Teachings of Christ Mind

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

It’s been a while since we’ve met in this way, and I want to start out by saying, “I love you, I love you all.”

I want to say and remind you that you exist in an inviolable atmosphere of Love—the Father’s Love. The Father is the Source and condition of all existence. That means that Love is the Source and the condition of all existence. It means that Truth is the Source and condition … and condition of all existence. And the same is true for Principle, Mind, Soul, and Spirit. The Source and condition … that means that Truth and Love and all of the synonyms for the word God are invariable, as invariable as the Father is. Mind is the Source and condition of all existence.

Now, what this means is that Truth is not a mutual agreement. Love is not a mutual agreement. Life isn’t whatever anybody decides it is or whatever anyone wants to define it as. Truth is eternal, Life is eternal and, as it says in the Bible, “without variableness or shadow of turning ”¹ it, therefore, is dependable. It, because of its dependability, constitutes your security, your invulnerability. Because, in the presence of indivisibility, it is impossible for there to be division, divisiveness, chaos, fear, sin, sickness, and death—it’s impossible.

If the Father, if God, is the Source and condition of all existence, then all existence is an infinite singularity, an infinite indivisibility; therefore, the fact is that, in any given moment, every single one of you is utterly safe, utterly inviolable. And even if you have been convinced that you have been violated by illness, by accident, by abuse, what you divinely are has not been violated, and what you divinely are is Present and available for you to experience instantly because any other perception is an imagination—for lack of better words—a belief. And beliefs have nothing to back them up. Beliefs have nothing to ground them into a state of being Real.

Now, there seem to be a humongous number of distractions from the experience of safety, peace, and invulnerability at the present time. Life, generally speaking, [chuckles] is full of variableness and undependability you might say. That’s the common mutually agreed upon experience. But the message of A Course In Miracles, the blessing of any of the great religions lies in the fact that there is transformation available out of the human condition, out of sin, sickness, death, vulnerability, abuse, and so on. And it’s accomplished by means of a shift of perception, a healing of the mind.

Now, in the Bible, this is expressed in these words: “Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee: because he trusteth in thee.”² Now, one might read that and think, “Oh. Well, that’s a nice religious concept. He’s kept in perfect peace because he has his priorities right, he’s got his mind stayed on the Father.” Well, it has nothing to do with having priorities right in the sense of devotion to the Father. “Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee, ” and then the question is, why? Not because he has his priorities right, but “because he trusteth in thee.”

What that’s really saying is he “trusteth in thee” instead of his own best judgments, his own best thinking. You see? This is the more practical way to understand the meaning. God doesn’t want you to be obedient to Him because he deserves your obedience. He wants you to not be distracted from your holiness, your Sonship by relying upon an imaginary ability to think for yourself and, as a result of thinking for yourself, abandoning your natural inviolable eternal connection with Him. And, as a result of being in a state of denial of the Source and condition of your existence, creating for yourself sin, sickness, death, abuse, fear, vulnerability, and on and on and on. You see?

The focus isn’t so much as being obedient and being a good servant of God; it’s about you’re not doing what causes you suffering, what cause you fear and guilt. You see? This is very important.

Now we will keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on thee. In other words, whose mind is single, who says and lives the meaning of the words, “Thy will not mine be done,” and does it because he trusteth in thee, because he doesn’t trust in his own imagined capacity to judge and think for himself and, thus, be a creator, an independent agent having authority on your own. That independence is an imaginary thought. It’s an impossibility because it’s an alteration of something that already existed. It is a misperception caused by an incoherent use of the imagination that says, “I’m here, I’m conscious, I’m aware that I’m conscious, and I choose to be conscious in a way that’s not normal to me where all I’m doing in acknowledging eternity, acknowledging the Kingdom of Heaven, experiencing everything as it Is because I’m being subservient to God when I don’t have to be.

That divorce is imaginary, but, as we’ve talked about before, the moment a first independent thought was imagined and another Brother or Sister joined with you in a mutual agreement as to that new definition, fear and guilt came into the picture. Well, if fear and guilt doesn’t constitute vulnerability, what does? And that fear and guilt colors every perception you have of the only thing that’s going on—the Kingdom of Heaven, Reality—in which there is no variableness or shadow of turning, no opportunity for differing opinion, nothing with which to influence or motivate brothers and sisters to engage in what seems to be the act of Creativity, but which is just an experience of mortality because it’s an experience of something unreal, the unreality of which will have to end.

And how will it end? Simple. By letting your mind be stayed on the Father, on that which is the Source and condition of you, which brings your Birthright back into place as your conscious experience. And all the misperceptions of the only thing going on will vanish, allowing you to experience Reality, the Kingdom of Heaven as It is, and, thereby, confirm the Father in it as its Source and condition and, in that acknowledgment, take your place as co-creator with God—not originator but co-creator.

What are you here for? It’s a valid question. Are you here to just continue the movement of the wheel of history, the over and over and over and over repetition of the past, of being mortal? Or is it to step off the wheel of history? Are you here to engage in time and process, which of course means no originality? Or are you here to step out of time into the experience of eternity? Well, there would be no such word as “atonement” if you weren’t here to become free of whatever is illusory in your experience.

Well, you say, “My parents and my grandparents and my ancestors all the way back to the caveman, they were born, they grew up, they learned how to survive, they developed skills, they passed those skills on down to their children and their children’s children.” And wow, look what we’ve become. We’ve become sophisticated forms of survival with more effective means to kill or bring the disobedient ones into line with more—how can I put it—with more awful means of disciplining the incorrigibles than ever existed, which involved less process but more suffering for them. Yeah, you’ve come a long way, but you’re still on the wheel of history, and you’re here to get off of it.

A Course In Miracles, the Bible make it clear that the way to step out of time, the way to get off the wheel of history is to abandon your trust in your best independent thinking, not lean on to your own understanding any longer and go within, become still, turn to the Father and ask, “What is the Truth here?” and let the answer come, not from you any longer but from the Source and condition of all existence of You. And, therefore, of your understanding, comprehension, and experience of your Brothers and Sisters and of all Creation.

So, many of you have understood to some degree what’s called for, turning the attention to the Father saying, “Thy will, not mine be done,” and then leaning into whatever the Father’s Will is with benign innocent attention so that it can be revealed to you in the absence of your own busy thinking and register with you as what it truly is according to the Father, who is the Source and condition of what is revealed to you.

Now, the Father will keep you in perfect peace if your mind is stayed on Him. And all of you know the importance of peace, the importance of quieting the mind, which is the first step of the holy instant, the first step of the two-step, which is to shut up. Such a simple thing. It doesn’t take a lot of skill. It’s not complicated. It just means, shut up.

Now, if one has never shut up before, it can take a little practice and a little process called meditation. And, because the “still small voice” of God, is a still small voice in comparison to the chatter of independent thinking, it takes persistence to arrive at a point of becoming still enough to be able to hear the still small voice. And everyone who practices the discipline of becoming still through meditation, through any viable means of becoming still, it can seem that an ever-present condition of listening and hearing is going to be a quiet environment. That it’s going to involve, in effect, being able to go into a private quiet cave, separated from not only the noise of one’s own thinking but the noise of one’s environment.

As a result of doing this, one does learn how to hear the voice for truth, how to hear the Holy Spirit, how to hear me, how to hear and experience the Father’s Perspective. And, as one becomes experienced, familiar—let’s put it that way—with becoming still, listening and hearing, one can begin to assume that the quiet environment will always be essential.

But, this is my main point tonight: The fact is that, when you need to know the Truth that heals, when you need to know the Truth that transforms, when you need to know the Truth that allows you to step out of time in order to experience an instantaneous healing that supposedly—according to the mutual agreements of separated minds—would have to go through a lengthy process of reconstruction in order to experience the Truth that’s needed, you will have to be able to hear it in the middle of the call for Truth, which is very often an emergency. And you can’t say, “Oh. Well, just a moment, I’m going to have to go home, and I’m going to have to go into my room where I always sit to become still because it’s so much easier to be quiet there, and I will listen for the Truth and . .” Well, that doesn’t work because the healing, clarifying answer is needed right in the middle of the call for it, the emergency, or the abusive situation, or the threatening situation, or the disturbing situation.

Right now, on your globe, disturbance is occurring at a level that it’s never happened before. And I mean it in this sense because, of course, the cave men got into the battles with different groups over who was going to be able to have this woman for his own or because somebody was mad at the other group. And they had major conflicts. But they weren’t global.

You live in an age now where communication is globally instantaneous, and everybody knows what’s going on everywhere else and is impacted by the apparent seriousness of it as a total group. And the dissonance is, therefore, really disturbing because the potential is there for so much mutual agreement about the emergency, about the call for healing.

And, because the breakdown of global integrity—whatever there was—because of the feeling of vulnerability, which everybody knows everyone is experiencing, it seems to tear at the very fabric of the capacity to be still enough to hear the Voice for Truth and then to have the courage to voice it. And it can seem as though God and the Holy Spirit have disappeared, when they haven’t. The Holy Spirit is nothing more than your right Mind which is being held in trust while you dally with independent thinking with an imaginary mind of your own that has the capacity to think independently.

You have—each and every one of you have—the capacity to experience the Voice for Truth within you in spite of the disturbance and the apparent substantiality of it because so many are believing it, that it’s hard to imagine that it’s not substantial and that it is simply a misperception believed. It’s nothing more than a belief, but it is a belief that everyone is talking about. It’s a belief that many are saying, “It’s real,” and many are saying, “It’s not real.” But there is such focus and intensity around its consideration that it can seem almost impossible to be quiet enough or in the “proper environment” for listening and hearing and being able to experience a shift of perception that transforms.

Now, the tendency might be to get upset, to be mad because you are faced with a situation that you can’t resolve because you can’t have a quiet enough place to listen. And, if you can’t be in a quiet enough place to listen, you can’t possibly hear the Holy Spirit or me or the Father, even if we want to talk to you, even we want to share the Truth with you. It isn’t true … it isn’t true

If you indulge in being upset because the conditions for hearing guidance aren’t available to you, your very anger and distress will be the only thing keeping you from letting yourself hear. Being angry because the proper conditions aren’t present to hear what will heal the situation is a grievance about something that isn’t true.

If you came upon an automobile accident and there were serious injury and there was blood and there were broken bones and the picture was very distressing, you, because of your unfamiliarity with it, could become very distraught. But a paramedic or a physician looking at the same situation does have peace because it is not unfamiliar, and he knows what’s needed, and so he experiences it without alarm, even though he deals with it very specifically in terms of correcting it.

This is important because everyone today around the globe, when you turn on your television set, when you look on the Internet, when you see bits and pieces of news that are fake one—and true—on your phones, you think that this is all justifiably disturbing instead of simply being something to look at, recognize that, indeed, correction is needed, but you are not called upon to be reactive, to be emotional.

It is exactly this kind of a situation that a physician’s skill is called for. And when you look at the circumstances through all forms of media in your world today—no matter where you are—they are circumstances which call for correction, for healing. And it calls for the clarity that every single one of you has the capacity to experience if, instead of being appalled by the appearance, you simply ask, “Father, what is the healing Truth here? Father, what is the response that’s needed?”

It isn’t time to succumb to the circumstances or the way things appear. It’s time to step off the wheel of history. It’s time to step out of time. It’s time to participate in atonement, by what? Not relying upon your own best judgments and your own best thinking, but by trusting into the Father, abandoning your act of independence that brought on fear and guilt and what you call the vagaries of the human condition.

And you know what? When you look at things that seem to be validly disturbing and you do shut up and you do say, “Father what is the Truth here?” or “Holy Spirit,”—that which is nothing more than my right Mind—“what is the Truth here?” be careful that you don’t think you, because of your experience at listening for guidance and receiving it, can determine what the answer will be.

It’s rather like a child, a toddler throwing up on the carpet, a really foul-smelling vomit. And it’s overwhelming the smell. And you say, “Father, Holy Spirit, how can I overcome the smell?”

And the Holy Spirit says, “Go to the kitchen and get a sponge and moisten it.”

“What? Go into the kitchen and get a sponge? What’s that going to do about the smell? And I need to know how not to be overcome by the smell.”

And the Holy Spirit says, “No, you simply need to clean up the mess.”

“No, no, no, no, I am so disturbed and upset by the smell, Holy Spirit you’ve got to find a way to shield me from being disturbed by the smell. That’s what needs to be transformed.” You see?

“No, it isn’t. Go into the kitchen get a sponge, get paper towels moisten them, wipe it up, clean it up. Get a cleaner, a cleanser afterwards. The smell will be gone.” You don’t have to get rid of the smell to solve the problem. You don’t have to be shielded from the smell in order to clean the mess up. You see?

It’s very easy to think that you know the condition. The quiet cave in the corner of your house, in the comfortable chair where you always meditate. You don’t have to have that in order to clearly know what’s appropriate out on the highway or in the grocery store with the rude cashier or customer. All you have to do is recognize that the conditions don’t need to be perfect. You only need to ask, “What is the Truth here that heals, that resolves the situation.” And then, if the answer isn’t what you expect, you go and get the sponge. Or you do the thing that will actually resolve the problem without requiring the Holy Spirit to deal with the peculiar interpretation you have given to the problem before you will listen to the rest of the answer that will actually solve it.

I want to end by reiterating that God is the Source and condition of all existence. That Love is not only the Source of all that exists but the condition of it. Every single thing, from a blade of grass to a star, is the Presence and manifestation of Love, actually loving everything else in Creation. The Father’s Love reaches every one of you from every one of you, and from every blade of grass and from every needle on a pine tree and from every butterfly, from every bird, everything.

You’re here to abandon the wheel of history. You’re here to abandon time not because it constitutes a major evolutionary step that everyone is ready to make but because, in the absence of trying to do things that have never been done before through the use of your own thinking and imagined authority, you relax back into what a new you you divinely already Are. And in the absence of your self-reliance, you get to see and experience and have restored to you the Kingdom of Heaven that you’ve been in the middle of all along.

Oh, it’s very egotistically satisfying to think, “Wow! I live in a time where I’m at the threshold, and I’m going to be able to observe a major transformational evolutionary step. Wow, how fortunate I am to be here when so many before me aren’t! How special I am.” No. No major evolutionary step, just an undoing of an imagination that one has a capacity, an independent self-originated capacity, to think for one’s self, but, of course, always in tandem with another Son or Daughter of God thinking for him or herself because it takes a mutual agreement.

… which brings me to one last point.

When you go to step off the wheel of history, when you decide to abandon your part in the divorce from the Father in the act of independence—which wasn’t that independent because you had to do it with a brother or sister—when you withdraw your part by leaning once again into the Father with your mind stayed on Him, those who have partnered with you in creating mutual agreements will not be overjoyed. And you will hear objection and all of the mutually agreed upon means that have been developed by the independent ones to coerce and manipulate and control will be brought to bear upon you. And, of course, all of those techniques will be familiar to you because you’ve used them yourself.

And so, the temptation will be there to deal with the coercive invitation to resume independence with your well-established independent skills, when what is called for remains the same: abandoning your self-reliance and letting your mind be stayed on the Father by constantly asking, “What is the Truth here? Holy Spirit, Voice for Truth, what is the Truth here? I am ready to be through with sin, sickness, and death. I’m ready to be through with vulnerability. I’m ready to be through with the feeling of impotence in the face of this global mutual agreement that everything’s going to hell in a hand basket, and we ought to be afraid, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

It’s not true. And the invitation, what can be abusive coercion, to reestablish your place in the mutual agreement that makes illusion seem real will not be able to be used by you as justification for feeling hopeless because it appears to you, or the suggestion is that it doesn’t allow you to have the conditions necessary to experience the peace of your Being, in which the sudden shift of perception can occur that is the miracle that heals.

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