 One of the things you said during your dialogue just caused me aggression when I thought to be true you said something to me that was spirit doesn't even have, you know, spirit is not in flesh and I thought, wow, what I've always believed to be true is that I am spirit having a physical experience and that spirit is animating these bodies. So I guess I just wanted to give you more clarification around that statement. Yeah, we can take the metaphor of, I'm going to talk about Pinocchio in the sense that Pinocchio was always wanting to be a real boy, you know, to not be a puppet or a marionette but a real life experience and that kind of shows how this animation, even in the world of cartoons and animation Walt Disney, you know, took a bunch of images and he just flipped them together and it was such great speed that to the high, the high perceived the continuity of not a static image but a motion picture. Cartoon characters are literally just a bunch of images on a timeline that are strung together in such a rapid succession that there's no breaking point, you know, it looks like a continuous movement and so when we say the body seems to be animated and the plants and the animals and so on and so forth like the spirit is behind all that, we have to realize that the ego took the power of the mind that was invested in it and it was the Big Bang and it did all the animation. It did the animation of the Big Bang and then with evolution and creatures seem to grow and form on planet earth and so forth all of the animation and even all of the energy behind the animation is part of the ego of this world Now within that metaphor it's like where the spirit, how the spirit even then relate to us or to the body and to the world and if we continue with the metaphor of Pinocchio it would be to flip it around and get to a point of saying okay I'm tired of being a real little boy, a real little girl, tired of being the man, the woman or I've never been fully satisfied, I've always been seeking and searching for more or to try to become better and to say I'm ready to get back on the strings and I want you to pull the strings I think that was one of Wayne Dyer's books, Pulling Your Own Strings except this is more of saying to the spirit, you be the one to guide and direct the strings and that's what Of Course Miracles is saying, is saying that the only purpose I remember when I first read that, Jesus says that the only purpose that the body has the body has solely a means of communication, that's it, it just has one purpose and then another point of Of Course he actually says the only purpose of the body is to let the voice for God speak through it that's even more specific than just calling it a communication device and I don't know about you but if I look back into the parable of David in the history I've used this body for many, many, many different things you know we can talk about not only to walk or to swim or to run or to have sex with or to eat with or to ski with or to play tennis with or to play golf with or you know if you really made a list, if you just sat down and looked back at your life and you said what have I used this body for? Every one of us could make a long list, really quite a long list and of course those things would have involved pride, striving, working, playing as well as seeking for things and avoiding things we would use it for all those motives and those were all ego motives I mean even playing, we know there's a value to play because we know how fun it feels but when you get caught up in a game and you lose track of yourself in the pretending a lot of times when children were playing they were just pretending when you lose yourself in the pretending then that is part of the ego's trick as well so when I first got into this I thought wow that's all the Holy Spirit once had the voice for God speaks for me that was a problem initially because I was very shy and maybe somebody else other than this one because that doesn't sound really appealing and then the other thought my ego had was you know that actually sounds downright boring you know variety is a crisis of life and you know just like if you know the ego says it's good to have a lot of money because it gives you more options you can buy more things and do more things well if you're a body and you seem to have a lot of options a bit of a bit of desass a bit of spice it's stimulating to be able to do lots and lots of things and then when you start to get into oh a body that's one purpose but let the voice for God speak you can see that the ego is NOT at all thrilled by that one purpose I've even done talks where I've been talking like for a full day and someone will raise their hand at the end of the day and say, you know what you're talking about? Sounds very boring. Extremely boring. And I don't think that's for me. It's just too boring. It's too monotonous and everything. And from the ego's perspective, you have to understand that even the course of miracles to the ego would seem pretty boring. And he's really just talking about the same thing, and he's zooming around like he's a little, like he's Tinkerbell with a little wings going, zooming around the very same thing. He keeps going around and around and around. He comes around to you and he goes, right in front of you, did you get it? Duh, nope. He goes around the end. Did you get it? It's very circular. It's very symphonic. You know, people have read the course and they say, come on, he's just saying the same thing. He's just saying it in lots and lots of different ways. And that's just kind of like the spirit going, did you get it yet? Did you get it? I'll try this one. I'll try this one. You know, it's like, I want you to get this. And I'm going to hang with you. So I'm just going to keep lightly spinning around and we'll try to get it. So that's how the journey goes. And when you really have a desire to have the experience, then I will tell you that the course and miracles will get simpler and simpler and simpler. It won't seem like this big book. It won't seem like a task or some kind of a deep, long, heavy burden. You know, a lot of people feel that way, like you just had that retreat up there in Madeleine. And I remember he was saying, oh man, I'm just seeing, I'm just at the very beginning of this thing and it can feel almost like a heaviness, like there's so far to go with it. But the more our desires start to stir up, the more the love and the peace starts to really ignite inside our hearts, then all of a sudden our readiness to really have the eyes to see and ears to hear just gets, we get much more ready. We're really ready to really have an experience. We have a real experience of what this is really talking about. So to me, that's been my life's calling is, first of all, was to have the experience and have it in a sustained way so that it was a constant experience. And then the joy is to let the Spirit come through in many, many seemingly different ways using all kinds of different learning aids and all kinds of different symbols. That's why I've enjoyed and actually enjoyed the travel. It's not when I was a kid. I was one of those kids, I've been there yet, kind of been hated to travel when I was young. But then it actually becomes inspired because of the purpose behind it. That's what enlivens, that's what makes the travel a joyful adventure. And it's the same with writing, you know. It's like when I swore that I would never write a book. I mean, I figured with the course we've got the course, there's just no need for a book. So actually the books that are over there, I didn't write them. I spoke them. And somebody transcribed it and put it into a book. I didn't sit down on the pen. It was just given. And it's the same with singing. And I do a lot more singing now than ever. I like to go on singing tours. I never thought I would go on a singing tour, but I enjoy singing. You enjoy... It's just the inspiration comes through you and it gives you this energy and vitality and aliveness. And a childlike sense of wonder and joy and glee because it's so present. It's not stuck on that timeline, you know, which is where the monotony and the repetition and all the heaviness comes in. We have to repeat something over and over and over. It's beautiful because that is in Tennessee. Once you... even a defense mechanism like projection, once you start to consciously see that, ah, I've been blaming, I've been projecting, you start to pull it back. Really what you're doing when you pull back the projections is you're pulling them back into the mind. It's the mind that was trying to project them out onto the screen of the world. And you're really pulling them back and seeing that, no, the cause is in my mind. It's not an external cause. But the tendency when you start to pull the projections back from all the characters on the screen and all the different circumstances is to, oops, we get it back this far. And you're blaming the personality self because that personality self is associated with the mind. And sometimes when people say, ah, my thoughts that point to the skull is that the thoughts are open to the brain. But the thoughts aren't in the brain, the thoughts are in the mind. The brain itself and the body is just a projection. So if you start to withdraw the projections from the other bodies, the tendency still is what we would call self-criticism, self-condemnation. And that's pretty common with Course in Miracles students and teachers to say, okay, I'm getting much more laid back and low-keyed and accepting and tolerant of my brothers and sisters, but the tendency to be hard on yourself as a personal self is the same thing. And that's why when someone kind of holds it in and really doesn't reach back to the full sense of forgiveness that a lot of times what we call cancer, heart attacks, those kind of things, that's the ego still projecting the guilt onto the self that it's still identified with. And that means you just have to go one more step back to get back to your mind away from this idea of the body. At one point Jesus says, the body is outside you, but it seems to surround you. That's kind of an intro. Hope they ever told us that. Well, I heard my knee. The body is outside you, but it seems to surround you. Very baker-ready for a mother. Wow, that's cool. You start to see in your own mind that you do have to apply those metaphysics, and that means in the end you have to take this off the hook too. This can't be a source of blame when it's just another symbol. But the reason it's just projected with so much blame is because the ego mind has identified with it. It thinks that it now has a home in the body.