 So I thought at the very beginning I just opened it up to see how people, if anybody had any kind of things that came up from our last session or issues or insights. I've been reading this book on near-death experiences and I can't remember. Is it embracing the light? Yes. Are you ready? Yes. And it's the way these people talk. It sounds like all of them have had revelation as described in the Course. As opposed to the miracle revelation induces only experience, doesn't it say that? And they say, they make it sound like death is just the greatest thing in the world. They come in contact with God, they don't want to come back. They just are in the presence of what sounds like the Course is trying to lead us toward. This experience of peace and love and God. I was reading that book last night and just thinking about how much I make out of nothing and how all these problems, you know, their description of what goes on is like, and then I saw, they would say, I saw my problems were not problems at all. It was just a bunch of silliness about nothing. But anyway, you had mentioned earlier that you had been going through some things in the Course related to death and it's just, it was just an amazing, amazing experience, just the way that I felt. I felt like I took some kind of revelation of my own from all of this description. It's just interesting, because that's how I really got into a lot of spiritual things was the near-death experiences years ago. That was the thing that really caught my eye. I was reading these descriptions. But years later, having gone into the Course, it's interesting the whole idea of near-death experiences. You know, it's like you go into a near-death experience to get towards the light. And there's a couple passages in the Course where Jesus says it's kind of, you have to be careful. There's a danger in equating physical death with peace or coming to heaven. And so, basically, it sounds pretty good. You just die, you know, and then you're in heaven. And that's a common kind of a thing. And also, it could be reassuring, because that's one of the things we've heard. But if you really start to follow it out, it's like, there was a movie, what's the name of the one was Mimi and Rogers for the Rapture. The Little Kid. The Little Kid is a little girl on that. You know, kind of, her mom keeps saying, you know, well, daddy died and daddy's in heaven now. And we're going, that's what you do. You know, God takes you to heaven, you know, and comes and gets you. And then, well, that's something that's a common thing that's told to children and everything. But anyway, then it's like, you know, the little child after a while, I want to die, mommy. I want to die. I want to go be with daddy. You know, as soon as you make that association of heaven with the physical body dying, then it's like, where does this go? You know, and if you take it to another extreme, it would be if it was just that simple that you just had to physically die to go to heaven, then suicide, or then people could just, you know, in their rough experiences. I didn't like that movie for that reason. But it had a lot of... I didn't know what I was getting into. I really, I guess I expected... It would be a good one to do with the video getting through the course, because it gets at this whole thing. But if death, if you have to die to go to heaven, so to speak, it still comes back to anger at God. I mean, there is a scene in that movie where the woman just fires into the sky, you know, just furious, God, for... It seems like a catch-22, that she thinks she has to die to go to heaven, but she doesn't want to die. And, you know, she has to come up and give the movie away. But basically what I thought we'd do tonight is maybe go in to spend a little time on death. I didn't want to get too much into death, because if we really follow it in, it can be a real heavy-duty kind of topic. And I think it would be a good springboard then to maybe talk about our function in here as ministers of God, or however you want to do it, and really try to articulate more the positive side of what we're moving towards in the sense of we're being called to be teachers of God, and what does that mean, and I'd like to get into the ideas of unlearning. Because for a lot of people, that's scary too, because they feel like I've spent my whole life learning, what am I going to do now and learn everything that I've learned since kindergarten? You know, I gave a talk at a conference in Cincinnati, a course you ran to at a conference, and there was one gentleman who came up to me afterwards, and he said, I just feel like the course is, I'm just angry at the course because it's like it's anti-intellectual, that a lot of my heroes are people that are great minds and have learned great things, you know, and from the sounds of what I'm hearing from the course of this unlearning thing that needs to take place, he just was very upset. And I really want to kind of go into that too, because the course is not saying that all these skills and abilities that you've developed have to be under, pretend like you can't cross the street, pretend like you can't drive, pretend like you can't walk, you know, that's absurd. But the course is saying, and what we'll go into a little bit I think tonight, is that all of the abilities that you have, whether they're mental abilities, psychic abilities, physical abilities, they're all completely neutral. And the only thing that really needs to be changed is the purpose. If you can take the skills and abilities that you've learned and give them to the Holy Spirit, then they can be used to channelize them and to bring your mind to really learn the ability of healing, which is the one ability that you have to develop. And that's a much better perspective than thinking, what am I going to do? I took all this accounting, I've got to forget all my accounting, you know, that kind of a thing, which can seem like, once again, the more, from that view, the more that you've learned, the more that you'd have to unlearn. And it's something not quite, you know, right about that. So it's our investment in the meaning that's not of a purpose for the Holy Spirit. It's where we get into anything. The ego has once to use all the skills and abilities that are developed for its own purpose, which is really, if we get into it, it's more to keep the mind identified with the body. You know, if you look at the most, I look at my life, and I look at all these ten years I spent in college and a lot of the jobs I've worked and everything, and basically the underlying motive was I wanted to get good degrees, so I could get a good job, so I could make lots of money, so I could have my body very comfortable. Very thank you the rest of my life, you know. And it's like, the thing is, when you start to follow through, you start to see, ah, when it's being used for the body, for the body's comfort, for status, for fame, you know, like the Bible talked about those things, fame and pleasure and this and that, then those are very good goals. There's been some passages that have been coming to me all day. We'll just look at two different passages on death. We won't spend a long time going into death, because we could literally go from death into the attraction to guilt and the attraction to pain and the attraction to death, which is three kind of sections in the course. And on the surface, that sounds like, like that's nuts. Attraction to pain, who would want to be attracted to pain? Attraction to guilt, guilt's not something I want to be attracted to, and attraction to death, oh yeah. You want to be attracted to death? I may get into the section of death, and attraction to death is kind of like, no, I don't, I want to be attracted to immortality or eternity, but in the course he says over and over, you don't see how devoted you are to death. You know, you're so devoted that you worship death. That doesn't, on a surface level, it doesn't make a lot of sense. You know, how am I worshiping death? Well, we could spend probably the next couple years going into that one and to really take a look at that. But what came to me today was Lesson 163. So the title of the lesson, you know, is very reassuring for us. There is no death, the Son of God is free. But then he's going to start taking it a lot deeper. What do we mean by death when we talk about the word death? Because I think all of us right away, when we're growing up, the images we have of death is, of course, death of bodies. You know, relatives die, animals die. There seems to be death as part of the cycles of nature and everything. And what we're going to see in these lessons, as we look at it, is Jesus is going to pull our definition out from the physical realm and pull it back into the mental realm or the mind realm. Does anybody want to read the first paragraph? Death is a thought that takes on many forms, often unrecognized. It may appear as sadness, fear, anxiety, or doubt, as anger, faithlessness, and lack of trust, concern for bodies, envy, and all forms in which the wish to be as you are not may come to tempt you. All such thoughts are but reflections of the worshiping of death as Savior and as giver of release. That's quite an interesting paragraph. Concern for bodies, you know, you ever say to either son or your daughter or others, hey, have a safe trip. I'll be concerned, call me when you get there. Oh, death. I mean, how many times do you think of something like that and the context of that is death? But what we're seeing in this first paragraph is a huge array of forms that if it's just, you know, a twinge of something, you know, lack of trust, and envy. And what it's doing is it's training the mind to start to think along the lines whenever I'm upset, whenever I'm unhappy or uncomfortable even. Maybe I'm a little hot. Maybe it seems like it's a 95 degree day or something I'm a little hot. Death. Okay. Maybe I'm a little hungry, you know. I'm craving something, you know, or it could be anxiety about maybe you're going to take a test or you have a big day coming at work, you know, or some doubts about a friend or they didn't do what they said they were going to do or whatever. If you really look at that paragraph, you can see that what he's talking about is death is a lot different than what the deaths were thinking about or even the near-death experiences. The near-death experiences are people who are clinically, in the world's eyes, dead. You know, brainwaves, brainwaves, heartbeat stops. And you can see how Jesus is pulling the definition out into saying whatever you're upset in any way, that's death. Not necessarily a physical death. Yeah, not a physical death. It's a desire to die. Which is, I don't know, that's a leap. Depends. Depends. Well, everything is like reflective of the opposite of the thoughts of God. And the opposite of the thoughts of God are to basically to die. God is perfect peace, perfect joy, perfect love. And anything else, sadness, anxiety, fear is the total opposite. It's starting to become more clear. And you can see how, too, that this definition, a lot of the questions that come up is like, where do you go after you die and what about the next realm? And there's lots of different beliefs about reincarnation and what was it in the Catholic Church that they had a thing called limbo land or whatever it was. Purgatory. Purgatory. And you can see how all these questions and all these kind of postulations are based on this kind of linear death and the death of the body. There's some kind of a soul that kind of leaves the body and goes somewhere. And, you know, Jesus, as a part of the text talks about it, he calls it a curious belief that something lives on that's the body. You know, he's poking fun at it, even that. That really what he's trying to do in the course is start to say, anytime you're feeling upset in the slightest bit, it doesn't matter whether it's rage or terror or it's just you're mildly annoyed, you're just a little bit ticked off or you're mildly uncomfortable. Even mildly uncomfortable. You think you've been sitting in an auditorium and your back is stiff. Death. It keeps bringing everything back to it's a thought in our mind and it just gets sprayed out onto all these forms on the screen but really what we want to do is we want to trace it all the way back and we want to see the ridiculousness and the impossibility of the thought of death and then peace eternal, you know. And then we can really come to the solution. But as long as we just keep death defined in this narrow way of thinking that it's just when the body dies, you know. We talked about last week about how what happens when the body dies in a sense until the mind accepts the atonement, until the mind accepts the Holy Spirit's purpose completely, then the scripts just seem to change. Instead of thinking more of an incarnational thing where you were a soul, this incident soul comes down into this finite little slab of flesh and then goes out, back and goes out, comes back and goes half and comes back. Another way of thinking it might be here's a mind that's deceived in itself. It believes that it's separated from God. So it's seeing these nightmares on the screen and it just kind of changes the channel. You know, like these little changes you have on the TV, you could just kind of cable go click, click, click. It's just click, click, click. As long as the mind still believes in guilt, it's still going to look onto the screen for witnesses for guilt. So from that perspective it's like, gee, Jesus, help me really see the foolishness of the guilt in my mind. Help me heal my mind so that I'll no longer look outside to reinforce the guilt. I'll no longer need perception in the end. You know, I'll be able to return to the abstract light and hear that experience as if it's just this unconditional light. So, would you say that there's one mind that believes it's split off and is experiencing or trying to experience all of these different forms of separation through different bodies or something like that, just all this fragmentation of one mind? That's the highest level though, in the sense that I guess the best example of that would be there's a question posed to Jesus in the teacher's manual where we talked about, you know, how many teachers of God does it take to save the world?