 a spontaneous addition of the Course in Miracles live, practicing the deep, deep, deep teachings of Jesus, basically from the Sermon on the Mount, Judge Not, let's keep you judged. So, Judge Not, those two words, wow, they can pay so much because that is the gateway to accepting the correction or accepting the Atonement and remembering God. So, yeah, I think another two words that I really like was be passers-by. That was, I think, from the Gospel of Thomas. But today, I thought I'd talk a little bit about the experience of starting to see that you cannot judge, not really that you should not judge, but that you cannot judge. You really aren't capable of judgment. Judgment is something that was invented by the ego as a way of bringing order into chaos. And that's where all the rules and regulations and mores of the world, the laws of the world come into play because they're all laws of judgment. And what Jesus is teaching us in the Course is he's basically teaching us that those who fail to forgive must judge because they must justify their failure to forgive. So, you can't really have consistent happiness and peace and joy if there's a state of judging anyone or anything. And I know some of you may have a question, well, how do you navigate time and space without judgments? Judgments seem to be necessary as far as moving forward or doing anything or accomplish anything. And basically, yeah, that self-concept of a doer or personality self is tied in to judgment. And the Holy Spirit's guidance and the guidance of Jesus is basically unwinding from that person, that personality, that mask, that mask of a world that was made to cover over the Christ's mind. So, I thought we'd take a little quick tour of some important ideas. Because, yeah, sure, the intuitive guidance is absolutely necessary. I think there's nothing more important. I know for myself, about 35 years ago, I started to come into contact with this intuitive voice. And then it became stronger and stronger and clearer and clearer as I followed it. And that voice, the voice of Jesus, the voice for God, the Holy Spirit, it just means everything. It just takes you to a life of living from the inside out, instead of trying to react and respond to the world, which is the human predicament. It's the human condition. So, in order to really see that it's impossible to judge and come into that state of just loving acceptance, accepting what is, let's start off with chapter 12, where Jesus says in chapter 12 in section one, the judgment of the Holy Spirit, understand that you do not respond to anything directly but to your interpretation of it. Your interpretation thus becomes the justification for the response. That is why analyzing the motives of others is hazardous to you. If you decide that someone is really trying to attack you or desert you or enslave you, you will respond as if he had actually done so, having made his error real to you. To interpret that error is to give it power and having done this, you will overlook truth. The analysis of ego motivation is very complicated, very obscuring, and never without your own ego involvement. The whole process represents a clear cut attempt to demonstrate your own ability to understand what you perceive. This is shown by the fact that you react to your interpretations as if they were correct. You may then control your reactions behaviorally, but not emotionally. This would obviously be a split or an attack on the integrity of your mind pitting one level within it against another. There is but one interpretation of motivation that makes any sense. And because it is the Holy Spirit's judgment, it requires no effort at all on your part. Every loving thought is true. Everything else is an appealing for healing and help. Appeal. Regardless of the form it takes. Can anyone be justified in responding with anger to a brother's plea for help? No response can be appropriate except the willingness to give it to him for this and only this is what he is asking for. Offer him anything else and you are assuming the right to attack his reality by interpreting it as you see fit. Perhaps the danger of this to your own mind is not yet fully apparent. If you believe an appeal for help is something else, you will react to something else. Your response will therefore be inappropriate to reality as it is, but not to your perception of it. There is nothing to prevent you from recognizing all calls for help is exactly what they are except your own imagined need to attack. It is only this that makes you willing to engage in endless battles with reality in which you deny the reality of the need for healing by making it unreal. You would not do this except for your unwillingness to accept reality as it is and which you therefore withhold from yourself. So here's the key line. It is surely good advice to tell you not to judge what you do not understand. No one with a personal investment is a reliable witness. For truth to him has become what he wants it to be. So that's the key. It is surely good advice to tell you not to judge what you do not understand. No one with a personal investment is a reliable witness. So this is why the personal perspective of the ego, the filter of the ego is the filter designed to try to understand something through fragmentation through judgment. And when you really go deep, you start to realize and hear from the intuitive voice, the spirit that it's actually judgment that obscures understanding. It's judgment that obliterates peace of mind from awareness. It's judgment that gives you false sense of achieving some kind of conceptual understanding that actually is not understanding at all. There's a part in the course where Jesus says that peace and understanding go together and cannot be found apart. So of course, the judgments are part of a fragmentation, a defense against the truth, a defense against reality, a defense against oneness and love. And that is why you have to really, really, really be shown the impossibility of the judgment. The only judgment you want to follow and live by is the guidance. In that sense, judgment is evaluative. But if you're told where to go, what to do, what to say, when to say it, you know, all those things are handled by the judgment of the Holy Spirit until the mind can reach that leaping off point of just not needing to judge anything, basically just the acceptance of everything exactly as it is. And that is reality. That's where we open up to our experience of the light. He goes on a little bit later to say, only appreciation is an appropriate response to your brother. Gratitude is due him for both his loving thoughts and his appeals for help. For both are capable of bringing love into your awareness if you perceive them truly. And all your sense of strain comes from attempts not to do just this. So if we move into chapter 15, where Jesus is talking a bit about the Holy Instant, the Holy Instant is just the present moment and being present, like Eckhart Tolle talks about a lot. And this is Jesus's words for the present moment, the Holy Instant. The Holy Instant is the Holy Spirit's most useful learning device for teaching you love's meaning. For its purpose is to suspend judgment entirely. Judgment always rests on the past for past experience is the basis on which you judge. Judgment becomes impossible without the past. For without it, you do not understand anything. You would make no attempt to judge because it would be quite apparent to you that you do not understand what anything means. You are afraid of this because you believe that without the ego all would be chaos. Yet I assure you that without the ego all would be love. So basically it's clinging to the past that blocks the present moment. It's holding on to the past that keeps the mind in a fragmented analytical way of perceiving. And the next paragraph talks a little bit about this. The past is the ego's chief learning device for it is in the past that you learn to define your own needs and acquired methods for meeting them on your own terms. We have said that to limit love to part of the sonship is to bring guilt into your relationships and thus make them unreal. If you seek to separate out certain aspects of the totality and look to them to meet your imagined needs you are attempting to use separation to save you. So this is another key in the sense that if you cling to the past and the past is the ego's chief learning device then you cling to the belief that you learn to define your own needs and acquire methods for meeting them on your own terms. That's the belief in lack, the belief in scarcity and the learning of skills and abilities to define your own needs and acquire methods for meeting them on your own terms. That's what the mask of personality and the world is about. Making up false association, false needs and then coming up with the methods that you believe are necessary to achieve those those needs. It just puts the mind on a hamster wheel of survival and Jesus is telling us we have to start to realize that the ego judgments are originating by our desire for them in the mind and we have to desire the peace of God, desire forgiveness and the release of false beliefs and concepts to actually experience consistent happiness and joy and peace of mind. Nowhere is this so apparent as in the perception of relationships and it doesn't matter whether we're talking about in interpersonal relationships in terms of couples or groups of people like spiritual communities or groups of people, cultural groups or broader experiences with larger groups. It's all a misperception when the perception is fragmented and the section in the Course that really deals with this in the most direct way, the one that I found so helpful over the years to go back to is Chapter 17, Giveness and the Holy Relationship and Section 5, the healed relationship, where he's taking talk about the Holy Instant and the present moment will say and then applying that to reinterpreting the whole perception of all relationships and that is what the Holy Spirit does. That's how we go into the healed relationship or into what the Course calls Holy Relationship. He starts out that section by saying the Holy Relationship is the expression of the Holy Instant in living in this world like everything about salvation the Holy Instant is a practical device witnessed to by its results. The Holy Instant never fails. The experience of it is always felt, yet without expression it is not remembered. The Holy Relationship is a constant reminder of the experience in which the relationship became what it is. As the unholy relationship is a continuing hymn of hate in praise of its maker, so the Holy Relationship is a happy song of praise to the Redeemer of relationships. So key line in there without expression it is not remembered. That's why living on purpose in letting the purpose transform your perceptions of everything in the human condition, jobs, family, relationships, community, country, letting it transform every aspect of fragmented perception into a holistic view and that takes you toward the light. The Holy Relationship a major step toward the perception of the real world is learned. It is the old unholy relationship transformed and seen anew. The Holy Relationship is a phenomenal teaching accomplishment. In all its aspects as it begins develops and becomes accomplished it represents the reversal of the unholy relationship. Be comforted in this the only difficult phase is in the beginning where here the goal of the relationship is abruptly shifted to the exact opposite of what it was. This is the first result of offering the relationship to the Holy Spirit to use for his purposes. These ideas of transforming specialness into holiness, of transforming darkness to light, of transforming fragmentation to holistic perception and the unified perception perspective of the Holy Spirit. These have enormous resistance from the ego and that's why oftentimes people will say I just want to stick with the status quo. I just want to go back to the good old days. There aren't any good old days. The past is a misperception of reality and the release of the past and the experience that the past is gone and it can touch me not. That is where the healing occurs. So we see a huge huge amount resistance. I had a friend Dorothy who used to cook was in the kitchen at the foundation for A Course in Miracles in Roscoe, New York and she said they had to buy like six or seven times as much food every time Ken Wovenick would do a workshop on these these different chapters chapter 15 to 24. The resistance to letting go of old ideas and old concepts about relationships is absolutely enormous because the ego made these false relationships and false associations to block the light of Christ, to block the truth and so basically in this section Jesus is saying you need to really hang in there and you need to hang in with the faith that your perception is being transformed. That's also the purpose of studying the Course. It's the purpose of spiritual communities. It's the purpose of all relationships. And so Jesus says here in paragraph 8, except with gladness what you do not understand and let it be explained to you as you perceive its purpose work in it to make it holy. You will find many opportunities to blame your brother for the failure of your relationship where it will seem at times to have no purpose. A sense of aimlessness will come to haunt you and to remind you of all the ways you once sought for satisfaction and thought you found it. Forget not now the misery you really found and do not breathe life into your failing ego for your relationship has been has not been disrupted. It has been saved. And I think I will wind down here with one more paragraph from from this beautiful section the healed relationship and this is paragraph 9. You are very new in the ways of salvation and think you have lost your way. Your way is lost but think not this is lost. In your newness remember that you and your brother have started again together and take his hand to walk together along a road far more familiar than you now believe. Is it not certain that you will remember a goal unchanged throughout eternity where you have chosen but the goal of God from which your true intent was never absent? So how beautiful how beautiful that that everything can be transformed. You can't really understand anything by looking at the world through fragmented perception and the desire to understand with the filter of fragmented perception is is insane. It's ludicrous. You can't really look back on anything without using the past to judge the motivations of who you believed you were and who you believe they were and then trying to have the ego tell you what's good and right and what's wrong and what should be different in form and it's the perspective in the mind the interpretation of the events as we read earlier that's the problem as long as you're misinterpreting anything or anyone you can't know reality and you don't really need to do anything to to accept reality you can accept reality exactly as it is and that's the key we're finding in here you know that every time there's fear every time there's doubt it's because the ego is still valued and Jesus is saying you do not any understand anything about relationships anything that you personally individually want from a relationship you know blocks you from knowing the reality of of spirit anything you want from another person means you won't really see them for who they really are because the spirit is just give give give give all to all and when you get into get get get it's not pretty the ego gets in there big time so thank you for joining me for this little snippet of the live really understanding that we cannot judge it's impossible to judge anything and when you come to that acceptance and that realization you will only follow guidance in terms of what to say and what to do because you want to experience joy and following the guidance of the Holy Spirit and Jesus is experiencing joy God bless you love you