 Okay, hello everybody. Welcome back. Welcome to our all-day movie workshop. It's great to see everyone. So yeah, we've got quite a large group with us again. It's that time of the month where we have our, we have our online retreat, our Tabula Rasa online retreat weekend, and we also have friends just joining us for the movie workshop. So it's a nice full room here in Zoom. And so I thought I'd just kind of let anybody new know about the flow of the day. So we'll start with the movie with David, and then afterwards we'll have a 10-minute break, and then we have our breakout rooms for you to express and share any of your reactions or emotions from the movie. And then we'll have a 45-minute break, and then we have a Q&A session with me. And so I'll pass it over to you now, David. Okay, thank you, Pete. Hello, everyone. Hi, welcome. I see we have about 112 people from all over the world, probably from maybe about 20, 25 different countries. And we have a fun movie today. I think it's going to be very profound for you because it will be along the lines of our theme for the weekend retreat, which is My Spirit Given Function. And then it will, it's quite a deep movie. And I think we're just going to all go into it. For those of you that are new, of course, after the movie, there'll be a short break. And then there'll be breakout sessions on Zoom, so you can share your experiences. And then after that, there'll be a Q&A with Pete at the end. So it's pretty much an all day event. And I'm just so grateful. I see my friend Richard Donnelly there in Lake St. Louis. I recognize that lamp right over your head. Richard hosted me in Lake St. Louis for many years. And I was guided there by friend Kathy Martin, called him up and said, we need a place to stay. And we have had so many encounters in that beautiful house. And the location of today's movie is in the Lake St. Louis area, Lake St. Louis, right above where Richard lives. So Richard, thank you for being with us today. Richard's a longtime Course in Miracles student and practitioner. And what a beautiful heart you are. It's such an honor. So today's movie is going to go into the depth of spiritual awakening and healing. Because what we're doing today is we're looking at that idea for our retreat, which is my spirit-given function. And we talked about yesterday how God created Christ in heaven. It's a pure state of mind of eternity. And that God gave us the function of creation. So actually, we have creative ability. We're able to create spirit. And in the Course in Miracles, Jesus says that you have creations, he says. He's meaning Christ has creations, but they're purely spiritual. They're not like dogs and cats and butterflies. Those are our projections. Those are our ego projections. Because as we know, the dogs and the cats and the butterflies are an eternal. They do pass away like the bodies, all the bodies do. So our spirit-given function is creation. So that doesn't have anything to do with form. It doesn't have anything to do with time or space. It's just, thank you God for giving me creative ability to create like you. And in terms of time, Jesus says also that your function is healing. But when Jesus says healing, he's talking about healing of the mind. He's talking about accepting the atonement and miracles in the mind. And some of you might have read some amazing things that Jesus has to say in his Course in Miracles. One of them, I think, probably one of the most striking of the 50 miracle principles at the beginning of the book is when you get to miracle principle number 24 that says miracles enable you to heal the sick and raise the dead because you made sickness and death yourself. And can therefore abolish both. You are a miracle capable of creating in the likeness of your Creator. Everything else is your own nightmare and does not exist. Only the creations of light are real. So, wow, that's a, that's a nothing real can be threatened, nothing unreal exists statement. You can heal the sick and raise the dead. Most of us when we were growing up, our parents didn't tell us that. Is anybody here? Did any of you have parents that said you can heal the sick and raise the dead? I did not. I have not met anybody on the planet and I've met thousands, tens of thousands of people and nobody ever said that they were told that. Maybe if I went to all my Christian science friends all over the world, I might find some parents that would come up with a statement like that. But this is not typical. And when Jesus is saying you can heal the sick and raise the dead, remember what he's teaching us is that form is the projection of the ego. So when he's, when you read that statement, you can heal the sick and raise the dead. You may think of, of a body with other bodies, a body that could walk on water or a body that, that seemed to have all kind of symptom removal going on around that body of Jesus. Lazarus's course is probably one of the most famous ones where he was, he was dead and buried for three days, says in the Bible, four days in the Orantia book. He was really dead. I mean, he had the worst form of sickness, death. He was in the grave and he had wearing grave clothes and he was smelled like, like, I don't know what. We weren't around when that, that stone got rolled away, but whatever came out of that sarcophagus, whatever came out of that, that grave burial site was, was not smelling very good. But Jesus really wasn't into the five senses. He just said, Lazarus come forth. And that was an example of raising the dead. But then what Jesus tells us is that images are just projections of the ego. Bodies are never born. They never really die because they're just projections like trees and mountains and flowers, houses, cars, projections, stars, planets, black holes, everything in time and space is a projection of the ego. So Jesus is not talking about healing the projections, and he's not talking about healing the raising the dead projections because there are no dead projections. Everything in time and space is a projection. And what Jesus is telling us is that our mind that believes in the ego is what's sick. The mind that believes in the ego and has a Holy Spirit, bright mind, that split mind is sick because the mind was created by God to be whole, to be one, to be eternal. Another thing that the principle right before 24 is is 23. And principle 23 says miracles rearrange perception and place all levels in true perspective. This is healing because sickness comes from confusing the levels. This is the core of what the Course teaches about level confusion, where Jesus is teaching us that only the mind is capable of causation. People don't cause anything. Governments don't cause anything. Viruses, COVID-19, these things don't cause anything because it's a projection. So as long as you're looking for causes in the world or effects in the world, you're really looking at a world of effects. They're unreal effects from an unreal cause that is the ego. So our mind is extremely powerful. Thankfully, there's only one mind. So we don't have 7.8 billion different private minds trying to wake up. It's just one mind. And that mind is just wanting to accept the correction. And Jesus is telling us, hey, I did it already. And when I awoke, you were with me. So don't be too upset about what you're perceiving, because it's a done deal. I awoke, and when I awoke, you were with me. But when he's talking about making sure the miracles rearrange perception and place all the levels in true perspective, what he's saying is that all the levels of perception that we may talk about, like we may talk about a physical level or a psychic level or an interpersonal level or a family level or a national level, he's saying, no, all those levels are actually in perfect alignment in the right mind. So when you're in your right mind with the Holy Spirit, there really aren't separate levels. Everything is seen as one experience. And he also says in the workbook, when I am healed, I am not healed alone. So if you accept the correction, you're accepting the correction for the one mind. And that means everyone is saved with you when you accept the correction. That's why Jesus was like the Messiah, because that was just a symbol of a mind accepting the correction for everyone. And it's saying it's a done deal. That's the oneness that that Eckhart Tolle talks about. Rupert Spirit talks about. Adi Shant talks about. Byron Katie talks about. I talk about every mystic and saint. Nisargadatta talks about it. Everyone talks about the oneness. And the oneness is simply the reality that God is one. So in A Course in Miracles, Jesus does come out and he says God has one son. One son. And that one son is Christ. It's neither male nor female. You don't have to get caught up on the sunward. People go, oh, why? No, it's neither male nor female. It's just perfect love. The Christ is perfect love. Now, we're going to actually watch a movie today of we're going to kind of start off and gently zoom in to a family that's living in Lake St. Louis right there where Richard lives. He's right there at the, he's right there at the, at the place where this movie, this movie is about. Wentzville Fire Department. Yes, I remember that Wentzville Fire Department, because I was there. I was watching the movie and I'm like, wait a minute. This is all deja vu. Wentzville Lake St. Louis. I kept looking in the movie for Richard. Where is Richard? He should be, he should be here too. My dear friend Richard. So we're going to kind of zoom in to a family in Lake St. Louis area, which is west of St. Louis, the city, west of the big arches. And, and basically it's a family that is a husband named Brian, a wife, his wife is named Joyce, and they have an adopted son named John. This is based on a true story. As far as the world goes, this is this, these events actually happened. And basically this is a family where John is an adopted son. He's been adopted. Joyce and Brian went on missions work for Christian missions down to Guatemala, where our friend Anna Paola is from. And while they were down there, they adopted a very little, a little boy, an orphan boy named John. And so Joyce and John and Brian are the Smith family. And we're going to slowly ease into this movie. So you get to see the Smith family, you get to see their, their high school as a Christian high school, you get to see the surroundings. And you're going to just kind of ease into the family life of the Smiths. And then an event will occur in which John is out playing with two of his friends on a frozen lake, because this is winter time in Lake St. Louis area. And it gets really cold, Richard can tell you, I can tell you, it gets cold here in Cincinnati. It gets cold there. And the lake is frozen and John and his friends are going to go out and play on the ice and a neighbor is basically going to say, get off the ice. Get off right now. You shouldn't be playing on this ice. It's dangerous. And they're kind of, you know, like teenagers are, you know, where we're training for the Olympics, they say, you know, they're being warned to get off the ice. And we're training for the Olympics, like leave us alone and everything. And then they're, they're going to fall all three of them into the cold water. And one of them, John is, is going to try to help his friends get out, but he, he doesn't make it out. And he loses consciousness. And so he basically sinks unconsciously down to the bottom of its lake, Lake St. Louis. It's just north of where Richard lives in the Lake St. Louis area. And, and he will just go down and he's going to be down and out. He's going to be down in the cold, frozen water unconscious for approximately 15 minutes. 15 minutes of unconsciousness, just his body lying at the bottom of Lake St. Louis. And that sets us up for our movie today, because what I'm going to do is I'm going to use passages from A Course in Miracles. And I'm going to teach what Jesus taught us in A Course in Miracles as we watch the movie. So we're going to go from a family situation. And John loves, he loves Steph Curry. Anybody know Steph Curry? Yeah, World Champion, Golden State Warriors. He's a big Steph Curry fan. And John also believes Michael Jordan is the greatest player in basketball history. He's very convinced about that. He's 15 years old or so, you know, so he's, he's going to be living his life. And then we're going to go into this experience. And then during the rest of the movie, I'm going to bring in teachings from A Course in Miracles. Just like we started today, and I said our true function is creation in heaven. Our function is healing in time. We have to begin to realize that it's not people that get sick. And it's not people that die. Those things that bodies go through, including birth and death, are inventions of the ego. They're just concepts that the ego made up in the mind. God didn't create them. And so we're going to go at it from the perspective that there's only one mind. And the miracle simply rearranges perception. And the prayer of the heart is answered to him to the mind in the form of peace and happiness and joy. And what seems to be healing in form, or a boy's body coming back, or a sickness, a symptom removal, is basically only a witness. Jesus tells us that whatever you perceive in form is just a witness to your belief. So there is no actual healing that occurs in form, because form is images. And even the Bible said, hold no grave in images before the Lord thy God. The ego made up all the images. And quite frankly, you can't heal what's not real. That's something you want to put in your notes. You cannot heal what is not real. You know, if the ego made up a trick, or the ego made up an image, you don't have to heal the image. You just have to heal the mind that believes that the images are real. You see, that's what the healing is. That's why Jesus says nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Herein lies the peace of God. Here we are. We're all on Zoom. Oh my gosh, there's 137 of us on here now. We got a big movie room today. We're from all over the world watching this. But what it is is we're just praying for the Holy Spirit to show us that really there's only one mind. When we pray for somebody else that we perceive as someone who's not ourselves to get healed, we're really praying for our own mind to let go of the perception that there's more than one of us. You see, that's what the healing is. The healing is just the awareness that there's only one mind. Now, a lot of you I know have read The Mystics and Saints, and there's so many great metaphysical teachings. But to say there's one mind, it totally goes against what the five senses show us. So if you've lived however many years seemingly in form in your body, all the evidence that your five senses has been showing you is false evidence. As Mary Baker-Eddie said in Christian Science, there's no mind in matter. There's no life, truth, substance, or intelligence in matter. There is no such thing as biological life. There is no such thing as life in terms of brainwaves or heartbeats or pulses and things like that because form doesn't have life. Life is eternal. I always say as one time Ken Wopnik was asked by a student, you know, what does the Course in Miracles have to say about life on other planets? And Ken very calmly said, the Course says there's no life on this planet. Now there you go. Now that is really the kind of thoughts we have to have. There's no life on this planet. So we're not concerned about healing the sick and raising the dead in terms of bodies, but we are concerned about seeing the world differently. We want to see the world with the Holy Spirit. We want to see that there's nothing to get hung about, as the Beatles say in Starbury Fields Forever. Now I'm going to read you one quote here that I think this is one of the best quotes that I have read because it's one thing to be told God has one son or to be told that there's just one of us and this is the Christ, but here's what the quote says. It says, this is from chapter 14, it is not true that you can make decisions by yourself or for yourself alone. No thought of God's son can be separated or isolated in its effects. Every decision is made for the whole sonship directing in and out and influencing a constellation larger than anything you ever dreamed of. I'm going to read that last part again, directed in and out and influencing a larger a constellation, a larger than anything you've ever dreamed about. So picture this. It seems like we've got 100 and now it's 138 people watching our Zoom, but actually there's only one of us. And that one, that one of us is so powerful that we're dreaming a dream, a constellation of planets and stars called time and space and galaxies. And every single thing that's happening on all of those galaxies in the entire cosmos is the result of our decision, our one mind's decision. So everything that seems to happen, even the movement of the planets and the spheres is coming about as a result of our decisions. And until we accept the correction and forgive it all, then we're simply looking at a motion picture of our mind. So when we look out the window, when we look around the room, we're just watching a motion picture of consciousness. And nothing's happening by accident because our mind is so powerful that it's deciding everything. You don't like what your partner did. Well, you had your partner do that thing. It's your own decision. You weren't abandoned or abused or rejected. Your mind decided that it was going to be that way. And now you can decide again, which is what true healing is. So the point of the course is just to let go of our erroneous, wrong-minded decisions. And Jesus does say, the power of decision is your one remaining freedom as a prisoner of this world. You can decide to see it right. What you made of it is not reality, for its reality is only what you give it. You cannot really give anything but love to anyone or anything, nor can you really receive anything but love from them. If you think you have received anything else, it is because you have looked within and thought you saw the power to give something else within yourself. So this is why there's no victims. This is why there's no abuse. This is why all things are working together for good to the human being. This does not seem conceivable because if you ask humans, they'll say, well, I have my opinions about the war in Ukraine, but it doesn't have anything to do with my mind. Or I have opinions about global warming or Omicron virus or things, but it has nothing to do with my mind. And Jesus is saying, well, actually ego, wrong-minded decisions are producing the whole world you see. And when you join with the Holy Spirit, all of your wrong-minded decisions that you've ever seemed to make are instantly corrected, instantly as you give them to the Holy Spirit. Imagine that. Thousands, millions, billions, trillions of wrong decisions. And all you do is when you give it to the Holy Spirit, it's all completely healed. And it says, if there never was a wrong decision, you don't even go to heaven and get to tell your war stories. There are no war stories to tell when the Holy Spirit cleans everything out. That's why we call the Holy Spirit the Comforter. That's very comforting to think that trillions and trillions of wrong-minded decisions can be corrected. Through his power and glory, all your wrong decisions are undone completely, releasing you and your brother from every imprisoning thought any part of the sonship holds. Wrong decisions have no power because they are not true. The imprisonment they seem to produce is no more true than they are. So these ego thoughts aren't true and the world of projection that the ego thoughts made is not true either. What I like about this movie is we're just going to go zooming into this little Christian family. We'll call them in the Smith family. That's a real general name, Smith. The Smith family in Lake St. Louis area. And then we're going to move through it. And as these events come, it's one thing to practice your Course in Miracles training with different things that you perceive every day. That's what the work looks about. But when it seems to be in a family with a mother and a father and a son and the son goes down into the pond unconscious for 15 minutes, this is where we get to practice. There's no order of difficulty in miracles. Most doctors, most nurses, most people that part of the medical model, medical establishment will tell you that the prognosis is not good. If you fall into a frozen lake, you throttle about to get out, you grab on the ice, you can't do it, and then you go unconscious and you sink to the bottom of the lake for 15 minutes. Most doctors would tell you that is not a good thing. I was talking yesterday about science and I was saying the entire medical model is based on Newtonian physics. And Newtonian physics is based on empiricism, which is linear time, and getting examples, getting scientific evidence from linear time to conclude what science is. And what I've said is it's all false. Every bit of Newtonian physics that we were ever taught, or we taught ourselves, is a better way of saying it, is false because cause and effect are not separate. And linear time presumes that cause and effect are separate, that the past comes before the present and the present comes before the future. That the past and the future are different. Why would any of us have a career if we knew that the past and the future were the same? What would a career even mean? Why would you work for something in the future if you knew there was no future? If you actually saw your mind invented the future, the ego constructed a future and a past to keep you worried about events that are to come and guilty about events that have already happened. That's the only reason the ego constructed linear time. It's a big trap to keep the mind guilty. So in this movie, when we get to those points of looking at things again, I just want you to pay attention to not so much what seems to be happening on the screen but just your own emotions around sickness or death, because Jesus tells us that the last illusion that you will surmount is the belief in death, because the ego is the belief in death. So to transcend the ego, you have to transcend the belief in death. And this is not something usually that we were raised with. I mean, my parents took me to church and we talked about different things in our Course in Miracle groups. We talked about the things that were bothering, that were triggering. I remember, Richard, one time we were over there, we were having a Snapple Tea and one of your beautiful Bastro Pad pre-made sandwiches and we were just having a good time. It was supper time and you were saying, David, the one thing I can't stand is when these solicitors call you to sell you something at 5.30 or 6. After you just get home from work, you just want to rest and have a nice Snapple Drink. I have one of your iced teas and they call you up. And we were talking about it and then the phone rang and it was a solicitor that was calling Richard right while I was talking about it. And I think, well, that's J.C. Central, that Jesus is having some fun with us, because it's one thing to forgive a solicitor, but now, today, we're going to try to overlook and forgive death. I mean, we're going to go for the big one because that's really the whole point of all this is to feel the joy and everlasting love of God. So, I want you to just sit back and the first part of the movie, I'm not going to pop in because I just want you to get a feel for the Smith family and I want you to get a feel for their life. And then once we start getting into the boy John drowning and the emergency team, the Wensfield fire department being called in and all the things are going to happen, this story is not about one miracle. This is about many miracles. This is about a fireman who comes and he's going to try to go down and with a big hook find John's body, which is way below him in dark, and he's going to intuitively try to find it and he's going to hear his captain tell him something that the captain later on will say, I never said that to you. And the guy that's going to be used to bring John's lifeless body up is someone he doesn't even believe in God. He's hearing God's voice from a police captain and he himself doesn't believe in God. The police captain said, I never told you that. There are miracles that happen in our perception that are just for our one mind. They're just there for us to experience what this healing joy is all about. It's not about other people. It's not about people at all, actually. So sit back, enjoy the movie. I think it's going to be a beautiful emotional ride, but we're going down we're going down into the depths of our own mind, our one mind to find the light. That's what we're doing today. We're going to have a have a good time doing it too. Manuel's got his hands up like, yeah, okay. Hallelujah. Okay, I'll pop in a little bit later in the movie.