 Of course, the Miracles is a very powerful spiritual tool. It's one pathway among many, and it defines itself that way. It says it's one form of the universal curriculum in that there are many. It's a pathway of forgiveness in the deepest sense of the word. Like I know in the Bible, it says, forgive 70 times 7, but some of you maybe have tried that. That's only 490 times, and I tried that too. It didn't work. But it's a sense of many. Maybe 2,000 years ago, 490 was many times. Today, we know it's going to take a deep cleansing of our consciousness to come to a state of peace of mind. The song was talking about what the Bible was referred to by Jesus as the kingdom of heaven. In the East, it might be Nirvana, or just seen as bliss, pure love, oneness. So it's a curriculum that comes from Jesus Christ. It's very, very practical. It's almost like if you really read the Gospels and the teachings of Jesus from 2,000 years ago through the Gospels, you can see that there's a lot about forgiveness and love. Loving God and loving your neighbor as yourself. He really emphasized the first two commandments, of the 10 commandments. And if you can imagine 2,000 years have passed now, and we have some new words, new terminology, new fields of study. One of them is psychology. Back in 2,000 years ago, we didn't have Sigmund Freud. We didn't have all these teachings about the ego and defense mechanisms and unconscious guilt and so on and so forth. So it uses the teachings of psychology. It uses the teachings of education and the terminology of education, which is another major field that we have that's evolved since the time of Jesus. And it also uses Christian terminology. So we have a combination between the psychology, educational terms and Christian terminology. So we'll get things like psychology. It will talk a lot about denial, repression, projection, the dynamics of the ego that keep us trapped because we're still locked into attack and defense whenever we're using these mechanisms. And it talks about the ego in a way that a little bit beyond what Freud did. Freud saw the ego as having some kind of value, basically mediating between the superego, the morals and mores, and the id, which were all these unconscious impulses and urges. And so the ego has some kind of a value to kind of mediate so you could actually survive and live in between these conditioned morals and standards and these impulses. You might say the eros, the urges of the ego, and for the id, I should say. Now Jesus is saying basically in the Course that the ego is a mask that's been laid across the face of Christ. It's an attempt to have a false identity and to be disguised from who you really are, which is spirit. So the teachings of the Course in Miracles, it starts off with a text. It's got a workbook of daily lessons, 365 daily lessons, one lesson a day for every day of the year. It's very, very practical. And then it's got a manual for teachers at the back for those that really go into the curriculum as you might say a teacher of God or a miracle worker. And basically it's saying that that's our true profession, underneath all of our earthly professions, that everybody wants peace, everyone wants happiness and joy, and everyone needs a lot more training at letting miracles come through them. Kind of being conduits of instruments for miracles. Like St. Francis' prayer, make me an instrument. Lord, make me an instrument. Well, we've got a practical curriculum that literally has a text that sets forth the theology or the theory. It's got a workbook for kind of like when we were in high school, we had maybe like chemistry class, and then we would go into the lab to actually perform the experiments with the elements and everything to actually see how it works practically in our life. That's what the workbook's about. Of clearing away the ego debris from the mind and learning how to trust in the spirit and let go of judgment and criticism and condemnation. And then the manual for teachers just takes another step in terms of you find all kinds of subtleties of pride that come in as you go on the spiritual journey. The ego wants to go along on the spiritual journey. It wants to turn it into something prideful, have some kind of power, some kind of esteem that's built up on even the ideas of healing in which there seems to be some healers that have more ability and then there's those that have less or those that are in need and those that have the healing powers. And really this is a course that's teaching us our perfect equality. That everyone and everything is perfectly equal, which is a reflection of our divine oneness in heaven. And we need to be rinsed free of all these ego beliefs of superiority and inferiority, of having false senses of pride and then also senses of deep unworthiness and shame and inferiority. All of these are part of a mask that is being worn that's covering over our true Christ self. It's saying too that Christ is like an idea in the mind of God. So Christ is neither male nor female, nor masculine or feminine. It's literally a creation of perfect love. And it's saying that we are all children of God. We came from God and we forgot who we are. And we've fallen asleep and we're dreaming a dream in which we feel we're separate from everyone and everything. And we aren't going to wake up from that dream until we learn to forgive, until we learn to have a happy dream. We aren't going to wake up from a nightmare until we first learn to forgive and have a happy dream. Then we'll wake back up into reality. In the Bible, of course, most industrializations are very familiar with the Judeo-Christian language because it's so prevalent. Even though Islam is probably the largest religion in the world, for most of what we're familiar with is Judeo-Christian teachings and theologies. And it says in the Bible that Adam fell asleep. You go back to Genesis, but at no point in the Bible does it say that Adam woke up. And so in that sense, of course, the miracles is coming along using the Judeo-Christian language, but in a way that is designed to rapidly raise up consciousness, raise up awareness so that you can start to transcend all limiting ego beliefs and approach a very, very high state of mind, which is like the gateway back to the Kingdom of Heaven. But the Kingdom of Heaven is just an inward state, a state of mind. It's a state of attitude, the B attitudes in the Bible. And it's not a form. It's not like you go off to a place, as if there's like an afterlife that you go off to another place. The more you open your heart and you open your mind to a state of mind that Jesus calls the Kingdom of Heaven. And he says it's within you. It's not out somewhere. You don't have to reach for it out in the world or in the cosmos. Now, the teachings of the Course are what I would call non-dualistic teachings. So you can go back into ancient China, you can go back into India, some of you have heard of the data Vedanta, but the data really means not to. And that is a basic way of talking about. There's a oneness that we are that connects us. And even in quantum physics, they're now talking about the quantum field, the unified field, like movies like What the Bleep Do We Know and so forth. They're describing the same thing that Jesus is talking about, Buddha, a lot of the mystics and saints. It's a unified field of awareness where even within the perceptual world everything is completely connected. So every galaxy, every star, every atom, every molecule are really all connected even though the ego beliefs are of time and space and distance, which makes it seem like as a human being we're disconnected from a lot of other things. And we're very tiny in the perspective of the human perspective. Of course, miracles are saying no, actually you're vast and powerful beyond measure as your true identity is, but you do have to go through a system of training your mind to release the ego, to be continuously aware of that high state of mind. A lot of us get glimpses and we're so thankful for the glimpses. Thank God, hallelujah. Thank you for showing me that glimpse of who I really am and how it feels. But the struggle comes in when we seem to drift back into the human consciousness and awareness that is back into separation. So this is a very practical curriculum in training the mind to higher states of consciousness that basically pulls from three fields of studies, Christianity, psychology and education. And for some, like with Francis, she had a very large Course in Miracles meetup group. Some of you have heard of meetup over in Sydney and then started to go deeper when she met me and we started to go deeper into this experience. I would say the Course is truly aimed at the experience of peace of mind. It's not meant to be just another philosophy, another theology. It's actually aimed at having an experience, a sustained experience of peace of mind. That all the songs about peace and all the love songs, you know, they go into talking about something that has kind of been a goal of humankind for many, many centuries. And it's saying, oh, here's the practical steps you can go through to reach that goal. And to know yourself as you truly are has God created you instead of the way that the ego makes it seem. So personality, persona in Latin is mask. And the personality self of human beings is like a mask that has to be lifted so that we can find our true authentic self. So that's a little summary of what this Course in Miracles is. It's actually been translated into maybe 17 or 18 different languages. There are people practicing it all over the world. It doesn't really have some kind of a system or hierarchy of teachers and leaders. There's no pope of, of course, the miracles and so forth. It's a self-study book. And you might say that there are lots of groups that practice it, including Tina has, you have two groups right here in Minneapolis. And that's actually the paperback version of the Course, with its text at the beginning and workbook in the middle and manual for teachers at the end and then a clarification of terms actually at the very back of the book that describes some of the basic concepts and ideas in a very, very helpful way. And I have been privileged to have been able to go to many countries and see, actually help in the Course getting published into some very, like down in South America where people really want the book but haven't been able to afford it. So there's been a lot of collaborations of getting it published in an inexpensive way on Bible paper for people that are really wanting it.