Teachings of Christ Mind

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Library of Christ Mind Teachings
The Way of Mastery

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Now, we begin.

And again, greetings unto you, beloved and holy friends. We come forth in this hour to continue our discussion of The Way of Transformation. We come forth in this hour to yet again remind you that all that you think, all that you see, and all that you do is not the result of that which comes to you, but rather, that which comes from you. For always and forever, the world you perceive is uncaused, save by yourself. This is why it is always true that freedom is closer to you than your own breath. That freedom is the reality of your being. That freedom is that which is realized without effort. Freedom is realized when you decide to accept the Truth that is true always:

I and my Father are One.

I Am That Which I Am.

You are Consciousness. You are Awareness. You are that which witnesses, that which experiences, that which pays homage to the one thing that God has created: Christ. Christ, then, means ‘the anointed.’ You have been anointed since before the beginning of all worlds with that which the Father Is: Awareness, Pure Intelligence. You have been anointed with the ability to choose what you would wish to perceive. And thereby imbued with the power to create, you abide–freely–in each moment.

This freedom is completely unobstructed and unchangeable, forever. It is in your freedom that you think what you think, you see what you see, you feel what you feel–even in your third-dimensional reality. At any moment, you are perfectly free to see the radiant beauty of the real world pervading all things, even your own consciousness, just as you are also free to see fear.

In our last hour together we began to explore, by way of analogy, that which has transpired that brought you into the experience of being a spark of the Divine, an aspect of the totality that brought you to the place of the soul. And the soul then condenses, falls if you will, into what you have called your physical world. And there you find yourself, right here and right now, surely the product of the world around you, surely the product of your parents, surely the product of forces beyond your control. And yet, the whole while, you have remained exactly as you are–the witness, pure consciousness, the Self, the seer, as some have called it.

Beloved friends, from the moment…now we are going to speak in this hour specifically about this one life that you’re living now. Beloved friends, in the moment prior to your incarnation, you were in existence, abiding with perfectly clear awareness within a state or quality or dimension of consciousness. Now, it is true that even that was the result of choices made in the past. But again, we wish to speak in this hour of this one incarnation. Now, imagine then, if you will … perhaps you might wish to pause the tape, allow the body to relax. Let go of any gripping in the mind. Let the things that need perhaps to be done to, shall we say, sit on the shelf for awhile, and then continue.

Beloved friend, imagine, if you will, abiding without a physical body and yet having awareness. This should not be difficult, since you do it each night while you sleep. You do it when you ‘daydream.’ It occurs occasionally while making love, while watching your television. In fact, each and every one of you experiences that quality of awareness several times during each and every day, when you ‘forget yourself’–that is, you forget your embodied existence. The difference being that in your world, you ‘come back to your senses’–that is, you come back to embodied existence.

Imagine, though, a state in which there simply is no physical form, and you are abiding as Consciousness, Itself. Oh yes, you have awareness. Oh yes, you have form, but that form of energy has not condensed into the third dimension. You have friends. That is, you have other consciousnesses with which you are in perfect communication. For the vast majority of you, in fact we would say here in this hour, all of you that are listening to this tape as it is first given out, all of you are sufficiently evolved to have come into this life of yours, now, from a state of consciousness that is quite peaceful, quite joyous. Communication with those which we would call as ‘friends’ is unbroken. It is consistent; it is respectful; it is loving; it is free.

As you relax and listen to this simple description, what color, or colors, begin to come to mind? Notice them, pay attention to them. What images seem to fleetingly flow through the mind? Notice them. Pay a moment’s attention to them. For remember an ancient truth we once gave you: You cannot imagine that which you have not experienced, for imagination is the picturing in the conscious mind. That picturing must come forth from something. Mind, as you know it, can only picture what is or has been. It can then, of course, find ways, at times, to bring it back in to the third-dimensional experience, but that does not mean that it is new.

As you were abiding in that state, you were in relationship. Most of you were multidimensionally aware, that is, while you had a predominant color or level of energy, you were aware that you were surrounded at all times by other dimensions. Many of you communicated multidimensionally, both with that which would be called of a higher frequency as well as with that which would be called of a lower frequency. Many of you communicated with beings who were incarnated within the third-dimensional realm.

Now, there was a moment, for each and every one of you, when the decision was made within your consciousness, within your mind, that conditions were appropriate for you to again incarnate. There are many, many factors that attract the soul to yet again condense into physical form, but the chief among these is the perception and thought that there is yet something left undone, there is yet some lesson that cannot be realized save within the physical domain, that there is indeed a purpose that you, as a soul, would yet wish to fulfill.

It is very true that some of you have incarnated because you felt compassion. That is, you looked upon the third-dimensional realm and saw it suffering and yearned to bring Light to this dimension, in which you now find yourself. And yet even this stems forth from the reason, or the perception, that you must do something to correct what is occurring. That is a perception that many of you are aware still runs you. As you look out upon the world, as you look out upon your brothers and sisters, there is this compulsion, this need to get involved, to fix. There is a belief in many of you that if you take no action, that somehow you are belittled, that your sense of identity, your sense of being, is caught up with looking out upon the world, judging what is right and wrong, holding opinions about what ought to be done, and then often trying to persuade others to do it your way.

So, there you are. You are Spirit, and yet you are soul. You are having a relational experience and you are perfectly aware. Time does not quite exist where you are, for time is a unique and peculiar experience that is very much linked to matter or to the body. You abide in a timeless state. As you look upon the conditions, you are also aware of your connection with souls that you’ve known before, that are currently incarnated upon the physical plane. You are aware of, you can sense, the quality of a resonance of their consciousness with yours, that is, with the lessons you are longing to learn. A decision is made in the mind, not forced upon you, whatsoever. In fact, we would share with you that the decision to incarnate need not have ever been made. That is, you are not compelled by some force outside of yourself to come into this dimension. Does that mean that you made a mistake? Not at all. There can be no mistakes in all of Creation.

As you begin to descend, which means to bring your attention to slow its vibration of consciousness down, as you begin to incarnate, you did not so much go anywhere as merely–shall we say–turn your thermostat down, so that the quality of your consciousness, your essence, your soul, began to vibrate at a frequency that resonated with the third-dimensional plane. Your attention, your focus, your desire, began more and more to be focused on one unique, particular set of circumstances. These circumstances are the web of relationship created by the parents, created by the cultural milieu in which they live, the quality of consciousness–that field of energy, if you will, like a spinning vortex, itself a spinning vortex within a larger spinning vortex called the world, itself. And from your place of perception, the world is not solid at all. It’s just another dimension of vibration, and that is all, with its own peculiar parameters.

And so you as soul, you as individuated consciousness, began to descend into incarnation. This cannot occur before the moment of conception in your mother’s womb. Usually it is at that point of conception when you, as a soul, become involved in the very act by which conception occurs. And a new form of life begins to develop within the womb. In that moment, there is a flash, what you might call a quantum leap, and your attention becomes almost entirely fixated on, identified with, the particular quality of energy that is that new birthing of a physical form. You’ve ‘come into body,’ as they say it. Coming into body simply means that you’ve fixated your attention away from all other dimensions and have ‘taken on,’ if you will, the unique and particular and, sometimes, very peculiar parameters involved in that physical form. And what is that physical form made of? Inert matter?–hardly. It is, itself, a web of relationships created by the particular vibrational patterns of the mother and the father.

Therefore, as you come into this world, the very first relationships that you have are with the mother and father, and you know and feel them intimately. For you are now identified with a growing physical form that is, itself, growing out of–like a wave coming out of a particular ocean–it is growing out of the matrix of energies that make up the mother and the father.

Here is also where your ‘struggle’ begins, your struggle to create yourself in the world. Your struggle begins to find yourself. For the majority of you, this process whereby attention is shifted from a different state of consciousness into the physical dimension…for the majority of you, this flash, this quantum leap, this shifting of attention, was so dramatic and required such a shock that you began to forget your connection to Spirit, your realization that you are soul, Pure Consciousness. You began to lose awareness of your freedom. You could call it becoming unconscious, or falling asleep.

Now, the very first universe that you experience within the physical dimension is the experience, or the universe, of the womb. Here, you are in constant, constant communication with all that is passing through the energy field of the mother. This doesn’t mean just the potpie she had for dinner, or the cup of coffee she had in the morning which made your heart race (hmm?). It is also the quality of air that she breathes. But more important than these, the quality of emotional energy that makes up the particular matrix she is experiencing in her own universe. For these things immediately affect the hormonal balances, the flow of chemicals through the physiological system and, at this point, you are very much part of that physiological system. Therefore, you take on, you begin to feel and experience the psychic field of the mother. You are also aware of the psychic field of the father and of any other immediate family members. You are also aware of the energies, any particular dominant energies that are going on within the social structure. Remember we talked before about webs of relationship. You are a field of energy within a field of energy within a field of energy within a field of energy, even in your third-dimensional realm.

Many have used the word imprint to describe this initial state in which you become identified with the physiological form emerging out of the field of energy that is the particular matrix of the mixture of energies of the mother and father. This is where you start. And again, you have done so in order to bring forth what you would call certain lessons. You have done this because of certain patterns held within the consciousness before you turned your attention to this dimension. And again, for the vast majority of you, in fact all of you listening to this tape, that descension, that quantum leap from the realm of Pure Spirit from a different vibrational state, into the vibrational state of the third dimension, was a shock–so much so that your awareness forgot yourself as Pure Spirit.

Now, if the shock at conception isn’t sufficient, it could happen any time during the womb. If there is any kind of trauma for the mother, if there is a physiological imbalance, if it is difficult for the breathing experience, if there is any problem with the flow of nutrients to the body, if the mother is under even occasional acute emotional stress, then you will make an attempt to pull back away from the body, in an attempt to rediscover the realm of Spirit. When you do this, the body of the fetus goes numb, that is, life force is withdrawn from it. And as it grows, the nervous system adapts to the level of life force that is flowing through it, and that is what comes from you and not from another. So that anytime during this period of nine months, you are in a particular universe, you’re having physical experience, not unlike one who is sixty years old in the physical dimension. You are experiencing the sensory realm of third dimensionality. And you are already being deeply influenced by psychic patterns not your own.

Therefore, the journey of awakening requires, from the moment of birth on, the development of certain motor skills, certain verbal skills, certain social skills, so that hopefully, if you’re very lucky, by the time you’re about twenty or twenty-one years of age, you’re ready to start finding out who you are. It is very, very rare for an individual, especially in your cultural time frame, to emerge at the age of ten or twelve or fourteen or seventeen with a deep sense of themselves apart from the parents, the family or the culture. You think you are yourself, but you are really a bundle of reactivity seeking to find approval, seeking to find safety, survival, friendship–in the world. That is, you are already caught up in the perception that what you experience is coming to you from the outside, and that you must, therefore, seek to adapt yourself to it. You are not yet alive.

If you are very, very fortunate, during the time frame of the twenties, you merely experience greater degrees of freedom, greater degrees of making your own decisions and experiencing the outcomes. This can be a very turbulent time. Still, you will believe that you know yourself, and yet you have not even begun to know yourself. And again, this is for the majority.

As you go into your thirties, there is an opportunity now. Spirit begins to speak to you. Situations begin to emerge that require of you deeper understanding. If you’re very, very fortunate, you will have begun to realize the great influence that the parents have had. Usually, this is a state of rebellion. Internally, you will begin to individuate more clearly. The spiritual search often begins in the thirties in earnest. You may have been aware of that earlier in the twenties. Again, this is not a hard and fast rule, but generally, by the thirties, it is time to truly, truly begin to answer the yearning of the soul.

Now, if the egoic consciousness has been fundamentally successful, that is, you’ve found a way to create your survival, you’ve developed what are called the personalities that allow you to interact with the insanity of the third-dimensional human realm, if you’ve had no major calamities or traumas, if you’ve had no major failures, you might continue into your forties with the smugness of thinking that you’ve got it all together. If you have found ways to avoid the fundamental gnawing question:

What is my purpose? Why have I really come to this planet? I am more than just this. I am Pure Soul. I am Pure Spirit. I know there’s more to it than this…

If you’ve been able to successfully keep yourself distracted, that question may not yet have fully arisen.

The egoic consciousness is merely that part of the body-mind that is responsible for keeping you physically alive. It is fueled by the desire for survival, the desire for safety. It wishes to create a certain set of order around you, because through order it can anticipate what will be required to keep the physiological organism functioning.

Now, what occurs is that somewhere along the line, usually very, very early in life, you begin to identify with the egoic mind and include your psychic state, your mental perceptions. The ideas you begin to learn about the world begin to be enfolded in the physiological individual, which is really the home of the ego. The body is the home of the ego, the body-mind, including the brain structure and the higher dimensions of functionality of the body, which is all the brain is, just a higher level of organizational principles and characteristics–to do what? To help the body function.

So a further step of forgetting who you are occurs when you begin to sense yourself as identified with the particular perceptions, the particular belief structures, that are floating around in the higher mind of the body, itself. You have forgotten the soul. You have forgotten Spirit. You’ve become identified as an American, as an Afro-American, as a Caucasian, as a boy, as a girl, as a fan of some sports team, as a lover of ice cream. You begin to take on and create what are called principles, never realizing that the principles often are merely the product, or the outcome, of your social learning from the time you were in the womb, and from the time that you were conditioned by the schooling of your culture.

Many of you have gone so far as to believe that you are an Alabaman, or a Washingtonian, or a Californian, because someone has told you that that’s where you live. And though you’ve never found a boundary upon the face of the Earth that says,

Here is California and here is Nevada,

you have found a sign that someone has created and you have read it, and believed it, and have created an identification with one small aspect of life. Many of you are only now emerging to sense yourself as a global citizen, something that transcends being an American or a Canadian or a South African or a Russian.

So you begin to sense, by what we’re sharing, this process whereby you keep making yourself smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller, taking on psychic patterns from the parents, from the peers, from the society around you. The spiritual path begins when, for some reason, something begins to whisper to you,

This is not who you are. This is not why you’ve come. You’ve come to heal your sense of separation from God. You’ve come to realize the Truth.

Egoic consciousness, then, begins with the shock at the moment of conception that brings your attention to be completely fixated on, and as, the physiological form beginning to emerge from a certain web of relationship. This begins to color your vision, color your understanding. It gives you your unique individuality in the world. As you grow, as you emerge, as you move through certain experiences, you become colored by what you’ve had to do to survive. You become colored by the psychic imprints of those around you. You think you’re thinking your own thoughts, when what is often the case is that you’re merely parroting all that has come into your computer bank, into the brain and into the body.

Now, it is quite true that this all began because there was a resonance between the web of relationships of the parents, and of the society, and where your own unique quality of consciousness was, prior to birth. In this sense, karma can be said to exist. Karma simply means action, the effect of, so that when you drop a pebble in the pond, you create a certain ripple. As long as you continue that ripple, by dropping the same pebble in the pond, you get the same results. And part of those results is the need to be identified with only this vibrational field of energy called physicality.

Until you decide to change the momentum of the ripples you are creating in the depth of the mind, you cannot begin to ascend from the third dimension. The desire to do so is always within you. That is, it may be dormant, but the desire to know God must necessarily be within each soul, since God is your Reality. You have fallen asleep, and at some point, there comes the urge to awaken. When it comes, it is unmistakable. The fireworks may not occur, but a shift happens within your beingness and you know that you can never return to the way it was. You can never again pretend that life is only what you see through the senses.

Now, the soul begins to speak. The connection that was once lost begins to be reestablished. It was never really lost, it was just forgotten, it was suppressed. It became the background instead of the foreground. It begins to whisper in the depth of your being. It comes to you in the form of your dreams. You begin to notice books that you never noticed before. You might wander into your New Age section of the bookstore, not even understanding what compelled you to do so. And there, you pick up a copy of The Jeshua Letters, or A Course in Miracles, or some other such book, that begins to trigger within you a thirst and a longing. A friend suddenly invites you to come to some funny workshop, the kind you’ve never been to before. And yet, when you go, something triggers you, something touches you. Something begins to awaken. You may not notice it, but it actually triggers a physiological state within the body, within what is called the chakra system. The heart begins to stir in its slumber. And the mind thirsts for knowledge, a knowledge unlike any that it has gathered in its identification with egoic consciousness.

The longing to awaken has come. And from this moment, though you don’t understand it, you begin to attract, slowly at first, perhaps stumbling a bit now and then, exactly those situations that will keep prodding you to look deeper. A meditation teacher comes. A prayer group comes that you feel called to join. You begin the process of your study. And a new question is emerging. No longer,

How can I survive?

No longer,

How can I make money? How can I do all these things?

A new question comes:

Who am I?

There may be many forms to it, but the question remains one:

Who am I? What am I? From where have I come? What is life…God? What is God? How can there be anything at all?

These questions begin to stir in the mind. Often they first make their appearance in some form around the age of ten to twelve, as you enter into a stage of life that is your first taste of individuation. That is, you begin to sense that you are–just like when the child was born, it began to sense that it was other than the mother’s body–at around the age of ten to twelve you begin to sense that you are other than the mother/father, that there’s something that wants to think for itself and be for itself. Often those questions will begin to come, that’s the first stirring. Usually, those questions are not attended to. There’s much too much else to do. You still need to learn to think. You still need to learn to drive a car. You still need to learn to balance a checkbook.

Later, those questions occur again, generally in the early to mid-twenties. But again, the momentum is to become established as a physiological being, and so the questions are suppressed. Into the thirties, and most definitely by the forties, those questions begin to press up upon the consciousness. You know how to make money. You know how to balance a checkbook. You’ve done these things in the world. You’ve had sex, you’ve baked cakes, hmm? You’ve thrown birthday parties. You’ve gotten drunk. You’ve done it all, hmm? But something else is gnawing–something else is gnawing.

This is also a point of great challenge:

What will I be committed unto–Love or fear? Will fear run me? Will the very principles that I’ve identified myself with, and have utilized to ensure my survival, my ordering of life–will these things become more important than realizing the Self?

Hmm? Awakening the Christ within. For you see, awakening requires a dismantling of the structures of consciousness by which you’ve been ordering your perceptions of the third dimension. Ultimately, to truly awaken completely requires the dismantling of very subtle, deeply embedded patterns of perception that were already making up the soul prior to your incarnation in this life. The slate must be wiped clean so that all that remains is the Reality of Spirit, with no filament or trace of egoic consciousness left. That is not an easy thing to do, yet it requires no effort, save the effort to Love. Love is the great healer. Love–that which erases the imprints in the depth of the subtle soul.

The patterns that you brought forth with you as a soul are like a magnet, that is, they attract energy states in the physical dimension experience that are resonant with those patterns. Often, when you say you ‘fall in love,’ it’s just that you’ve come into contact with another field of energy that happens to fit, hand-in-glove, with the very patterns of consciousness that you carry in the depth of your being. Old memories of other incarnations are triggered when you visit a certain physical location. And the emotion feels so good and warm in the heart,

Surely this is where I must live on this planet. This is with whom I must spend my life.

Hmm? And yet, all of it is emerging as the result of your karma, that is, the patterns and the effects that have come from those patterns.

Awakening does require vigilance. Awakening requires that rather than merely going with the reactions of the third-dimensional being, you begin to question, you begin to observe, you begin to feel, you begin to think more deeply. You begin to engage yourself in some form of spiritual practice. And whether it be meditation or prayer - or what have you–all of these things are modalities which interrupt the momentum of the soul, which is normally caught up with its third-dimensional experience. You interrupt the pattern of being caught up in the world long enough to sit quietly for half an hour, or to chant, or to walk–you do something in a different way. You’re beginning to turn the momentum of the mind back upon itself. You’re beginning to become self-observant rather than world observant.

Now, for all of you that would like to quicken and hasten that process, the answer is very simple: spend more time becoming self-observant; less time being concerned with what’s going on in the world; and no time blaming the world for your state of being–not parents, not society, not God–but owning. And here is an important word that we will share with you. You’ve heard it many times before, but when you truly reach a point of assuming one hundred percent–all–responsibility for what you think, what you feel, what you see, what you experience, this creates a quantum leap in the other direction, toward self-observation, toward the freedom that you are seeking, toward the healing of the soul, toward the realization of your purpose, toward freedom, toward awakening. Without it, the spiritual journey never quite gets off the ground–you could say almost literally! You never quite ascend, and indeed you cannot ascend, without the assumption of complete responsibility. You must extricate yourself from the psychic enmeshment with other webs of relationship in the sense that you’ve come to perceive that they are causing your decisions. In other words, you must assume power.

You are well aware of those in your third-dimensional reality who assume power. You sometimes love them or loathe them, but they are powerful. Can you assume the same power in your own life? Can you come to look at your beloved, if you’re in relationship, and say:

You know something, this being is not causing how I feel. This being can never fulfill me. This being has nothing that I can extricate from them in order to fill up my sense of lack. I am alone in my journey to God, for I abide alone in God. That is, I’m an individuated spark of divinity. It’s within me. The Kingdom of Heaven is within me. What I am seeking is within me. What fulfills me must come forth from within.

This is why once I said,

If you do not bring forth what is within you, what is within you will destroy you. If you bring forth what is within you, what is within you will save you.

If you do not bring forth what is within you–and what is within you is Love, is Christ–you will feel burdened and unfulfilled. And usually, most human beings go through their entire life with a sense of unfulfillment, lamenting what the world has done to them, lamenting the decisions and choices they’ve made in the past. They become burdened by what is on the outside, along with what is in the past. And eventually the body dies, the spirit withers on the vine. And at death, another quantum leap occurs that is shocking as they discover themselves to be popped back into another vibrational state that often triggers great fear.

Very few beings upon your human plane have entered death consciously. It is indeed time, even for those of you that listen to this tape, to simply make a decision:

I will enter into the transition, called death, with deliberate consciousness. I will make sure, by beginning now, that I carry no resentment, that I have forgiven everyone of everything. And as the body does enter that state, I will release the world and require nothing of it. I will not long to run off in freedom, but I will experience death consciously. I’ll notice the subtle energy changes as I flip from this dimension into another at the speed of Light.

Beloved friends, come to understand, at this stage of our journey together, the true immensity of who you are and what you are. That you are not so much dealing with ‘things’ in the world as patterns of energy that reflect in some way what is already occurring in your consciousness. If you’re experiencing things in the third-dimensional plane, it can mean only that you have chosen to vibrate at a certain frequency–or otherwise, you couldn’t have the experience. You couldn’t have the experience of running into a wall with your body unless you were vibrating at the same rate as the wall.

Is it possible to change the vibrational frequency of the physical body? Listen very carefully. I’m going to say something rather unique. I’m going to say, no. It is only possible to change the vibrational frequency of your consciousness, out of which the body has emerged.

This requires a turning about in the seat of the soul, a changing of the momentum of consciousness–not outward, but inward. Not as an escape from the world–it isn’t something you have to do all day, everyday. But you spend time in prayer and meditation. You spend time in forgiveness. You spend time breathing and relaxing. You begin to allow changes to occur in the choices you are making, so they come more into alignment with your growing understanding of yourself as a creator, as a soul. You begin to change your environment. You paint the color of the walls of your bedroom a different color, that which brings a sense of pleasantness to you. You change your physical environment completely by moving into a different apartment. Many of you know perfectly well that often it means the changing of relationships. And initially, this does make sense.

But there is a point in which you realize that you could keep changing relationships ad nauseum and never get anywhere–that now it’s time to settle down, be with the one you’re with–or the ones you’re with–and yet utilize your time with them to discover what patterns have been running you. Self-awareness…turning the momentum of the mind back toward the Self:

Why do I think what I think? Why did I see what I saw? Why did I react the way that I reacted?

Eventually, the soul that is truly committed to awakening does not flee uncomfortable situations until it believes it has fully extracted all the wisdom that it can. There is a way of knowing when that occurs, and we’ll get to that at a later time. In short, when there is just a quiet sense of peace, and you can look upon the players in the experiences you’ve just had with perfect equanimity and see them as perfectly innocent, and you detect that there is nothing in the body that is not at peace–the heart is not racing, the shoulders are not tight–you truly understand that you are not in fear, then it is time to move on. If there is reactivity in the mind because of anything that emerges in your relationship with your brothers or sisters, rest assured, the lesson is not complete. If your ‘principles’ have been ‘violated,’ rest assured, there is much to be learned.

Remember always, that all events are neutral. And in a large measure, the process of awakening is a process whereby you dissolve the value you have placed upon certain ideas and perceptions of what life is and what life is for. Yes, there are times you will be troubled, as you come to realize that what you thought the world was for, and everything you’ve been putting your energy into, means nothing. Often, this precipitates a period of what has been called by certain mystics the Dark Night of the Soul. It’s really not the Dark Night of the Soul. It’s the Dark Night of the Ego, and the Healing of the Soul.

The Way of Transformation requires utmost personal responsibility, utmost personal dedication. No one can do it for you. And the patterns you feel weighed down by, the fears that are yet within the mind, will remain with you for all of eternity–until you decide to heal them. From that desire you will attract the situations, the teachers, the books, the experiences that provide for you the opportunity to do so. There is an acceleration of the healing process only when you completely release any valuation on victimhood–that is, the belief that,

Somehow, in some way, someone or something has done something to me.

Now, that’s a simple thought to hear, and one can nod their head. It is another thing to look honestly upon your reactions in life to make sure that you are not, at any time, perceiving yourself as a victim. The practice of extending Love can often teach you that this is so. When you take a situation that pushes your buttons, and you decide to not flee, but stay, this teaches you the Truth of your Reality.

This is why the practice of forgiveness is so extraordinarily valuable. In fact, you could say that, ultimately, the practice of forgiveness is the whole of spirituality, since forgiveness means to let the world off the hook, to step out of any sense of victim consciousness, and then even beyond that, to forgive one’s self for the perceptions they have made in error–perceptions of one’s brothers and sisters, of the world, and of God. Ultimately, forgiveness is forgiveness of one’s self for ever allowing delusion to settle into one’s own mind, whereby one perceived one’s self as separate from God, separate from brothers and sisters, capable of being victimized. Forgiveness, when completed, is the establishment of Love.

Beloved friends, look well, then, to see,

Where am I perceiving myself as a victim of the world I see? Am I feeling constrained in my relationship? Do I resent my spouse?

The spouse is not holding you where you are. And that one does not have the power to take from you your ability to look with Love upon her or him.

Is it your job you hate? No one forces you to drive your car upon the freeway to arrive at your place of employment–no one.

Oh, but I must survive!

Then you have made yourself a victim of the perception of the need to survive. Any one of you at any time is perfectly free to drop the valuation you have placed upon the world.

I was once criticized for dropping the valuation that my particular society had sought to implant within me, the valuation that said that a son should follow in the footsteps of the father, that if the father is a carpenter, then you’ve got to take over the family business. I said,

I must be about my Father’s business.

And I spoke, of course, of my Heavenly Father. I had to know the Truth of who I was, and my purpose was to awaken Christ. I broke the mores, the rules, of the family structure within that community, within that time frame. Like many of you, I was a bit of a rebel. And where other children were conforming to the pressures of society, I went off to study with the rabbis and teachers, to sit in the desert at night, often not to return. Even at the age of twelve I separated myself from my parents at the time of a great festival, and went to hang out in my Father’s house and talk with the spiritual leaders.

Are you willing to break with the conventions of the world in which you live? This can be as simple as, instead of gathering with friends to watch movies on Saturday night, you say,

No, I’m going to go into my closet and light a candle and pray…for six hours.

And when they look at you with their eyebrows raised, you simply smile.

In what ways are you conforming to the views others hold of you and their need to have you be a certain way? Do you show up at the aunt’s birthday party just because the family says you always should, yet in your heart you have no desire to? The willingness to trust and follow your heart, not the reactive ego that is often interpreted to be the heart, but the heart that longs to know God–this is a telltale sign of whether or not one is achieving maturity. Beloved friends, look well, in this Way of Transformation, for you must discover any corner of the mind that is yet holding out the view that life is something which happens to you, and that there is something you are helpless to change. The position of being a victim is a position of loss of power. And Christ is not about loss of power. Ultimately, it is not so much about going anywhere, as much as it is about abiding within, realizing that this world is unreal, this world is harmless. And in any situation, it is you with all power under Heaven and Earth to teach only Love.

But that requires, you see, that you let the world off the hook, that no one and nothing is any longer responsible for your joy, your happiness and your peace. For you have established your unity with Spirit, with God. You’ve realized the Self, and you look out with equanimity upon a neutral world. And as this physical universe fades from view for the final time, within you will be no compulsion to avoid it, or to enter it, for you will be free–free even as you walk this Earth. The body moves, the soul does not. The mind thinks, but the depth of the mind is as still as the ocean. You live, yet not you, for Christ dwells in you. And wherever you go, the presence of peace enters the room before you. You are awake, you are free–all because once you made a decision to give up victimhood, and to assume responsibility for learning how, in all situations, to be only the presence of Love.

So, again you can see that we’ve made a bit of a continuation. And we will continue to continue until what has occurred within your consciousness is that you have begun to remember the journey that you have taken.

Turn back, then, toward your creations. If there is anything uncomfortable about your past, turn back to it, examine it, feel it, look at all the patterns that made it come up. Look at the choices you’ve made that, perhaps now, you are embarrassed about. But look not upon them with judgment. Look with curiosity. Learn to look with wonder and the innocence of a child:

Well, that was an interesting decision I made, when I was twelve, to steal my neighbor’s bicycle. I remember how I ended up in juvenile hall. Hmm…what was going on just before I made that decision? What pattern was running me? Oh, my goodness! I was looking to get attention from my Dad. Wow! So the need for approval was running me. How fascinating! How is that pattern running me now? Is there any trace of it left–still needing approval of another?

I say this unto you: Every moment of experience you’ve ever had is available for you, right down to the moment of conception, right down to the quantum leap that you took from a certain vibrational frequency into this physical domain. Self-awareness is everything, for it is the Self with a capital S that you most long to realize.

Beloved friends, we love you, but we cannot make your journey for you. We can only walk with you on the way that you choose. You can utilize your relationship with me and with Shanti Christo to fully awaken. Or, you can come close, and then decide it’s uncomfortable, and run away again. You will only run to another structure or form of energy, a web of relationships, that forces you to stay with what is uncomfortable in order to learn, in order to grow, in order to heal, in order to Love–not as a cursory,

Oh well, yes, I love you.

No–but something done whole-bodily in which there is no longer any reactivity filtering through the nervous system of the body-brain. For the ultimate state of consciousness is not an aversion of this world, but the embracing of this world. There is no greater sense of freedom than to be able to abide where you are as one who is free.

Be you, therefore, at peace this day, beloved friends.

Be you, therefore, at peace always.

Amen.



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