 You know, it started to dawn on me that I actually did have a lot of preferences in terms of the way I wished it would go and some anger and resentment at those people that I feel were blocking that, that weren't joining in that, that were actively resisting that, or that even were apathetic and didn't care. I was a bit resentful of all of these types of people. The more I followed the course and the teachings, I went into deeper and deeper states of mind, of awareness, and I found that instead of anything being ripped away, it was more like the Holy Spirit was using the ego preferences that I still was holding on to in a way of a loosening pattern, almost like they were all wound very tight, like winding up one of those tops that's just tightly wound in a tight spring, and the Spirit was not saying to me, well, you're wrong because you've got these preferences. The Spirit was saying, well, give them over to me and fulfill my purpose and I will use even the ego preferences in a way that will be like little presents or little symbols of thank you. So, for example, if I'd be traveling around to different countries and I had a preference for ice cream, I would be in South America and I'd be down there or the Canary Islands and something and they'd say, people just love you so much, they want to feed you, they want to buy you gifts or they want to have you over to their house and meet the whole family and take pictures and all this and that. They would say things like halalos in Spanish is ice cream. Like halalos? Halalos? Yes, and then, oh my, it would just come from every direction. Halalos, halalos, Spanish likes halalos. But I wasn't hard on myself, I would be like, okay, how sweet. That's very nice, sweet in a couple of different ways. How sweet emotionally but also was tasty. And then I would travel with someone who really liked water and we would just seem to get invitations to islands, to coastal regions, to the swimming pools and there was water everywhere. I mean, it wasn't anything to push away, it was just like a gentle symbol of the Spirit saying thank you for sharing these beautiful ideas. Thank you for smiling and laughing and hugging and dancing and sharing the joy of the Kingdom and even in the Bible it said all things else would be added unto you when you seek first the Kingdom of Heaven. So to me that's a real key point with the preferences is the sense that I can say honestly that what happened was they just started to fade and fade in my awareness whereas before they were prominent they started to get like further and further on the outskirts so that I would barely think of them or only occasionally come in. And I think the woman who wrote to me this morning was saying that her life felt a little bit flat. She was kind of going through one of those phases where she said some of the things that were so important to me before I seemed to be disinterested in and yet there was still a bit of a judgment like I don't like this feeling. It feels very different from the me that I was accustomed to and familiar with. So yeah, I think I'm glad you raised that up because that's how I go through my life. I was trained a bit in this at the very beginning like in 1991 when I was impelled to start traveling. I did get a few instructions just like in the course in the workbook we really had two instructions, you know, not doing more than one lesson a day and trying not to make any exceptions, you know, wherever possible. And one of the instructions that I received from Jesus at the beginning of my travels was He said, eat whatever is served. And that turned out to be a, I guess you could say, a mechanism for flushing up a lot of preferences. Sleeping preferences, food preferences, climate preferences. Just in terms of people that I would like to hang around, you know, friend preferences. I was on the road and I was on the move day after day and those preferences got flushed up right in my face like in my nose on a daily basis. And I could either hang in and cling to those preferences and feel miserable, just absolutely miserable or I could start to loosen the grip a bit and just say, show me. I do not know how this is going to go. I would get to sleep on certain kind of mattress, you know, not really firm. So it is the spirit that had me sleeping on the floor or, you know, I would get those kind of things that would flush those up into awareness. All the way across the board, even to sexual preferences, I remember one time, this wasn't so much sexual preferences, but it was, I went down to Columbia and I had been down to Columbia a number of times to teach and people were always gracious because of standing ovation at the airport twice when I landed there and I thought it was some famous ex-Beato or something, McCartney or something around it. So I was used to standing ovations and actually just one time I went down there and two people picked me up that I had met the previous year and they just said, oh, we've made arrangements for where you'll stay and who you'll be staying with. And they had many gatherings playing for me, you know, full-scheduled days of gatherings. And then it took me to this house, it took me upstairs to this room. It was a king-size bed and I was up there, unpacked my suitcase, got set, went off to my first day of gatherings. I came home the next day and for that night I went upstairs and I was up there getting ready to go to sleep and then this beautiful Colombian woman walked in and she said, are you enjoying your stay? And I said, yes, very much. And she said, thank you, this is my house and these friends had put me up at their friend's house, not telling me. So she said, so I'm going to be staying here in the room and she just got into bed, talked about all of her, the new boyfriend she'd met, just spilled the beans, just talked and talked and talked and talked. She said, am I boring you? She just kind of went on and talked to this and she just smiled, she looked at me and she says, I don't bite. Okay, that's good. Then the next day I remember getting up, going off to do more gatherings and everything, and I came home and she wasn't there, but her cat was there, so then I had a cat as a companion. Then I went the next day, was gone the whole day, came home and I was just coming into her living room and I could see that this boyfriend that she had and she was describing it looked a little bit like Yanni, the piano player, Bruce with the long hair, there he was and I thought, oh boy, this is getting more interesting. By the minute, it's like 10, 30 at night, I've been doing gatherings all day and she said, my boyfriend wants to talk to you about some things that we're working through in this and that, so I'll spend another half an hour there. In fact, she said, my boyfriend and I are going to sleep up in the bed tonight and he said, okay, okay. She said, so I'm going to find a place for you and she found a closet for me to sleep in that night. She put a mattress in a closet, but this is what I mean by, you know, when you're there really showing up to just share and extend, of course, as you're going through the mind training those preferences are going to rise into awareness. That's actually what the mind training is for because this is an unconscious belief system and because it's unconscious, we aren't even consciously aware of what some of these beliefs are. For example, we may have a diet that we've eaten ever since we were little kids and we don't really realize that that diet is part of a belief system until we take a trip or until someone from another country comes to visit or something and suddenly, like they say in quantum physics, there's something that bumps up against our little bubble and we go, hey, what's this?