What you Are. And it’s when you abandon patterns that you’ve used to make yourself feel secure, that you are free to Wake up and to see Creation for what it Is and to Know yourself for what you Are and to see it as unified – all God – all God being All including You. And You, the recognizer of It, the confirmer of It.

How? By not having applied your own definition to It. But having let It reveal Itself to You, not as a concept or memory to be stored but as a present ever fresh Movement of Meaning.

Now, Paul has had an experience for the last thirty some years of speaking with me, and my sharing what I have to say with everyone. And the happening of it as right now – the happening of it is not a matter of fulfilling a concept. Paul has no way to say what he is right now. And what he’s doing isn’t what he is, but as pure conscious Awareness paying attention in the Now of Attention, he finds himself Being this way and has for all of these years.

He is unable within himself to identify himself as, let’s say, a teacher. Because he hasn’t planned any of this, he hasn’t studied for it. What he’s doing and what comes out of his mouth isn’t calculated for a particular purpose that he developed. He is just Being. And yet, others can look and say, “Oh well, he’s a teacher of A Course in Miracles, or he is channeling Jesus, the Author of A Course in Miracles who is teaching what the Course means, or he’s a teacher of God.”

And then regardless of that, as he looks at the last twelve years where every week there has been an ACIM Study Group he could see a pattern there and begin to feel that every gathering, every meeting is going to follow that pattern because it is an ACIM Study Group. And yet, I’ve been throwing him for a curve for a number of months now and have jumped around in the book and have even, as tonight, not read from the book at all, discussing things of great value but not following the pattern.

And many of you, like Paul, practice linear thinking … very orderly linear thinking. And the linear thinking is a means of control – a means of establishing security. After all, if Paul consistently holds A Course In Miracles Study Groups, others can depend upon the idea that he will continue to do that. And so he will suffer from their expectation, or he could imagine that they have that expectation when they don’t, and suffer from not living up to their expectation because of course, it’s important to be consistent because that’s what renders identity in form.

Identity? … wait a minute! Identity is conscious Awareness – Attention. Attention that is non-conceptual, which in the Silence of its capacity to Know, things become Known. And that is the Movement of Creation. That is what being the eternal You means.

Now, what I am teaching, what I am sharing with everyone and have been sharing for a number of months now is for Paul’s education as well. Paul has had to learn because of the way his life circumstances are occurring that he can’t be prepared to let me speak. He can’t be prepared for an ACIM Study Group. And he must come up to the moment we begin to move into that space of the eternal Now and let me speak, let the unfoldment of our Being unfold spontaneously fresh. And he’s having to learn to do this without fear and without doubt creeping in to kibosh the unfoldment.

In other words, he’s having to trust more so than in the past. He’s having to let go control.

And I’m sharing this because it’s something everyone needs to do. It’s part and parcel of Waking up. Part and parcel of Waking up is learning to let go of patterns that you have used to provide yourself not only with a sense of identity, but with a sense of security, safety and power – presence, if you will.

The moment you recognize a pattern, even of a so-called divine activity, the moment you recognize a pattern like that and then attempt to repeat the pattern – keep the pattern going, because that’s normal and because that’s what’s expected of you, you have lost your innocence. You’ve lost the innocence of your attention. Your attention has become clouded by preconceptions, by memory and by goals that have nothing to do with the eternal You. Of course, they have to do with the you of the moment. But you want to get out of the moment. Paul wants to get out of the moment. He wants to become free of the bondage of the structures of the conceptions that he brings into play in the moment.

If you’re so sure what the structures are, then when you enquire of the Father, “what is the truth here,” you are going to expect the answer to conform to the patterns and the identifications that you’re in the middle of, and employing, and valuing. That blocks the eternal freshness and spontaneity that Being actually is. And so you’re not the eternal You. And that which is characteristic of the eternal You is invisible to you, because you’re the “you of the moment,” the “you of the circumstances.”

Your feet are planted in the wrong place, if you want to Wake up, if you want the benefit of the holy instant. If you want the benefit of the holy instant when you say, “Father, what is the truth here?” you must mean, “Father, separate and apart from my best theories and conceptions and everything I know, what is the truth here? What is the truth beyond my best beliefs?”

Last week I phrased it a little differently. I said, “Father, tell me the truth about everything!” Imagine if you will, a cozy living room in the winter, with a fire in the fireplace and a father sitting in a wing-backed chair, with four small children in their pajamas sitting on the floor around him looking up at him, and he has a book in his hand, and the book says, “Fairy Tales.” And the children say, “read to us daddy, read to us!” And now let’s change the title of the book to, “The Truth About Everything,” with the children eagerly saying, “Father, tell us the truth about everything!” You see?

When you practice the holy instant, the point is not to say, “What is the truth here about this awful situation, so I can do something about the awful situation.” It’s not like getting spiritual medication to treat some actual problem. It’s a matter of stepping out of the “you of the moment” and the moment that you’re seeing yourself in, and shifting your attention to the eternal You that you Are and gathering information, gathering the wonderful truth from there, that clears your mind and causes you to stop misunderstanding, which will be accompanied with what you would call “healing,” or the resolution of the problem. But it’s not because you stayed in the world, in the moment and fixed something up there, by virtue of bringing something from the eternal Now into the moment of time. You see? That’s not what happens.

You plant your feet firmly in your divinity. You plant your feet firmly in your relationship with the Father or the Holy Spirit and you ask to know the truth about everything, because you want to Know. You don’t want to be ignorant. And you don’t want to make up answers just so you can feel somewhat secure.

“I want to know the truth about everything.” No, you’re not too busy taking care of problems to give your attention there. There aren’t other more important human problems and conditions to be attended to – more important than wanting to know what the truth is about everything. “Father, speak to me about anything I need to know.”

Do you think your Father would talk about something irrelevant to your clarification of mind and your healing? No. But don’t, in the asking of the question, provide a structure that the Father’s Answers must fill or satisfy, because you don’t know what you need to know, primarily because you think you’re the “man of the moment,” the “you of the moment.” And from there you can’t know what the eternal You Knows. And so, your feet don’t get replanted where your Being is the answer and the resolution of the problem.

Write it down and put it on a sticky note where you can see it:

“Father, tell me the truth about everything!”

… to remind yourself that He Who is your Source Loves you and is intent upon your being the eternal You and experiencing It and understanding It and daring to be from There with Him.

I really have only one task, and that is to, in as many ways as necessary, tell you that you are in the middle of the Kingdom of Heaven, you are in the middle of the Movement of Creation. You are part of It, as with all of Creation you are divine. And you’re not experiencing It as It truly is. And that does not mean you’re insane and that you should be concerned. It simply means that you’re experiencing confusion, which can easily be replaced when you stop accepting all the definitions you’re currently using, and reach out to That which is the Movement that causes all of these things as they divinely are, not as you’re misperceiving them and saying, “Father, tell me the truth about everything! Tell me the truth about this.”

And I must say this, as I said, in as many different ways as possible, to encourage you to dare to risk the chance that doing that will indeed constitute the essential steps of your Awakening. Don’t be satisfied with the miserable way things are. And don’t assume that because there has been a pattern to them that they are actual and substantial.

They’re flimsy, totally flimsy. You give the seeming strength to them by your attention and your belief. But you can do something else. You have the capacity to say, “There must be a different way to look at this. I wonder what it is? Father, tell me the truth about everything! I choose not to ignorantly stay stuck in my ignorance. Father, tell me the truth about everything! I will listen and I will do my best not to coerce Your Answers into the structures of my current, local, finite perceptions.”

The children say, “Father, tell us the truth about everything!” And He looks down at them and says, “Okay, but you’re going to have to expect to hear what you’re not expecting to hear.”

I love you very much. This is the good news. And I look forward to being with you next time.