 Is it a sacrifice to give up pain? You know, the belief in this world, the belief in bodies, the belief in perception, the twisted perception is death, literally. It's the belief in investment in death. And it's painful. It is painful to maintain belief in something that isn't true. And so the question then comes down to, is it a sacrifice to give up pain? Those who come to this world, so to speak, those who seek for idols, that seek for answers in this world are literally seeking for happiness and salvation where it cannot be found. And this is painful. So literally by giving up judgment, by giving up the ordering of thoughts and so on and so forth, this is the giving up of pain. Is it a sacrifice to give up pain? You know, to the deceived mind. Yes, only to the mind that doesn't recognize that it is pain. Yes, exactly. And the undoing is to recognize just what you said. Yes. That there's nothing here. And this goes immediately, runs right back into our discussion on pleasure and pain because they're like two sides of the coin. And you know, if you hold a song about love and marriage, you can't have one without the other. It applies to pleasure and pain. You cannot have one without the other. Many passages in the course about those who seek for pleasure cannot help but find pain as well. It's a disguise. I mean, the body's pleasure, you know, to the ego, this is good. It whispers to the mind, you know, that this is good. To itself it whispers this is death. They want passage in the course. The ego does not want the mind to see the trick of pursuing pleasure. Now, pleasure to the deceived mind is one of the greatest things going in the dream world. And this, if it's, this is a kingdom apart from the abstract spirit of God, this is perceived as being one of the best things going. I'll say. It's kind of like it's a cruel, wicked world that the deceived mind believes. And it's a doggy dog world and there's all this pain and sickness and suffering and everything. And at least, thank heavens, it would say we have pleasure. As a relief from all the others. The respite to help offset, you know, all of this, you know, misery and loneliness and despair. But what the ego does not let the mind see is that by investing in pleasure, obviously, pleasure is up the body and we're getting back into the senses and sensation and the pleasure reinforces the body as being real in the mind, in the awareness of the mind. And once again, you know, it comes back to those passages of you recognize the spirit or you perceive the flesh. Jesus clearly laying out that it's one or the other, that you can't have both. In the ultimate sense, there is no reconciliation between spirit and the time-space matter continuum. That the closest you come to the leaping off point is true perception or the happy dream, which is still a leaping off point. I mean, knowledge and the happy dream, you know, don't have a meeting point. And the mind has to be trained to come to true perception or come to the real world or the happy dream so that God can take the final step. This is the steps that God requires of his children, metaphorically speaking, or the Holy Spirit requires. So when we get to this pleasure-pain thing, again, the Holy Spirit overlooks pleasure as he overlooks pain. People can see the Holy Spirit, you know, forgiving or overlooking the painful aspects of the world. But in passages in the Course, we also see where he just as easily overlooks a tiny throb of pain or a little worldly pleasure is the way it's stated in the Course. So once again, we get to the fact the Holy Spirit does not look to affect and the world of sensations, the feelings in the body and so forth, whether it be pleasurable, painful, or anything in between, are not in that domain. The Holy Spirit does not see the body as the deceived mind sees it at all. So it comes back full circle to that thing about giving up the values of the world and as you just said that a mind will perceive it as a sacrifice to give up the values of the world and see that the values of the world are painful, regardless of how they seem to be experienced. And one must see that pleasure and pain are two sides of one coin to be able to clearly come to that recognition. In any single instant, the Course tells us the attraction of guilt would be experienced as painful. But within the projected world of time and space, it gets kind of spread out on time so that then the mind can believe it's a person that has painful experiences and pleasurable experiences. It's kind of spread out, you know, the body is remembered or anticipated. One can think back even on, boy, these were painful experiences. That really hurt. And boy, those were pleasurable experiences. Wow, ooh la la, I remember when. But those are all miscreations, misthoughts. The mind is blank. The mind isn't thinking at all. The mind is covering over the whole instant. Yes, we're getting down to the core of things now. We're not dancing around the periphery anymore. We're down to the core, to the basics of it. And there's joy. I mean, that's the thing with it is there is immense relief, immense joy that comes when the mind gets clear on this, when the mind no longer buys the tricks of the ego. It literally listens to the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit's lessons are joyful. When the mind is learning what it thinks perceives as a painful lesson, the perception of it being painful is because there is a decision being made in the mind for the ego. One does not choose the Holy Spirit as an advisor and experience pain. That's ludicrous. So, you know, in the sense of saying, oh, it's been painful and everything, you know, and pain is good even. No pain, no gain. Pain, no gain and all these different things. You know, the deeper one goes, one can see how absurd that this is. This is not to say that pain can't act as a contrast, that the Holy Spirit does teach us through contrast. But it's the contrast of peace and joy and love, the experience of the feeling of connectedness with this painful experience, the contrast between the two that really, in a sense, propels the mind to want to move toward the joy and to make choices with the Holy Spirit to continue to feel that joy. We have to have something to rely on daily when all these things come up. And if we have these false self-concepts and we're working through all these lessons and forgiveness, we need something that we can feel close to. And the Course calls that something, the Holy Spirit. And it goes by many names and many traditions, the inner voice and intuition and the small still voice and just many, many names. And so what we did was we put together a section here on quotes about the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of joy. He is the call to return with which God blessed the minds of his separated sons. The Holy Spirit is the call to awaken and be glad. How can you wake children in a more kindly way than by a gentle voice that will not frighten them, but will merely remind them that the night is over and the light has come. The Holy Spirit sees the world as a teaching device for bringing you home. The Holy Spirit's teaching takes only one direction and has only one goal. His direction is freedom and his goal is God. Any direction that would lead you where the Holy Spirit leads you not goes nowhere. The opposite of joy is depression. When you're learning promotes depression instead of joy, you cannot be listening to God's joyous teacher and learning his lessons. The Holy Spirit is your guide in choosing. He is in the part of your mind that always speaks for the right choice because he speaks for God. The Holy Spirit's voice is as loud as your willingness to listen. It cannot be louder without violating your freedom of choice which the Holy Spirit seeks to restore, never to undermine. The Holy Spirit will direct you only so as to avoid pain. Surely no one would object to this goal if he recognized it. The problem is not whether what the Holy Spirit says is true but whether you want to listen to what he says. The voice of the Holy Spirit does not command because it is incapable of arrogance. It does not demand because it does not seek control. It does not overcome because it does not attack. It merely reminds. It is only because you think that you can run some little part or deal with certain aspects of your life alone that the guidance of the Holy Spirit is limited. Do you really believe you can plan for your safety and joy better than he can? You need merely cast your cares upon him because he caret for you. Be comforted and feel the Holy Spirit watching over you in love and perfect confidence in what he sees. Complexity is not of God. How could it be when all he knows is one? He knows of one creation, one reality, one truth, and but one Son. Nothing conflicts with oneness. How then could there be complexity in him? What is there to decide? For it is conflict that makes choice possible. The truth is simple. It is one without an opposite. And how could strife enter in its simple presence and bring complexity where oneness is? The truth makes no decisions for there is nothing to decide between. And only if there were could choosing be a necessary step in the advance toward oneness. What is everything leaves room for nothing else? Yet is this magnitude beyond the scope of this curriculum? Nor is it necessary we dwell on anything that cannot be immediately grasped. Okay, this would be a definite statement, as we were speaking on on the other side of the tape, of a statement that goes beyond all metaphors, that hints at a state that is beyond all metaphors, state of knowledge. And the Course of Miracles is basically a course that deals in the realm of the dream and deals in decision, making a decision for the Holy Spirit, making a decision for the right mind, and learning to look closely and distinguish between the alternatives for choice, presuming that there is a choice in the split mind. And although this is metaphorical, the mind that believes that it is separated from its creator must make choices. And the Course is simply a course to help one make a better choice where a mistaken choice was made before.