 If you still believe that you can affect the world and you can change the effect of the world through politics, you still believe there's causation in terms of form, rulers, politicians and so on and so forth. And the solution is much, much simpler than that. That's quite a complicated attempt. If you take a side for good or evil in this world, or one side in a world war or so on and so forth, it means you have an opinion. And that opinion is what sickness is. The teachings are judge not, and if you hold on to opinions, you have a sick mind, because God did not create an opinionated mind. That's not something that's part of creation. God didn't extend opinions. Opinions are blocks to love and light. Of course, the Holy Spirit has to work with the mind that believes in opinions and use everything the ego made to lift the mind up back into a state of pristine stillness and perfection. And that's the Holy Spirit's job. John and Yoko decided that they had to have a reason to come together, and what they decided upon was the reason for them to come together was peace. They would straw the attention to world peace, so they spent tens of thousands of dollars on billboards. They would sing songs like, Give Peace a Chance. And I remember watching a documentary one time with Yoko and John, and one of the things they decided to do, they had some really interesting ideas. They decided to do a bed inn. They just decided, we'll just stay in bed and we'll invite the press into our bedroom. They put signs up behind themselves of statements, make love not war and so forth, and draw in the press. And they would answer questions about peace and world peace and about the purpose of their life. But it was interesting because one time I was watching a documentary on their life, and it actually showed them at the end of the day after the press had left, and everyone had left, and the cameras were rolling, and it showed them. And they started just opening the windows and looking out into the stars. And they got very deep and mystical and philosophical, and it was a great moment that captured on film where they kind of looked at each other, and they went, you know, it's all about us. They just had one of those mystical moments that they saw in one instant in front of the camera. You could just feel it that they saw that it really wasn't about world peace, that all the billboards, all of the songs, all of the press and everything they were doing, they kind of looked at each other and they said, it looks like we have to be peaceful. I mean, it just zoomed back in into a state of mind, into taking responsibility for a state of mind, even with all of the layers of that. And so I really feel like that's what we're zooming into here, and that's really the purpose of this whole retreat is going in so deeply that you start to take full responsibility for your state of mind, absolute responsibility for your state of mind. Any time a projection arises, any time a temptation arises to point the finger, to look at a circumstance, to look at the world, look at the conditions of the world or the circumstances, it's all pulling us inward to just accept full responsibility for that state of mind. And of course, in one sense, that's where relationships are a speed up because the temptation to project can arise in a very strong way in what we would call relationships. I think once you go very, very deep with the journey, you start to encounter extreme rage, extreme anger, extreme pain and hurt, and the interesting thing about it at a certain stage is when you look around, there's nothing in form that even seems to be causing that. You're just dropping down into the unconscious mind, into the darkness, and your eyes can look around and you may even have the thought, well, I don't even have any reason to be this angry. There are the mystics and saints that have gone down, down, down to a certain point when they would like to blame the rocks or the rain, but they see how irrational it is to be blaming the rain for this rage, absolute intense rage. So really, relationships are more of like an inroad because there's so much mirroring that's going on. They just take you in and down faster, and Jesus is saying, your way will be different. A holy relationship is given you. He's really saying the mechanism of relationships is given you to speed up your awakening. He talks about contemplation and meditation, and he says these means will reach the end, but they are tedious and time-consuming, and relationship he offers as an alternative. So it's part of the dismantling. It's part of the fast track, and that's something that we're embracing. That's what we embrace in this seeming community, even though when we say community, it usually conjures up thoughts of group or bodies or location or something like that, and really community is just another metaphor for coming to a state of communion and seeing that everything is mined without exception. There really aren't groups. There never have been individuals or groups. There never has been a collective. That's a word that gets tossed around a lot in spirituality, the collective. Collective mind, you hear that a lot, but there is no collective mind. Collective what? Private minds, there is no collective mind. That's just another construct of all these layers of constructs that you move through in just coming to an experience that everything without exception is mind. There's not mind and matter. There's not mind and physicality. Everything is mental. That's why Jesus says all illness is mental illness. Sometimes people read that in the Course and they say, how can that be? All illness is mental illness. It's because there is only the mental. Illness has no other category to fall in. It's mental and so is everything else. Think of the most physical thing you can think of and it's mental. Sometimes people say, you're a mental case. It's true. You should acknowledge it. Next time somebody calls you a mental case, you got me. I am a mental case. And I've been working on that but I'm actually wanting to get to such a place of allowance and acceptance that I can go, yeah, I'm a mind. I'm a mind. Okay. I'm in the mind of God and I'm happy. Ultimately that's your resting place. You will only rest in mind. There's no rest in this world. There's no rest for the body. You can try to sleep at night but it doesn't bring an end to the mind chatter or to the monkey mind. There is no rest for the monkey mind but in divine mind is the rest. So that's what we want to do tonight through our joining together is to open up together into an experience of mind. It's actually, when I talk about words like joy, the only joy that you'll ever know, the only joy that you'll ever experience is sustained joy. If you have a little bit of joy here and there, that's not it. That's not it. That's why I talk a lot about divine providence, about letting the Holy Spirit do it through you, about getting so immersed in your purpose that you lose track of everything else and you're just gliding in the joy, gliding in the joy. It's like glee, glee, glee, glee, glee. It has to be sustained joy, sustained glee or it's not really glee. It's not really joy. That would make the angels laugh. Oh, I have a little snippet of joy and that's a joke in heaven. How can you have a snippet of joy? Angels don't get that. That's angel humor. It's the same with reverence. Sometimes we talk about reverence. You want to get into such purpose, in such devotion that it's like you get swallowed up in reverence. It's not something that you get every once in a while or have a feeling of and go, ooh, got my attention. It's something you want to be swallowed up in it. You just want to give yourself so fully over to it. So if we were talking about the pathway to God is like a cup of coffee at Starbucks, you've got your cup, your little Starbucks cup. And then what do you need? You need hot water. And the liquid in the drink we'll say is that's the majority of the whole drink. Not the liquid, it's not much of a drink, a little powder or cream or whipped cream or something. What? This is not it. I paid for a drink. The drink is the trust. The only way that that cup fills up is through trust. And we've been talking about that. You have to have trust. It's the key, it's the centerpiece of everything. And then as you get into more of the flavor of the drink, you might say, then you're getting into the nuances. That's where you have the consistent trust and you start to get that feeling of joy. And then at times you start to feel more and more of that deep reverence. You know, the spices start to come in and the whipped cream or the toppings, the cherry, whatever you have on, it just gets better and better as your Starbucks drink just keeps starting building and building and building, you know, to the full thing. And that's what we're here to do. We're here to give ourselves so completely over to the spirit that we start to feel the fullness of that experience. It's not a glimmer, glimmer, glimmer, glimmer. It's just the fullness, the richness of that experience. So I've been talking a lot over the last week about extension, the joy of extension. Inspirations start to come to mind. Inspirations start to come in. Oh, yeah. It's like there's something moving inside there that just wants to burst through. It wants to shine and share and burst forth and that's what extension is. It's also, you want to extend from a place of my cup runneth over. You want to have that bursting feeling because that's what's going to carry you. It's not going to be like another task. Like, okay. I'm supposed to extend. Okay. What do I do? You know, you want to feel the feeling spilling over in your heart so that it's like you're carried and the extension comes through you in more of an involuntary way instead of you trying to work up into it. Like you're going to work up, work up to it, work up to it. You want it to just flow through you. So I think that's something we can talk a bit about tonight, that extension. Because it's something that is coming. You can feel it coming more and more and we have lots of opportunities to practice extending with our brothers and sisters and there's lots of ways that the Spirit gives us to practice this extending, but we want to master it. We want mastery through love. We want the love gushing through us to wash away every other vestige of anything else that there could ever be.