 In the course, the lesson I am not alone in experiencing the effects of my thoughts is that, does that mean that in the world, the earthquake, the radiation, is that all part of my thoughts? Is ties into another of the two or two self-events? Thought manifests as form on some level, of course. Could you speak about that? Yeah. The lesson is, my self is ruler of the universe. Interesting lesson. It's talking about the capital self. So, the self that God created is the ruler of the universe. In other words, it has, like Jesus said, be of good cheer. I have overcome the world. I have dominion over the world. It literally has dominion over the whole cosmos. The self that God created is the ruler of the universe. It's really its pure spirit, so it's beyond the cosmos, the universe. But even in this world, everything that comes into experience, that is experienced in part of this world, is based on desire. So, everything that seems to happen is happening because it's desired. And then, what does not occur is what is not wanted to occur. So, in answer to your question, it's totally all-encompassing. There's nothing random about anything. And it's all based on desire. And things that seem to occur are there, are occurring by desire. There's no involved decision. And the things that do not occur are not occurring because they are not wanted or not desired. So, in the end, that's why it takes so much mind training. So, we could start off with the real basic law of the universe, which is as you so socially reap. Basically, the giving and receiving are the same. And so, this world was made as a reflection of separation, of the belief in separation. So, it's a fragmented world. It's a fragmented perception. And we can look into that fragmented perception. We could seem to pull out aspects of it like tsunamis and earthquakes and, you know, nuclear radiation meltdowns and so forth that are kind of in the news right now. We can pull aspects of it out. There seem to be problems within the perception. But the problem is, it's the fragmented perception. It's just, it's a world of fragmentation, a whole cosmos of fragmentation. And you might have seen the movie Inception, you know, where it's like there's layers and layers and layers of dreams. In fact, the mind has gotten so much into the fragmentation that now the fragmentation seems like reality. And that the mind is simply sleeping and dreaming has completely been forgotten. You know, now the fragments have taken on life. You know, like Pinocchio, the puppet, you know, becomes a real boy. Well, these puppets that are just dream figures, really, and framers, they've now taken on a reality, and it's quite terrifying from that realm. And so, even with all those different realms, and even though that's just been forgotten, it's still just the projection of thoughts that Jesus says in his workbook, my thoughts are images I have made. And basically the projected world is just the projection of these thoughts. Now, the goal is to wake up from the dream. And you can't wake up from a dream that you're not even aware that you're dreaming. You know, it's impossible to wake up from the dream if it's taken on a reality. You can't wake up from something that you think is real. So it takes a lot of mind training to go back, back, back into the mind. And the more you do, what you start to realize is that these unreal thoughts are actually all the same. They seem to be different. They seem to take different forms, but actually they're all the same. They're all illusions. And when you get back far enough, then that's where you shift from a fragmented perception to a unified perception. Instead of seeing the parts, you see the whole. That's what forgiveness is about. It's just getting far enough back. So, from healed perception, you know, these things that seem to be separate events that appear at different places on earth and different times and so on and so forth, they just become like unified. They become simultaneous instead of spread out over a timeline. And in that sense, the main thing that occurs when that just occurs to unified perception is you realize that there really is no inner and outer. That the projected world is really not outside of consciousness or outside of mind. That mind is all-encompassing and as soon as you bring the perception back to the perceiver, and you can see there's no split there, there's no split between the perceiver and the perceived, between the observer and the observed, that unification of consciousness is what is healing. That's what healing is. So in that sense, you could say that thoughts are all brought back to the thinker and you start to realize there is no role apart from what you think, which is what he's teaching in Lesson 132. And that's where the peace comes in, because the only conflict was thinking that there was something that had left the mind of the thinker that was kind of out there. Like a runaway freight train, it just got worse and worse and worse debt. Like they talk about the national debt, just trillions upon trillions. Fragmentation, like the mirror that cracked and cracked again and cracked again and cracked again. It's like the fragmentation just seemed to get worse and worse and worse and worse, and yet the only problem was that it was perceived to be external. It had to be brought back to the mind of the thinker before it can be seen just as nothing. And that's really what the whole mind training of A Course in Miracles is about. The whole workbook is starting to train the mind to see that the thoughts that you think you think and the images that you think you perceive are actually identical. That you don't have the little swirl of thoughts going on in your mind and in a giant projected world that's outside, it's actually the same. And once you bring those together, that's where the peace comes in. It's like everything is stabilized in that. A hurricane, a tsunami, a meltdown, an earthquake, those... As long as those are perceived to be separate events and occurrences that are outside, then they seem to be a threat to what? To the mind that's identified with the body. That's where the threat's coming in. It's the body identification. What can a tsunami do to spirits? Whoosh! What's that? What can an earthquake do to spirits? It would make no... it would be no threat at all to the spirit but it's to the sleeping mind that has forgotten the spirit, that's identified with the body. That's where the terror is coming in because these events seem to be as like external events that could bring harm to the body. That's where the problem comes in. Processing the Holy Spirit. Yeah, I think when we talk about faith or trust, it's not so much that trust or faith is on a scale of more or less. A lot of times people say I need to trust more or I need to have more faith. It's that faith and trust is like where is it invested? So the discernment, the deeper you go into spirituality, you start to discern the difference between the spirit and the ego. And you start to realize, oh my gosh, I've invested the power of my mind in a crazy belief system. And because of that, I'm seeing a crazy world that's reflecting that belief system back to me. And I need to pull my investments away from the ego. And then I need to trust in the spirit. In my life, it took the form of all those years of education, kindergarten and grade school and junior high school and then ten years of university on top of that. And then I started realizing, well, what am I trusting in? I'm trusting in the laws of economics. I'm trusting in the laws of medicine. I'm trusting in the laws of time and space and the environment and everything. Well, of course that's all I've known. I'm trusting in everything that I've learned about this world. So I've invested heavily in the learning of the world. Then the spirit is like, okay, now let's reverse. How about being a miracle worker? A miracle worker. You're going to talk to my mom and dad. I don't think they have that in their expectations for my life. It's like you actually start to open your mind up to have miracles performed through your consciousness, through your awareness. And it's almost like as you do that, it washes your mind clean, free of the darkness, the judgments. I certainly didn't grow up thinking as to be a miracle worker. I didn't study for that. But then, eventually when I got into the course in 1986, I started to realize pretty quickly, oh, this is a curriculum in training a miracle worker. And I better own up to this, that's what my life's going to be about. And then after a while I was like, okay, all right. You don't have to speak it. Somebody comes up and says, what do you do for a living? You don't have to say, I'm a miracle worker. You don't have to use some discernment. But essentially you're going through all this training and you start to have these miraculous experiences in your life that are just unbelievable from the standards of what the world would say is possible. And it just becomes more and more natural. And the peace becomes more and more natural. And so that's just the way it went in my life. Now I'm basically clueless about the world. You know, when people come and start to ask me, I mean, after being in urban planning and engineering and learning all about how things work in the world and how everything relates to everything and learning in an over-learning is for 10 years in university. I had to basically, I learned all of it. So now when people ask me like a really technical question, I can honestly tell them, I don't know. I really don't know. I'm pretty comfortable with that too. Even if they say, are you dumb? Are you an imbecile? No, I don't identify with that either. I just don't know. And it's more and more when your mind starts to open up, you start to realize that you retain less and less of the learning of the world. And you do get more clueless, but you're inspired. You're clueless but inspired, you know, and that's the key to happiness. I think it's maintaining that, both of those things together. But that's part of how we're being trained as miracle workers, you know, to really trust in the spirit and to not react and respond to the images of the world as if they were a threat, to really have dominium over the images. And it works. That's the best part.