 Okay, this is our first question of the night about say yes with a reference to Jim Carrey's Yes Man movie trying to say yes to break out of the habit of saying no to everything and then at the end of the movie there's actually he has to learn discernment because his girlfriend senses he's inauthentic and he's going to lose his girlfriend unless he learns some quick discernment which is really a speed-up thing but so yeah yeah you can say that you know like the Bible says let your yea be a let your navy nay it takes a lot of discernment and mind training to come to the point where you can authentically let your yes be yes and your no be no because there's so much conditioning in there there's so much people pleasing there's so much resistance and then when you start to open up to the context that there's a spirit within you a guide like the Holy Spirit that that knows what is best for you that knows your best interest in every seeming situation and and can give you the yeas and the nays and you have to learn to receive and to be spoken through that's that's the goal of all spiritual awakening is to achieve that and to experience that but on the way for most people the frustration is is they don't hear the Holy Spirit's voice guide and guidance directly so they're left with this you know dilemma their yeses and their nose and they know that they want to be intuitively harmonious so that they don't have to regret their yeses and nose and keep changing their mind incessantly because they don't have any clarity and what Jesus says in the Course is you would be unwise to not follow a teacher who in every circumstance knows you're good and therefore you know we're opening up and I think the general theme of that whole movie was starting to break out of resistances and fears and doubts and open up and to start saying yes that's actually how it starts for Jim Carrey in that movie he's amazed at the miracles that happen when he just begins to start to say yes so we tend to use with our spirituality and our community we kind of use the elder brother approach even in the Course Jesus has described as an elder brother perfectly equal to you in every way and one who can save a lot of time by the wisdom and the guidance and so that's what we're all about is collapsing time and saving time bring the alpha and omega together to a unified experience and so we kind of advocate more of an elder brother approach in the sense that just like in this world if you had an AA sponsor who had been sober for 35 years who was humorous and seemed very clear and wise and seemed to offer really wise things to a lot of the people there would be a sense of respect for that elder brother who had done the program work the program and seem to be excelling in all aspects of living and if there are those that have done a lot of work and are consistently peaceful and everything even in this world that's a good thing to follow not necessarily that those teachers would tell you everything that you should and shouldn't do or would direct you specifically but certainly it would be an inspiration and certainly it could be someone that you could join with and link with and so the main problem I said if the ego had a middle name it would be autonomy and that's the whole thing that's set this world up as autonomy that's what the authority problem is about the belief that you can author yourself as a personality and so it's going to take a lot of surrender and letting go of those autonomous decisions and to come into alignment of Holy Spirit decide for God for me or today I will make no decisions by myself that's a very humble mind that can actually say and mean today I will make no decisions by myself so as you're going through it if you can just be aware of the resistances if you feel closed down and shut down a lot of times like our character in Yes Man Jim Carrey he was very very closed down and very fearful and paranoid and still there was almost like an arrogance and a cockiness and a pride I know there have been spiritualities that have just like the drug slogan is just say no there are some spiritualities that just say yes and that blind yes to everything is not going to get you very far either because it's just like a reaction it's not there's no discernment at all with it so we tend to use the sense of we have open discussions and a lot of prayer and then joining together and just like our discussion today when you came in right over there and we had our discussion and when we give it over to spirit it's like joy and laughter usually are the outcome that comes from being so surrendered and letting the spirit just flow through so freely where everybody can expose and express and then the clarity just kind of emerges so yeah I certainly wouldn't advocate saying yes when you come to a spiritual community that's a very deep and very devoted and very reverent and they have sayings in place like we do in terms of tasks and projects and all kinds of backdrops just designed to learn to listen to the spirit within and to let it do it through you so to speak that's the goal not to try to have a doer mentality or a doer concept but to be done through so completely that your mind becomes aligned with that which is a state of beingness and doesn't have a do or a don't do in it it's just pure beingness and pure spirit that's always the goal with everything we do and oftentimes people come and encounter all kinds of resistances that come up and in many many cases if there's a sense of great great wisdom behind everything that's being done and you can surrender into that and trust that there is a purpose behind things and that you don't have to try to use your past learning the pros and the cons and the analysis to try to find that because you won't find it through that you will find it through listen follow listen follow and if you can't hear and so the listen follow doesn't work then trust and follow trust and follow but I would also be discerning in terms of who you're following and Jesus had a great line in the Bible you shall know them by their fruits that's a great discernment line if I've ever heard one really in the most basic simple straightforward way that you want to trust what is trustworthy and you shall know them by their fruits is a real practical way of doing that so I feel like in this world we have mentors and we have those that seem to have gone before and seem to have worked this just like we have apprentices working with craftsmen it's the same thing spiritually that that same thing works if you want to learn a craft you would learn from a master craftsman if you want to learn and experience peace of mind then you turn to those that are peaceful to experience that and that doesn't necessarily mean successful as the world judges it because it can be an inverse thing there because Jesus says you can't judge your advances from your retreats but you can begin to discern more of a sense of a lightheartedness and a peace and that's something that you want to learn to trust more and move towards and follow even if you aren't hearing or feeling something yourself it can be that you'll break through resistances by trusting and following and that's really something that is very important we teach this very important it works very very well so it's worked well for us I happen to have an unusual spiritual journey in the sense that I started hearing the Holy Spirit very clearly you know back in the late 1980s and I would say my teachers and mentors most of them would be considered dead by the world but they were through books books and movies mostly books where I felt this huge heart opening and resonance almost like I was connecting with them it didn't matter how many years or decades or centuries that they passed away I really felt like this deep connection with them like they were right there with me in presence right there with me in my heart and so consequently my journey was unlike many people's journey because I didn't really have like physical teachers or in the case of like Gary Renard materializing teachers either but for many people that's the case they do have materializing teachers or what seems to be material teachers and again you're back to you shall know them by their fruits you know that's the best way of discerning so if you're working like in the community and somebody's stewarding a house or overseeing a task or a project or whatever and you know you're asked to do something that's very project related or task related or something in this kind of context I would say the advisable answer is yes and it has much wisdom behind it and you get to watch your emotions whether you say yes or no you really get to watch what if you have any reactions or things that come up it's good to pay close attention to those whichever you say yes or no it's good to pay very close attention to those and in the end it's the way that you unwind from the ego because in the end the ego is a decision making process it's based on a lie and you want out of that lie it's like a closed system too so you know that's why it seems to take quite a bit of willingness to come outside of that it's kind of a circumventing lie that's all around that's so all pervasive as they say in the matrix everything you see is part of that lie part of that control so it's advisable to say yes in that kind of context and also pay close attention to your emotions and then through saying yes and feeling the joy and happiness and feeling that deep flow of spirit that's the most important thing is starting to realize that it never really was saying yes to externals it was really an internal process all along it just looked like there was external characters involved and the whole point of the process is to collapse that whole inner outer thing too.