Teachings of Christ Mind

Good evening. It is Easter Sunday, a day that is celebrated with joy. But let’s understand something, it doesn’t mean anything all by itself. It only means something in a context, a context that began with my appearing on your globe in an event that was called “a birth”—a virgin birth. And Easter occurs before a conclusion, if I may put it that way, an event which brings the whole context into focus. And so, it’s in that overall context that I’m going to be with you tonight.

In the Bible, John said, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”¹ I have shared before the statement that “the starting point is”—in any situation or circumstance—“the starting point is that God, Spirit, is All-in-All and there is no other might or Mind.” Now, that is the underlying fact. That is, you might say, the context in which Creation occurs. That is the absolute Truth. That is what governs everything.

Now, the saying, the statement, the teaching is that relative to my “birth,” God gave His only begotten Son for the illumination of all of mankind. And I’ve talked about this before. The interpretation is that I was the only one begotten of the Father, totally. But that’s not the fact. That’s not the meaning. The meaning is that I was begotten only of the Father, and I came to share with everyone that that is the Truth about them as well. I am here tonight, I am available to each of you directly in the context of your own mind to tell you that you are begotten only of the Father. That the Father is your Source, and the Father is the condition, and the Father is the mentality of you. You could dare to ask yourself daily, “Am I begotten of my Father, or am I begotten of my own thoughts and the thoughts of others?”

Now, something momentous happened at my birth because it constituted the appearing in human experience as it was perceived to be by everyone. It was the insertion into the human experience of that which broke the lineage that held everyone bondage to the concept of us and them. And it also undid the concept of evolution before Darwin ever conceived of it. Why? Because it shifted the attention from the horizontal to the vertical. The horizontal was everyone relating to each other in terms of lineage, in terms of back and forth communication between bodies on the surface of a globe, all horizontal.

You see, by virtue of it being a virgin birth, one could not claim that I was part of Jewish lineage, humanly speaking, even though Abraham was in the lineage of Mary. But the fact is that that which caused conception was not a Jew, or a Gentile, or any other man but rather the Father. You see? Begotten only of the Father. And so, it broke lineage.

Now, it also, as I said, undid the concept of evolution because my presence was not part of a physical evolution of material elements. Because the starting point of that event was God. That is what made it momentous.

Now, when I was with my disciples, I said to them, as it is related in the Bible, “Let not your heart be troubled.”² This was saying don’t, hang out begotten of your thoughts, begotten of your concerns. Don’t hang out in that private intellectual space where you will inevitably be troubled. Let not your heart be troubled. Don’t hang out there. You believe in God, believe also in me. Why? That could sound quite arrogant. But the reason is, if you believe in me, you open the door for being able to believe in your Self. If you believe that I am the Son of God, and you believe in God, then you have justification for abandoning the material concept of evolution and of lineage and of being transformed.

I continued by saying, “In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.”³ What does that mean? I go … I go to the Father to prepare a place for you. Sound familiar? It illustrates the first part of the two-step, the first part of the holy instant. I go to the Father. I go to prepare a place for you. I go and, by going, provide a path. I am and have been called “the way-shower.” I prepare a way for you to dare to go to the Father, to take the first step of the holy instant.

“And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also.”⁴

Now, this describes normal divine Being, which it is your Birthright to be experiencing. And mind you, the whole reason for my being here in that way was to illuminate you in your divinity to you, so that you might dare to abandon your confidence in lineage and evolution.

If I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again. When you go and prepare a place for your brother by asking of the Father, “What is the truth here? I wish to have no other concept of my brother, my sister, my world than Your perspective.” His, the Father’s perspective infills you, and you find yourself relating to your brother in a new way. In other words, you come again to your brother with the new perspective and receive you unto myself. I no longer see you as Jew, or Muslim, or some defined differentness so that you might see yourself that way as well and abandon the sense of differences by which you control your concepts of others, the way you behave toward them, and the way you allow them or expect them to behave toward you. You see?

Why? So that free of the sense of lineage and of evolution, Brotherhood, as it divinely is, might naturally replace the suffering that has resulted from misperceptions of what everything means.

Now, I said that my appearance and what I came here to teach caused a shift to be able to occur from the horizontal to the vertical and, in A Course in Miracles, it is the holy instant which is the pivot between the horizontal and the vertical. It is something utterly simple … something utterly simple. It’s a matter of abandoning or being willing, at least momentarily, to set aside everything you’re confident about—all of the definitions you have applied to everything or that you have learned from others—to stand in an innocent mind, a mind innocent of preconceptions, with curiosity to ask of that which is the Source of All That Is what the Truth is about All That Is. You see?

When you do that, in effect, you come back, you give your attention to your Brothers and Sisters and your world from that perspective, and that’s the transformation.

Now, the other end, if you will, of this Christmas/Easter story event is the Ascension. That event is the demonstration, if I may put it that way, the, for lack of better words, the physical, the tangible demonstration of the fact that I and you do not actually—and have never actually—existed in time or space governed by the laws of time and space. This was the crowning illustration, if I may put it that way, which is meant to serve you in daring to embrace a function, a capacity, and a Being (I mean that as a verb, not as a noun) a Being that is radically different from the one you’ve been experiencing which has been full of sin, sickness, death, suffering, and so on.

It’s important to give your attention to this, to contemplate it. I told my disciples at another point, “If you have seen me, you have seen the Father.”⁵ And likewise, if I have seen you, I have seen the Father, and if you have seen your brother, you have seen the Father. Now, nobody seems to be behaving that way because few are consistently engaging in the holy instant. But the fact is that, if you are there, if your Brother is there, God is what is there, purely holy Being. And the experience of this is your Birthright. It is your Sanity. It is present for you to experience.

But as we discussed last week, it’s necessary for you to be willing to abandon the confidences you have in your private personal capacity to do things and make things happen. You must be willing to join and participate with the Father in recognizing and acknowledging Creation right here, right now on earth. It is time for Heaven to be experienced on earth because it has always been Heaven. But when you joined with a brother and said, “Father, we want to determine the meaning of everything,” you lost the experience, and you began the horizontal journey, or the horizontal way of being, in which you found yourself governed by time, in which you found yourself governed by space. You call them the “laws of physics”.

But I will tell you something: what you call the laws of physics will always accommodate God, and they will only accommodate God because they are not fixed in the way you have imagined them to be. They flow. Eventually, it will be discovered that the Movement of Creation is a result of the laws of physics accommodating Creation and not forcing It to be what It is.

In the Ascension one would say, I went to the Father … I went to the Father. I had actually already gone to the Father, consistently. It was my way of being with everyone. But in continuing to go to the Father, in continuing to let the Father’s Mind fill me and inform me as to what to say and do and Be, I arrived at a point where I was able—or because the Father Moved for the benefit of everyone—I was able to demonstrate Movement that did not conform to the laws of physics or the behavior of matter. Because there is no matter; it’s all the energy of Spirit conforming to identify the Father’s Will.

And I demonstrated what is absolutely possible for every single one of you. I can come back at any time. You can leave at any time. Death is not essential. Death is no part of it, actually. You see, birth and death are part of a linear process, [chuckles] but, as you’re all well aware, it’s a constant rehearsal of the same thing. It’s Ground Hog Day over and over and over again. So you’re caught in a sense of time that isn’t actual, but it seems quite real when you confine yourself to the horizontal view.

In the horizontal view, you appear to be one among many: many who are good and many who are not good, but one among many. And you must constantly negotiate for your safety because, basically, you’re not safe. And the reason you don’t feel safe is because you aren’t experiencing the groundedness of your Being, which is experienced when you’re not claiming independence, when you are switching to the vertical and saying, “Father, what is the Truth here? Father, what is our joined perspective as I yield to Your clarity?” You see?

And, as difficult as it is to grasp, the fact is that this practice needs to be engaged in every moment of your day on earth, in what seems to be to you, because of your conditioning, a place of lineage, and a place of evolution, a place of physical laws and the constrains of time. But it’s an unreal bondage, and that’s the point.

If you will notice, from beginning (my birth) to the end (the Ascension) one thing was consistently conveyed: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The starting point is that God’s Spirit is All-in-All and there is no other might nor Mind. God is the Alfa and Omega. Being, or allowing yourself to be one with God, does not constituted the end of your identity, the one you have forged and brought up into existence. It constitutes becoming free of a sense of self which was built upon lack of clarity, misunderstanding, a disconnectedness from your Source, and, therefore, a sense of lonely isolation which called for protection.

So, we talk a lot. I have shared a lot about the holy instant, the practice of the two-step, and it’s because it is the pivot between the horizontal and the vertical. My life demonstrated the value of being begotten only of the Father instead of begotten of my best thinking, your best thinking, judgments, imaginations, et cetera. The point is to move you to consciously and conscientiously use your mind in a new way. And what is the new way? It’s embodied in the words, “Thy will, not mine be done.” Thy will be done. There it is in the Lord’s Prayer:⁶ Thy will be done.

Today, Easter is a day to remember to say, “Thy will be done.” What is Thy will? “I yield to You … I yield to You. I am going to abandon self-protection. I am going to abandon self-assertion based upon my limited perceptions. I am going to listen for You and yield to what I am infilled with of the awareness of Reality, right here. And I am going to come back, so to speak, to my brother with Our joined perspective. And I will relate to my brother with You providing the words, with You providing the actions. I will not come to You … join with You … get your perspective and then separate from You and, as an independent authorizer, come back to my brother and deal with him on the bases of what I have acquired—but which I’m not acquiring in the moment—by continuing to be joined with You.” You see?

You need to come back to your brother with the Father. In fact, you need to let the Father bring you back to your brother. And you need to let the Father infill you with the awareness of what to do. And what the feeling, what the divine feeling of it is. This is the only way your brother will be able to be unafraid in your presence. Because when you come back in your own right, independent, your behavior exudes the same crass independent, thoughtless, self-protective attitude that your brother is well familiar with because not only he practices it, but he recognizes it when others practice it, and he will not be able to relax enough to trust and let go.

You’re here to convey, by your very presence, to your brother Let not your heart be troubled. You believe in God, believe also in me. When you are joined and you’re bearing and your presence is one of pure innocence, it inspires faith. It inspires confidence in something beyond acquired protocols and behavior patterns and attitudes that have been developed and used solely for the purpose of self-protection. That’s the wonder of it. That is the reason there was a Christmas and an Easter and an Ascension.

You know, in the human condition when one is working from a horizontal view, there’s always inequity because you’ve abandoned—everyone has abandoned—the awareness of Wholeness, Wholeness that just makes inviolability a fact, not something to be achieved. Wholeness is unchallengeable and that which is Whole doesn’t challenge.

But when you’re in the horizontal view, inequities are rampant; they are perceived everywhere. And as a result, differences become issues and confirm the need for self-defense. “So-and-so has something I don’t have.” Or, “So-and-so took something I did have.” “Jesus had something I didn’t have. He was the only begotten Son of God. He was special. He was a special envoy to help us poor sinners. He was different. Who he was and how he was bear no relation to me, except in terms of developing certain principles based upon what’s perceived and a practice of them because their practice is likely to bring about more harmony than what I’ve been engaged in based upon my own independent thinking and judgment. But, still he had something I didn’t have. He was something I am not.”

And so, you go through your day and your life with certain expectations. You expect not to have the experience that the Christ would have. And in fact, you’re confident that you cannot have the experience that the Christ has had because you are not the Son of God. You have faith in that. To one degree or another, you have faith in that, else you would challenge every single inequity, every difference of quantity and of presence, and you would not settle for it.

But you anticipate suffering and lack because you are a mortal, even though the Course says differently, you are a mortal. You are a mortal, embracing and attempting to embody the Principles that the Course teaches. But you know what? The Course isn’t teaching Principles to be memorized and incorporated into your thought structures so as to create a better life for yourself. They are what the Course is presenting is the call for engaging in the holy instant, in going to the Father, to gather from the Father the facts, the experience of Truth, the experience of Love. And you do it while you’re looking at your brother. You do it while you’re looking at your world or your universe, and you can now see it through the Hubble telescope … incredible!

You do it while you’re looking at what you thought was going on in time and space, governed by time and space. But from the eternal, unlimited, divine perspective of the infinite Mind whose Movement is visible as all of Creation and is your Mind when it isn’t so gosh darn important to you any more to abide in the tiny, mean-spirited, fearful, self-protective frame of mind and mental practices that you have thought were all you had available to you. You see?

The message is that God is All, including you, embracing you, being you. Now, last week, I began by sharing with everyone that I love you. The message of Christmas, Easter, and the Resurrection—don’t ever think of them again independently—the message of Christmas, Easter and the Resurrection is: God loves you. God so loved the world that he presented an insisting event that was meant to penetrate the commitment that mankind was committed to, to trust its own concepts and its own apparent capacity to derive concepts. And as a result of that commitment, stand in the dark, stand blind, as it were, because you can’t see more than what you’re willing to believe. You can’t see what you are confident you can’t see.

So, let’s understand this: Christmas, Easter, and the Ascension all point you in the direction of abandoning the attempt to improve the horizontal perspective of eternity, the linear perspective and interpretation of something of omnipresence. It is not the means of improving the linear experience. Again, it is not the improvement of the linear experience. It is not the constant securing of lineage. It’s not the constant reestablishment of limits and boundaries and differences. It is a willingness to step out of that into your Birthright.

I am going to end by sharing something that I’ve shared before. In Christian Science, it’s a slightly modified form of the daily prayer. It’s something that Paul says at the beginning of each gathering. And it embodies and epitomizes everything that we’ve been talking about.

“Thy will be done. Let the reign, r-e-i-g-n, let the reign of divine Truth, Life and Love be established in me. And rule out of me all self-will. And may Thy word enrich the affections of all mankind and govern them.”

This describes going to the Father and coming back. It isn’t a selfish thing of saying, “Let me be filled with divine Truth, Life and Love and forget about my brother and sister.” No. “Let the reign of divine Truth, Life and Love be established in me. And rule out of me all self-will. And,” here’s the embrace, here’s the coming back to your brother, “And may thy word enrich the affections of all mankind”—Jew and Gentile, Muslim, Buddhist. “And may thy word enrich the affections of all mankind and govern them,” meaning: and govern them as I am letting it govern me, by letting myself be begotten only of the Father.

This is the Easter, Christmas, Resurrection message.

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