 truly want, I mean, truly not ego wants, but the desire of your heart, you already have and are. So that fits in with our theme that this is not about accumulating more knowledge of the world, or oftentimes taking workshops and in services and retreats and so forth. The mentality is still okay, what can I get? Maybe I can get some more tools and have more abilities and so forth, but this is not really about going in the direction of more. It's actually that we have a beer commercial in the United States, which says less is more. It goes the other direction from more, more, more, more of whatever. Jesus has a little section in the course, in the back of the book, back of the text called Beyond All Idols. And in that section, Jesus says, he starts it off with a question. It's always great, you know, you're reading a book from Jesus Christ and he starts off his first sentence with a question and you're like, okay, that'll wake you up in the morning. He says, What is an idol? Do you think you know? And that's the start. And then he kind of rolls on, but an idol is for more of something. It does not matter more of what. So you see how all-encompassing that beautiful teaching is, even when you have this desire to be more spiritual, and that desire is projected off into the future. And the big fallacy is that the ego believes that, you know, it has to try to do something to keep its existence going in your mind. So it will even hijack terms like enlightenment and come up with concepts about future enlightenment and enlightened personality self. And that can seem like a pretty good ideal at the beginning until you start to realize that it's going to throw in the other version of an unenlightened view and keep comparing the two. And you always come out on the short end of the stick feeling like you're less than you could be or less than you should be, but you should learn not to shoot on yourself. You can learn not to shoot on yourself just to continue opening and opening and noticing when ego thoughts and private thoughts arise just beginning to learn to watch them and notice them without reacting to them, without taking them seriously. So instead of a smorgasbord of possible options to try to become an enlightened personality self, it's really helpful to start to realize that what you're really going to focus on in this lifetime is going to be mind training and mind watching. And that when the temptation is to just get lost in the doer and get lost in the personality self trying to become a better person or become more enlightened, you can start to realize that's just another trick of the ego. The ego made up the persona, the mask, and then one of its favorite tricks is to take the mask and then work at trying to improve the mask. And what we're going to talk about is learning to dissolve the mask or let the mask fall away and just be the authentic Christ self, the authentic spirit that you already are and always have been. So I would say one of the biggest traps and one of the most addictive patterns that you first have to take a look at is the idea of self-improvement. That's a very basic trend in human beings. It doesn't matter what culture, what country, there's like this deep ingrained idea in self-improvement. And we have, you go to the library, you have self-help sections. A lot of us have spent a lot of time looking in self-help. Actually the self that's being helped is the ego and the ego is actually beyond help and beyond hope. It's like going into the librarian or to the bookstore just saying to the lady the counter, I've got a really miserable self but I would like to get an improved model, trade up to a much more improved model so you have anything that can help this miserable self well it's actually a death wish, but do you have anything that will help brighten up this death wish or spruce it up a little bit, make it a little more presentable, even lovable. There's teachings that will say the ego is to be loved and at some point this question dawns into your mind how do I love a death wish? How do you go about loving a death wish? It's just that the death wish is pushed out of awareness it's in the unconscious mind so all of the work that we seem to do in the spiritual journey is just raising what is unconscious into awareness and then just seeing it for what it is, which is false. False in the end can't be good or bad, it can't be beautiful or ugly and it can't be intellectual or dumb and it can't be spiritually enlightened or un-enlightened. Those are all just opposites that get projected onto the small self into the ego and in the end forgiveness is quiet, it's still, it's tranquil and it quietly does nothing. Everything that you're aiming for in this life is just to learn how to gracefully do nothing. That's kind of summarizing it. That the self that you are just is. The self that you are is a state of beingness and beingness isn't a doer. A lot of times we have conferences and workshops and so forth that are mind, body, spirit, whether you go to conferences or stores and I know it's popular to try to find an integration between mind, body, spirit and it ain't going to happen. There is an integration of the mind that's possible and certainly perception can be integrated but the body is a concretized form of error or of sin or of false belief and it's an attempt to make the error real but in kind of like a concretized form and actually that's another topic that Gay and I were talking about was the body. The body is just really and the Holy Spirit's perception is neutral. It's not positive, it's not negative, it's just a symbol that can be used as a learning device and the mind is the where the learning takes place or we can say more correctly the unlearning so the body is more like an unlearning device helping you unlearn the ego and in that sense you don't put any more importance on it than it deserves. If it's just a symbol to the Holy Spirit and only the ego would try to make the body a hated symbol a symbol of limitation a symbol of lack a symbol of embarrassment or unworthiness or unwellness the ego will try to make it into something if it's negative or it's positive. Another thing that the ego likes to do is glorify the body. You might have seen the programs on television the wonder of the human body and exploring all the systems of the body and all the intricacies as a wonder of the world and this is glorifying the body still trying to make it more than neutral and nothing he's got sections in the back of the text too that talk about trying to glorify the body by dressing it up and trying to attract other bodies with it and basically he says in that same section that when you do this when you try to use the body in a way as an attraction device you are offering your brother a crown of thorns instead of the gift of lilies so the most basic thing if we look at some of the basics of human nature the idea of presenting a beautiful body to the world that is if that becomes a preoccupation if that becomes an obsession of the mind if it becomes something that remains as a priority then Jesus is just saying in his own terms you offer your brother a crown of thorns and none of us want to be offering thorns we want to be offering the gift of lilies so we can say that the body is just a communication device for the mind the body is an unlearning device for the mind to unlearn everything that it has seemed to learn to peel the onion to kind of get down to the core of innocence that the mind truly is and to do all of these concepts layers of concepts that have come in