 Again, precious time to explore together and investigate whatever is your passion to investigate. That's a golden opportunity to talk about. Already this afternoon we started to go into war a little bit and the insanity of all that, how extreme that seems to start to work that in and we talked about, you know, it was a suggestion maybe of going into a special relationship and taking a look at that. What we're looking at is we're looking at the ego thought system. And the main point we keep coming back to is it has to be thoroughly looked at, thoroughly investigated because if you raise part of it to light and keep part of it in darkness then you might as well be all the way in the dark because that's the way it is. You have to either raise this thing all the way up or you sleep well. One of the things about, we've talked a little bit about this special love relationship or special relationships is that Jesus says that we've looked at a lot of the other aspects of the ego very closely but until this one is raised to light you won't let the ego go as long as you have an investment in anything of the ego system and you have an investment in the whole system. So it can even seem like, well, I'm making good progress now. I'm getting less and less prejudiced or I'm more this and I'm more that and in the end it comes down to unless you raise it all the way up then it's kind of the illusion of progress. And many pros and cons and many spiritualities throughout the ages even when people have attained psychic powers and abilities and attained what with the world's eyes would seem to be quite advanced states of consciousness it's still as long as there's ego tricks then it's not the release that the mystics are talking about. So, is there anything that's coming up that is your passion? Is your burning question to go into very briefly tonight? We have two forms of special relationships. It's a good word and we were just getting away from the idea that okay, here's special relationships and I have to give out something but if you think about it as well, okay, everyone who seems to be in this world has formed special relationships. There's nobody who's come here who doesn't have any but really it's how can I transform my perception of what relationships are? Because initially it's difficult to even conceive of or imagine a relationship without apartment about bodies and even when people discuss we have a long, long distance relationship or a close to close relationship. It was a year ago that was Bill Donahue and Tomas. He was in Chicago, she was in whatever New York but that's just another example of relationships being in terms of bodies because it's described as where those bodies are. The difficulty of having a long distance relationship seemingly as opposed to both being under the same roof and so on and so forth and that's kind of the starting point of all special relationships, involved bodies. Holy relationships are symbolic as well of just the mind giving up all judgment and all thought of what relationships mean in the ego sense and it's just a metaphor for a healed perception. It's just another way of talking about healed perception. And then there's a section in the course where Jesus talks about the only real relationship which is kind of well what do you mean by the only real relationship and he says that the only real relationship is the relationship between the father and the son. So that has nothing at all to do with special relationships or holy relationships but holy relationships again being healed perception that's the step that the mind has to take. That's the direction it has to move so that it can remember the only real relationship. Isn't it also a reflection of that real relationship? So it's not the thing itself, it's symbolic or representative of the only real relationship. Also what was coming to mind there's two sections in the course one really goes into specialness and how it has to be looked at in the following section in the course is part of this translation that you were saying you wanted to get to a translation or transformation and it describes in great detail what that transformation is like. It talks about stages of disorientation and it's kind of nice that even here heads a roadmap and hear Jesus talking about this period because it's kind of like there can be the thought well I'm somewhat clear now and if I get clear and clear and clear I'll just get clear and clear until I have a burst of clarity and wake up and actually he's saying you're not clear at all now and if you go along and along and you'll seem to get clear and clear and clear and the clearer you get you'll reach a point of disorientation. And it's nice to have it described in there because if you don't have an idea I bet it can seem like the ego can kick in like you're doing it all wrong or you're doing something terribly wrong but how can following the Holy Spirit come to a place of aimlessness or disorientation and he's describing it as you become accustomed to a world of total darkness where nothing means anything and now as you turn your it's basically saying that as long as you believe that you're in a world of separation and fragmentation that your whole presumption is backwards and upside down so if you can imagine turning something forwards and right side up it's kind of like a vertigo yeah right those little things that you take of snow for Christmas you know and when the snow settles it's great then when you start to turn it around it gets real murky and the snowflakes roll over and it takes a while before all the snowflakes settle on the top so to speak and that's another little metaphor for what's happening with this transformation in mind it also for me it was helpful to see that it was like reading that it was like just having a feeling that Jesus, Holy Spirit, whatever for me it felt like Jesus really understands what I'm going through he's describing it in great detail and that was so reassuring to me it was like he had his armor on it's okay I know what you're going through it's fine I know it doesn't feel good but it's okay hang in there yeah and that was like the little bit that I needed to hang in there because otherwise it felt like turn and run it feels really good relationship during this game we just turned to the choice for completion which is a 317 317 317 317 in the first edition and 341 in the second edition what's the title of the section? the choice for completion and the section which follows it is called the bridge to the real world where we talk about this transition period in this orientation so we'll work our way we'll start off with the choice for completion to just get kind of a snapshot or a pretty good look at I thought you were talking about the guilt relationship that describes things as well yeah 317 the special relationship it is necessary first to realize that it involves a great amount of pain anxiety, despair, guilt and attack all enter into it broken into by periods in which they seem to be gone all these must be understood for what they are whatever form they take they are always an attack on the self to make the other guilty I've spoken of this before but there are some aspects of what is really being attempted that have not been touched upon so generally when we talk about special relationships another term that we can use will be love-hate relationships and every relationship that one seems to have in this world would easily fall into the category of love-hate whether it is with your spouse your parent your son or daughter your pet your wife seems to have a perfect relationship with her always total bliss, peace and happiness there always seems to be that well as he describes anxiety, despair, guilt, attack all enter into it but there seems to be some pretty good periods where it seems like your cruising along pretty good seems like everything is working real well but then the hate rears its head sometimes it's not real overt sometimes it's just minor annoyances little bit of irritation, frustration again Jesus says there is no difference between rage, hatred and minor annoyances so it still all falls into the category of love-hate very simply the attempt to make guilty is always directed against God but an ego would have you see him and him alone as guilty leaving the sonship open to attack and unprotected from it this is the basic ego of beliefs that God is angry and that God has pretty much abandoned you in this world and you've abandoned God and this is a kingdom that's been made up apart from God and that the special relationship attempts to find some kind of pleasure in the dust so to speak or finds something that's consoling or seems to have the characteristics of love or seems to be a practice of substitute for love it's really an attack it's directed against God I don't understand how that happens so we can talk a little bit about the dynamics in the sense that we've used in a couple different cases we used this scenario one time where we said that in the beginning we're always one or kept a tiny man idea which the son of God remembered not to laugh we've also looked at the section where it talks about you made just one substitution you know, delusion for truth and it's been a fragmenting substitution the whole world that you see is a world of fragmentation that just sprang from that one thing so the mind once believed that it separated from God it believed it was it was horrified what it thought it had done and in its horror it was advised by the tough or the snake or the tempter to become identified with a screen in which the air was projected a world of form and that's where all the special relationships that we're going to be talking about come in in other words, all those relationships with bodies whether it be bodies husband and wives, children pets, whatever it's still relationships that seem to be between bodies and as long as those are held on to it's still not going within the mind and questioning the whole belief system that this whole world is built on and in that sense it's being distracted by these relationships and bodies and the guilt that's been buried and the fear that we were talking about earlier this afternoon not being questioned and looked at so in a sense, by using the screen using the world as the smoke screen to hide from God it's generally it's seen as attacking God not in reality in other words, in reality the Holy Spirit is back there the light in the mind is saying you can't attack God you know he's beyond attack and in reality you can't attack yourself you can deceive yourself and the Holy Spirit keeps reminding the mind you know, come back to me come back to me and we have to question all these false beliefs because attack isn't real another way we could say it is the attack against God is really the mind's beliefs that it can and has attacked and one of the basic cornerstones of the course is that the mind cannot attack the mind is really one how to something that's one attack it doesn't have anything to attack with or to be attacked it's just this abstract mind but he says you can make up fantasies and you can make bodies up and bodies can seem to attack each other and as long as the mind believes in those fantasies those fantasies are in reality and it certainly seems like attack is real and if the mind believes that attack is real