19th March, 1991 — Tuesday

Paul: It has been a number of days since we have had a formal, daily conversation, even though I have touched base with you and have asked various questions pertinent to each day.

I guess I don’t know how to do this shift. I don’t know what else to say. So, I’ll leave it at that.

Raj: Paul, the simple but profound fear that you are experiencing is that in cooperating with my instructions, you will cease to exist. After all, if nothing goes through your mind and nothing is uttered from your mouth but what I am saying, then where, indeed, will Paul be? Indeed, will what is present, uttering my words and experiencing the communications inwardly that I am providing, will that, then, be the new identity of Paul — like a walk - in that isn’t really Paul? Will Paul ever be able to speak to friends again, or will it just always be Raj communicating with people whom Paul has known? Has there not been any essential, real presence where Paul seemed to be, or used to be before the Voice for Truth began to be expressed from his lips?

These are, indeed, serious questions. And, of course, ultimately, “Are you being misled by one who is unscrupulous?”.

I will have to begin answering those questions with this statement: Indeed, there has been, and is, something essentially Real about you. And the intent and result of this exercise of letting yourself be the transparency for Truth is not to eradicate That which has been Real about you, but to allow That which is Real about you to come forth in full bloom, you might say, without any aspect of It being covered up, hidden from view out of Awareness.

Even now, as we speak, you are aware of you. You are aware of being. You are aware that it is your mouth and your voice speaking these words, even though you are not originating these words in the way that you originate words when you are uncentred and reactive, not paying attention within.

You see, Paul, the fallacy is that you have been expressing in your life — aside from our communion and conversations — intelligence, as though it were really your intelligence, in the sense of it being a possession. You think that you have been loving, kind, thoughtful, generous, as though they were possessions of yours, integral parts of you. But, I will tell you something: When you have expressed love, or when you have expressed truth, or when you have expressed intelligence, they have been a use which your mind has been put to by choice. You have chosen to embody them, rather than other things, and express them, and let everyone think that they are expressions of the essential ‘you’. Why cannot the Voice for Truth, why cannot the Christ presence, the Christ consciousness be embodied in the same way?

Oh, … because that’s not you. But, Paul, the intelligence wasn’t you, either! The love wasn’t you, either! You see, nothing originates with you! Not even humanly speaking. You use intelligence, and your neighbour does not. You express love and your neighbour does not. You express forgiveness and your neighbour does not. But, you see, it is always a choice; a choice to embody something which, by virtue of its being a choice, means that it doesn’t express that which is making the choice — just the motive of that which is making the choice.

Are you not happy to be around someone who expresses intelligence — one who chooses to express intelligence, rather than one who does not? Do you not seek out the company of one who chooses to be loving rather than hateful?

Tell me something. What would you think if he said to you, “Well, this is not really me that you’re experiencing. This is just something that ‘comes through’ when I get out of the way”. What would you think? Wouldn’t you say, “Well, don’t get hung up on it, else I will find someone else who is not hung up on it and enjoy his expression of love, and his expression of intelligence”?

But, you say, “To express the presence of the Christ and let it appear to be me, is dishonest”. Well, is there dishonesty when someone expresses intelligence instead of confusion? Is it dishonest if someone expresses love instead of hate? Is it dishonest if someone chooses to embody all that is truly meaningful instead of that which is useless, and even destructive?

One looks at another who has come to adulthood, or a stage of maturity, and he is expressing qualities of the sort that you have chosen to express in your life, and one says, “I am certainly glad that he made the decision to express those qualities rather than many of the others that seem to be on the list to choose from which are less pleasant, less desirable, less constructive”. And one credits the other for the choice.

But, obviously that which made the choice is not constituted of the choices that were made, and therefore what you experience of that one is the result of the choices and not that which made the choice.

You see, what I am pointing out here is that at this point all there is to you is that which stands at the point of making a choice — the choice to embody and be the unrestricted full expression of Truth, Love, Life, Principle, Mind, Soul and Spirit, instead of conceptual life, conceptual truth, conceptual love, agreed-upon definitions of principle, a sense of mind, a soul that is refining itself and growing, developing, becoming, and a spirit that is, depending upon the choices, either evil or good.

If it is not conceived to be dishonest to choose for intelligence which isn’t one’s own — because one has the choice for unintelligence, as well — then it is inconsistent to assume that the choice for the Voice for Truth is dishonest, that letting the Voice for Truth be one’s self-expression is dishonest, especially when It is meaningful and transformational and everyone else is so grateful that you or anyone else has made the choice for the Voice for Truth rather than conceptual truth, conditioned truth — mutually-agreed-upon truth that has nothing to do with Reality.

What are you going to choose to embody? The Voice for Truth, or a private, separated ego sense of Paul? What is it that you are going to choose to identify you, or at the least identify your choice and your fundamental motives? You see, the stumbling block here is the belief that the intelligence and the love and the truth, etc., that you have been expressing was, indeed, a possession of yours, an attribute of yours that gave you some semblance of substance and, I will say, authority. But, they were not. And so, the apparent sacrifice is not a sacrifice at all. It is a shift of choices. That is all.

Are you going to channel your ego, or are you going to channel the Voice for Truth? That is really the issue here, because you are no more the ego than you are the Voice for Truth.

Now, the great miracle in all of this is that when you choose to be the embodiment and expression of the Voice for Truth, you wake up! And when you are choosing for your own limited capacity to reason and think and come to conclusions and make decisions, and apparently act authoritatively, you are bound in a dream of existence. And no matter how many others are joined with you in that dream, it remains a dream, and it substantiates the dream.

So, you cannot rely upon the thousands or even millions of mankind who stand in agreement with your limited self-perception as justification for not making the choice to express and embody the Voice for Truth, nor can your departure from that agreement and your choice to embody the Voice for Truth be truly judged as a dishonest or arrogant limited self-appraisal, because as you are well aware, it does not amount to a self-appraisal. When you are making the choice for the Voice for Truth, it does not appear to be a choice for That which You Are. But it is a choice for that which inescapably provides the experience of Integrity and Peace and invulnerability, which the choice for the ego and the dream never did provide — which gives you a clue that you are on the right track.

I will repeat it again: The great miracle of this is that when you make the choice to express and embody the Voice for Truth, you wake up! You come back into your right Mind. And the Brotherhood and the Kingdom of Heaven that you are in becomes illuminated to you as It is — not as it is perceived to be from within the limited ego frame of reference.

This you will have to trust me on. But you do not have to trust me on the fact that when you make the choice to Listen, to be present with and express the Voice for Truth, you experience your Self more clearly as having Integrity, as being invulnerable, as being at peace — not just absent of anxiety, but in a rich, deep, broad experience of Peace that feels good and is, for lack of better words, nourishing to every fibre of your Being.

Let it be very clear to you that the ego that you would channel is an authoritative sense of self which is totally illusory. If you are experiencing a sense of authority and the high that comes with it, you may know that you are out of touch with Reality. But, if you are expressing the Voice for Truth, and are experiencing no sense of authority or authorship whatsoever, you are in the process of waking up, and you are closer to the Truth, experientially, than ever before.

Know also that the sense of authorship experienced from the ego standpoint is a sense of claiming that you are intelligent. It is a matter of claiming that you are loving, when even in the dream that is not the case, because in the dream you seem to have the choice for being intelligent or unintelligent, reasonable or unreasonable, loving or hateful, kind or cruel. Obviously you cannot be either one of those pairs, because you have made a conscious choice for one or the other. In other words, you have adopted one or the other as expressive of what you value. And then you have practiced at embodying the choice you have made. So, you see, it doesn’t really constitute a real Authorship.

Honesty or dishonesty is not the issue here. Whether you are making a false claim and sacrificing what was real and didn’t need to be claimed, is not the issue here. The issue is whether you are going to choose for the powerless vantage point of the ego which promises power, or the powerless vantage point of your Being, which is omnipotent and therefore doesn’t promise power, but which, because It is omnipotent, is powerful, with no occasion to utilise it powerfully, and therefore never implies, insinuates, or suggests a potential for power.

You see, the suggestion is that you are sacrificing something of substance for something which is hollow. But what you must realise is that the ‘something of substance’ called the ego frame of reference is hollow also! It is empty of Reality, and your Being is empty of illusion.

You must make the choice, and after you make the choice for the Voice for Truth and the shift occurs, we will then talk about the dishonesty of it… if, at that point, you feel so inclined to pursue the subject.