 Okay, well, this session's afternoon we're going to talk about laying aside the self-concept, but we wanted to do it in a little bit of a context that Jackie had said sometime during the retreat while I'm here for these two weeks, I would like to go into sickness and symptoms and so on and so forth, and so we thought we would talk about it a little bit. It's a great lead-in because it's really all about mistaken identity, and that's the reason why we have to expose and release the self-concept is because it's being held to take the place of our true identity, and as long as we hold the self-concept in value it in our mind, that means we are not valuing the self that we truly are, which is pure divine love, and we're wanting to hold a false concept in the place of that love, and we have to really get down deep to really start to see that we really don't want the substitute. We'd rather have the actual real love, we have to have experiences of that real love before we even know that it's there because it was such a good hide-and-seek job, such a good dissociation, such a good denial of impression that it's just been totally pushed out of awareness, and so we seem to have to make contact with that. So in terms of sickness, we can start out with one line from the core, sickness is anger taken out upon the body. So when we start talking about symptoms, that's kind of the dynamic that's underneath it, that there's this guilt that's in the mind, and there's this anger, this self-hatred that's in there. It's really a self-hatred that comes from believing that you're an ego, instead of being the Christ self that you are, and so it's very, very deeply rooted and buried in the mind, and sickness is just one of those attempts to kind of fend off divine love and kind of say to God, aha, you see here's proof that I'm weak and frail, and little and vulnerable, and to prove that I'm not worthy of that love, it's just like a trick that the mind is calling forth a witness to prove its littleness and its frailty in the face of all this love that's coming close, calling on love, calling on the awareness of God's love, and that love gets closer and closer to awareness, and then the ego freaks because it knows it's doomed. Before it chases you to the tomb, it decides it's going to do some sickness, ploys and distractions too, and I think for most people they would say that sickness is a pretty strong witness, you know, even people who work with the Course, you know, sometimes get to a point where they feel a bit just saddened or some pretty intense emotions can come up when friends or loved ones seem to have perceived illnesses or if you seem to have issues going on around the body. But we want to make it pretty practical today at not only talking about some of the dynamics of what's going on in the mind, but start to get closer and closer to the idea that sickness is just a decision, it's a decision in mind, it's a wrong-minded decision, and so obviously it has to get exposed because, you know, as people say all the time, who in their right mind would choose to be sick? And no one in their right mind would choose to be sick, but when you have an unconscious mind where there's a lot of guilt stuff down there and buried, and you're afraid of the love that's underneath that guilt, afraid of God's love, believing that still that there could be some punishment or retribution or some price to pay for separation, then the mind is actually afraid of healing, and therefore sickness seems to hold a value to that mind that's afraid of healing. It's a way of proving unworthiness, it's a way of, you might say in a strange way, it's a way to mitigate punishment, like there's a feared punishment from God through the ego-belief system, and it's like the child who's going to get spanked and spanked in effect to the parent, oh, I'll punish myself so you don't have to punish me, or I'll do it to myself so you don't have to do it to any God, that's kind of in a strange and twisted way, that's what sickness is about. I'll do it to myself in a smaller scale than the big punishment that I unconsciously believe that I deserve. And again, we're not talking about conscious, consciously, because most people who have studied the course consciously say, no, I feel, I'm worthy of love, I want to be loved, I want to be shown love, but unconsciously it's this dark, buried kind of secret, the belief that you could separate from God and the belief that there will have to be some kind of punishment, because when you believe in the ego, the ego says, you know, don't think you're just going to get off scot-free for what you did, you will have to pay a price, and that's just generating more guilt, more shame, and more tricks, and these tricks often involve projecting symptoms to the body just to reinforce the belief in separation. That's all they're meant for. And what we want to do today is a combination of sharing some of our own experiences with the sicknesses that seem to have come up in our lives in a very practical way, and what we did in our mind when they did come up to face them and set them free and be free of them, and also to open it up, because we'll start off with this leg-aside-the-self concept, inviting people to share any kind of troubles, difficulties, things that you've dealt with in terms of bodies and body symptoms, health issues, and we'll use that as our in-road, very much like the movie we watched the other night, The Guitar. You know, that was a great movie for seeing that really there was an unworthiness there, and a sense of deep deprivation that was so buried that it seemed to play out as diagnosis of the terminal illness, cancer, and then radical life changes that occurred after that that seemed to be very intuitively guided. She just made them in such a rapid succession that she had a feeling of, she just took her mind completely off the focus of her throat, of the laryngitis, of the diagnosis, and got really focused on what she felt she was called to do in the brief time that she had left, and that all turned into be a process of healing, and so I think you could say that for everyone, that you can use this talk as an opportunity to go deeper into your mind towards true healing, which is really just laying aside the false self-concept. So that's the context of it. This could apply to addictions, a perceived weight problem, also accidents of any kind that impact the body. So shall I start with a little bit of my little journey here? A long time ago, probably in my late 20s, I received a meditation, and it was a visual, I am, and this was a causation, a marriage, I am, I believe, I think, I feel, I do, I have, and that it always flows that way, and never this way, that what I have never, ever ever causes what I feel or what I do. And I began to apply it with clients who had weight issues, for whatever reason Spirit guided me to assist in that department, just because I love to exercise and hike and dance and what not, and that led me to begin to assist people in fitness, and that led me into the issue of self-image, because I began to see that no matter how much people exercise, how much they dieted, it really didn't change this core feeling they had about themselves, and that that feeling would inevitably outpict you if they had some sort of temporary improvement in how they wanted their body to be. So that was my inroads into really getting that causation was strictly an internal affair, and very early on for me health did become my sort of leading edge of learning. I was, I had, I guess they called it chronic fatigue syndrome later, but before it was ever identified as that, in my mid-20s I began to just get extremely exhausted and lost a lot of weight, wasn't digesting well, and did everything conceivable as far as the do and the have part of that formula of trying to fix myself and heal myself with diet and, you know, living in California there's a vast array of every kind of alternative health therapy you can imagine, and I went to a lot of them. And in the process I just felt such disillusionment because nothing was permanently working, and I noticed that my entire emotional state had become depressed. I felt happiness sometimes but more sporadically, and the constant state was a heavy-heartedness. So I just began, after I'd received that causation lineage and was applying with my clients, I thought, hmm, I might apply it with myself, you know, that an idea occurred that I could actually practice what I was teaching. And I said, okay, what do I have? I have a body that appears to be sick, not functioning well. What do I do? I eat perfectly according to my concepts. I exercise. I do everything possible for it. What do I feel? I feel depressed, exhausted, sad, and that was the surface layer. And what do I think? I think I'm never going to get better. No matter what I do, nothing ever works. I think there's something wrong with my body. There's something wrong with me. God doesn't love me. Nothing's working. And then reaching back, I began to get in touch with these deep, deep unworthiness feelings that when I really was honest with myself, were the cause rather than the illness. In other words, the illness was an expression and a manifestation of that lack of self-worth. And then when I went to the I am level, what was I identifying with? I could feel I was identifying with something that was not whole, lacking, fundamentally lacking, incapable of getting ill, that it was fragile, that it was vulnerable to seemingly external forces. So in that beginning journey, I was just working on the mental level. And it wasn't my time quite yet to really fall into the emotions. But just working on the mental level, the symptoms did improve as I released some of these beliefs and the thoughts that were with them. Then later on, I found that there was a huge layer of anger that was very much the glue that was keeping the deeper beliefs in place. And I could actually, when I would drop into it, I could feel, you know, even though the term autoimmune, which basically means as far as how the medical establishment sees it, where the body is attacking itself, literally self-attack, and that this was a symptom of my self-attack. Because things like chronic fatigue and all the Bible, and all these different symptomologies, they consider an autoimmune issue. So I said, well, how literal could we get? How obvious? If this symptom is simply a symbol pointing to me of my internal attitude, how more obvious could you get than self-attack?