 Go within your mind. That's where meditation comes in, you know. Go within your mind, sink down beneath these clouds of darkness of the egos. You can just kind of meditate, sink past them and go down beneath them. Because the Kingdom of Heaven is literally within your own mind. Jesus, the Kingdom of Heaven is within. And the Course is also a path, whereas if you have trouble meditating, relationships really speed things up. Because all of these unconscious beliefs that you've got in your mind. We were talking about a dinner where, you know, you're so convinced. My mom will raise me this way and I know that this is the way that is right and best and good. And then you get married and your spouse says, well, my mom and dad is raising me this way. And you may think that this is it, but this is it. And then all of a sudden you see that you seem to have a conflict of interest. All the Course is saying is, it's like two egos duking it out, you know. But the Course is saying, when you let aside your ego and you listen to the Holy Spirit, then you'll have harm. Because you'll be listening to the same voice. What I'm hearing is talking about cause and effect, really listing these effects, these things that happen and how we react to the effect. If I hear you correctly, we live like working on the side of cause. Always being part of the cause, not the effect. If you're the effect, the reaction to the effect, you're on the negative side. On the positive side, if you're constantly being the cause. Not a God, you're not a God, but you're the cause. The miracle. In other words, the Course says that you're dreaming a dream, a fragmentation. In other words, God did not make this dream a fragmentation. It's a projection from your mind. But the first thing you have to do is you have to return, turn around cause and effect. You believe you're the victim of this world that you've made up. And as long as you continue to believe that you're this innocent victim with no power, then you're stuck. So first he says, turn cause and effect around, that's what you're saying. And then quickly give cause over to the Holy Spirit. Because the Holy Spirit knows that there is no real cause for this world, because the ego isn't real. God didn't create the ego. So what you have to do, instead of a direct approach to love, or picking up a book that you're going to learn about, exposing the ego, and every time you're tempted to blame, to blame your spouse, to blame your job, to blame the IRS, or to blame something, the dog or something, you can choose a miracle. And all the miracle does is remind you. Remember, cause and effect. And quickly then, the miracle also reminds you that since this thing doesn't really have the power to take your piece away, then the thing that seemed to cause it must not be real either. So that the more that we transfer this and take this and practice it in our daily lives, we get better and better and better at realizing that there's nothing in this world that can take our piece away. Until finally he generalizes it. First we start off with certain things, because we're afraid to do this and try to practice this all the time. But what we do is we practice little by little, and the more we start to generalize it, the more we become convinced that there's nothing in this world that can take away our piece. We then, instead of being this little bitty dream figure, this little body that's subject to all these forces in the world, we see ourselves as the dreamer of the dream. Just like at night time, you know, when you're sleeping at night and you go to bed and you seem to have all these things that happen at night and all these dreams, and then you wake up and you go, phew! I'm glad I was just a dream. The course is saying that don't come at a time when you hear only the voice for God, the Holy Spirit, and you go, phew! That was just a dream. And you wake up, in a sense, to the Kingdom of Heaven. To me, this really makes a lot of sense because, you know, the more, instead of just kind of reading and talking about it, the more you actually go and apply it, the more joyful your life gets, you know what I mean? You can actually sense real shifts in this place in your life. And it's like it's all the proofs in the budding that it speaks, you know, the more you start feeling peaceful, that the more, you know, you're moving on. Then, of course, also the course is kind of saying that there is no compromise between everything and nothing. That if you, like, transcend the ego 99.99%, it still hurts. Because the course is saying, basically, as long as you have even a scrap of fear in your mind, then the ego still has like a toe in the door. And that's why Jesus, it was such a... That's why he's literally our ratio, because when he completely, 100% transcended the ego, that's where he became a model for us. And that he's not tempted anymore by the ego. He knows it's false. When you meditate, how do you communicate? Or who do you communicate with? Or what do you communicate with? How do you communicate? Or what do you see? I don't know how to meditate. How do you meditate? I see meditation as really just trying to be very receptive. In other words, there's a lot of chatter when you first start out. The ego does not like this idea at all. Because the ego knows that if you get real still, you're going to start hearing the voice of the Holy Spirit and Jesus, or whoever, however you want to call it, intuition or whatever. And the ego is very threatened by that. So there's this shrieking in this world about, you know, sometimes there's yakity, yak yak yak, chatter that goes on. Oh, I've got to take care of this. I've got to remember to go to the bank, and I've got to remember to pick up the kids. You know how the mind just wants to race in there. It just does not, at the beginning, it's not used to this feeling. But as you just use the lessons of the workbook, Jesus has put in the workbook, guided meditation. It's like a bold part of the book. He's even got that covered. Where he starts out real gradual, and in the early lessons he doesn't hardly put any structure, you know, because he knows that, you know, it takes willingness just to be able to really put your life to this core. It's much less to expect miracles and wonders right off the bat. So he starts off real gradual, and then little by little, you know, he introduces some structures. And the only reason he introduces structures is because he knows the mind is very untrained, and it needs a certain amount of structure. But he quickly, as you go along the lessons later on, he lets that go more and more because he doesn't want you to get into rituals. You know, I'll read my course every day at this time. I'll do it so many hours a day and this and that. He doesn't want, he goes and tries to get in there anyway he can, you know, to make a ritual out of it. You know, like there's a holy communion, you know, stuff like that. So it's all in the book in the sense that he'll say something like, try to settle down now. Just quietly. Try to watch yourself as dispassionately as possible as they come and go. If it helps you, think of them as like an oddly assorted parade going by. He's giving you all kinds of little analyses and metaphors so he knows that you're not new, you're new to this meditation business and he knows that you need some structure and guidance. So literally, if I look at this, this really, there are parts in the lessons that compare to like then mind training exercises where literally it's trying to be as dispassionately and watch yourself go by. So that's what makes it so neat is that he's got, he knows that's what's going to happen and he's prepared, you know. He's got, it's almost like a master psychologist designed these 365 lessons because, you know, they are really, really well suited to an untrained mind. And initially when there's so much chatter, it's kind of like, well, just watch those thoughts. You know, don't judge them. You know, just watch them. Let them keep going by. Just watch them go by. You know, and then later in the workbook, it's like think beneath the thoughts. But you don't start out thinking. You know, there's just too much going on. There's just too much chatter there. It's only later through the whole training program that you're going to get the kind of thinking beneath those thoughts and that's when your mind does start to come to some stillness and real receptivity. Lots of people like to train. You know, they talk about training thoughts. They keep going through like this. And basically, you know, you're sitting there, you're just real detached and you're watching some of these things go by. And before you know it, you're on the training. One train leads to the next, you know, that experience of like, it starts along one of the lines of thinking. And then before you know it, it's like, then you wait, but wait a minute here. And then you hop off the train. Then you hop back on invariably. Then you hop off without judging. Then you hop on. And it's kind of like, that's what this happens with meditation is. At the beginning, you know, you're going to hop on some of those trains. And some of those trains are even, it's going to even be thoughts like, I'll never get this. I'm not making any progress. I don't know how to do this. I don't know how to do this. Those are ego thoughts. You know, ego, those are trains. And then you hop off and you go, okay. You know, another way you can do it is with your thoughts. One way we heard Christian science one time was when you have thoughts that are going through your mind and you're not sure whether they're ego or Holy Spirit thoughts, which can be confusing sometimes. Just put, say it's the Lord at the tail end of the thought. Yes. Say what? Just put, say it's the Lord at the tail end of the thought. And if it sounds ludicrous, you know, like, you know, I can't believe that person did that at the tail end of the thought. You can imagine Jesus complaining about something. You know, he's just thinking of ego. Let that one go. But, you know, there's little techniques or whatever that you can kind of come into and to start to identify and sort out in your own mind, you can stop this. In this sequence of trunking, when I'm trunking in meditation, querying that, that's very clear in some places that your thoughts don't mean anything. And it recognizes what they are in the film though. That has to be all for me. That would actually weigh down your interest. I know what you're talking about, but I can't get it into any part of it. Well, we could talk just a little bit briefly about the workbook in the sense that the lessons rotate back and forth from what you think you see out there in the world to what you're thinking in your mind. Because to the untamed mind, what's out in the world seems a lot different than what's in my mind. In other words, behavior is like this thing is going to a party and you really start judging somebody and it's like then you have a thought, I'm glad they don't know what I'm thinking about it or something like that. Because the mind believes it's private. It doesn't believe minds are connected. So what Jesus says is he goes about the first lesson is talking about the perceptual world. Nothing I see means anything. Which is quite a great one to start off with. But he starts off with nothing I see means anything. Then the second lesson continues with I have given everything I see all the meaning that it has for me. This is that you were talking about perception about how everybody believes the meaning in what they see. And the best example of that is that a group of 5 or 10 people go to a movie and then you sit around and talk about the movie after where you get 5, 10 different views about what do you mean? She was a victim or whatever. I thought she was doing great. I thought she was powerful. She was trying to do that. You can hear all these different interpretations. The second lesson brings it back to I have given everything I see all the meaning that it has for me. The meaning is coming from my mind. It's not that the events are giving meaning for telling me how things are happening. But then I think what Pat is talking about is lesson 4 literally he says these thoughts do not mean anything.