Editor's note: This transcript has been lightly edited to bring clarification to certain points of the dialogue and for easier readability. For this reason, it does not match the corresponding audio mp3 word-for-word. However, the overall content and the expressed ideas remain unchanged.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14
Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26

The Belief in Lack

Participant: Tell me the construct, self, that has a need for money or anything money can buy. That’s what you’re saying

Speaker: The construct is a construct in lack. I mean to deny yourself-hood as the Christ and to accept a false self that has been made up, that is fictious… that is to accept the belief in lack. And from within the construct, if I believe I’m a person, then I’m lacking. Just the simple lacks of… I’m lacking warmth, I need to put a coat on. I’m lacking coolness so I need to take some clothes off because I’ll burn up. I’m lacking food. I’m lacking sex. I’m lacking water or something to quench my thirst. I’m lacking love, I need people to stroke me and touch me and love me.

Participant: Affirm me, validate me…

Speaker: Yes. Encourage me, support me. I’m lacking prestige or position or respect. I need and want that. I need awards or I need things that give me recognition.

Participant: So you’re saying all that, every one of those things is part of the construct, not real…it’s just part of the construct.

Speaker: Hm hmm. And money of course…finances ties into that. And money is tied in with the world with prestige, with status, with freedom of the body. I can have money and I can travel. I, the small i, the body, can move around in this fictitional world and go where it wants to go, do what it wants to do.

Participant: Enjoy the finer things in life.

Speaker: Yes. Fine dining and fine this and fine that. A menu of ways that the construct has contrived to have the “good life” of what it would call the menu of the pleasures and the great things of the world. And it’s a big deception because the guilt of believing in such a construct is concealed in the mind. The mind has kind of run into the form and seems to be having an experience even though it’s a hallucination of an experience that things are working well in this world. That things are coming out very well.

Participant: So the guilt is hidden, and at the same time it’s held in place. It’s perpetuated in the mind?

Speaker: It doesn’t go away. Even the system where it seems like, “Gee, I’m a person, I’m starting to get all the good things in life, fine dining and comfort for the body and I have a sense of respect from my peers and community and everything…”

Participant: Security…

Speaker: Security…

Participant: Stability.

Speaker: "There’s still those dog gone things like sickness and some of these moody periods I have where I just feel all alone and they break in to this nice dream world of an illusion of happiness and satisfaction that I have made up. It gets broken into by these periods. In some cases it seems the other way, it seems if I have this big alcoholic addiction or this great scarcity that I’m constantly fighting to make ends meet, to pay the bills, to survive poor living conditions, and so forth." This is the poverty end of the world. It’s the same, in the sense that instead of being run from, and the lack and the scarcity being handled by more stuff that seemed to provide an illusion of security, then the scarcity and the lack is experienced on the other extreme as being very real again and it still comes from the mind’s belief in the construct. This is more of a direct overt thing. The world is then constructed then in such a way that it’s witnessing to my belief in lack, my belief in unworthiness. I’m stupid, I’m uneducated, I don’t have enough food to eat, I don’t have proper medical care and so on and so forth. But this is just another end, another extreme of the construct which still is made to witness to the lack.

Participant: So, it seems like it’s always either witnessing to the lack or it’s covering over the sense of lack or belief in lack, one or the other?

Speaker: Correct. Filling in the hole with something in the world. Solving the problem with an external means.

Participant: Except, if I perceive myself as poor and deprived, how does that fill in the hole? I could see it if I perceive myself as wealthy and able to have everything I want. But at the other extreme that you just describing, how does the mind see that is filling in the hole?

Speaker: Well, in that case, it’s not so much in filling in the hole but there still is a wish in many cases, a wish I had all that stuff, in my mind, to fill in the hole. That’s like, for instance…

Participant: Ok, it’s the belief that all that stuff can fill in the hole…

Speaker: It’s like lottery tickets and everything, people in this world with so called low income, just line up hoping for that big score. And the belief is still in there, there’s still a belief that something outside myself can fill me up.

Participant: Ok. That’s how they’re really the same. It’s because the belief behind each manifestation is saying that wealth and power and all that is what will make a difference. It’s what will fill up the void, the emptiness that I feel.

Speaker: Yes. And, we aren’t going to make that generalisation that cuts completely for everyone. There are those who just have a disdain for wealth and possessions and we could get into the aesthetic realm where there’s a thing of I’m still a person you see, I still believe I’m a person in this realm. It’s seen that the less possessions I have had as a person or the more I deny my body things ie deny food by fasting or I deny comfort and luxuries…that some how that will mitigate the punishment that I still deserve.

Participant: Like, I’ll do it to myself first and God will back off?

Speaker: Yeah, that’s one thing. Or, just the sense of, it really is still the level confusion, the belief that I’m still a person, the belief in the subject-object split is still held onto but, now instead of it being valuable and favourable to collect as many things and possessions and associate as a person with these things, now there’s a dissociation but I’m trying to dissociate as a person from the world, trying to step out of the world, trying to escape from the world while I still believe that I’m a person in the world.

So I go to the mountain, so I go to the convent or the monastery, so I don’t associate with people. You see people, because the mind believes that I’m a person and I’m going to just get away from other people or other objects. I’m just not going to do this and that. And, of course, there’s still the belief in personhood and that hasn’t been questioned. So, the mind has still made up a construct of poverty in the material sense and then that seems to be the way to go, that seems to be the most valuable. That it’s more valuable to be poor and for a person not to have objects then it is for a person to have objects. Once again, that’s just a different construct. That’s not the escape from the construct that I made this whole thing up.

Participant: It’s still not stepping back and saying that it’s just a construct.. is what you’re saying.

Speaker: Right.

Participant: It’s just a different one.

Speaker: Yes. It’s still saying that there are certain forms that are evil in the world and I’m going to avoid those evil rich forms and I’m going to pick a poor form that’s better than the rich form. In a sense, the old stuff about Jesus, the line could be used, “Well Jesus was a beggar” and therefore I’ll just take on the form of a beggar and magically I’ll be a healed person. But, personhood has to be questioned, has to be stepped back from.

Participant: So, is there any construct that is any more viable or more helpful than any other construct?

Speaker: Yes. There is one construct that is more valuable, and that’s forgiveness. That’s the construct that I was talking about earlier, that when you step back, step back, step back…when you can see it as a construct. It’s still a construct but as described in the course, forgiveness is like a blanket that just covers everything. You’ve stepped back so far that you’ve got this purpose in your mind. This purpose of healing, of wholeness, of not ordering, and not judging and not valuing and arranging among the thought forms any more. Then you have like a blanket that literally covers the thought forms in one metaphor. It’s seen as a fabric that I’ve talked about before. There’s no hierarchy among the thought forms. There’s no meaning read into them and no associations.

Forgiveness is a meaning in the mind that is given to everything in form and obviously it still is a construct in the sense that it is perceptual. But it’s the one helpful construct. It’s the all inclusive construct where there’s no ordering among the thought forms.

Participant: What about other constructs? Doesn’t the course say something about changing concepts as you go along and that, as you change the concept that you’re holding onto at that time will be more expansive than the one that you let go of, until you finally get to the point where you let go of all of that. But, in that sense, isn’t the construct that keeps getting broader and broader, isn’t that more helpful than the one that you left?

Speaker: Yeah. In some sense, that’s the only value that can be put on a construct or form of any kind is, “What is it for?”
You could talk about it in a religious sense of a heaven and a hell and so on and so forth. And then, we can throw in the idea of something like a re-incarnation perspective of a soul that is immortal but keeps going through…keeps returning again and returning again to the world learning lessons until it finally has remembered itself and seen past the veil of the maya, or the illusion.

That can be a helpful construct. For instance, re-incarnation could, if it gives a sense of the eternal, of something that is beyond the temporal world. But, obviously it’s still a construct in the sense that it involves the belief in birth and the belief in death. The death and birth of what? The body. It still involves the body, it still involves time. We could call call them “lifetimes” or whatever, so there’s a lineal sense to it and it’s obvious that all of this is still part of the construct of the world because it involves all these temporal things… time, space, birth, death, bodies. So, it’s helpful.

Participant: Well, even, I mean, you can talk about it in terms of the different lifetimes, but even within what is called lifetime, a lifetime, doesn’t the mind keep expanding? Well, I guess it depends but, at least, our purpose, in undoing and unlearning and examining and looking at things is so that you can see the construct and step back from it. It just seems that the construct in the mind keeps changing, keeps losing up as it were, keeps letting go of more and more of what it once thought it was.

Speaker: Like the wheels we were talking about, where you step back. Though the mind seems to be still on a wheel, it can see the smaller wheels within it.

Participant: That it’s already stepped off of it in a sense but knowing that it’s still on a wheel. It’s just maybe a bigger wheel outside that smaller one that it left.

Speaker: Yes. And, forgiveness in that sense would be the largest wheel that would be outside of all the other wheels. It could kind of look in on those. So, it’s like, “What is helpful?” This is the way the undoing process works. The mind increasingly starts to see that there are no accidents. Every situation can be seen differently and it’s like ‘What’s most helpful?’ But this process is still the Holy Spirit and the higher mind working with the beliefs in the lower mind and it is for the lower mind to voluntarily give up these beliefs. That is a good way of looking at it, still with the idea or the knowledge that the purpose of the intent is to lay aside all concepts, all images, all thoughts of self, of God, of world, that are part of the construct.

Participant: And that’s only in Atonement, isn’t it?

Speaker: Yes.

Participant: So it’s like, as long as I perceive myself in a world I’m going to have some sort of construct in my mind about all that… about myself and about the world.

Continue to Part 10

Home | About this Website | Study Materials | Contact | Donate | Order Materials

You are welcome to share the ideas offered here.
If you would like to participate in distributing these materials please contact us.
We love to hear from you.