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Profundities:
Defining God Clearly...
In this study group Jesus explains clearly a beautiful and profound definition of God and His nature and what all he is holding out to us as His Children.
The AUDIO DOWNLOAD and/or LISTEN HERE for the following transcript: April 10th, 2005 AUDIO
The PDF Transcript for reviewing/printing: April 15th, 2006 Transcript
Defining God Clearly...
In this study group Jesus explains clearly a beautiful and profound definition of God and His nature and what all he is holding out to us as His Children.
The AUDIO DOWNLOAD and/or LISTEN HERE for the following transcript: April 10th, 2005 AUDIO
The PDF Transcript for reviewing/printing: April 15th, 2006 Transcript
Raj Christ Jesus ACIM Study Group – April 10, 2005
A Course In Miracles (reference pages)
Chapter 9 – THE CORRECTION OF ERROR
Section – GRANDEUR VERSUS GRANDIOSITY
Sparkly Book – p.218 / JCIM – p.91
………………………………………………….
Chapter 9 – THE ACCEPTANCE OF THE ATONEMENT
First Edition – p. 165 / Second Edition – p. 178
RAJ: Good evening.
AUDIENCE: Good evening.
RAJ: And welcome to everyone who is joining us on the Internet.
It’s always well as we’re going through the book to remember that the book isn’t about God, or about this subject, or that subject. It’s all about you. And at the bottom line, it’s all about the way you’re using your mind. You should catch yourself if you find that you’re beginning to think about something the Course has said as though you’re thinking about a disembodied or distant idea, or concept, that you hear, can consider and look at and sort of objectively evaluate and come to understand. Because as long as you do that, it’s not connecting with you. Now part of what makes the Course difficult to grasp is that it’s not really addressing the one you think you are. It is addressing the one that you are—the One That You Divinely Are. It says things that you are capable of grasping because of What You Divinely Are.
But as long as you’re insisting that you’re something else, that you’re little and tiny and puny and inconsequential and powerless, and on and on and on, you’re going to say, “Well, this doesn’t relate to me. This isn’t helping me get more power. This doesn’t help me at being better at what I am.”—meaning “what I think I am.” But it’s all about you. And it’s all about helping you release yourself from all the definitions you and everyone else mutually have made-up, and which you rely upon as dependable, I’m going to say, foundations for living successfully and surviving.
One of the things that we’ve been engaged in, and that anyone would find themselves engaged in if they were reading the Course by themselves, is the acquiring of new definitions. And one could think, “Well, we’re just replacing bad definitions with good definitions, but we’re still going to be existing in a context of definitions.” No. [laughing] Here’s what it’s like. You have a rope that you have wrapped around yourself, and you have managed to tie yourself into [a] very constricted position, and then you have tied some really excellent knots, and you’re bound. And we’re coming along and we’re saying, “Okay. Here’s how you untie this knot.” And the tendency is to think that the manner of untying the knot and the purpose of untying the knot is so that you can be given a better knot, because obviously the quality of the knots you made were not excellent because you weren’t coming from a Place of Excellence in you when you made them. But, no. We’re undoing the knots so that you can unwrap the rope and become free.
Now why am I saying this? I’m saying it because I want to start out this evening redefining God, because your definition of God is one of the knots that you keep yourself bound by. The basic problem with your definition of God is that it’s a noun. God, the meaning of the word “God” is a verb. It means Being. God is not a Being. That would be a noun. God is Being Itself—Singular, boundless, unlimited Being—Movement.
It is a Movement of Mind. Well, you can talk about the word “Mind” as though it were a noun, but it’s also a verb. It is an uninterruptible Experience of Being Conscious, of Consciousness—never inactive—boundaryless—again Singular. And this Movement of Being Consciousness is called Creation. It is What You Are. Being, the Movement of Being, is the center and circumference, the totality of every single thing that can be experienced—we’ll say the Universe, and even more—the flower—everything.
But I want to come back to this fundamental idea. God is not a Being. God is Being Itself. It is difficult to apply words to it. But it is exactly what you are experiencing right now. You are experiencing being. You can think of yourself as a Being, but you are an unstoppable Movement of Conscious Awareness being Conscious. You didn’t trigger [finger snap] the spark of Conscious Awareness that you’re experiencing ongoingly. You’re not responsible for it. It just is what you’re faced with and that you can’t get away from. You see? It’s changeless, but it’s forever on the move, if you will.
So now when you read about God and you read about the Father, you can be alert so that you don’t begin to think of a Being—a masculine figure with a long white beard and flowing robes, sitting somewhere at the point of authority in the middle of Creation. You see? Someone you could pray to who may be generous and help you, and may say, “Mm. You have a little more to learn. It’s not quite time for you to be free of your problem.” You see? You can begin to think, you can begin to be alert so that you don’t play into that.
Being is like a river. Now let’s take the Amazon River because it’s a very long river. The river is in movement. The river is a movement of water. Water that is not moving is a pond, or a lake. A river is a movement of water. And you could take one point in the Amazon and, let’s say, scoop out a cup of water, and a thousand miles down river you could scoop out another cup of water, and the quality of the water in one place might be slightly different, because it had gone over rapids and had air beaten into it so it’s more highly oxygenated and so on. And you could begin to think as though there are parts of the river. But the river is one river, and the river is all movement.
You could say there are molecules, so you can find a way to describe water as though it’s made up of parts. And you could think of yourself as some of the molecules of water up here, and others of you could think you’re part of the molecules a thousand miles downstream. And you could create within yourself a sense of having a unique experience of the Movement of Being. But you know what? A discrete or unique experience would be purely conceptual, because the river is a Singularity. It’s Total. It’s all One.
As you begin to let go of your private, tiny, little definitions of yourselves, what you’re doing is experiencing a breakdown of the sense of separation, so that you finally arrive at a point where you can say, “Thy Will be done.” You say, “I yield to the Movement that I’m part of and inseparable from. I abandon this funny activity that I’ve engaged in of partitioning myself off from the Whole. I am willing to abandon wanting to be somewhere other than where the Movement of the river has me. I yield to the Movement.”
That’s what yielding to the Father means, or yielding to God. It means allowing yourself to come in, back into that place of humility that allows you to fit in. And then abandon the idea of fitting in so that the Movement Itself can be experienced by you as the Totality of You, and of yourself as inseparable from the Whole Movement. And this is when you have the experience of being a co-creator with God by allowing yourself to be the Movement, by allowing the Movement to be All There Is of you. You’re no longer holding yourself apart. And the Movement of the Whole becomes available to you as your Infinite Conscious Experience of what? Being. Not of being something. Not of being God. Not of being in partnership with God, another thing. But the Mind that is moving that constitutes the Conscious Experience of Being in which nothing of what is natural to that Movement is experienced as being withheld from you.
I know this is nothing new, but I’m trying to put it in different words so that it might register more fully. The culprit that disallows you from experiencing What God Is as Being is an idea that you have that you have a will of your own that you can exercise—a will, we’ll say, different from that which gives impetus to the Movement of the river itself. Which means that you think that the little part of the river that you’re in, can, through the use of will, move a little bit to the right, or in a direction other than the Movement of the river. And this capacity to express will has created in you a sense of a self that has it, that has will. And so this will becomes the cornerstone of a definition of self—a self that has no existence really, because you are the Movement of the river, because you are inseparable from it. You are at this very moment the Movement of the Conscious Experience of Being.
Now as a result, you all are a collection of conditioned responses based upon the definitions you have created, or acquired, and incorporated. And these constitute the box, that for the last few weeks I’ve been telling you, doesn’t exist. As a result of these definitions which you’ve adopted, you walk through the Kingdom of Heaven and you don’t see it. You see your definitions.
Now a while back someone objected when I used Paul as an example, saying that the Christ would never put someone else on the carpet, so to speak. But, whenever I use Paul as example, it’s because it also illuminates something for him. And for everyone else, it makes the expression of Spirit, actual Truth, more relevant.
Now, before the Gathering tonight, some avocadoes were needed in the kitchen and Paul was asked if he would go downstairs and get them. He said, “Sure.” Well, he knows where the avocadoes are. I mean, after all, he’s very likely the one that put them there when he got home from the grocery store. Paul went downstairs, looked in both of the refrigerators, found no avocadoes, came back up and said, “They must be up here because there’s not a single avocado down there.” Well, in between the two refrigerators, there’s a table in which squash and things that don’t have to be refrigerated are sitting. Susan said, “They’re right on the table.” And Paul said, “I didn’t even look on the table. They’re supposed to be in the refrigerator. I only looked in the refrigerator.” And Judy says, “Gotta learn to look outside the box.” [mild audience laughter]
You see, they were there, but not where Paul knew they should be. And so he did not see them, because he was not looking with curiosity. He was looking with confidence. You see? His definitions were what he was relying upon. And every single one of you walk through your day thinking you know something, and as a result of what you think you know, you miss the Kingdom of Heaven. And yes, an experience of the Kingdom of Heaven would be one where something practical like happening to look where the avocadoes are, because there was an impulse to, allows you to find the avocadoes, to know where they are. You see?
You all go through your day, unless you have specifically sat down and meditated and become still and let go of your definitions, you are all going through your day truly as automatons—robots living out the expectations and the confidences that are based upon the definitions that you have adopted as factual. You don’t get up in the morning and walk through your day with innocent eyes—eyes that don’t know what to expect, eyes that are not biasing the experience of vision in any way. That’s what “yielding to God” means when we’re talking about yielding to the Father, or yielding to the Holy Spirit. That’s what we’re talking about in practical terms. It all has bearing upon and relates to what? Every Conscious Experience of what? Being—that you’re all experiencing unavoidably and unalterably at every moment.
You are living the Life Divine right now. You are experiencing the Conscious Movement of Being. Being. You are not a Being having an Experience of Being. You are Being. You see, “to be or not to be,” is not the question. There’s no choice! Being is What You Are right now. Not a Being. But Being is What You Are right now.
We talk about there being a Place of Excellence in you. We’ve talked about it being the Altar within you, and that the need is to go within into the Altar. It didn’t say to go out on a stage in front of humungous crowds. It didn’t say to find large gatherings of people to socialize with, and to be with, and to get things from, and give things to. You go within to the Altar. It’s a very quiet place. It’s a very private place. It’s a place where only you can go and only you can be. Because there’s no one else there other than the Holy Spirit, going there can’t be used to impress anyone, can it? It can’t be done for egotistical reasons, in other words.
I’m going to paraphrase a statement. The student of Truth is alone with his own Being and the Reality of things. When you go within to the Altar, very often initially it’s necessary to learn how to meditate and become still. And the reason is because to get to the Altar, you have to leave the ego behind. You have to leave your precious right to think your own thoughts and have your own definitions, you have to be willing to leave that behind, because in order to arrive at the Altar and learn, you have to be empty.
At the very least you have to be willing to let something in other than what is already there. In order to go in to the Altar and learn, you must become humble. Humility must characterize you when you’re there. Humility is the Nature of Being. It’s also the Nature of Grandeur.
And all of the stuff that you can’t take there is that which is characteristic of grandiosity, of the ego. Grandiosity is something that one engages in when he believes that he has accomplished the requirements necessary to fulfill a definition he’s holding in his own mind about what success is.
Grandeur, on the other hand, is something that is inherent in you because of the Nature of Being. It’s a Wholeness, a Singularity, characterized by Excellence, characterized by Perfection—Perfectness of Symmetry, we’ll say—perfect balance of form and outline and color and illumination and Spirit. It’s characterized by Exquisiteness. Not exquisiteness that impresses, but Exquisiteness that constitutes the experience of Loveliness that is unsurpassable. And Loveliness is Love expressed. Everything that you’re experiencing right now wherever you are, the nature of it is Love. Loveliness is what is characteristic of it—Loveliness far more profound than you can imagine. And it’s not separate from your hands and your feet, and the room you’re in and the things in the room.
But you know what? Like Paul, you’ve got to stop being so damn sure you know where the avocadoes are, so that you can look at what is right in the front of your face and actually see it, and know that it and the seeing of it are all part of the Singular Movement of Conscious Being, of God, of You, but not separate from each other—all the same thing.
Let’s go to the book.
We could stop there and you could all leave and have a radically different week from any other week you’ve had, just on the basis of consistently and conscientiously remembering that God is a verb, and the verb means Being. And it’s the Movement of Mind being Conscious, having what you would call the Conscious Experience of Being. And therefore, everything that you are having conscious experiences of, are one and the same—Living—the Living Conscious Experience of Being—not being a thing, but Being—a Living, Existing—and therefore, isn’t foreign to you, isn’t separate from you, is as totally lovable as you, is constituted of Love, just as you are.
And so there needs to be great inquisitiveness. And you need to not be lazy. Why put off the fuller Conscious Experience of what? Being. Being conscious of What Being Is—Mind unconfused about Its Infinite Conscious Experience. That’s why it’s called waking up. [finger snap] Lights going on. [finger snap] Illumination occurring. Seeing things clearly, instead of through a glass darkly. Let there be curiosity and inquisitiveness.
And if you’re so damn sure that the avocadoes are in the refrigerator when they’re not, if you’re so damn sure that so-and-so is never going to change, catch yourself. Stop it! Abandon that confidence, that definition. And be willing to look outside the box, because not only are you not in the box, they’re not in the box either. But you’re not going to see what they are until you’re willing to stop looking where you think you have to look. And you think you have to look where your very own definitions tell you a thing has to be.
Well, none of you would have enjoyed avocadoes in your sandwich if Paul had refused to look to see where the avocadoes were. And none of you will have a changed experience if you’re not willing to look for the Evidence of Being in places and in styles, or characteristics, that you’re not prone to be attentive to.
Let’s go to the book.
RAJ READING: The ego depends SOLELY on your willingness to tolerate it.
RAJ: Simple, short sentence.
What would happen if you weren’t willing to tolerate it? It would disappear. It depends entirely, solely, on your willingness to tolerate it. You give it all the life it has. You see?
[laughing] As long as you’re sure the avocadoes are in the refrigerator, you’re in a box. You’re in the box. You’ve got blinders on. And the sense of yourself that’s so confident, will be the sense of yourself that you’ll experience, as long as you’re tolerating it, as long as you’re actually choosing for it, as long as you’re not conscientiously trying to think a little bigger, be a little bigger, behave as though there isn’t a box, behave as though your definitions don’t mean anything. Your definitions will bind you as long as you tolerate them.
You see? It’s all about us—every single one of us. And no, that’s not Paul saying that. The Truth in here is about every single Individuality. And you know what? The lies about us are the same lies about all of us.
Continuing.
RAJ READING: If you are willing to look upon your grandeur you CANNOT despair, and therefore you cannot WANT the ego.
RAJ: If you are willing to see the avocadoes where they are, you cannot despair. You’ll be able to enjoy the sandwich. And therefore, you cannot want to think that the avocadoes are in the refrigerator which is empty of avocadoes. You see? When you have fulfillment, you cannot want lack. [laughing] You see, this isn’t some spiritually deep thing here.
RAJ READING: If you are willing to look upon your grandeur you CANNOT despair, and therefore you cannot WANT the ego. Your grandeur is God’s ANSWER to the ego because it…
RAJ: Your Grandeur.
RAJ READING: …is true. Littleness and grandeur cannot coexist, nor is it possible for them to alternate in your awareness. Littleness and grandiosity…
RAJ: Not littleness and Grandeur.
RAJ READING: Littleness and grandiosity can and MUST alternate in your awareness since both are untrue, and are therefore on the same level.
RAJ: In other words, littleness and grandiosity are both elements inside the box, or inside your belief that a box exists in which you are choosing to live within and function within and delight in the challenge of.
But littleness and Grandeur cannot coexist because the one is the nonexistence of the other. You see? When you know where the avocados are, you no longer don’t know where they are. You see? It’s humorously simple.
Again.
RAJ READING: Littleness and grandiosity can and MUST alternate in your awareness since both are untrue, and are therefore on the same level.
RAJ: And another reason that they must alternate is because littleness is very uncomfortable, and so you find yourself needing to do something to overcome the discomfort. And instead of finding the clarity in which you see that the box doesn’t actually exist, if instead of that, you seek to make yourself feel good while still in the box, you will have to find a way to puff yourself up and to talk yourself into feeling good about yourself. And so you will have to engage in processes that will allow you to fulfill criteria that you have established that identify the meaning of success. And that is how you achieve grandiosity in order to overcome the feeling of littleness. However, the grandiosity that you have created for yourself was not created by God and arose out of a misperception or a false perception of What You Truly Are. And therefore, the grandiosity, although temporarily achieved, will always be lost because something built on an illusion cannot stand. And so then, once again, you’ll be experiencing littleness, and you will have to do something about it. And so it alternates back and forth eternally until you finally arrive at a point of somehow discovering that there ain’t no box.
And as I said two weeks ago, my Birth, death, Resurrection, and Ascension forever undid that apparently absolute belief that everyone had been suffering from—that they were inside a box and that they were something they were not.
Again.
RAJ READING: Littleness and grandiosity can and MUST alternate in your awareness since both are untrue, and are therefore on the same level. Being the level of shift it is experienced as shifting, and extremes are its essential characteristic.
RAJ: You see, tomorrow Paul can go downstairs to the refrigerator, expecting to see something else there that might not be there and not find it, and then he’ll have to face Susan who won’t have forgotten, although Paul will like to conveniently forget that the same thing happened the day before. And so he hasn’t learned anything yet. But what that means is that there is something to learn, and there is a benefit to be had if he will just go downstairs or do whatever he’s doing without preconceptions. You see? Without thinking inside a box, and to be unconditionally open to a more all-inclusive Conscious Experience of Being—verb.
RAJ READING: Truth and littleness are DENIALS of each other because grandeur IS truth. Truth does not vacillate; it is ALWAYS true.
RAJ: The Movement of Being never vacillates. It always is.
RAJ READING: When grandeur slips away from you, you have replaced it with something YOU have made.
RAJ: A definition, an expectation, a concept, which you are giving preference to in place of saying or constantly being in the attitude of, “I, of myself, know nothing. I, of myself, have no capacity to experience the Conscious Experience of Being.” You see, you are That. Being is What You Are and you have no choice about it. You don’t have a capacity to be it. It already is you.
And you can’t afford to replace that simple, unalterable fact with a crazy idea that says you do have a capacity to be what you want to be, to be what you define yourself as. And if you compulsively attach yourself to the project of being what you can’t be, you will, for the time being, render yourself unconscious of What Really Is. And you will have this little fantasy, this little nightmare, that you call the human condition.
But you know what? I have to keep reminding you that the only way you can do this is by using the already-existing Elements of Creation and providing a bias to them, applying a bias to them. You’ve got to distort your perception of something that is Eternally Real. This is important. It’s a valuable thing to understand, because it means that as soon as you stop applying the bias to it, What It Is will register with you. It doesn’t require work. It requires less work. It requires you to stop applying a bias to Something That Is Eternally Unchangeable. That’s work. It’s not going to be work to get back in your Right Mind, to see Things As They Are. It’s going to be you neglecting to apply the bias.
Again.
RAJ READING: When grandeur slips away from you, you have replaced it with something YOU have made. Perhaps it is the belief in littleness; perhaps it is the belief in grandiosity. Yet it MUST be insane because it is NOT true. Your grandeur will NEVER deceive you, but your illusions ALWAYS will. Illusions ARE deceptions.
RAJ: What? Deceptions your ego pulled on you? No. A deception you pulled on yourself by saying, “I’d like to have a moment to look at the Movement of Being and use the capacity I have as a Being to alter the course of the river a little bit. Ha, ha, God! [laughing] I gotcha to be what You weren’t gonna be. Now I’m somebody!” You see?
Waking up… let’s put it this way, there is no hereafter in which to wake up. As I said last week, the hereafter is here. My Presence after the crucifixion, after the Resurrection, was a demonstration of the hereafter here! The Kingdom of Heaven that you associate with the hereafter is here! It is what you are experiencing “through a glass darkly,” but it is what you’re experiencing.
Now, you know, after the meeting tonight, Paul could have a conversation with Sue and say, “Listen. We need to have a little more consistency here in how we handle the food in this house. And, you know, if the avocados go in the refrigerator, they go in the refrigerator. You don’t put them someplace else. Otherwise we’re going to have an understanding that every time you put the avocados where they don’t belong, you’re going to hear from me. And I’m going to make it as unpleasant as I can until you knuckle under and are consistent enough to put them where they belong, so that you and I don’t have a discrepant experience with each other. And we can have harmony because we’re always putting things where they belong. We’re always putting them where I have determined they ought to be. We’re always going to put them where we together are going to mutually agree that they will be.” You see?
And now, what are we doing? [laughing] We are developing something for psychologists to study— the science of psychological human behavior and how to come about a harmonious experience through the practice of conscious, mindful control. You see? An infrastructure of proper behavior could begin to be established, when the answer is not to improve things inside the box, but to challenge the existence of the box entirely, so that no matter whether the avocados got left in the trunk, you’ll know where the avocados are when you want them. You see?
Is some of this jelling a little bit more and making the Truth that’s in here relevant so that the experience of What God Is becomes available in the simplest of daily events? I told Paul in the beginning, All of You—meaning “All of What You Are”—All of You is always functioning. All of You is always present. And All of You is always available. Now all of any one of you, all of What You Are, is Creation. All That Exists is some Aspect of the Infinitude of your what? Being—verb. Being. Existing. It’s always all available to you. Not only where the avocados are, but where the Pope is. Not only where the avocados are, but the experience of what it’s like to stand on the surface of Mars. The surface of Mars is part of the Infinitude of your Being. If it’s always available to you and it’s always present as you, you can have the Conscious Experience [finger snap] now.
Nothing, not anything, not any Aspect of the Infinitude of your Being which is inseparable from God Being, nothing of the Infinitude of You will be unavailable to you, because you’re neither behind the Point of Perfection, nor advancing toward it—you are at that Point. And what we’re talking about tonight is disclosing how it is that you can begin to have the experience and understand yourself therefrom, instead of from the standpoint of who you definitely think you are, and how you definitely think things work, which cause you, like Paul, not to find the avocados because you were looking a foot and a half to the left. And he couldn’t conceive that the avocados would not be in a refrigerator.
RAJ READING: Your grandeur will NEVER deceive you, but your illusions ALWAYS will. Illusions ARE deceptions. You cannot triumph, but you ARE exalted.
RAJ: Well, it’s only someone little, who attempts grandiosity, that could feel they had triumphed over adversity, over the conditions of the box.
RAJ READING: You cannot triumph, but you ARE exalted.
RAJ: [laughing] Exalted. The blinders get ripped away. You can see more. Your frame of reference is exalted. It’s not tiny by virtue of commitments you’re holding on to that keep you seeing in a limited fashion. You are experiencing the fuller Conscious Experience of Being. Being.
RAJ READING: And in your exalted state you seek others like you and rejoice with them.
RAJ: Uh oh. I hear somebody saying, “Oh, boy! That would really be nice. I would love to meet some other people who think like me, you know. I would love not to have to associate with and deal with these people who are so ignorant of the Truth. Because it’s so much work. It’s so stressful.”
Now you may think I’m digging deep for meaning here, but I’m not. And you need to see that this is included in this statement.
RAJ READING: You cannot triumph, but you ARE exalted. And in your exalted state you seek others like you and rejoice with them.
RAJ: I wish to see the Evidence of Love. Well, if you wish to see the Evidence of Love, you will seek for the Evidence of Love. And you will seek for it in others so that you can find that they are like you and you can rejoice with them.
You don’t go off and leave the shitty bastards behind that made it so difficult for you, so you can find those who are already in this exalted state that you are and you won’t have to put up with shit anymore. No. In your exalted state, you seek others. You look into your Brother’s eyes—the bastard, the bitch, the one who’s giving you hell, the one that’s causing you so much stress—and you rejoice with them because you have sought for the Truth in them, and through diligence and persistence to see the Truth, you found it. If you were exalted because you’ve recognized there ain’t no box, then you’re going to look into your Brother’s and Sister’s eyes, who are still thinking they’re in the box, and you’re going to share the news with them so that they can see that they aren’t in it either, and the two of you can rejoice together.
RAJ READING: It is easy to distinguish grandeur from grandiosity because love is returned, but pride is not.
RAJ: Love is inseparable from Grandeur because humility is the characteristic of Grandeur. And in the presence of humility, no one feels threat. And I promise you that any time any one of you experience an absence of threat, you feel loved.
Grandiosity, on the other hand, the characteristic of it is arrogant pride, self-satisfaction. Pride can’t be shared. It’s a private experience of [laughing] bloated self-appreciation.
RAJ READING: Pride will not produce miracles, and therefore will deprive you of your true witnesses to your reality.
RAJ: What are your True witnesses to your Reality? They are the messengers that return to you that you’ve sent out.
What reality? I’m going to say it this way. From what reality are you sending out your messengers? The reality of grandiosity? The reality of your personal private definitions? They will come back to you and confirm your perceptions, your ignorances.
But if your Reality is the experience of humility in which you make no claims about yourself but the Father’s Claims About You by virtue of His expressing Himself as you, those constitute a Grandeur that you can feel and that you know is True About You, and you know you didn’t manufacture. And from that experience, you send out different messengers, and thus you are not deprived of your True witnesses to your Reality.
RAJ READING: Truth is not obscure nor hidden, but its obviousness to YOU lies in the joy you bring to its witnesses, who SHOW it to you.
RAJ: How many of you have had the experience of being in a really bad mood and some happy bloke walks into the room and just showers you with the joy that they’re feeling? You see? This does not witness to your reality, and it can really bug the hell out of you. And you will not respond to the witnesses for joy with joy, and thus you don’t fulfill your Function of glorifying God.
RAJ READING: Truth is not obscure nor hidden, but its obviousness to YOU lies in the joy you bring to its witnesses, who SHOW it to you. They attest to your grandeur, but they cannot attest to pride because pride is not shared.
RAJ: And I’m adding: Pride cannot be shared.
As I said, it’s a very private experience.
RAJ READING: God WANTS you to behold what He created because it is His joy.
RAJ: God wanted Paul to see the avocados [audience laughter] because they were there to be seen for what they were, to be used for the purpose they were there for. If God wants for Paul to see the avocados, He wants all of you to see the Presence of Being, the Presence of What He Is, the Presence of What (capital “B”) Being Is in everything—the flower, the table, the leaves, the fingernails, the poncho, the chair, the socks. You see? You may call them something else when you see them for What They Truly Are. But the name is not what they are. What They Are is Real.
You know, there’s a song, [singing] “Roll out the barrel.” Well, roll out the curiosity. And you know what? If you do it this week, and there aren’t major changes, you know what? There will have been one major change. You will have been using your mind in a new way that is utterly constructive. And so, it’s not a test. It can be looked at as a matter of practical discipline to start using your mind in a way that has as its goal to see the Face of God here and now, to see the Kingdom of Heaven here and now, to see Grandeur of Being in the simplest of things that you encounter every day.
If you don’t see a lot of brand-new things, all it means is that your previous habits are so ingrained that they are still taking precedence. But what they are causing you to see isn’t real, and therefore it isn’t something to be willing to settle for just because your really great, conscientious persistence during the coming week, didn’t cause major transformation.
You know what? This piece of paper wants you to see What It Really Is. The petal on the flower wants you to see What It Truly Is. You say, “Well, maybe I could understand the petal of the flower because the flower is alive. But this piece of paper is inanimate. It’s not alive. How could it have a want?” Because there ain’t no such thing as matter. All Substance is Spirit. Spirit is God. Substance is Living. The Substance of Spirit is Love. Every single Idea in the Mind of God is experienceable, as I’ve been saying. And because Everything is an Idea, the Substance of which is Spirit, it is Conscious—Living—Conscious. It has an Intent to communicate its Meaning for Being. Its Meaning for Being—not for being a piece of paper, but for Being, simply Being. You see? Being, the Conscious Experience of Being, is a conscious experience of intimate relationship, conscious intimate relationship, with every single Idea in the Infinitude of Creation that you call “things.”
Maybe you have trouble with the contents of this book, but the book is Spirit. It is an Idea that is experienceable as a book. As a book, it wants you to experience its reason for existing as a book, regardless of the content, but also including the content.
Start looking at everything as though it’s alive—not matter alive, but an Idea. Not matter. A Living Idea. A Living, Conscious Idea that exists for the Purpose of expressing and extending its Meaning so that it can be recognized and experienced. You are living in the middle of a Living God. You are living in the middle of an unalterable, unchangeable, unlimited Movement of Being/Existing that’s called God.
You say, “Well, how can I pray to a Movement? You know, I can pray to God because God is a thing, a noun. God is a thing I can send messages to. Now you say that God is a verb—Being, Movement. How can I pray to that?” Well, I said a number of years ago, prayer is saying “Yes” to God. It’s the little molecules of water, that desperately want to see it (themselves) as unique and separate, yielding to the Movement of the river so that it finds itself as the Movement, because it lets the Movement be all there is to it, or all there is to them (the molecules).
Prayer is saying “Yes” to God. That’s prayer. Not, “Will you do this for me?” You say, “God, help me to be what You want me to be.”
Or, “Help me not get in the way of What You’re Being right here where I am, so that I might experience That, rather than the interesting, challenging, miserable experience I’m having by virtue of my choice to give preference to my definitions and my meanings and how I want things.”
Okay.
I love you. And I look forward to being with you next week.
And if you don’t understand what I’ve been saying, and if you’re frustrated by what I’ve been saying, then acknowledge it, and then be willing to set down any emotional charge you have about it, and go to the Altar, go within to that Place of Excellence in you. Just remember, you can’t take frustration there with you and still be able to learn. You can’t take anger with you. And you can’t take the confidence that there are no avocados downstairs because there aren’t any in the refrigerators.
Don’t go in there with confidences. Say, “I don’t know what the hell is going on. I don’t know what the heck anything means. I think I do, but I’m willing to acknowledge that I’m not enlightened at this moment, so therefore, I’m willing to set aside what I believe and I’m willing to set aside (the fact that) the emotions I’m experiencing because nothing is working the way I believe they ought to be working. And I am choosing to be willing to be quiet and listen. I know that the Truth wants to be known. I know it’s my Birthright to know it, and so I’m going to get out of the way and be undefended against the experience, the influx of it.” And then be willing to persist. If you don’t hear the answer the first time, if you don’t see the avocados the first time, go back again and look with less confidence even. They’re there. The answers are there. They’re in you.
Okay.
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A Course in Miracles Study Group with Raj, April 10th 2005
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Phone: 360-638-0530 Fax: 360-881-0071
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A Course In Miracles (reference pages)
Chapter 9 – THE CORRECTION OF ERROR
Section – GRANDEUR VERSUS GRANDIOSITY
Sparkly Book – p.218 / JCIM – p.91
………………………………………………….
Chapter 9 – THE ACCEPTANCE OF THE ATONEMENT
First Edition – p. 165 / Second Edition – p. 178
RAJ: Good evening.
AUDIENCE: Good evening.
RAJ: And welcome to everyone who is joining us on the Internet.
It’s always well as we’re going through the book to remember that the book isn’t about God, or about this subject, or that subject. It’s all about you. And at the bottom line, it’s all about the way you’re using your mind. You should catch yourself if you find that you’re beginning to think about something the Course has said as though you’re thinking about a disembodied or distant idea, or concept, that you hear, can consider and look at and sort of objectively evaluate and come to understand. Because as long as you do that, it’s not connecting with you. Now part of what makes the Course difficult to grasp is that it’s not really addressing the one you think you are. It is addressing the one that you are—the One That You Divinely Are. It says things that you are capable of grasping because of What You Divinely Are.
But as long as you’re insisting that you’re something else, that you’re little and tiny and puny and inconsequential and powerless, and on and on and on, you’re going to say, “Well, this doesn’t relate to me. This isn’t helping me get more power. This doesn’t help me at being better at what I am.”—meaning “what I think I am.” But it’s all about you. And it’s all about helping you release yourself from all the definitions you and everyone else mutually have made-up, and which you rely upon as dependable, I’m going to say, foundations for living successfully and surviving.
One of the things that we’ve been engaged in, and that anyone would find themselves engaged in if they were reading the Course by themselves, is the acquiring of new definitions. And one could think, “Well, we’re just replacing bad definitions with good definitions, but we’re still going to be existing in a context of definitions.” No. [laughing] Here’s what it’s like. You have a rope that you have wrapped around yourself, and you have managed to tie yourself into [a] very constricted position, and then you have tied some really excellent knots, and you’re bound. And we’re coming along and we’re saying, “Okay. Here’s how you untie this knot.” And the tendency is to think that the manner of untying the knot and the purpose of untying the knot is so that you can be given a better knot, because obviously the quality of the knots you made were not excellent because you weren’t coming from a Place of Excellence in you when you made them. But, no. We’re undoing the knots so that you can unwrap the rope and become free.
Now why am I saying this? I’m saying it because I want to start out this evening redefining God, because your definition of God is one of the knots that you keep yourself bound by. The basic problem with your definition of God is that it’s a noun. God, the meaning of the word “God” is a verb. It means Being. God is not a Being. That would be a noun. God is Being Itself—Singular, boundless, unlimited Being—Movement.
It is a Movement of Mind. Well, you can talk about the word “Mind” as though it were a noun, but it’s also a verb. It is an uninterruptible Experience of Being Conscious, of Consciousness—never inactive—boundaryless—again Singular. And this Movement of Being Consciousness is called Creation. It is What You Are. Being, the Movement of Being, is the center and circumference, the totality of every single thing that can be experienced—we’ll say the Universe, and even more—the flower—everything.
But I want to come back to this fundamental idea. God is not a Being. God is Being Itself. It is difficult to apply words to it. But it is exactly what you are experiencing right now. You are experiencing being. You can think of yourself as a Being, but you are an unstoppable Movement of Conscious Awareness being Conscious. You didn’t trigger [finger snap] the spark of Conscious Awareness that you’re experiencing ongoingly. You’re not responsible for it. It just is what you’re faced with and that you can’t get away from. You see? It’s changeless, but it’s forever on the move, if you will.
So now when you read about God and you read about the Father, you can be alert so that you don’t begin to think of a Being—a masculine figure with a long white beard and flowing robes, sitting somewhere at the point of authority in the middle of Creation. You see? Someone you could pray to who may be generous and help you, and may say, “Mm. You have a little more to learn. It’s not quite time for you to be free of your problem.” You see? You can begin to think, you can begin to be alert so that you don’t play into that.
Being is like a river. Now let’s take the Amazon River because it’s a very long river. The river is in movement. The river is a movement of water. Water that is not moving is a pond, or a lake. A river is a movement of water. And you could take one point in the Amazon and, let’s say, scoop out a cup of water, and a thousand miles down river you could scoop out another cup of water, and the quality of the water in one place might be slightly different, because it had gone over rapids and had air beaten into it so it’s more highly oxygenated and so on. And you could begin to think as though there are parts of the river. But the river is one river, and the river is all movement.
You could say there are molecules, so you can find a way to describe water as though it’s made up of parts. And you could think of yourself as some of the molecules of water up here, and others of you could think you’re part of the molecules a thousand miles downstream. And you could create within yourself a sense of having a unique experience of the Movement of Being. But you know what? A discrete or unique experience would be purely conceptual, because the river is a Singularity. It’s Total. It’s all One.
As you begin to let go of your private, tiny, little definitions of yourselves, what you’re doing is experiencing a breakdown of the sense of separation, so that you finally arrive at a point where you can say, “Thy Will be done.” You say, “I yield to the Movement that I’m part of and inseparable from. I abandon this funny activity that I’ve engaged in of partitioning myself off from the Whole. I am willing to abandon wanting to be somewhere other than where the Movement of the river has me. I yield to the Movement.”
That’s what yielding to the Father means, or yielding to God. It means allowing yourself to come in, back into that place of humility that allows you to fit in. And then abandon the idea of fitting in so that the Movement Itself can be experienced by you as the Totality of You, and of yourself as inseparable from the Whole Movement. And this is when you have the experience of being a co-creator with God by allowing yourself to be the Movement, by allowing the Movement to be All There Is of you. You’re no longer holding yourself apart. And the Movement of the Whole becomes available to you as your Infinite Conscious Experience of what? Being. Not of being something. Not of being God. Not of being in partnership with God, another thing. But the Mind that is moving that constitutes the Conscious Experience of Being in which nothing of what is natural to that Movement is experienced as being withheld from you.
I know this is nothing new, but I’m trying to put it in different words so that it might register more fully. The culprit that disallows you from experiencing What God Is as Being is an idea that you have that you have a will of your own that you can exercise—a will, we’ll say, different from that which gives impetus to the Movement of the river itself. Which means that you think that the little part of the river that you’re in, can, through the use of will, move a little bit to the right, or in a direction other than the Movement of the river. And this capacity to express will has created in you a sense of a self that has it, that has will. And so this will becomes the cornerstone of a definition of self—a self that has no existence really, because you are the Movement of the river, because you are inseparable from it. You are at this very moment the Movement of the Conscious Experience of Being.
Now as a result, you all are a collection of conditioned responses based upon the definitions you have created, or acquired, and incorporated. And these constitute the box, that for the last few weeks I’ve been telling you, doesn’t exist. As a result of these definitions which you’ve adopted, you walk through the Kingdom of Heaven and you don’t see it. You see your definitions.
Now a while back someone objected when I used Paul as an example, saying that the Christ would never put someone else on the carpet, so to speak. But, whenever I use Paul as example, it’s because it also illuminates something for him. And for everyone else, it makes the expression of Spirit, actual Truth, more relevant.
Now, before the Gathering tonight, some avocadoes were needed in the kitchen and Paul was asked if he would go downstairs and get them. He said, “Sure.” Well, he knows where the avocadoes are. I mean, after all, he’s very likely the one that put them there when he got home from the grocery store. Paul went downstairs, looked in both of the refrigerators, found no avocadoes, came back up and said, “They must be up here because there’s not a single avocado down there.” Well, in between the two refrigerators, there’s a table in which squash and things that don’t have to be refrigerated are sitting. Susan said, “They’re right on the table.” And Paul said, “I didn’t even look on the table. They’re supposed to be in the refrigerator. I only looked in the refrigerator.” And Judy says, “Gotta learn to look outside the box.” [mild audience laughter]
You see, they were there, but not where Paul knew they should be. And so he did not see them, because he was not looking with curiosity. He was looking with confidence. You see? His definitions were what he was relying upon. And every single one of you walk through your day thinking you know something, and as a result of what you think you know, you miss the Kingdom of Heaven. And yes, an experience of the Kingdom of Heaven would be one where something practical like happening to look where the avocadoes are, because there was an impulse to, allows you to find the avocadoes, to know where they are. You see?
You all go through your day, unless you have specifically sat down and meditated and become still and let go of your definitions, you are all going through your day truly as automatons—robots living out the expectations and the confidences that are based upon the definitions that you have adopted as factual. You don’t get up in the morning and walk through your day with innocent eyes—eyes that don’t know what to expect, eyes that are not biasing the experience of vision in any way. That’s what “yielding to God” means when we’re talking about yielding to the Father, or yielding to the Holy Spirit. That’s what we’re talking about in practical terms. It all has bearing upon and relates to what? Every Conscious Experience of what? Being—that you’re all experiencing unavoidably and unalterably at every moment.
You are living the Life Divine right now. You are experiencing the Conscious Movement of Being. Being. You are not a Being having an Experience of Being. You are Being. You see, “to be or not to be,” is not the question. There’s no choice! Being is What You Are right now. Not a Being. But Being is What You Are right now.
We talk about there being a Place of Excellence in you. We’ve talked about it being the Altar within you, and that the need is to go within into the Altar. It didn’t say to go out on a stage in front of humungous crowds. It didn’t say to find large gatherings of people to socialize with, and to be with, and to get things from, and give things to. You go within to the Altar. It’s a very quiet place. It’s a very private place. It’s a place where only you can go and only you can be. Because there’s no one else there other than the Holy Spirit, going there can’t be used to impress anyone, can it? It can’t be done for egotistical reasons, in other words.
I’m going to paraphrase a statement. The student of Truth is alone with his own Being and the Reality of things. When you go within to the Altar, very often initially it’s necessary to learn how to meditate and become still. And the reason is because to get to the Altar, you have to leave the ego behind. You have to leave your precious right to think your own thoughts and have your own definitions, you have to be willing to leave that behind, because in order to arrive at the Altar and learn, you have to be empty.
At the very least you have to be willing to let something in other than what is already there. In order to go in to the Altar and learn, you must become humble. Humility must characterize you when you’re there. Humility is the Nature of Being. It’s also the Nature of Grandeur.
And all of the stuff that you can’t take there is that which is characteristic of grandiosity, of the ego. Grandiosity is something that one engages in when he believes that he has accomplished the requirements necessary to fulfill a definition he’s holding in his own mind about what success is.
Grandeur, on the other hand, is something that is inherent in you because of the Nature of Being. It’s a Wholeness, a Singularity, characterized by Excellence, characterized by Perfection—Perfectness of Symmetry, we’ll say—perfect balance of form and outline and color and illumination and Spirit. It’s characterized by Exquisiteness. Not exquisiteness that impresses, but Exquisiteness that constitutes the experience of Loveliness that is unsurpassable. And Loveliness is Love expressed. Everything that you’re experiencing right now wherever you are, the nature of it is Love. Loveliness is what is characteristic of it—Loveliness far more profound than you can imagine. And it’s not separate from your hands and your feet, and the room you’re in and the things in the room.
But you know what? Like Paul, you’ve got to stop being so damn sure you know where the avocadoes are, so that you can look at what is right in the front of your face and actually see it, and know that it and the seeing of it are all part of the Singular Movement of Conscious Being, of God, of You, but not separate from each other—all the same thing.
Let’s go to the book.
We could stop there and you could all leave and have a radically different week from any other week you’ve had, just on the basis of consistently and conscientiously remembering that God is a verb, and the verb means Being. And it’s the Movement of Mind being Conscious, having what you would call the Conscious Experience of Being. And therefore, everything that you are having conscious experiences of, are one and the same—Living—the Living Conscious Experience of Being—not being a thing, but Being—a Living, Existing—and therefore, isn’t foreign to you, isn’t separate from you, is as totally lovable as you, is constituted of Love, just as you are.
And so there needs to be great inquisitiveness. And you need to not be lazy. Why put off the fuller Conscious Experience of what? Being. Being conscious of What Being Is—Mind unconfused about Its Infinite Conscious Experience. That’s why it’s called waking up. [finger snap] Lights going on. [finger snap] Illumination occurring. Seeing things clearly, instead of through a glass darkly. Let there be curiosity and inquisitiveness.
And if you’re so damn sure that the avocadoes are in the refrigerator when they’re not, if you’re so damn sure that so-and-so is never going to change, catch yourself. Stop it! Abandon that confidence, that definition. And be willing to look outside the box, because not only are you not in the box, they’re not in the box either. But you’re not going to see what they are until you’re willing to stop looking where you think you have to look. And you think you have to look where your very own definitions tell you a thing has to be.
Well, none of you would have enjoyed avocadoes in your sandwich if Paul had refused to look to see where the avocadoes were. And none of you will have a changed experience if you’re not willing to look for the Evidence of Being in places and in styles, or characteristics, that you’re not prone to be attentive to.
Let’s go to the book.
RAJ READING: The ego depends SOLELY on your willingness to tolerate it.
RAJ: Simple, short sentence.
What would happen if you weren’t willing to tolerate it? It would disappear. It depends entirely, solely, on your willingness to tolerate it. You give it all the life it has. You see?
[laughing] As long as you’re sure the avocadoes are in the refrigerator, you’re in a box. You’re in the box. You’ve got blinders on. And the sense of yourself that’s so confident, will be the sense of yourself that you’ll experience, as long as you’re tolerating it, as long as you’re actually choosing for it, as long as you’re not conscientiously trying to think a little bigger, be a little bigger, behave as though there isn’t a box, behave as though your definitions don’t mean anything. Your definitions will bind you as long as you tolerate them.
You see? It’s all about us—every single one of us. And no, that’s not Paul saying that. The Truth in here is about every single Individuality. And you know what? The lies about us are the same lies about all of us.
Continuing.
RAJ READING: If you are willing to look upon your grandeur you CANNOT despair, and therefore you cannot WANT the ego.
RAJ: If you are willing to see the avocadoes where they are, you cannot despair. You’ll be able to enjoy the sandwich. And therefore, you cannot want to think that the avocadoes are in the refrigerator which is empty of avocadoes. You see? When you have fulfillment, you cannot want lack. [laughing] You see, this isn’t some spiritually deep thing here.
RAJ READING: If you are willing to look upon your grandeur you CANNOT despair, and therefore you cannot WANT the ego. Your grandeur is God’s ANSWER to the ego because it…
RAJ: Your Grandeur.
RAJ READING: …is true. Littleness and grandeur cannot coexist, nor is it possible for them to alternate in your awareness. Littleness and grandiosity…
RAJ: Not littleness and Grandeur.
RAJ READING: Littleness and grandiosity can and MUST alternate in your awareness since both are untrue, and are therefore on the same level.
RAJ: In other words, littleness and grandiosity are both elements inside the box, or inside your belief that a box exists in which you are choosing to live within and function within and delight in the challenge of.
But littleness and Grandeur cannot coexist because the one is the nonexistence of the other. You see? When you know where the avocados are, you no longer don’t know where they are. You see? It’s humorously simple.
Again.
RAJ READING: Littleness and grandiosity can and MUST alternate in your awareness since both are untrue, and are therefore on the same level.
RAJ: And another reason that they must alternate is because littleness is very uncomfortable, and so you find yourself needing to do something to overcome the discomfort. And instead of finding the clarity in which you see that the box doesn’t actually exist, if instead of that, you seek to make yourself feel good while still in the box, you will have to find a way to puff yourself up and to talk yourself into feeling good about yourself. And so you will have to engage in processes that will allow you to fulfill criteria that you have established that identify the meaning of success. And that is how you achieve grandiosity in order to overcome the feeling of littleness. However, the grandiosity that you have created for yourself was not created by God and arose out of a misperception or a false perception of What You Truly Are. And therefore, the grandiosity, although temporarily achieved, will always be lost because something built on an illusion cannot stand. And so then, once again, you’ll be experiencing littleness, and you will have to do something about it. And so it alternates back and forth eternally until you finally arrive at a point of somehow discovering that there ain’t no box.
And as I said two weeks ago, my Birth, death, Resurrection, and Ascension forever undid that apparently absolute belief that everyone had been suffering from—that they were inside a box and that they were something they were not.
Again.
RAJ READING: Littleness and grandiosity can and MUST alternate in your awareness since both are untrue, and are therefore on the same level. Being the level of shift it is experienced as shifting, and extremes are its essential characteristic.
RAJ: You see, tomorrow Paul can go downstairs to the refrigerator, expecting to see something else there that might not be there and not find it, and then he’ll have to face Susan who won’t have forgotten, although Paul will like to conveniently forget that the same thing happened the day before. And so he hasn’t learned anything yet. But what that means is that there is something to learn, and there is a benefit to be had if he will just go downstairs or do whatever he’s doing without preconceptions. You see? Without thinking inside a box, and to be unconditionally open to a more all-inclusive Conscious Experience of Being—verb.
RAJ READING: Truth and littleness are DENIALS of each other because grandeur IS truth. Truth does not vacillate; it is ALWAYS true.
RAJ: The Movement of Being never vacillates. It always is.
RAJ READING: When grandeur slips away from you, you have replaced it with something YOU have made.
RAJ: A definition, an expectation, a concept, which you are giving preference to in place of saying or constantly being in the attitude of, “I, of myself, know nothing. I, of myself, have no capacity to experience the Conscious Experience of Being.” You see, you are That. Being is What You Are and you have no choice about it. You don’t have a capacity to be it. It already is you.
And you can’t afford to replace that simple, unalterable fact with a crazy idea that says you do have a capacity to be what you want to be, to be what you define yourself as. And if you compulsively attach yourself to the project of being what you can’t be, you will, for the time being, render yourself unconscious of What Really Is. And you will have this little fantasy, this little nightmare, that you call the human condition.
But you know what? I have to keep reminding you that the only way you can do this is by using the already-existing Elements of Creation and providing a bias to them, applying a bias to them. You’ve got to distort your perception of something that is Eternally Real. This is important. It’s a valuable thing to understand, because it means that as soon as you stop applying the bias to it, What It Is will register with you. It doesn’t require work. It requires less work. It requires you to stop applying a bias to Something That Is Eternally Unchangeable. That’s work. It’s not going to be work to get back in your Right Mind, to see Things As They Are. It’s going to be you neglecting to apply the bias.
Again.
RAJ READING: When grandeur slips away from you, you have replaced it with something YOU have made. Perhaps it is the belief in littleness; perhaps it is the belief in grandiosity. Yet it MUST be insane because it is NOT true. Your grandeur will NEVER deceive you, but your illusions ALWAYS will. Illusions ARE deceptions.
RAJ: What? Deceptions your ego pulled on you? No. A deception you pulled on yourself by saying, “I’d like to have a moment to look at the Movement of Being and use the capacity I have as a Being to alter the course of the river a little bit. Ha, ha, God! [laughing] I gotcha to be what You weren’t gonna be. Now I’m somebody!” You see?
Waking up… let’s put it this way, there is no hereafter in which to wake up. As I said last week, the hereafter is here. My Presence after the crucifixion, after the Resurrection, was a demonstration of the hereafter here! The Kingdom of Heaven that you associate with the hereafter is here! It is what you are experiencing “through a glass darkly,” but it is what you’re experiencing.
Now, you know, after the meeting tonight, Paul could have a conversation with Sue and say, “Listen. We need to have a little more consistency here in how we handle the food in this house. And, you know, if the avocados go in the refrigerator, they go in the refrigerator. You don’t put them someplace else. Otherwise we’re going to have an understanding that every time you put the avocados where they don’t belong, you’re going to hear from me. And I’m going to make it as unpleasant as I can until you knuckle under and are consistent enough to put them where they belong, so that you and I don’t have a discrepant experience with each other. And we can have harmony because we’re always putting things where they belong. We’re always putting them where I have determined they ought to be. We’re always going to put them where we together are going to mutually agree that they will be.” You see?
And now, what are we doing? [laughing] We are developing something for psychologists to study— the science of psychological human behavior and how to come about a harmonious experience through the practice of conscious, mindful control. You see? An infrastructure of proper behavior could begin to be established, when the answer is not to improve things inside the box, but to challenge the existence of the box entirely, so that no matter whether the avocados got left in the trunk, you’ll know where the avocados are when you want them. You see?
Is some of this jelling a little bit more and making the Truth that’s in here relevant so that the experience of What God Is becomes available in the simplest of daily events? I told Paul in the beginning, All of You—meaning “All of What You Are”—All of You is always functioning. All of You is always present. And All of You is always available. Now all of any one of you, all of What You Are, is Creation. All That Exists is some Aspect of the Infinitude of your what? Being—verb. Being. Existing. It’s always all available to you. Not only where the avocados are, but where the Pope is. Not only where the avocados are, but the experience of what it’s like to stand on the surface of Mars. The surface of Mars is part of the Infinitude of your Being. If it’s always available to you and it’s always present as you, you can have the Conscious Experience [finger snap] now.
Nothing, not anything, not any Aspect of the Infinitude of your Being which is inseparable from God Being, nothing of the Infinitude of You will be unavailable to you, because you’re neither behind the Point of Perfection, nor advancing toward it—you are at that Point. And what we’re talking about tonight is disclosing how it is that you can begin to have the experience and understand yourself therefrom, instead of from the standpoint of who you definitely think you are, and how you definitely think things work, which cause you, like Paul, not to find the avocados because you were looking a foot and a half to the left. And he couldn’t conceive that the avocados would not be in a refrigerator.
RAJ READING: Your grandeur will NEVER deceive you, but your illusions ALWAYS will. Illusions ARE deceptions. You cannot triumph, but you ARE exalted.
RAJ: Well, it’s only someone little, who attempts grandiosity, that could feel they had triumphed over adversity, over the conditions of the box.
RAJ READING: You cannot triumph, but you ARE exalted.
RAJ: [laughing] Exalted. The blinders get ripped away. You can see more. Your frame of reference is exalted. It’s not tiny by virtue of commitments you’re holding on to that keep you seeing in a limited fashion. You are experiencing the fuller Conscious Experience of Being. Being.
RAJ READING: And in your exalted state you seek others like you and rejoice with them.
RAJ: Uh oh. I hear somebody saying, “Oh, boy! That would really be nice. I would love to meet some other people who think like me, you know. I would love not to have to associate with and deal with these people who are so ignorant of the Truth. Because it’s so much work. It’s so stressful.”
Now you may think I’m digging deep for meaning here, but I’m not. And you need to see that this is included in this statement.
RAJ READING: You cannot triumph, but you ARE exalted. And in your exalted state you seek others like you and rejoice with them.
RAJ: I wish to see the Evidence of Love. Well, if you wish to see the Evidence of Love, you will seek for the Evidence of Love. And you will seek for it in others so that you can find that they are like you and you can rejoice with them.
You don’t go off and leave the shitty bastards behind that made it so difficult for you, so you can find those who are already in this exalted state that you are and you won’t have to put up with shit anymore. No. In your exalted state, you seek others. You look into your Brother’s eyes—the bastard, the bitch, the one who’s giving you hell, the one that’s causing you so much stress—and you rejoice with them because you have sought for the Truth in them, and through diligence and persistence to see the Truth, you found it. If you were exalted because you’ve recognized there ain’t no box, then you’re going to look into your Brother’s and Sister’s eyes, who are still thinking they’re in the box, and you’re going to share the news with them so that they can see that they aren’t in it either, and the two of you can rejoice together.
RAJ READING: It is easy to distinguish grandeur from grandiosity because love is returned, but pride is not.
RAJ: Love is inseparable from Grandeur because humility is the characteristic of Grandeur. And in the presence of humility, no one feels threat. And I promise you that any time any one of you experience an absence of threat, you feel loved.
Grandiosity, on the other hand, the characteristic of it is arrogant pride, self-satisfaction. Pride can’t be shared. It’s a private experience of [laughing] bloated self-appreciation.
RAJ READING: Pride will not produce miracles, and therefore will deprive you of your true witnesses to your reality.
RAJ: What are your True witnesses to your Reality? They are the messengers that return to you that you’ve sent out.
What reality? I’m going to say it this way. From what reality are you sending out your messengers? The reality of grandiosity? The reality of your personal private definitions? They will come back to you and confirm your perceptions, your ignorances.
But if your Reality is the experience of humility in which you make no claims about yourself but the Father’s Claims About You by virtue of His expressing Himself as you, those constitute a Grandeur that you can feel and that you know is True About You, and you know you didn’t manufacture. And from that experience, you send out different messengers, and thus you are not deprived of your True witnesses to your Reality.
RAJ READING: Truth is not obscure nor hidden, but its obviousness to YOU lies in the joy you bring to its witnesses, who SHOW it to you.
RAJ: How many of you have had the experience of being in a really bad mood and some happy bloke walks into the room and just showers you with the joy that they’re feeling? You see? This does not witness to your reality, and it can really bug the hell out of you. And you will not respond to the witnesses for joy with joy, and thus you don’t fulfill your Function of glorifying God.
RAJ READING: Truth is not obscure nor hidden, but its obviousness to YOU lies in the joy you bring to its witnesses, who SHOW it to you. They attest to your grandeur, but they cannot attest to pride because pride is not shared.
RAJ: And I’m adding: Pride cannot be shared.
As I said, it’s a very private experience.
RAJ READING: God WANTS you to behold what He created because it is His joy.
RAJ: God wanted Paul to see the avocados [audience laughter] because they were there to be seen for what they were, to be used for the purpose they were there for. If God wants for Paul to see the avocados, He wants all of you to see the Presence of Being, the Presence of What He Is, the Presence of What (capital “B”) Being Is in everything—the flower, the table, the leaves, the fingernails, the poncho, the chair, the socks. You see? You may call them something else when you see them for What They Truly Are. But the name is not what they are. What They Are is Real.
You know, there’s a song, [singing] “Roll out the barrel.” Well, roll out the curiosity. And you know what? If you do it this week, and there aren’t major changes, you know what? There will have been one major change. You will have been using your mind in a new way that is utterly constructive. And so, it’s not a test. It can be looked at as a matter of practical discipline to start using your mind in a way that has as its goal to see the Face of God here and now, to see the Kingdom of Heaven here and now, to see Grandeur of Being in the simplest of things that you encounter every day.
If you don’t see a lot of brand-new things, all it means is that your previous habits are so ingrained that they are still taking precedence. But what they are causing you to see isn’t real, and therefore it isn’t something to be willing to settle for just because your really great, conscientious persistence during the coming week, didn’t cause major transformation.
You know what? This piece of paper wants you to see What It Really Is. The petal on the flower wants you to see What It Truly Is. You say, “Well, maybe I could understand the petal of the flower because the flower is alive. But this piece of paper is inanimate. It’s not alive. How could it have a want?” Because there ain’t no such thing as matter. All Substance is Spirit. Spirit is God. Substance is Living. The Substance of Spirit is Love. Every single Idea in the Mind of God is experienceable, as I’ve been saying. And because Everything is an Idea, the Substance of which is Spirit, it is Conscious—Living—Conscious. It has an Intent to communicate its Meaning for Being. Its Meaning for Being—not for being a piece of paper, but for Being, simply Being. You see? Being, the Conscious Experience of Being, is a conscious experience of intimate relationship, conscious intimate relationship, with every single Idea in the Infinitude of Creation that you call “things.”
Maybe you have trouble with the contents of this book, but the book is Spirit. It is an Idea that is experienceable as a book. As a book, it wants you to experience its reason for existing as a book, regardless of the content, but also including the content.
Start looking at everything as though it’s alive—not matter alive, but an Idea. Not matter. A Living Idea. A Living, Conscious Idea that exists for the Purpose of expressing and extending its Meaning so that it can be recognized and experienced. You are living in the middle of a Living God. You are living in the middle of an unalterable, unchangeable, unlimited Movement of Being/Existing that’s called God.
You say, “Well, how can I pray to a Movement? You know, I can pray to God because God is a thing, a noun. God is a thing I can send messages to. Now you say that God is a verb—Being, Movement. How can I pray to that?” Well, I said a number of years ago, prayer is saying “Yes” to God. It’s the little molecules of water, that desperately want to see it (themselves) as unique and separate, yielding to the Movement of the river so that it finds itself as the Movement, because it lets the Movement be all there is to it, or all there is to them (the molecules).
Prayer is saying “Yes” to God. That’s prayer. Not, “Will you do this for me?” You say, “God, help me to be what You want me to be.”
Or, “Help me not get in the way of What You’re Being right here where I am, so that I might experience That, rather than the interesting, challenging, miserable experience I’m having by virtue of my choice to give preference to my definitions and my meanings and how I want things.”
Okay.
I love you. And I look forward to being with you next week.
And if you don’t understand what I’ve been saying, and if you’re frustrated by what I’ve been saying, then acknowledge it, and then be willing to set down any emotional charge you have about it, and go to the Altar, go within to that Place of Excellence in you. Just remember, you can’t take frustration there with you and still be able to learn. You can’t take anger with you. And you can’t take the confidence that there are no avocados downstairs because there aren’t any in the refrigerators.
Don’t go in there with confidences. Say, “I don’t know what the hell is going on. I don’t know what the heck anything means. I think I do, but I’m willing to acknowledge that I’m not enlightened at this moment, so therefore, I’m willing to set aside what I believe and I’m willing to set aside (the fact that) the emotions I’m experiencing because nothing is working the way I believe they ought to be working. And I am choosing to be willing to be quiet and listen. I know that the Truth wants to be known. I know it’s my Birthright to know it, and so I’m going to get out of the way and be undefended against the experience, the influx of it.” And then be willing to persist. If you don’t hear the answer the first time, if you don’t see the avocados the first time, go back again and look with less confidence even. They’re there. The answers are there. They’re in you.
Okay.
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A Course in Miracles Study Group with Raj, April 10th 2005
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