 Oh, maybe how I have felt in my life that anywhere I am I can speak my peace, which is true. I can go in anywhere, but now I'm finding that maybe I should be thinking a little bit or listening a little bit or something, you know, about... Just questioning that concept that I have a right, and that's the way I am to be able to speak my words wherever I go. Right. That's that thing too of authority and feeling powerless is the way there's a section later in the course where he talks about the leader and the follower. That he said, you keep escalating back and forth between the leader and the follower role. Sometimes you want the leader role where you take it and you feel in control on top of things. I mean, there seems to be, through the ego lens, something good in that. But that's good. That's good self-esteem. I just read an article on the most important attribute that children should be learning now in college students' leadership roles. That's going to be at leadership. And for every leader there has to be a follower. And how does it feel to be a follower? Passive. Some of those things you were coming up with, sometimes like I've been had, I've been taken advantage of, I've been unfairly treated. Where Jesus says, yes, because of some situations where you want to give the leadership role away and you want to take the follower role. Like you can think of in husband-wife relationships or whatever where it's like, oh honey, you do it. You can do this so much better than me. I don't even want to bother with it. You know, I don't even want to think about it. You do it. You make the decisions and just let me know. What am I doing right now with money? And that would be like in a particular role. Then there's other situations where it's like wanting to reclaim. It's like, wait a minute, you know, not with everything. You do this well, you do this and that. But it's like escalating back and forth. And it reminds me of that story about, you know, there's a poem or something, you know, don't walk in front of me for I may not follow and don't walk behind me because I don't want to leave. Walk beside me and hold my hand and be my friend. I mean, when I've read that poem the first time I went, what a wonderful symbol of walking side by side, arm in arm, equal. There's an ease to that. And to me that's what we're training our minds to do. That both of those extremes are not our ego extremes, both of them are. And the only way that I can come to, so to speak, the middle ground, which is neither, would be to humbly ask and be willing to keep asking and asking and surrendering my own sense of a personal will to God or a higher power, Holy Spirit or whatever. You talked about having that feeling of authority. And my thought was, yes, there is authority, there's power, there's magnitude, but that doesn't come from the little I. Who thinks it's a big I? What do you mean? When I think of power and authority and all the things that you just said, I'm thinking about it still in terms of the ego taking control. I think it's a big I. Don't think of it as a little I, okay? But there's a whole, that's where the self-concept comes in. Obviously I have a self-concept that's either a weakling or a powerful person. I have vacillated through those and what I'm trying to understand here is there's another place that I need to get to and that is that Jesus is beside me or the Christ or whatever and that I need to surrender to that voice I haven't surrendered yet. To me, the surrender is that visualization of being on the floor and letting you guys drag me. That's the surrender or getting up off the floor and saying the hell with all of you. It's the two ends again. And I need to really come to that place where I'm listening. And maybe that's... Kind of like two things is I don't want to go, you have to drag me or I'll show you where we're going. Going on in my mind. The conflict is crying. I'm too weak. I want to hug you. I love you. Or stop the sniveling stuff, Mary. Get off and you can do it. And then though, I want to come in here and tell you guys this is it. I got to go out and find a job. What am I doing here? And there's power in that statement. So-called. Well, I'm just saying that's what's going on in my head right now. In other words, I've gone to all these seminars on powerful women and all this stuff and it's either that or the little. It's either I'm vacillating in between. Neither one of them is the right mind. That's what I'm realizing. Neither one's the right mind. And I feel that when I do surrender. But I, you know, that's where my conflict is coming. It's either the hell with the course, power. I read this handbook. I'm not weak at all. I don't need this, you know. Or I need this so bad I can't survive and you just take me because I can't study it anymore. It's not a feeling of this has come into my life and I need to be quiet and listen to where this is going to direct me. And that's where I need to be focusing a little bit more I think. I guess I'm just having a thought that even your hesitancy to call when you're in the midst of upset, even when it seems to escalate and compound and continue seems like it's on that extreme end of, you know, I've just got to take charge of my life here. And I don't need anybody. And I would think, I'm feeling weak because I need him for me to be able to study this. I need to be doing something productive. And if I'm not doing something productive, then he, whatever you said about the gas station guy is where I'm feeling. I'm had, he's got power over me, he dominates me. I have no power as long as all I'm doing is going around reading the course and he's spending all the money for me to be able to do this. So I don't need him, I don't need you, I don't, what do I need? You know, you don't have any power as long as you're in the wrong mind. That's when I don't have power, that's when I'm in the wrong mind. I'm powerful when I'm in the right mind. Has nothing to do with any of the other things. Yes, it's a whole redefinition. It's a whole redefinition of power. I think the thing about it too is Mary, you know, you are beginning to look right into the teeth of specialists. If we, if it was like Jaws, you've been a good swimmer and done all kinds of things around and around. And now you're just stopping and you're looking right down the mouth and these big teeth are there. And, you know, it's like, and you also sense too that the only way that you ever come to peace is by looking right at that, right down the, facing fear right down, looking at it and everything. It seems, I mean, how many situations, I mean, we could use some, Beverly and I have talked about this over and over. In fact, on that coming to true relationship, I think that's the thing we go into is, first of all, it seemed to be, I'm a child and I'm dependent on my parents. Ooh, I have to do, and then I start to come to adolescence and it's like, get some room, get, you know what I'm saying, get away from me, give me some space. I want some autonomy. I'm tired of taking orders and all this and that. There's a real sense of dependency. And then a lot of times it just gets jumped over, transferred seemingly to another form because the mind still believes in dependency. So now it's more dependent on teachers at school or in religious institutions. The poverty chest of the obedience, we've talked about that, obedience to what? The obedience to the superior, that's what obedience to. There's a tight ship and you, when they say do something, you do it because that's the way the institution is. So then it can seem like many people have, like you said, gone to seminars for men, women, liberation, empowerment, you know, reclaim your power. You don't have to be tightened by your parents or your institutions and this and that. You can be an entrepreneur. Get out there. Don't work for anybody else. Take the bull by the horn and be an entrepreneur. Make those decisions. You know, you can be independent, financially secure. And we've gone into this whole discussion because a lot of the upsets in more recent times that have come up for Beverly have been what we call it, I call it the independent woman. It seemed to be good. Instead of the domesticated, sniveling servant woman who had no power, whether it was in a relationship or financially or in society or whatever to independent woman, that seems to be a good message. That seems to be, yay, feminism. Yay, go, go, go. That's the ego of the ego. And it's like falling into the ego's trap on the other side because it's still, the independent woman is still a construct of personhood. Independent woman is not spirit. The independent woman is a woman who can take charge, who has power, who's not enslaved by all these other factors and forces and everything. You know, as it's come up and we've gone into it more and more, it's starting to trace it down even deeper to see that as long as I even value that concept of myself, which is where you could get into things about speaking my mind. An independent woman doesn't care if there's men and women or children around. If she's got something on her mind, she lets it fly and let the chips fall where they may. You know, you could see that can be part of a concept in there. And that's going to hurt because it's still a denial of my capital self. My true power is my power of mind, which is not part of this world or is not in personhood. That's been helpful, I know, when we've gone into it and discussed it, because when the anger has come up and the rage and everything, we've traced it down. That's what we've been able to get in contact with. An independent woman is not in the follower category. She is a leader. She is out front. So what I notice is I go through all these feelings and then I say, Holy Spirit, I'm willing to surrender, but I don't know how. And then I start feeling really helpless and vulnerable and scared. There's something about that, because it certainly isn't surrendering to my power. It feels like surrendering to the ego is what it feels like. When you're feeling powerless. When I'm saying to the Holy Spirit, I know that what I really want to do is surrender to you and come into my sense of oneness and power. But in the process of doing that, it feels like surrendering to the ego and being on nobody. Especially if I've got a lot of feelings going on about a grudge attendant. This whole thing of surrendering to the Holy Spirit, we have to really start to get clear what we mean by it. And if there's, like Mary was saying, if I still value the past or the goals of the past or whatever, then it starts to make a little bit of a meaning to why I would be so afraid of this light in my mind for the Holy Spirit's purpose, because it seems to be a loss or a sacrifice to give my mind over to the Holy Spirit. It's kind of like Jesus says, it's like you believe you've kind of ripped off a part of heaven. You've pulled away a part of heaven, and now you've made your own kingdom. And the Holy Spirit is saying, give it back. You're saying, give it back. I don't believe you anyway, but you're not even here. Right, that's right. I see everything else. I have these times. We don't believe that you're here. I want it back. You can't have it. And that's what it's perceived as. In the sense that we have to come to a point where we joyously, voluntarily give over this split-off, fragmented part of our mind and give it back in the sense that it can be shown for the nothingness that it is. So the deceived mind is saying, no, stop. You can't make me be something that I'm not and don't want to be. And the Holy Spirit is simply saying, my child.