 So, how this plays out, I remember years ago, I would go around and facilitate the course of miracles groups in Cincinnati. And one time there was this little hole in the wall kind of store called Whatever Works Wellness Center, and I would walk by there and I'd go, oh cool, Whatever Works Wellness Center. So I got to meet the owners, Connie and Vince, and they would have little baskets for people to give to people who were having health challenges or sickness, and they'd have flowers, and they'd have candy, and they'd have typical things that you might take to somebody to cheer them up if they were sick, and they'd have books, metaphysical books stuck in these baskets. One of them was a Bernie Siegel, a medical doctor, and some of his books, he and his wife put together, and they asked me to facilitate a course of miracles group at their center. So I did that, and I would go in and do that, and then after maybe a couple months or so, I went home and the spirit said, now there's going to be some mail waiting for you in your mailbox, and this is going to be a very important lesson. So I went and got the mail, and sure enough there was two letters, and I sat down and the spirit had me open the first one, and it was somebody who was a very tiny little course group by hand, but they had written this glowing, glowing letter of, oh we've never seen anyone so loving and kind and clear as you, and da-da-da-da-da-da, so I had to go through the whole letter, it was just praises, praises, praises, and compliments, compliments, compliments, you know, just one side, the other side, then I opened up the other letter, and it was from someone in the same group at the same center, whatever works for them at the center, and it was like, who do you think you are? You are the most arrogant self-centered, and da-da-da-da-da, and I just went through the whole thing, and it was just loaded with criticisms, and then the spirit said, now. I went to work with you so that you have the same experience with both letters, because one seemed to be extremely positive, one seemed to be extremely negative, and the spirit was saying, it's all thoughts, and you have to be able to forgive or release the compliments just as easily as forgiving and releasing criticisms. So about a couple of years later I went to Indiana across the border from Ohio, and I was at a Course in Miracles conference, at a beautiful retreat center called Las Serena, and I was just there, and they had a couple different speakers, but they had, John Mundy had come flowing in from Roe to New York to speak there, and with his partner at the time, Diane Burke, it goes back quite a few years when they used to have a magazine called On Course, and did a lot of traveling together. So I went there, and during the retreat, John spoke to me, and he said, I really feel you have a deep grasp of Course in Miracles, and I'd like you to speak for maybe ten minutes to the group. And so I did, and what came through in those ten minutes was quite surprising to a lot of people, although I was just willing to have whatever come through, but basically I spoke for ten minutes on forgiving the good, and at the end of it, John came to me later, and he just said, that was very profound, and I really would like to talk to you more about this. Then he flew back to New York City, where he had Interfaith Fellowship, and a little, you know, he and Diane, they'd been trained by a rabbi in this interfaith, and they had pretty much a course community there in New York City, and John called me up on the phone, and he said, actually I would like to do a sermon on forgiving the good, and I'm a little apprehensive about this because I don't know exactly how this will be received, but if you could just give me some quotations from the course that I can use in my sermon, I'm going to put together this forgiving the good sermon. So I said fine, so I gave him some quotations of where to go in the book to find the forgiving the good teachings. I gave him the goods on forgiving the good. So he said that I awaited a couple more weeks, and he calls me, and he had his sermon, he put it in the bulletin, you know, the whole thing, forgiving the good, and he had all the quotes and everything, and he said, well, how did it go? He said, it was the worst reaction I've ever seen. He said, nobody liked it. Probably, you know, lost a couple of the congregation over the whole thing, and I said it was just not popular. And years ago in the 1990s, I used to joke with the students that I had back in the 1990s, I would give them titles of workshops to do that I said, if you really want to do a Course in Miracles workshop that will be very, very poorly attended, then I would say, here's your title, Healing the Pleasure, you know, Healing the Pleasure, and they would be like, oh, this is a version of forgiving the good, because when you really get into the depth of the teaching about the positive and the negative, you do start to realize from the teachings that pleasure and pain are both part of the ego's defenses against the joy of heaven, or the peace of God, that that's one of the reasons why the spiritual journey can seem to take so long is because the ego has invented its own positive, and that positive is a defense against discovering the truth of who you are. In fact, I said to people, if the world was just completely painful experiences for you, if you just, if everything you did was like being in an electric chair, everything, you did a piece of bacon, had a strong ray of sun, if you were like they used to, you know, in psychology shock the rats, you know, zap them and zap them and zap them until they just kind of were despondent, and like, what's the point? I get a good zap out of everything I try to do, I go to get some good zap, I try to go out for some exercise, I get a zap, if you got zap for everything, zap for the positive, zap for the negative, zap for the pleasure, zap for the pain, at some point you would go, okay, enough, I've had enough of this world, I want to know my true reality, but the sneaky part is the ego invents the pleasure to keep you trapped in the duality of the positive and the negative, the pleasure and the pain. So it's the thing where you go deeper into the teachings, you start to realize that Jesus' section on attraction to guilt, which he's got in his text, if you start to dig into that section, you start to realize that he says in these sections in the Course he says sin shifts from pleasure to pain and back and forth, it just shifts form, it morphs to use a kind of a power rangers, a more modern terminology that the kids can relate to, sin morphs basically back between pleasure and pain to keep the mind trapped and stuck in the duality, and the pleasure seems attractive and the pain seems very unattractive, so you might say that if you would go through philosophy, there's actually a branch of philosophy called hedonism, and some of you have heard of hedonism, it's basically maximized the pleasure and minimized the pain, that's what hedonism is about. It doesn't get you to bliss, in fact it just keeps you on the wheel, the so-called karmic wheel that they talk about in the East. So this really is a key point, this idea of the positive, that just to go for positive thinking without understanding a metaphysical context and without understanding the tricks that the ego has going on in the mind, then it doesn't really bring you release. The ego has pushed many beliefs out of awareness, we could say, into the subconscious mind, and it doesn't want these beliefs ever raised to awareness because if they ever get raised to awareness, the ego's out of business. It wants to perpetuate its illusory existence, it doesn't want to be seen as a puff of nothingness and laughed at, and have you release your mind and awaken to the reality of the kingdom of heaven once it's a stay stuck and trapped. So the belief that the pleasure and pain are different, that one is attractive and one is an aversion, is a belief that the ego pushes down. And Jesus comes along and he's got one sentence in the text that says, it is impossible to seek for pleasure without finding pain. You see his one sentence raises that up into awareness that says, let's make the connection here. And as I was saying before, if the world has nothing but painful experiences for you, you could drop it faster than dropping a hot potato. You know, it would be like, ah, no. But because of this unconscious belief, it's not seen for what it is and therefore the pleasure will take many, many different forms as many, many side roads. And people will say, well, it felt pretty good. You know, it can be, it can be any form of that. It can be...