tratados

Christ-consciousness will be temporary or sustainable depending on your ability to refrain from judgment. What is flows from Love and knows not judgment. All that you envision, imagine, and desire with love must be without judgment or it will be false envisioning, false imagining, false desire. This simply means false, or not consistent with the truth. It does not mean wrong or bad and is itself no cause for judgment. It is simply an alternative that will draw you out of Christ-consciousness and not allow it to be sustainable.

7.2 That you are living in the time of Christ does not mean that you will automatically realize Christ-consciousness, just as living in the time of the Holy Spirit did not mean that you would automatically realize the consciousness of the spirit that was your intermediary. But just as during the time of the Holy Spirit, your understanding of your Self and God grew through the indirect means that were available to you, during the time of Christ, your understanding of your Self and God cannot help but grow through the direct and observable means now available. Just as in the time of the Holy Spirit the spirit was available to all as intermediary, during the time of Christ, Christ-consciousness is available to all.

7.3 Those of you who have acquired Christ-consciousness and are now learning the vision of Christ-consciousness must realize the many choices that will seem to lie before you and your brothers and sisters in this time. The understanding of the unity that creates and sustains all living things will now be as close to the surface of consciousness as was, during the time of
the Holy Spirit, the understanding that man is imbued with spirit. People, both religious and non-religious, those who consider themselves spiritual and those who consider themselves pragmatists, will hold this understanding within their grasp. Many will be surprised by experiences of unity and know not what to make of them. Those who attempt to figure them out will come ever closer to the truth by means of science, technology, and even art and literature. Those who allow themselves to experience revelation will enter Christ-consciousness.

7.4 Those who sustain Christ-consciousness will abide within it free of judgment. They will not seek to create their version of a perfect world and to force it upon others, but will abide within the perfect world that is in the vision of Christ-consciousness. This perfect world will be observable to them and in them. It will be revealed to them and through them. It will be revealed to them through what they can envision, imagine, and desire without judgment. It will not take the effort of their bodies, but the freedom of a consciousness joined in unity, a consciousness able to envision, imagine, and desire without judgment and without fear.

7.5 This is why all fear, including the fear of death, needs to be removed from you despite the radical sounding nature of life-everlasting. You cannot sustain Christ-consciousness while fear remains in you, just as you cannot sustain Christ-consciousness while judgment remains in you. Why? Because it is not in the nature of Christ; it is not in the nature of the Christ-Self to know fear or judgment. What we are speaking of is abiding in your natural state. Your natural state is one free of fear and judgment. This is all that makes the difference between your natural state and your unnatural state. As your natural state returns to you through a heart and mind joined in unity, your body too will exist or abide within this natural state. It cannot help to, as it, just like your heart, exists in the state or reality in which you think you are. The only thing that has created an unreal reality for your heart and body has been the inability of the mind to join the truth with your conscious awareness. While your mind did not accept the truth of your identity or the reality of love without fear, it existed in a reality of fear and judgment, and bound heart and body to this reality. Your heart has now heard the appeal of this course and worked with your mind to bring about this acceptance of the truth, a truth your heart has always known but has been unable to free you to accept without the mind’s cooperation.

7.6 The mind, once released from the ego’s thought system, has but to relearn the thought system of the truth. Your mind, heart, and body have joined in alignment to bring this learning about. They now exist in harmony. Your mind and heart in union have brought harmony to your body. Sustaining this harmony will keep your body in perfect health, even while the manner of this perfection of your health will remain one of many options.

7.7 You will realize that what is is optimal to your learning. But you will also realize that an end to your learning is in sight. Once Christ-consciousness, and the ability to know what is has reached a state of sustainability in you, your need for learning and the conditions of learning ends. Being in harmony with poor health, and learning the lesson that it has come to impart to you, will return you to good health. Your poor health is, in other words, no cause for judgment, as it is the perfect health, now, in the past, and in the future, to bring you the lessons you would learn in order to return you to your Self and the unity of Christ-consciousness. The same is true of all conditions of all learning everywhere. The conditions are perfect for optimal learning. This is the nature of the universe. These conditions are perfect not only for individual learning, but for shared learning, learning in community, and learning as a species.

7.8 But let me again emphasize that the conditions of learning will no longer be needed once learning has occurred. The student no longer needs to attend school once the desired curriculum is learned, except through their own choice. Again let me remind you that no choice is wrong. Some will choose to continue to learn through the full variety of the human experience even after it is unnecessary. Why? Because it is a choice, pure and simple. But because it is an educated choice, an enlightened choice, a free choice due to the learning that has already occurred, the choice will be one guided by love and thus be a joyous choice and ensure a joyous life. These choices will change the world.

7.9 But the choice many of you will make — the choice to move from learning to creating — will create a new world.
chapter 8
To Come To Know


8.1 You are now beginning to reach the stage of understanding where in you can realize that it was not some separate “you” or some entity without form who, at some point in time, chose to express love in physical form, and so began this experience of human life. You are now beginning to be able to understand that it was God who made this choice. That this was the Creator making a choice and creation’s response was the universe, which is an expression of God’s love, an expression of God’s choice, a representation of God’s intent.

8.2 I say you are only now beginning to reach a stage where you can understand this, but what I really mean is that you are only now reaching a stage where in you can know, within your inner being, that this is the truth. I say this because it is only now that you can come to know this truth without reverting to old ideas of not having had “yourself” any choice in the matter, or reverting to old ideas of blaming God for all that has ensued since this choice. I say this because only now are you beginning to be ready to hear that you and God are the same. That when I say “God made a choice” I am not saying that you did not. I am saying that a choice was made within the one mind, the one heart and that this was your choice as well as God’s choice. It was one choice made in unity. It was the choice of all for life-everlasting and life-ever expressing. It was the choice for creation, for creation is the expression of love.

8.3 The heart of God is the “center” of the universe, as your own heart is the center of your being. The mind of God
is the Source of all ideas, just as “your” mind is the source of your ideas.

8.4 Let us dwell again, for just a moment before we let this dwelling in the past go forever, on what has “gone wrong” with God’s expression of love.

8.5 Creation in form had a starting point. This is the nature of everything that lives in form. It has a starting point from which it grows into its time of fullness. Creation on the scale at which God creates produced the universe, or in actuality, many universes. These universes grew and changed, ebbed and flowed, materialized and dematerialized in natural cycles of the creation process that once begun were unending and thus ever creating anew. So too is it with you.

8.6 Each expression of God’s love, being of God, continued to express love through expression of its nature, which was of God. What happened in the case of human beings, was a disconnect from your own true nature, which in turn caused a disconnect in your ability to express love, which in turn caused a disconnect in your ability to know God, because you did not know your Self.

8.7 The expression of your true nature should never have been difficult, joyless, or fearful, but you cannot imagine what a creative undertaking the human being was! If you can imagine for a moment yourself as a being whose every thought became manifest, as perhaps you can envision from remembering your dreams in which anything can happen without any need for you to “do” anything, and then becoming a form where expressing yourself depended upon what you could “do” with the human body, you can imagine the learning process that ensued. If your reality had been like unto the reality you experience in dreams, can you not see that you would have to learn to breathe, to speak, to walk, as a baby learns to do these things, and that these things were loving acts within a loving universe, a love-filled learning process. A learning process that was as known to you and chosen by you as it was by God, because you and God are one.

8.8 You might ask how, if what I’m saying is true, could God disconnect from Himself? What God could not disconnect from was the true nature of the being of God, which is love. What God could not disconnect from was the true nature of creation, which is love. What God, in effect had to do, what you in effect had to do, in order to live in a nature inconsistent with what God could not disconnect from, was disconnect from God. Since God was the center of your being, it was impossible to disconnect your heart and still live. What could be disconnected was your will, or in other words, your mind. Just as it is your nature to breathe oxygen, and not breathing oxygen is inconsistent with your nature, fearfulness is inconsistent with God. Judgment is inconsistent with God. Bondage or lack of freedom is inconsistent with God.

8.9 God always knew what your mind chose to rebel against: that creation is perfect. Your mind, being of God, was constrained by the learning limits of the body and chose to rebel against the learning that was needed in order to come into the time of fullness of a being able to express itself in form, never realizing that this just delayed the learning that had to occur to release you from the limits you struggled against. The constant striving to be more and more, faster and faster — each being’s yearning, passionate, excessive drive to fulfill its purpose, like a drive to explore the ocean before knowing how to swim or a drive to explore new lands while still believing the Earth to be flat, God saw and knew to be consistent with the nature of man, even while the fear and struggle that this impatience with the process of creation generated was inconsistent with God.

8.10 Thus, what could God then do? What does creation do with a storm arising on the horizon, growing out of atmospheric conditions perfect to generate its violence? What do you who are parents do with a child who is too impatient, too bright, too eager, to learn slowly and to mature gracefully? Do you withdraw your love? Never. Do you disinherit? Rarely. What you do is realize the impossibility of imposing your will and, because of this impossibility, you realize that you must let go. Thus your decision was also God’s decision.

8.11 In following in the way of God’s original intent, you rebelled against God’s original design, the design that is the pattern of creation. Your rebellion was not with God, although you came to see it as such. Your rebellion was not allowed, it was mutually chosen. Just as, as a parent, you come to see that you cannot fight a child’s nature, no matter how different it might be from your own; just as in extreme cases you see that you cannot stop your child from perilous behavior save by taking away his freedom through the most extreme of measures; this is what happened between you and God.

8.12 To take away your freedom in order to protect you, even from yourself, would not have been an act of love. To take away your freedom would be to take away God’s own freedom, the freedom of creation. Your rebellion against the constraints of your nature in form became part of the pattern of creation because it was the created’s response. It was your response, and since God is both the Creator and the Created, it was God’s response as well.

8.13 As you begin to live as both the Created and the Creator, you expand and enrich God. What other purpose would God ever have had for wanting to express the Love that is Himself in form, if it were not for the expansion and enrichment it would add to His being? What purpose is behind your own desire to do thus?

8.14 It was only the ego that made this desire seem to be for anything other than the purpose of expansion and enrichment of your being. If it is only in sharing who you are, through expression of who you are, that you come to know who you are, then this is true of God as well. God could not be the only being in all of creation who remains static and unchanging! How could this possibly be said of one whose name and identity is synonymous with creation? You like to think that God knows everything, and God surely knows everything that is. But consciousness of what is, the Christ-consciousness that allows you to be in communion with God, is not a static state. While consciousness of the truth is never-changing, consciousness of the truth is also ever-expanding.

8.15 Does one know love in one burst of knowing and never know more of love? Does one grasp beauty and thereafter remain ever unstirred by it? Is not the very essence of consciousness itself this ability to come to know continuously? To be aware constantly of what is, is to continuously come to know and yet to never not know.

8.16 You think of a state of knowing as a state in which there is nothing you do not know about something. This is why you study subjects — so that you can come to this completion and enjoy this certainty and pride that at least you know all there is to know about this one thing. This was the ego’s answer to being a learning being — choosing something to learn that it could master. This desire to be done with learning, which is a true desire, is consistent with your true nature and your purpose here. To learn everything there is to know about even one subject and to call that learning complete, however, is an error. If you re-think this definition you will see that even in regard to the learning of one subject it is not the truth. The only instance in which this is the truth is in regard to learning who you are.

8.17 Learning, dear brothers and sisters, does come to an end, and that end is fast approaching. Coming to know through learning will be of the past as soon as Christ-consciousness is sustainable and you begin to come to know through constant revelation of what is. True learning has had only one purpose…the purpose of returning you to awareness of your true identity. Be done with learning now as you accept who you truly are.