 To me the core of the question goes into this, you know, how to reach God and I know there are many different methodologies in many ways including a lot of, we could say, new age or new thought ways which is called affirmations where you affirm, affirm, affirm, affirm. What I like about the course and what I've come to discover in my own life is the course is very much like the Eastern teachings and Eastern philosophies which is more of neti-neti, not this, not that. Or it's more like the thing of like you've got a beautiful piece of a big hunk of marble and then Michelangelo comes along and takes away a lot of the marble and everyone goes whoa to what's left. I think it's that way with truth that, you know, Jesus says you do not have to seek for what is true but you do have to seek for what is false, that it's about removing the obstacles to the awareness of love's presence. So we're not trying to teach love and we're not trying to teach light and we're not trying to teach, we could say, abstraction. What we're trying to do and the whole focus of curriculum on planet earth or we could say in awakening is removing everything that's not it. And that's where faith comes in because, you know, it's like to continue on towards something that is not, you know, people work with a course and they maybe don't have an experience of the vision of Christ. They see the words in the book, vision of Christ, they go oh that sounds really important and good but the book is really aimed at forgiveness, at removing everything else and just to even continue on on the journey where you're feeling things are being undone and dismantled and taken away but it's quite intense to the ego too as well. It takes faith to even continue on to have all the marble removed, so to speak, to see what's left. So I came to a point in my life where I thought wow truth is approached through negation. You basically negate everything that isn't truth and what you left with is the I am-ness of the purity of truth. Now reason is something that is very important in philosophy and very important in science and what I liked about the course was the course did not negate reason. In fact Jesus would even say reason would tell you. He would start off a sentence and use reason as synonymous to the Holy Spirit. So for anybody who's coming from a scientific or a philosophical thing he's actually using reason in the course as synonymous with the Holy Spirit. So he's not negating it at all but he's saying reason, logic, that anybody who knows logic if you know the basic premises that if the premise is true and this premise is true then this is true, basically that you have to have true premises to reach a true logical conclusion, a summation. And basically the ego has false premises and then your premises you reach in a logical manner from following these false premises is a false conclusion. Whereas the course is saying no, spirit is real, your reality is only spirit and hence when you wake up your final conclusion will be that you are one with God which is what Jesus said I and the Father are one. You will end up in a logically in the same place if your premises are correct. So the Holy Spirit operates from an entirely different set of premises and the ego's logic is consistent but its premises are false and the Holy Spirit's logic is consistent but its premises are true and you will get very different outcomes logically from different premises. So that's why when I talk to scientists and philosophers and they will say where does reason fit into spirituality? Where does reason fit into religion? I say it fits in perfectly, I've got a book here called The Course in Miracles that actually is a reflection that reason is part of this and reason and faith are not seen as opposites in that way. They both take you to the same experience and that's important I think to know. Now the other thing about faith is that faith is not something that's quantifiable so a lot of times when people talk about faith they talk about I wish I had more faith, wish I had more faith, not in the Course. The Course says you can be faithful or faithfulness or faithlessness but you do have faith make no mistake about that. Faith is like the God given power of your mind. The question really is what have you invested your faith in just like with prayer, prayers are answered, be careful what you pray for you may get it, oh yeah it's be careful about what you're praying for because prayer, the power of prayer is undeniable and faith, the power of faith is undeniable but it's really what am I investing the faith in? So that can sound still kind of abstract so let's get more specific. Lesson 50, lesson 76, I'm 50 and I'm sustained by the love of God lesson 76 in the workbook I am under no laws but God's. In those two lessons he gets very specific about pills, money, protective clothing, being liked, knowing the right people, medicine, the laws of medicine, the laws of economics. He gets into very specific things and he would say all of these are things that are inventions of the ego so if you have your faith in all of these things you don't really know the love of God but it will sustain you in every circumstance if you tap into it so so that's a good example of when you have faith even in in medicine and the laws of friendship and the laws of economics and you know all those things that he mentions that's putting your faith in the thought system of the ego and when you see that that the love of God trusting in the Holy Spirit will say is the thing that you can put all of your investment in if you put all of your faith energy just in the Holy Spirit Jesus is saying that will take you home to the kingdom of heaven but it takes it it's a full investment you know they warned us don't put all your eggs in one basket it once says Jesus is saying you can put all of your eggs in the Holy Spirit's basket because the Holy Spirit is speaking for your true self and he will take you back to the kingdom of heaven so you see how it's just really starting to get really clear on what he's teaching us away from these old ideas of oh if I only had more faith my life would be a lot better as if it's a more or less thing and it's not really a more or less it's more of what is it for