Well, we’re at a really interesting point in the Course.  It’s a forward step that seems to have a backward step to it, or a blessing with a cursing accompanying it.  You see?

You’re all familiar with the phrase, “Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free,”¹ but what if the truth is going to make you free of something you don’t want to let go of?   You see, in a way that’s a two-edged sword:  It feels good and it feels bad—it blesses you and curses you.

We’ve talked about special relationships at some length.  What is the one thing you have the most special, special relationship with?

Your thoughts . . . your thoughts . . . YOUR THOUGHTS!  The ones that make you the qualified, wonderful, credible, valuable person that you are, the  thoughts you’ve had that no one else had, the thoughts that changed the world, perhaps.

But if you had those thoughts all by yourself, you had them in an arena where you were in a state of self-defense.  Because when you separated yourself from your Source, you immediately felt fear and guilt.  And you immediately began to live in the middle of Reality—the Kingdom of Heaven—as though it was Something that you had to protect yourself against.  And you lived as though the one that you Are, was an orphan—somebody not with a Birthright—someone without a Birthright.  You see?  And so everything you did was done as a defense against your lack—a defense against your incapacity.  You see? 

And so your thoughts did not come from a place of connectedness with truth or Reality.  And they came forth, not as an expression of Love, but as an assertion of self-protection. 

There’s no way to have a Meaningful idea—I’m going to use the word “idea”—when you don’t know who you Are and you don’t know where you Are.  And your life is being lived on a false basis.

Now, no matter what comes up during the day, your first inner response to it should be, “Well I don’t know what this means, but I’m going to immediately listen.  Not listen for my best judgments, not listen for my most creative ideas, but I’m going to listen for what the Holy Spirit would reveal to me as the simple divine truth about what is going on . . . or what the meaning of this, that or the other thing is.” 

You can count on it, . . that if you think you know the answer, if you, off the top of your head [snaps fingers] think you know the answer, you’re experiencing a special relationship with your thoughts.  And you’re not in the holy instant.  And you therefore, are not in that place where God’s laws prevail.

And so, no matter how wonderful the thought or idea or response is that you come up with, it’s still going to be fundamentally an act of self-defense.  That’s not love.  That’s not caring.  That’s not communion with your fellowman.  That’s an adversarial external interplay with another.

Now this is very important to understand.  If you think you know what the answer is, you don’t.

But if you do the two-step, you go into the Silence.   You stop assuming what the answer must be.  You stop valuing what your best judgments are, based upon your fantastic experience.  And you find yourself moving into a gentle peace—a quietness that isn’t full of thinking, but is full of a presence of stability that it will seem is not yours even though it is.

In this place you will find yourself Knowing what needs to be known.  And you will express it from that peace.  You will not express it from an egotistical, thrilling, exciting self-expression. 

When you abandon your special relationship with your thoughts, you bring yourself into the “not-knowing place” that we’ve talked about quite some time ago—a place to be valued within you.  It’s the quiet place of peace where the Altar is in the very center of you.  And there, the Father’s Will, the truth, the conscious experience of what is Real is had by you.

Very often what you experience there won’t have anything to do with what you thought you needed to know and act upon when you were thinking for yourself, [snaps fingers] coming off the top of your head.

This is very important because you don’t want to be going down side-trips that are fruitless, seeking to accomplish what doesn’t need to be done but you thought needed to be done because of your devotion to your best thinking.  That’s not how you will Wake up, that’s how you will delay Awakening.

Paul gave himself a very difficult  time  today.    There were many things to do . . . many things to do right up to the minute the meeting tonight started.  There was no time for him to prepare by getting his mind in the right place, by getting control of things so that he wasn’t interfered with.

You see, if he had had his way, he would’ve been able to take control of the day and have it be the way he knew (because it’s a false knowing) “it needed to be” in order for him to be where he needed to be mentally to listen to me this evening.  If he had been able to get control he would’ve changed the things that were getting in the way.

Well, he did.  [chuckle] He spent a good part of the afternoon asking me how to change things, how to get others to change their expectations so that he might have a certain modicum of peace and quiet in which to ease into the evening.

But you see, I couldn’t accommodate him because the answer, if he had really shut up and stopped his thinking and his devotion to his best thinking, he would have heard me say “You’re trying to prepare for this evening and the only way to be prepared for the evening is to be totally unprepared.  The only way to be prepared for the evening is for you to be in that place where you have no expectation upon yourself.  It doesn’t matter to you if anyone else has an expectation upon you.  All you need to do is to know that in the peace of your Being, you will be utterly appropriate.  In the peace of your Being where there’s nothing to live up to, that which is meaningful will come forth.”

Oh-h, but he wouldn’t of had that this afternoon because that’s not the way.  If it had happened that way, he would have been able to take credit for something that no one should take credit for.  He would’ve taken credit for an experience that wasn’t representative of the truth.

It’s a hard thing for all of you to grasp, that practicing the two-step, going into the holy instant, literally has nothing to do with being in control better than you have ever been in control before.

The only reason you ever thought you needed control was because you thought chaos was real and that your perceptions of what would correct it were themselves correct.  And you attempted with strength and bravado to make things happen when that which would have corrected the chaos that you were experiencing would have been to go into the Silence—to relax, to give up trying to be in control . . . you see? . . and do something that you couldn’t possibly take any credit for. 

Listen for the truth, let the truth in so that it might infill you and, for lack of better words, give you a rudder, give you a direction, give you an expression to give, an intelligent one, a meaningful one, a harmonizing peace generating one.  You see?

Not anyone really wants that because you value authority and control so much, because it is tied in with your sense of worth.

So, ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free and it will make you free of things you don’t want to let go of. 

You must know this so that you will engage in the work it takes to move past your insistence upon valuing the special relationship you have with your very excellent thoughts.

In the book:

Nothing you seek to strengthen in the special relationship is REALLY part of you.²

When you want to strengthen your ideas, when you want to strengthen your thoughts by acting them out and causing them to be a means of enforcing good in your world, you’re trying to strengthen something that’s not a part of you. 

As I said, it’s thinking that arises out of a misunderstanding of the nature of Being, which causes your thinking to be false and any actions that arise out of it to be detrimental.

Nothing you seek to strengthen in the special relationship is REALLY part of you. And you cannot keep part of the thought system which taught you it was real, and understand the Thought that REALLY knows what you are.

In other words, you’re not going to be able to hold onto your dearly beloved best concepts that have so much to say about “wonderful you.”  You’re not going to be able to hold on to them and still experience the . . .

. . .Thought that REALLY knows what you are.

That you are the holy Son of God, that you are here to bear witness of God by listening and reaching for—listening to and reaching for—God’s Perspective.  Because as His Son or Daughter, as His Offspring, His Perspective is what is embodied in you and that’s the way you will discover what It is that’s embodied in you.  You will discover It by seeking It of your Father . . . of It’s Source.

You HAVE allowed the Thought of your reality to enter your minds, and because you invited it, it WILL abide with you.

Now, . .

You HAVE allowed the Thought of your reality to enter your minds, . .

. . . you could say it was sort of a sneaky trick to get you to become inquisitive about a holy instant where you could, through its practice, connect with God.  Because, you know . . . literally, if you’re told ahead of time that you’re going to have to sacrifice who you think you are, you’re going to have to sacrifice the picture you have of yourself and the behaviors that you have adopted based upon the false picture you have of yourself, so that you might learn who you really Are, which is incredibly, fantastically different from who you think you are, you would’ve said, “No way, I’m not going to touch that holy instant!”

In a positive way, it is the reverse of taking a first puff on a cigarette or using a drug.  Because you have the experience and you’re hooked.  You have the experience and it’s one that you really will not put down. 

The minute you experience the holy instant and you experience the Father directly, you have an influx of the Father’s Perspective, it’s Something you will never forget and it’s Something you will never let go of again completely.  You may try to ignore It, but you will not be able to let It go, and It will abide with you and It will grow within you.  And whether you’re attending to It or not, It will sooner or later cause you to become more and more dissatisfied with “the human condition,” as you call it, as you see it, as you have generated it out of the fear and guilt.  It came into play when you said, “Father, I’d rather see it my way.  Father I’d rather say what things are.”

So, it sets you on an irrevocable path of Awakening.

Again, it sets you on an irrevocable path of Awakening—a feeling one—one that is going to cause you to be less and less content with “the human condition,” with the way things seem to be, with a life between birth and death filled with sin, sickness and ultimately death.  Ways that you have dealt with others will seem less satisfying. 

And if you haven’t actively been nurturing the practice of the holy instant or the two-step, it’s going to seem like the world is against you because everything is turning to sour grapes for no reason that you know of.  And yet, the reason is, you had a taste of truth.  You had a glimpse of the Father’s Perspective.  Revelation in some form occurred.  Inspiration occurred.  And it won’t leave you alone.

Now, Paul got arrogant this afternoon and he felt like, “Well, if nobody is going to respect him, if life itself is not going to respect his need to be in that place where he needs to be to listen to me, then he’s going to be depressed, he’s going to be unhappy . . .” and he caused himself to be very drowsy and felt like cancelling the meeting, [slight chuckle] like he was just too exhausted because of the demands of the week to follow through.  [sigh]  You see?

Now mind you, I’ve not talked with him about any of this before we began this evening.  We did not discuss this to put him in a better frame of mind so that he could relay it to you second hand.  He’s learning this first-hand right now.  But what does that mean?  It means that at some point this afternoon, late this afternoon, he arrived at a point where the distress—the disturbance he was experiencing—was not tolerable. 

And so he sat down finally and he did a meditation.  He sat down and abandoned all of the thoughts that he so loved that made him feel so righteously indignant all afternoon and which, because he was practicing them, caused him to become more and more limited, more and more incapacitated, more and more unwilling to be the Presence of Love.  You see? 

And so in his insistence, whether he felt like it or not, whether he thought it would be the answer or not, he became still.  He did the first part of the two-step.  “It wasn’t fair,” he said.  He shouldn’t have had to do it.  Everything and everyone should have recognized what he needed in order to have the Course In Miracles Study Group tonight in order to hear me.  And it was all bullshit.  Because all he needed to do to hear me was to abandon his special relationship with his great thoughts that determined that something was wrong and everything and everyone needed to change.  You see?

And there’s not a one of you that doesn’t value your thoughts enough to become devoted to them even though the thoughts you are devoting yourself to are diminishing your Spirit, diminishing your hope, confirming your doubt, aggravating your fear, and making it perfectly clear that something is terribly wrong that you must get control of. 

You hang crepe all the time in one way or another and you love the process of the negative forecast that you’re absolutely confident in even though that confidence is a confidence in some thoughts that you have devoted yourself to.  You see?

That’s the interesting place we are in the Course—I don’t mean in the book—I mean in the place in you where the Course moves you, grows you, heals you and causes you to be a new man or a new woman.

Again, . .

You HAVE allowed the Thought of your reality to enter your minds, and because you invited it, it WILL abide with you.

And I mean, it WILL ABIDE with you.  It will never ever go away again.  And its Presence permeating you will, in so many words, cause your days to be uncomfortable if you’re insisting upon living them as though your ideas about the day are true and you live with great devotion and love for your ideas.  In other words, you magnify the special relationship you have with your ideas.

Your love for it  . . .

. . . the Thought of your reality . . .

. . . will not allow you to betray yourself, and you could not enter into a relationship where it could not go with you, for you would not BE apart from it.

Now you may be able to fool yourself into thinking that, yeah, you’d like to be apart from it again and you’re going to ignore it for a while and you’re going to try and push it out.  But I’m sorry, listen to the words:

Your love for it will not allow you to betray yourself, . .

. . . by abandoning it totally again . . .

. . . and you could not enter into a relationship where it could not go with you, for you would not BE apart from it.

You see?  You had that first drag on a cigarette.  Nobody’s going to like that example but I’ve got to use it because it means something.  You can relate to it.  You can relate to having a single experience that addicts you to it.  And the experience of truth, when you let it in, is like that.  It will not leave you and it will not leave you where it found you.  It will move you forward.  And in effect, it will force you to abandon what you have wanted to hold onto.  In other words, the truth . . . you shall know the truth—have the experience of it—and the truth will make you free, whether you want to be free of it or not.  You see?

So, . .

Be glad you have escaped the mockery of salvation which the ego offered you, . .

. . . you know . . . through all your special relationships, with your own great ideas . . .

. . . and look not back with longing on the travesty it made of your relationships. Now no one need suffer, for you have come too far to yield to the illusion of the beauty and holiness of guilt.

Guilt has been used by everyone to make a better self out of you than you have been before and to honor the better self that you’ve made.  But you’re not going to be able to continue to do that successfully without increasing difficulty.  That’s the wonder of healing.  It heals!  The Revelation of Truth, the experience of truth heals!  It changes you!  And if it weren’t for your devotion to your special relationships you would embrace it whole-heartedly without resistance.  And the fact is, that the growth of truth in you will successfully move you to the place where you do abandon what no longer serves you.  That’s just the way it works.

Only the wholly insane could look on death and suffering, sickness and despair, and see it thus . .

. . . as beauty and holiness.

What guilt has wrought is ugly, fearful and very dangerous. See no illusion of truth and beauty there. And be you thankful that there IS a place where truth and beauty wait for you.

Now, today Paul used his special relationship with his thoughts to try to better the situation or the circumstance or the circumstances of the day.  But you know what?  It didn’t work very well.  It simply aggravated the situation. 

And as truth grows in you, your capacity to practice unhealthy attitudes, which before it seemed a pleasant thing to do, will become less and less pleasant and you will find less and less motivation to employ it.  And you will begin to lose the thing you would hold onto. 

It’s going to happen.  And you’re gong to have to recognize that the depression you experience, the hopelessness you experience around it is because what never really worked is obviously not working for you now.  And this is going to make it easier for you to give up what doesn’t work.  You see?  It’s part of the healing.  And what it does, is it requires you to use the discipline that I talked about last week, where you stand firmly in the face of what seems like your failure when you practice the holy instant, until its bluff dissolves.  You’re going to have to do as Paul did today . . . a meditation, or something where you are persistently consistent in not thinking, so that in the absence in the thinking that is generating the upset, your innate divinity, your innate Knowing can register with you.

See no illusion of truth and beauty there. . .

. . . where guilt is.

And be you thankful that there IS a place where truth and beauty wait for you.

You see?  When you’re so convinced of your negative forecast about everything, you are in a position where you’re refusing to consider, much less acknowledge . . .

. . . that there IS a place where truth and beauty wait for you.

That’s why you’re depressed.  And that’s why you are bringing the force of your willfulness to bear upon the situation—you have to do it because truth and beauty do not await you and you must create it.  But, . . .

. . . be you thankful that there IS a place where truth and beauty wait for you.

Why?  Because that will give you the nerve and the willingness to stop thinking and do the two-step and engage in the holy instant, whether it seems to be working or not.  And persist, and persist, and persist.  Because although you don’t know what will happen, you know that if you persist in your devotion to your special relationship with your thoughts, you will continue to be depressed.  And the depression, the frustration, the fear, the anger, the jealousy, all of it will increase and become even more intolerable until you finally say, “Aagh…there must be another way!”

. . . be you thankful that there IS a place where truth and beauty wait for you.  Go on to meet them gladly, and learn how much awaits you for the simple willingness to give up nothing BECAUSE it is nothing.

The new perspective you will gain from crossing over will be the understanding of where Heaven IS.

Listen:

The new perspective you will gain from crossing over will be the understanding of where Heaven IS.

Where is Heaven?  It’s not in your thinking.  Where is Heaven?  It’s in the Silence within you, where in the absence of your thinking, the Father’s Perspective—which He has embodied in you, as You, because You are His Offspring—can register with you and will register with you.  That’s where It is. 

From here, . .

. . . the thinking standpoint that Paul was in this afternoon. 

From here, it seems to be outside and across the bridge.

You know, it’s on the other side of getting people to change and getting circumstances to be different from what they are.

From here, it seems to be outside and across the bridge. Yet as you cross to join it, it will join with YOU and become one with you.

Your Being, which is already in perfect harmony with all of Creation and doesn’t need to be in control of anything, can register with you and will register with you when you do what it takes to let it in.

Now mind you, most all of you are doing this to one degree or another at various times.  What I’m saying is not totally unknown to you.  But as I talk about it here, you can recognize how you slip back and forth from clarity to devotion to your special relationships with your special thoughts and how you disturb yourself, and then how you do practice the two-step and find your peace returning, find clarity returning and finding a capacity to be that in a way is utterly appropriate and blesses everything.  These are not strange things to you. 

But I’ll tell you, when you get hung up on your special relationships with your special thoughts, your memory vanishes [chuckling] because you are so committed to your special relationship and you forget how easy it was once you finally decided the last time that there must be another way, and you practiced another way.

Yet as you cross to join it, it will join with YOU and become one with you. And you will think, in glad astonishment, that for all this you gave up NOTHING!

Ye shall know the truth, . . you Knew the truth and the truth set you free from NOTHING!  It set you free from the belief you had that you were connected to something when you weren’t.  Sanity has returned—a source of great gratitude when you have the experience.