Teachings of Christ Mind

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

Tonight, I want to talk about how important you are. And I don’t mean that in any grand egotistical way. I mean it in a very grounded essential way.

You’ve learned, among other things, that you are to look into your brothers’ eyes and remember God. And you know what? That’s the ultimate simplicity of Being … It’s the simple ultimate of Being.

You’ve also learned from the Course and from everything that I’ve been saying, that you are co-creators with God. And you know what? That’s not a different activity from what I just described with the words, “Look into your brothers’ eyes and remember God.”

To be co-creators with God means that you magnify Him. It means that you bear witness to God. It means that you look at your brother—you look in his eyes, or you look at your cat and look into her eyes, or you look at the snake in the garden and you look into its eyes and you say, “I have seen God.” Except it isn’t really a matter of just saying, “I have seen God.” It’s a matter of being present with that cat or snake or neighbor in an undefended way—meaning that you’re not bringing along with your intent to see any preconceptions: “Oh, snakes are scary!” “Oh, my brother’s a bastard!” “Oh, my cat is cute but you know what, she doesn’t cuddle very much, she’s not a very affectionate cat. I sometimes have to be careful when I’m around her cause she gets a little feisty.”

That’s not being present with anything with innocence—without a pre-existing agenda for your mode of behavior with whatever it is you’re being intimate with. And when you are coming into relationship with someone with a pre-existing agenda or concept, you are bearing witness to you. You are bearing witness to what you have faith in, which is what you believe. You have faith in your belief about snakes or your cat or your brother.

And you’re not being co-creator with anything because that which has come to these conclusions, you—using your imagination entirely separate from your union with God—are not actual. You’re not a presence that is capable of creating from scratch. All you can do is have an opinion or a skewed definition of something already put in place by the Father in the act of Creation.

This is why you are so important.

You are important because God needs to be witnessed to, in order for Creation to be confirmed—complete! That’s why you are important. That’s why you are essential. That is what gives you Meaning.

You wake up in the morning … you haven’t even gotten up yet, and suddenly you fill your mind with concepts about the day that is ahead of you: “Oh, boy, I hope it isn’t as bad as yesterday. I can’t take any more of this crap! It’s too overwhelming what’s going on in the world, or in my community, or in my family, or in my dis-integrated family!”

There’s no innocence there. There’s an agenda to not have today be like yesterday. You’re caught in time. You’re caught in the past and you project it onto the coming day, but hope that it won’t be the way you are projecting it!

You are bearing witness to yourself!

However, you don’t think of it that way. You think you’re thinking about the world. You think you’re thinking about them—out there!

But you are … you are thinking that you can think about them which doesn’t constitute connection at all and totally inhibits any possibility of communication—of communion … of union … of harmony … of peace.

But you are important. You are essential and the essentialness that you bring into the experience of Being is your capacity, your duty, to be looking for God in what you’re seeing … and persisting until you see God there. Because then you are bearing witness to the Father and being co-creator with Him and that is your Function.

Now, there’s a wave of fear rolling around your globe … well, no, it’s not really rolling around, it’s being pushed around on purpose, for a purpose. And that is to engage you in forgetting your Function: To stop recognizing God in everything you see. And instead, recognize a definition … um … put forward by who knows who? You know, how far underground can you possibly go to find out the depths from which fear is being promoted? But of course, such thoughts only increase fear and distract you even further from your Function. And you abandon your importance.

Now, when you decide to pay attention to your best thoughts, or your worst thoughts, when you choose to pay attention to the best or worst thoughts of others, the light in you has gone out, the divinity of you has been hidden, obscured by a preoccupation of your attention on something that—by giving your attention to—does not confirm God, and actually, at the bottom line, confirms absolutely nothing. I mean by that, the complete absence of anything.

Now, fear is being promoted. In many ways, right now, the bottom line concept which is being promoted is that everybody—the majority of the inhabitants on your globe—are dissatisfied with governments. And there is civil and social and mental unrest. And that it, all by itself, is rising to the surface because it has been pushed down so far, for so long, that it’s just bound and determined to come up. And it’s important for it to come up and be looked at and responded to.

Now, there is fear … yes. There is dissatisfaction … yes. But it isn’t coming from governments. And it isn’t coming from family members and it’s not coming from the community you’re in. It’s not coming from any place “out there” calling for correction “out there.”

The unrest, the anger, the frustration is an automatic accompaniment to each one of you choosing to pay more attention to your thinking than to “shut up” and in the silence of the holy instant, to turn to the Father, to ask of the Father, to experience what the Father is Being and what His Perspective is. So that once the Father reveals It to you because you’ve let It in, a shift of perception occurs in you that allows for you to see God where you hadn’t been able to see God.

The fear, anxiety, tension, dissatisfaction—all of those things arise because it is unnatural for you to think that you can think on your own. To think that you have the capacity to be independent and that your function is not to bear witness to God, but to bear witness to whatever the hell is important to you today, and who knows what it’ll be tomorrow … and by dammit whatever it is today its serious, it means something and everybody better recognize it … until you change your mind and it’s something else. But it will always be something else, and it will always keep everyone and everything off balance, because being unjoined with your Source is a state of imbalance itself.

And so all of your perceptions will be imbalanced and your importance will be out of sight, because out of mind, because you’re not giving your attention to your function, which is to complete the act of Creation by recognizing God in it right in your brothers’ eyes . . and right in the snakes’ eyes and right in the spiders’ eyes and right in the kittens’ eyes and right in the babies’ eyes, and right in the majesty of a four hundred year old redwood or the first blossom of a petunia in Spring. You hear what I’m saying?

I am saying that those who are operating on the basis of the ego—on the basis on independence from the Father—are for their very own selfish reasons, suggesting to you that people of a particular religion or people of a particular race, or people of a certain gender are worth being afraid of. In fact, it is essential to be afraid of them because they are untrustworthy or they are unscrupulous or they are underserving. And that’s the way they draw you in, to an emotional response. And they tell you that the emotional response you’re having is because it was in you all along, before they opened their mouth, and it was just ready to come out and that everyone who is disturbed is so grateful that they’ve been given permission to express it by someone who had enough guts to put forward the idea that it is unjustified to look into your brothers’ eyes and remember God.

And so they fool you into thinking that you have an ally in them when you didn’t even know in the beginning that you were angry for the reasons they have told you, you are. Yeah, you have been angry. You’ve been angry because you’ve been afraid. And you’ve been afraid because you’ve been in competition with God by authoring your own ideas, your own definitions at odds with God. And that makes everyone nervous. Everyone who is engaging in it feels nervous, because you are out of sync with your very own Being.

Now it would be very helpful if, instead of blaming all of this up-rise of anger on societies and religions and politicians and governments, and instead pointed your attention to the withinness of your Being and said, “You know what, no matter how fearful you are at the moment, if you will become still—through any means that works for you—if you will still your mind, you will, in spite of the anxiety and the overwhelm you were experiencing, you will experience peace—the anxiety will actually be gone.”

And in that peace, then, it would be well for you to be encouraged by the hatemongers and warmongers to turn to the Father—to your Source—and say, “Father, what is the truth here? What is the God’s honest truth here? What is Your Perspective? Infill me with the clarity of your Vision which is responsible for Creation and help me to see You everywhere!”

If that were what was promoted, everything would move in a direction of increasing harmony. I mean, actual cooperation globally. Because the problem would be being addressed—the real problem would be being addressed.

You are very important, because it’s your function to be doing this. Not because a position of honor has been proffered to you, but because you are and have been from the beginning, the Son or Daughter of God, the expression of the Creator. And you have been created as that which recognizes the Creator and acknowledges the Creator—confirms Creation—causing the wholeness of Being to have unbroken integrity.

It takes a lot of media … you know, newspapers, magazines, radio programs, television programs, twitter, Facebook, social communication—it takes a lot of media to spread the gospel of fear, to spread the gospel of hate and promote it and arouse it. And then in the face of having aroused it, telling you that all its done is brought to the surface anger that you already had for the very things you’ve been told you ought to be angry about.

That’s manipulation. That is deceit. And you know what? On the scale that it is occurring, it is evil. It is evil because it so completely distracts so much of the Brotherhood from its Function as co-creator and engages it in emotional responses of hate, of retaliation, of anger, of jealousy, and ultimately through the use of force stopping in whatever way it can, anything that might allow for you to rediscover your Function so that you might in the face of all of the turmoil, take a moment—take five minutes to sit down and breathe deeply … and slowly … and meditate and get into your peace. And then choose to find out what the truth is so that you might act on it and in accordance with it because you feel it at the very core of your Being, as the very core of You. You’re very important!

Now, everyone is well aware of the scope of the attempt to influence mankind on your globe. A lot of effort and energy is put into bearing witness to evil—bearing witness to that which does not include God in any way. Every Son and Daughter of God needs to own his or her Function completely enough to decide to bear witness to the Truth, to bear witness to God through the media, through involvement with friends, through involvement in the community, through involvement through social media.

Many of you are very aware of how much time you spend scouting social media and news to find out how you ought to feel, to find out what people are saying, to find out what’s currently “hot” and you read, and you don’t post. You read and you don’t contradict.

Now, I do not mean contradiction in the terms of argument and war. I’m talking about contradicting simply in terms of letting there be space in the media continuum that’s filled with something that’s true, so that those who are surfing for news come across IT and have a chance to be reminded of what is true and to feel something in their soul rise up and say “Yes!”

It is not the time to go into a cave or a closet to bear witness to God by acknowledging Him in your mind. It’s time to bear witness to God in the market place. Does that mean spouting religious talk? Well, in some circumstances that might turn out to be exactly the appropriate thing with the person standing in line ahead of you for three or four minutes.

But more than anything it has to do with speaking in a way that doesn’t confirm the fears and the anxieties and the anger that confront you through the people you know and meet. And instead, with the advantage of practicing the holy instant, being able to share ideas in language that register and lighten the burden and inspire whoever it is you’re dealing with, with the idea that there is another way to look at this … there actually is another way to look at this. Do you hear what I’m saying?

“Oh I know, it won’t work. Things are just too far gone. Everybody’s really just too angry.” You know, somebody can be very angry and very bitter and a hand gently placed on their shoulder with love can reduce them to tears, tears of relief that they don’t even know the reason for, but suddenly the distress and the tension vanished, the flood gates opened. You see?

And it brings us back to the very word I’ve been using for some time now, the word “involvement.” “Oh yeah, I know, look into my Brothers eyes and remember God, [chuckles] man, if that brings about a change, that really will be a miracle.” Yeah, exactly! This is called A Course in Miracles. A Course in sudden shifts of perception, meaning shifts out of one thing into another thing, shifts out of tininess into grandness, shift out of pain into relief and peace, shift out of sorrow into first peace and the feeling of the embrace of love, and then the joy that spontaneously comes forth from that. Yes, don’t forget we are talking about miracles!

And you know what? I said you’re important. Every single human being, every single aspect of Creation is important, because it bears witness to the Father … it demonstrates and confirms Creation.

If miracles aren’t possible, if sudden shifts of perception aren’t possible, then there’s no need for the Book—throw it away. But if the Book actually means something, then I not only encourage you but I challenge you, I charge you with the requirement to give more of your time each day to looking at everything not for confirmation of how bad everything is, but to see confirmation of God right where It seems to be totally absent, because It is there. And the uncovering of It is the whole point of the miracle. It’s the whole point of Atonement. It’s the whole point of the end of illusions.

Now because it’s your function, you are capable of it and the Universal stands behind you, underneath you, around you, above you, in support of the confirmation of God—the confirmation of Creation. So just because you’re not used to this, just because you’re not used to actually implementing it, is no reason not to experiment with it, not to try it with commitment.

Do you have something else that’s more worthy of exploring the possibility of with commitment? Is there anything else that promises what the Truth promises? Then stop arguing for the right to snooze a little longer, or not do it quite yet.

Now, watch out for thinking, because it’s easy to interpret what I’m saying as participating in the war between good and evil. But you must remember the evil is not a power. And so, something cannot war with nothing. There’s no war to it, what there is to it is simply neglecting to do the old any longer … just neglecting to give voice, to give utterance to the voice for fear, and instead listening for the Voice for Truth and then giving voice to it … where? To your brothers and sisters and to your world.

Now although it is not a war and it is not really a contest, I would like to know what the justification would be for the difference between a people standing up in the multitude of themselves against a coup, and a multitude of people standing up in determined intent to acknowledge good, to acknowledge Truth, to give voice to It, to speak It loudly, to speak It persistently, to—well for lack of better words—“fill the dessert full of flowers,” by bringing to the situation that which changes the situation without arguing with the situation.

Everybody says, “What can I do?” Oh well, you’re part of the multitude of those who are conscious and who have the capacity to choose for peace before they look out into the world and make decisions and come to conclusions about it in order to determine their behavior. You’re a part of the multitude who knows how, through the holy instant, or through meditation to move into the place of Silence where the still small voice, where the Voice for Truth, where wisdom of the ages becomes clear to you, is available to you, and becomes that around which you gather your resources to act.

You’re part of the multitude, whether you’re sitting on the toilet in your apartment, or cooking in your kitchen in your mansion, or driving in your Honda down the freeway, you’re part of the multitude of the Sons and Daughters of God who are important, because your purpose and function is to bear witness to the Father and be that which triggers sudden shifts of perception … miracles.

You know, many of you may be long time students of the Course and sometimes you can be such a long time student that some of the fundamentals which registered with you when you first opened the Book are off in the distant past of your memory. And you know what? It’s a perfect time to open up to the Workbook Lessons and reread the first seventeen, because it sets the problem clearly in place. In other words, it describes that which calls for correction and it describes what is the correction.

Now, I’m reading from:

Yeah, you look out and you see a meaningless world. And here they are, the politicians and the officials, and they’re whipping up a storm of antagonism and doubt and fear that seems to prove that the feeling of insecurity you’ve had is because of what they’re telling you the problem is, instead of the fact that you’ve chosen for a while to think for yourself as though you could think on your own, as though you’re an independent entity. And so, you’re convinced that you’re vulnerable, vulnerable to god knows what, from where, because no one is following the rules of war any more, nobody is intelligently [chuckle] fighting.

But the thing that the first few Workbook Lessons make clear are that everything you’re seeing that calls for correction is being formed by that which you’re using to look at everything through—the lens of independence. And you know what? Hidden a few steps behind the wonderful idea of independence, is power. Independence is never beneficent, it’s always to justify power and being powerful.

And so, you’re looking at the world through a lens that causes you to be afraid. The fear is there because you have abandoned your Source, and that is a scary proposition.

Now, coming back to:

… in other words, as not meaning everything you think it means.

“Father, what is the Truth here?” “Well Son, well Daughter, the truth is that when you let the Truth be shared with you, and you no longer feel the need to be the author of it yourself, the experience is one of indescribable happiness. Why? Because you’re Home, because you are fulfilling your function, your purpose, you are being what you were made to Be, you are in complete harmony with the Father, co-Creator of everything the Father is Being. That is indescribable joy.

And there’s the problem.

All the definitions and meanings that you’ve given it, and all the definitions and meanings that others are giving it and trying to get you to believe, it really is as well. Why? So that you might become upset and so that you might become controllable and join in an uprising, not against the primary mistake and the only mistake of thinking for yourself, but against everyone who is thinking for themselves at odds with you thinking for yourself. Is that clear? That is not a solution. That isn’t the way out. And your importance is lost if you get sucked into that.

What you would write upon it.

Listen to this:

And that’s why I say a prayer for you to give is: “Father, let me see the more of what You’re Being than what I’m seeing right here or right there.”

… your definitions, your theories, your mean-spirited attempts to coerce …

That’s the miracle! You see His. You don’t create His, you don’t twist His arm to show you. You don’t go through long educational complicated processes to deserve to know the Truth. It’s simple. The moment you shut up and abandon the word you’re giving, and listen in the Silence, you see the Word God has placed beneath what you applied to It, and the world changes. The world is transformed by the renewing of your mind, which like the domino effect, renews everyone’s mind.

And this is why you are important, not because you are powerful, but because in the simplicity of what you divinely Are, you—when you’re introducing nothing foreign to it—instill and inspire the recognition of the Truth, like the sun coming up in the morning and filling the night sky with light, illuminating everything. That’s just the way it works.

You are the multitude. What you chose to create by yourself or what you chose to let be Created by the Father and accept, determines your experience. One promotes ongoing illusion … and that’s all. But illusions are very uncomfortable, because you’re out of sync with your Being. And that never feels good. Choose to bear witness to your Source … exclamation point!

I love you very much.