Teachings of Christ Mind

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

What’s another way of saying that? The correction of misperception.

And how does misperception get corrected? By providing the conditions in which a miracle can occur. And what is a miracle? A sudden shift of perception. And how do you provide the conditions for a miracle to occur? By abandoning your best judgments, by abandoning your thinking, by becoming still and going within and asking to know the Truth. Asking of whom or what? The Holy Spirit—that which is nothing more than your right Mind. By asking your Guide, or by asking God.

In other words, you provide the conditions for a miracle, a sudden shift of perception, by reaching beyond your memory, by reaching beyond your strongest beliefs, by joining with something beyond the realm of your limited conscious awareness, or the area of your unlimited Conscious Awareness that you have circumscribed and bound yourself to. You provide the conditions for a miracle to occur by abandoning your isolation. And you abandon it by inviting something else in. When you do that and a sudden shift of perception occurs, error is corrected, misperception leaves you, causing you to no longer be looking at your world through the lens of your misperception, and allowing you to see everything through the Eyes of God. In other words, with the capacity to see What Is Truly There with the concurrent or simultaneous awareness that you, who are looking at it, are the Presence of Mind which is the Mind of God. So it isn’t you seeing something awesome where you had seen something quite ordinary in the past. It’s you, being something quite awesome, seeing that which is quite awesome that you had missed before when you thought you were what you believed you were, and looked at everything through that lens.

This section is relatively easy to understand without explanation.

… that which is nothing more than your right Mind …

Again.

Well, where does the correction, where does … where is the error that the ego is trying to correct? It’s always out there in someone else, or something else, or in a circumstance, or in a political system—whatever.

Which involves manipulating your world out there to correct the errors, to correct those who are coming from erroneous places, who are thinking erroneously and behaving badly because of their erroneous perceptions. But that doesn’t fit in, does it, with what I described as the means for the correction of error, because what I described had nothing to do with manipulating anything out there. It had to do with you providing the conditions under which the miracle could occur, the sudden shift of perception in you, the result of which is your seeing with new eyes not bound by your previous concepts and misperceptions.

Again.

Well, we discussed what errors are. They are misperceptions believed by you, by anyone. And the correction of misperception occurs in you by your again providing the environment, the conditions, in which a sudden shift of perception can occur.

You must ask the question, “Where is the error and who is suffering from it?”

If you say the error is out there, causing bad behavior out there which I’m suffering from, you’re already caught in the dream. And you are not providing the conditions under which a sudden shift of perception can occur, which is what will constitute the correction of error. The error lies in the fact that you are not looking at your Brother, or at your world, with God, or with the Holy Spirit. You’re doing it all by yourself in the privacy of your very private definition of yourself—in other words, as an orphan. That is where the error is and that is what the error is. And that is the only place that the error can be corrected that will suddenly cause you to become what could be called an agent for change, a healer.

Indeed, you do have Brothers and Sisters who are suffering from their own misperceptions. And they are behaving on the basis of their misperceptions, their misunderstanding of Who They Are. And they deserve not to be suffering from that, just as much as you.

When you go within and you join with the Father, or the Holy Spirit, and you allow the miracle to occur, the sudden shift of perception within you to occur, you will now not behave toward your misperceiving Brother as though the error is there and you must correct it there. You will be with that Brother, knowing What He Truly Is, because you’ll be seeing something awesome there. And as I said, that vision will be accompanied by the awareness that the Awareness, the Consciousness That You Are, is Itself something awesome.

And the awesomeness of What You Are, and the awesomeness of What Your Brother Is, will cause you not to attack him, not to try to change him, but to be with him in a way that is so utterly benign that he cannot help but feel the Love that he is embraced with, or embraced by, when he’s with you, causing him to feel a level of safety, and even courage to dare to drop his defense. You will be an agent for change because the Movement of Love that will be engendered by you, by your letting it through, will be recognized by him or her. And the invitation for him to put down his defenses will not be perceived as coercion, or as an attempt to correct.

Because remember whenever you engage in attempting to correct a Brother, there is an unstated premise to your attempt, and that is that your Brother is at fault. There is a judgment there and your Brother feels that. And that immediately calls for defense and causes your Brother to see you as a manipulator coming from the same ego place he, or she, is coming from, which means that your motives for manipulation are self-serving to you and that one better defend himself vigorously. This is why the attempt to correct a Brother doesn’t work, and does initiate and bring forth strong radical defense, even though there isn’t a bit of sense to the defense, even though you can see that the defense is insane.

Continuing.

… where? Not in changing the egos of others, but it lies …

And who’s going to relinquish it? The one who sees errors out there to correct. Who’s going to relinquish it? The only one you know about—you.

Continuing.

Now listen to the next sentence.

There is a rather foolish new-age premise that everyone is creating his own reality and no one has a right to override it because it is a gift of God, or from God, to you to be able to create your own reality. That is your function. That is what you’re in this experience for. Therefore, no one has the right to tell you that you are wrong. You have a God-given right to create your own reality without objection from any quarter. That is foolishness.

This can be carried further by those who pick up the Course, who are unclear and think that this is, indeed, supporting that premise, and so one reads and says, “It says, ‘But your task is still to tell him he is right.’” No, he’s not right in his misperception.

But you know what? The key element here is that no matter how your Brother, or Sister, is behaving, in fact no matter how any one of you is behaving, ignorantly based upon misperceptions you have, it doesn’t change the fact that although forgotten by you, you are at this instant the full and Direct Expression of God. It is God who is embodying Himself/Herself right there where you are. And nothing else is present but What God Is Being right there where you are. And the acknowledgement of this is the acknowledgement that you are fundamentally right. Your very Being is right. Your very Being is flawless, innocent, at this moment.

Your behavior doesn’t reflect that fact, and correction is called for there. But your misbehaving based upon your misperceptions doesn’t change What You Divinely Are. And some one of you with everyone else, with every other one of you, must dare to take the radical stand that the one you are confronted by is fundamentally right, is fundamentally the Christ. Someone must dare to look at his Brother, or Sister, with the conscious intent of acknowledging that, instead of continuing down the path of the general misperception that everyone is just a mortal, a product of a sperm and an egg, a physical organism. Or, perhaps a little bit better, a spirit temporarily in a body and appearing to be a material organism. You have to start daring to be radical enough to look at your miserable Brother and not believe what you’re seeing, to contradict it in your mind by acknowledging What Is True.

Now, you have book-learning, you have knowledge, you might say, from having read the Course, from having been with me in these sessions. You have knowledge as to what the Truth about your Brother is. And on the basis of that knowledge, you can break the habit of what you used to think by thinking something new, but that is not all it takes, because that’s not you experiencing What Is True. But if you will abide with the knowledge you have gained and be with it, rather than being in a constant state of reaction to your Brother’s bad behavior, you will provide the conditions under which a miracle can occur in you, the conditions under which you will suddenly find yourself relinquishing the ego—your ego. And that’s the point at which you become an agent for change and healing can begin to occur.

Continuing.

You understand the difference here? It doesn’t mean that you look at him and at his behavior and at what he’s saying and you say, “Yes, that’s right. That’s right. You have the right to create your own reality, and you’re doing quite a job of it. And you’re right.” No.

Your task is still to tell him he, the Divine One That He Is, is right. And the Divine One That He Is that is right is present at the very moment that you’re saying it, in spite of his ignorant behavior. You dare to take the radical stand of acknowledging What Is True About Him right when he is behaving badly.

Now listen.

You see? The level at which the change has to occur is within him where he’s willing to make a shift in his perception as to What He Is, not just a tentative and short-lived physical organism, but as an Eternal Presence of Mind that is God Being Himself right there where that Mind is. Period.

Holy Spirit—that which is nothing more than your right Mind. Your right Mind does not perceive your Brother’s errors.

So if you’re seeing errors to be corrected, you’re not seeing through anything other than your very own ego. And you’re not in a position to be an actual agent for change. You’re only in a position to exert more force, more apparent power, than the strength of your Brother’s conviction as to his way of looking at things and causing him for self-preservation to yield to the force that you bring to bear upon him. But both of you are still totally ignorant of What You Are, and there is nothing present to be an agent for change. No healer/healing present or possible.

Again.

Why isn’t there any communication at all between the ego and the Holy Spirit? Because you’ve divorced the two. When you divorced the Father and said, “Father, I would rather see it my way,” you caused a split between yourself—what you currently call yourself—and What You Divinely Are, which is called the Holy Spirit until you remember Who You Are, and then you become the Son of God, the Presence of God, as an Experience.

Continuing.

… meaning the ego …

The next section is entitled:

Why? Because the Holy Spirit doesn’t see errors. It does see calls for correction. But it’s like this:

There’s an old car, a junk heap, parked in a field and a plant starts to grow underneath the junk heap— the junk, the car—the junk car. And as it grows up, it bumps into the underside of the car and can’t proceed further.

Well, from an ego standpoint the correct response would be to say to that plant, “What a fool you are for germinating there. Look at you. You can’t grow tall like you’re supposed to. You’ve started growing in a place where you are hit by an obstacle and blocked from normal growth. How foolish of you. You’re doomed to a misshapen bent existence. And you will never be able to stand proud like your other brother and sister plants. And you will be the subject of ridicule and laughter. How foolish of you to have done that.”

The Holy Spirit, on the other hand, does see a call for correction, but the correction isn’t scolding and ridicule. The correction is to lift the junk heap off, because the Holy Spirit sees that it’s the nature of the plant to grow and stand tall and straight. And It, the Holy Spirit, stands in support of establishing that Meaning and Purpose that is the plant’s, with nothing blocking it. And so it doesn’t scold the plant. It moves the junk car, the junk heap. Its behavior acts in complete support and consistence with the Function and the Meaning of the existence of that plant. The plant, as a result, does not feel belittled. It does not feel ashamed. It feels the recognition of its Truth. And what I mean by that is it feels the recognition of its innate Meaning and Function, and appreciation is spontaneous, not defense.

You see the difference? Correction—from the standpoint of clear perception—emboldens, nurtures, supports, and substantiates That Which Is True in each and every thing.

Again.

You’re not hearing that which is nothing more than your right Mind. You’re still standing in the dark. You’re still standing in ignorance.

… and the word “are” is emphasized …

And I would add: By you.

It constitutes you making a choice to continue to be ignorant, to not experience a sudden shift of perception that causes you to no longer misperceive and allows you to more clearly fulfill your Function as the Presence of Love.

Continuing.

… what?

Remember, this chapter is called, “The Correction of Error.” Why? Why would we have a subject like that? Why would we discuss it? Because there is something that needs to be done. There is something that needs to happen because you’re not experiencing your Function. You’re not experiencing your Divinity. You’re bound by a tiny perception of yourself that limits the Divine One That You Are greatly. And correction is called for.

Remember what we’re reading about is not about nice happy thoughts that cause you not to be distressed when everyone else is being distressed—someone finding bliss in misery. That’s not what it’s about. It really is about correction. It really is about experiencing Heaven, instead of what you’re experiencing.

Your Function is to heal and to be healed. Your Function at the moment is to wake up, so that any stress and misery and tension that you might be experiencing will fade away, no longer to be any part of your experience so that you can be in a new way in the world and with your Brothers and Sisters.

I’m going to back up.

… meaning the Holy Spirit …

It is giving up your own healing.

And I promise you that whenever you find a Brother, or a Sister, not to be worthy of your willingness to see What Is Real, with a capital “R”, about them, you are using your Brothers and Sisters as justification for not experiencing healing and awakening yourself. If you want to wake up, you’re going to have to begin to use your Brothers and Sisters as justification for seeing What Is True about them so that you might wake up.

Continuing.

The Divine Sanity. The Real Truth about him.

It really is impossible for you to believe something is True about something, about someone else, that isn’t True about you. I mean really True. When you experience the Truth about you, it is experienced as an insight or a revelation. You feel it. You know it to the tips of your toes. And it’s not knowledge. It’s Knowing. It’s incontrovertible Truth. And when you have that experience, you know it’s True about everyone.

So:

You must be willing to turn your Brother’s errors over to the Holy Spirit.

What Your Brother Divinely Is, is as right as What You Divinely Are.

Because you’re abandoning your opportunity to be aware of What Is Divinely True About You as well as your Brother. This is why your Brother is so important. Until you extend the acknowledgement of Truth to your Brother, you cannot have it for yourself. This is a fundamental Law of Being you, might say. Not a law thought up and written down, but an Element of the Way Things Work before anyone could have a thought to make-up a law. You see? It’s the Way Things Are.

Continuing.

Surprise.

That in you which would see a need for correction is that which is misperceiving. And that which is misperceiving cannot bring about the correction. You see?

But are you stuck? No. Because all you need to do is to be willing to break the isolation and reach outside of your normal mental playground, and say “help” and invite something else in that breaks the isolation. And in the breaking of the isolation, a sudden shift of perception occurs, a miracle happens, and you know the Truth. It’s revealed to you as experiential down to the tips of your toes. And misperception abandons you. And no one corrected you, not even you.

… you have that capacity. You might not be able to force him to be What He Truly Is, but you have the capacity to see him truly …

Another sticky sentence. How often do you hear somebody say, “Well, if you would just accept me as I am, everything would be all right.” No, it wouldn’t.

To accept him as He Divinely Is. To accept him as What He Truly Is. To accept him as the Presence of God, as God Presence-ing Himself right there where your Brother is.

You accept him as He Is, not as he believes himself to be. You see the difference? Because it’s very important. And if you do not see it, you will be as unclear and vague and messed up as the Brother who says, “If you will just accept me as I am, you’ll see that everything will be all right.”

Continuing.

… meaning the Truth that is his and yours.

Another way I could say it is that you will not be paying attention to the Way Things Work. And so you will behave at odds with the Way Things Work. And whenever you do that, there is always dissonance, because it is an attempt to be unnatural as though you actually had a capacity to be unnatural.

Continuing.

Now who is this him and you? The piss-ant little ego sense of yourself? No.

Your Brother’s errors are not of What He Really Is, any more than yours are of What You Really Are. And you must remember that no matter what kind of presentation you are making to the world, or your Brother is (or Sister is) making to the world, you haven’t changed What You Really Are and you haven’t gotten rid of What You Really Are. And you haven’t damaged What You Really Are. And you haven’t irrevocably injured yourself for the rest of Eternity, so that you’re stuck in the problems you’re experiencing.

Again.

… you see the sentence didn’t end there because the idea isn’t complete yet.

Darn it. You’re just not going to get back into the Kingdom of Heaven all by yourself.

You see? How can you Love if you’re all alone? You can’t be Love if there isn’t an object of your affection. Love cannot be an isolated experience.

And I promise you, and you’ve all had the experience in one way or another, that when you think that you’re in a position of calling forth correction in a Brother, you’re met with resistance because your attitude is insulting. It’s a claim to be different from your Brother, better than your Brother, perhaps stronger than your Brother, not better, and then not even more right, but stronger. It’s always a position of difference.

And whenever anyone acts as though they are different from you, how does it make your feel? Well, there’s a long list of words. They’re all negative.

Correction, an “I’m better than you” attitude, or “I know what you need” attitude, does not arise out of compassion, which means there’s no Love in it. But correction—and I’m going to put quotes around the word “correction”—“correction” that arises out of Love arises out of compassion and out of an awareness of no difference between you and your Brother. And therefore, there’s no arrogance.

And then, if in the absence of arrogance, your Brother finds that you’re seeing something in him that goes beyond what they envisioned about themselves, something that says, “Little plant, look. I’ve removed the junk heap from above you so that everything in you that wants to stand straight and tall can, because that in you which wants to stand straight and tall is What’s Real, and it’s what needs to be embodied, and I know this.” Whew. That’s compassion. It’s Love.

And because it touches the plant, you might say, or your Brother or Sister in the very essence of their Function of Fulfillment, gratitude comes forth. Defenselessness comes forth. Defense melts. Why? Because you have not been the focal point in the interaction. Your Brother’s essential Fulfillment of Purpose and Being was the focal point with you, and your Brother recognizes it. You see?

So Atonement is not about separation. It’s about exactly the opposite.

Continuing.

And I’m going to add: But does know of the central essential Meaning which He has embodied of Himself in each and every thing, and which He Knows can take no part in experiences of limitation or resistance. And, therefore, He—God—cannot validate impediments and removes them.

Continuing.

[pause] Continuing.

You have the experience of time, don’t you? You are not experiencing Eternity, the Infinite Now, you might say. And this time is available for one purpose—for you to remember Who You Are, for you to come to a point of decision of willingness to abandon your infatuation with your apparent capacity to define yourself and everything else, yourself and your Brothers and Sisters, yourself and your world, and to be from an isolated, lonely context of conscious awareness which isn’t your Birthright.

Time is here so that change can happen, sudden shifts of perception—not change of circumstances, not manipulation of situations and Brothers and Sisters. Time is here for you to let one thing and one thing only happen—sudden shifts of perception that allow you to remember What You Are so that you can embrace it once again, instead of denying it and suffering from the denial.

You see? Not time. God didn’t give you, as part of His generous Gifting of What He Is, the experience of time. That wasn’t part of His Gift. But, let’s put it this way: The moment you said, “I’d rather give definitions to everything myself. I want a bill of divorcement, God,” then you were immediately given enough time to come to your senses. So use the time for what it’s for—to come to your senses. You see?

You see? Knowing is the State of Being. Learning is what you’re faced with when you’ve said, “I don’t want to know the Truth. I want to make the truth up myself.” And all of a sudden, you now have time to do it. You have time to wake up again. And you have an experience called learning, which is not native to your Being. In other words, you have the opportunity to remember the Truth About Yourself, and that’s what learning is. It is remembering Who You Are, coupled with your embracing it and activating it, and not being in a constant state of denial of it.

In other words, all learning was made for the purpose of bringing you to the point of wanting to wake up.

You don’t need time and you don’t need learning, but you made it, and so the Holy Spirit, that which is nothing more than your right Mind, uses it well on behalf of your reawakening.

You don’t know how to use time.

Ah! We’re back to that same subject that we cannot escape. You can’t do anything by yourself. You’ve got to include your Brother.

… what? Looking on yourself without condemnation? No.

By looking…

It just isn’t going to be the case that you’re going to finally stand in the Kingdom of Heaven looking back at all your crummy brothers and sisters who are so awful and saying, “Tsk. One day you’ll make it. I made it. Tsk.” You see? So if you had the illusion that you could do it whether anybody else did it or not, and that you could get ahead of everyone else, or that you recognized something Divine in you and you determined that that was a truth and that that made you a little bit different from everyone else and did put you a few steps ahead, it’s not the Truth. It’s not the Way It Works.

… the Holy Spirit …

How could condemnation not be real for you, but in your mind, still be real about everyone else?

“My God! You mean I have to swallow the whole elephant in one bite? I mean can’t I just learn how not to condemn myself? You mean that in order for me to stop condemning myself, I have to stop condemning everything?” Oh, tsk, tsk, tsk, poor babies. What a horrible thing to have to do to somehow have a slip of the mind where you’ve forgotten to condemn.

Is it really that valuable a mental commodity to you? Not really. But you thought it was valuable because you thought it was essential to your survival, because you’re looking at the Kingdom of Heaven through separate, lonely, unanchored eyes in which everything is not dependable, and nothing is anchored in a fundamental Source that is Principled and Intelligent. And so you have thought that condemnation was one of the essential tools that you had to use, or that you have to use, in order to control things into some semblance of intelligent order.

I’m going to tell you something. Love harmonizes naturally, without coercion. Love brings order because it harmonizes everything.

The question is, “What do I do with all these bastards in the meantime until I manage to do this? How do I protect myself until I know I don’t need protection any more?” The ego is sly and tricky. It’s asking the question because if it can get you to try to answer that question, you’ll never get to the point of wanting to experience the Truth about your Brother, because you’ll be busy getting the tools of your defense together to defend you in the meantime until you swallow the whole elephant, until you can bring yourself to abandon condemnation.

You had better be willing to consider the possibility that what you see as a call for correction, and what you see as an appropriate response to a call for correction, is something the Holy Spirit isn’t seeing at all. The call for correction … what’s needing to be corrected is not what the Holy Spirit is seeing, even though the Holy Spirit sees a call for correction. And you had better come to a point where you recognize that you have no way of knowing specifically what you would need to be ready to defend yourself against without the help of the clarity of the Holy Spirit, so that you aren’t taken in by the invitation to deal with these bastards until you can manage to let go of condemnation.

In the meantime, you want to abandon “a meantime.” Because I guarantee you, the response that will contribute to correction is nothing you will be able to perceive until you’re willing to let go of condemnation and ask of the Father, or the Holy Spirit, to have revealed to you experientially the Truth about your Brother, the Truth that never stopped being True—the Christ that stands there no matter how he, or she, is behaving—God Presence-ing Himself right there where your Brother and Sister are, in spite of how they’re behaving, in spite of how they’re misperceiving themselves, in spite of how you’re misperceiving them.

And remember, this is what you have time for. “Oh, I don’t have time!” That’s the only thing you have time for. That’s why it was gifted to you, so that you might do this one thing that undoes your decision to be an orphan, your decision to have gotten a divorce from your Father and caused you to forget your Identity because you abandoned That Which gave you Meaning.

I can go on and on. And I will at another time.

I know. I’m not moving fast enough for you.

How do we get to it? Well, [laughing] you get to it by not having a meantime. You get to it by doing it now. You get to it by not taking the bait that says, “Get your defenses ready so you can be protected until you can let go of condemnation.”

Okay. I said I could go on and on.

If this is what you’ve been given time for, if correction is the purpose of time, then the means of accomplishing the correction is yours, and you are capable of implementing it. It’s not a task that has been given to you that you’re not quite able to engage.

Remember, you at this very moment are the full-fledged Christ—whatever ultimate sense of the word “Christ” that you have been carrying with you, whatever fullest definition of the Christ that you have made-up—is What You Are right now. To come back into your right Mind, for your Sanity to return, is not only totally possible, it’s inevitable. Why? Because you will have learned how to be the Christ? No. Because you will remember that that’s Who You’ve Always Been. The capacity is present right now.

So, if you’ve been given time in order to come to your senses, and if you’ve been given something called “a capacity to learn” for this purpose, you have all been provided with all of the essentials to accomplish it. You’ve been given this help. Why? Because you have the capacity. Why? Because you never stopped being What You Divinely Are.

Do you see that even what you would call your ignorance is like a bowl that you are held in, and everything about the bowl stands in support and nurturing of your coming back into your right Mind? Everything that exists, even in your ignorance, is in Harmony with the Way Things Work. And the Way Things Work is nothing less than the Will of God expressing Being. So you’re not lost. And there’s not a strenuous journey here ahead of you. And you’re not being asked to do anything that isn’t utterly natural to you to do.

With this I will stop.

During this coming week, watch your mind, observe it, and when you find yourself beginning to indulge in any form of condemnation, notice it and halt it. Why? Because you know that no matter how delicious the condemnation might feel to you, you are not listening to the Holy Spirit. If you are not listening to the Holy Spirit, you have yourself blocked off from what? That which is nothing more than your right Mind. Now, is that the way you want to exist in your day, with that kind of a split, unplugged from the Juice of your Divine Being? No. That’s why you’ll stop. You see? Because when it’s happening, you’re not listening to, and you are incapable of hearing, the Holy Spirit, that which is your right Mind.

Okay. I said I would end there, and I will.

And I look forward to more good times with you next week. Okay. I love you.