 I'm not budging until I come back into it, and we have to be, in one sense, firm in our mind, we can't just kind of molly coddle the ego and think, you know, maybe if I'm sweet to it today, it'll leave me alone, you know, it's just, it's a death wish. You know, how do you, you can't even molly coddle a death wish, you know, it doesn't sound right. You know, how do you, you can't rock it or, you know, cradle it or whatever, you know, picture yourself with like a skeleton in your hand, cradle it or something, you know, there's just nothing really works that way. It's just a matter of like, really at times being firm in your mind, really firm, like, I deserve this, and I'm going to get to the bottom of this and experience that peace because it's my natural birthright. It's what was given me in my creation. That's why I deserve it, because God gave it to me, and that's a good reason to feel worthy about that. So, I'm here, I'm ready to just explore this stuff this year, and I think we'll just get the ball rolling. We've got some good starting points, and we'll just start rolling with this, and see where the spirit takes us. Yeah, I think maybe it's just the meaning of the word. To me, deserve is tied into worthiness. I am worthy. And maybe people interpret the word deserve in the sense of a misguided sense of entitlement, even though I would say that that's exactly what the Course is working with our mind in terms of worthiness. It's actually a workbook lesson that says I am entitled to miracles. So, I think it's probably just this connotation where people are so used to hearing the word deserve in the context of I deserve a bigger piece of the pie, or I deserve to be treated with love and respect, or those kind of things, which is really looking outward at the world and saying, yeah, expectation, the world should treat me better. And so it's like an old connotation. And I think that's the thing with a lot of language, like even from the Bible. In the Bible, there was a quote that's quoted very often by Christians. It's fear God and keep His commandments. And Jesus softly reinterprets that as a whole God and awe. That awe is an appropriate reaction or experience in conjunction with the Creator. And keep the commandments is really just stay aligned with right-mindedness, right-minded thinking. So I find that a lot of my travels that what we do when we start to have discussions with people will say their meaning with semantics, or sometimes people will even say, well, we're not saying the same thing. And to me, it's the state of unity and union, I feel, is not something that can really be found in the words, even. I'm always willing to say it in another way, or have a meeting of minds, so to speak, because there's really no universal theology, and in this world, there's no universal semantics, because words are but symbols of symbols twice removed from reality. But I feel like in my experience, when I hold onto that intention of this connectedness and joining, that the witnesses just all turn toward that connectedness. Even at times over the years when I've given talks and somebody's walked out, I remember being in a church one time and I was up at the pulpit, and I said something like, God did not create this world, and one of the ladies in the pews who just got up slowly just walked down to the end of the aisle, and I just happily continued right on sharing it. I'm not concerned that how it's received, or whether it's popular, or what, that's part of being uncompromising. But generally, those kind of things can sometimes seem to happen in larger gatherings, but I find usually when I'm just floating around, most of the people I meet around the world are not into metaphysics. Most of the people I meet are still part of that. I use the Chideo-Christian semantics and belief system, and yet we have these great connections, whether it's with Jehovah Witnesses, or Buddhists, Gnostics, people of Judaism and Hindus, I feel this deep connection, and the words will come out very, very different depending on who I'm with. And if you had like a time-lapse photography or a little camera, they would say, this guy's like a chameleon or something. We can't tell from the recordings whether he's Buddhist, or Hindu, or Christian, or whatever, because the words, I don't really identify with a formal set of beliefs, and the words will just come out in terms of connecting heart to heart and not separating in any way. It's a lot of fun, actually. If you don't have any opinions, how can you have any preferences? So if you don't care, and you have no opinion, then how can you live responsibly or contribute, or you would be not contributing? So for example, if you didn't care, you wouldn't recycle, or work for anything good, and then the world would come to an end even faster. So how do preferences, you know, how can it exclude? In other words, if you don't have an opinion, then you're not going to have a preference for anything. Yeah, that's exactly it. You're onto it. The preferences and opinions and judgments are actually identical, and when you start to really follow this down, you can kind of follow the divine logic of what you're talking about, you know, that they do equate. And when you follow it down, I call that mysticism. It takes you down to mystical states, which really, there's a great sense of feeling of connectedness, but also a sense of detachment from all things of the world. And I know for me this was like a big part of my journey, because I went through a phase where I very much felt like I was an activist. I would say not a very happy or peaceful activist all the time, but I was an activist, and I did have quite a lot of preferences and opinions, and quite a lot of justifications underneath those. Why I didn't meet, you know, why I was nonviolent or didn't buy these products, you know, was against nuclear proliferation and the whole deal. And then, I think that's one thing that got me, the more I worked with the Course, there was that line from Jesus, which was seek not to change the world, seek rather to change your mind about the world. And remember when I first read that, I said, I have no clue what that means. I mean, I know what I've been doing in the past, but I have been trying to make the world a better place. That's why I was involved with humanistic psychology. I would go to conferences to join with like-minded people and people that shared a lot of the same interests that I shared and cared about a lot of the same things that I did. But I have to say too that I remember one time, after that phase in my life, I was reading some of the writings from Peace Program and Peace Program was saying things like, if you want to be a bringer of peace, you must be peaceful. And it just hit me, you know, like, oh my gosh, I'm a hypocritical activist.