 Okay, well the Instruments of Peace was developed because people often times, is there some kind of a concise tool that can help me when I'm starting to feel some kind of upset? And I make a prayer, but it feels like I got a mishmash of ego thoughts just swirling around in my mind like a dark cloud and I need to have some steps to be guided through. Realizing that of course the more you do the steps, the more you kind of are almost like rewiring your mind and reconnecting that it should get easier and easier to just zip back into your right mind as you open to this new way of thinking and the new way of perceiving. But this Instrument of Peace is a way of working through things. Also I shared some very, very radical ideas during this week. I had a group of students that were very devoted to awakening and everything and years ago back in the 1990s and so there was another version that broke out of the Instrument of Peace. This one says at the top, working through upsets and healing your mind. The second version of Instrument of Peace was called Healing the Pleasure, working through pleasures and healing your mind. Releasing pleasures and the students said, oh this is great. I said yeah, if you ever want to do a workshop that's poorly attended, just do one on the second one. It was quite serious and I said if you really want to go fast you need to work with the other one too. But this is a little more introductory and practical for people. Well yeah, working through upsets and healing my mind, that's what I want to do. Because eventually you start to realize that the pains and the pleasures are just two sides of one coin and they both are capable of distracting you from that piece of non-judgment of just being still. So the course is very different from that old thing about accentuate the positive and affirm the positive and eliminate the negative. The positive and the negative are both two sides of one continuum of judgment and you have to really release the whole continuum. But this is really a good start at working with some of these metaphysics in a very practical way. You can work with anything that's disturbing you. It doesn't matter if it's mild irritation or annoyance or if you have rage coming up or vengeance or something that's an intense emotion. It might be good if you start to work with this on a daily basis or whatever. It might be good to start with some of the smaller upsets and build some confidence with it before you go after the jugular of the ego. Anything else when you start to learn how to ride a bike like we saw in Exodus in Heaven, you gain some confidence balancing and pedaling before you go enter a triathlon or something or a train. So what I'll start off with at the beginning here is I'm going to start off with a serenity prayer. Some people say, well, the Course is 1200 and some pages. Can't you summarize the Course in a little more succinct way than other than 1200 pages of words? I say, well, yeah, the Course is just the version of the serenity prayer. God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things that I can and the wisdom to know the difference. So that's really what the Course is about, except to do that, to make that change, to change the things that I can and the wisdom to know the difference. It really takes a lot of mind training and discernment. That's why there's 365 lessons in the Course and over 600 pages of text in the text to help prepare your mind and then even the teacher's manual. So what we're going to do today is I'll just briefly go over this and then what we can do is we'll go through it in an experiential way. So you can actually either use your instrument for peace and write in the things that come to mind for you, that you're wanting to work through. You can do it on a piece of paper that you have if you want to keep this and you want to take it home and Xerox it to practice it. You might want to keep the one with the blank and just write your answers in here on the paper. It's also, like I said, it's on the website. So if anybody wants to just go and you have internet access, you could just go to our website and go to the library and just download it and print it out from there. So what it does, I'll just read the introduction. Instrument for peace, working through upsets and healing your mind. The mind at peace is healed. The mind at peace has wholeheartedly welcomed peace. In this world, lack of peace appears in many forms. For permanent healing to occur, lack of peace must be traced back to its singular cause in the mind. Use of this instrument for that tracing back can help a willing mind let go of what it thinks it knows, see the world differently and experience a present state of peace and joy. So that's the introduction. It's just a very little practical tool to keep the focus on the peace, doing this for the peace of mind. So we'll start with number one and you can see it's, you can just answer the questions and fill in the blanks or put it down on your paper as honestly as you can. But if you have something that's troubling you or upsetting you, it doesn't really matter what it is and it doesn't matter how strong it is or intense. But there's anything that's disturbing you in any way. Something's been rolling through your mind. Bill and I just were meeting in his bus about half an hour ago and Bill was saying, I have an unsettling kind of feeling and then there's thoughts probably that go with that. The unsettling, that would be the feeling. It feels a little unsettled and then you would kind of use this to kind of get in touch with what's going on under that unsettled feeling and as a way of releasing that to come to peace. So we'll start off with what you're thinking about. It can be just thoughts or it can be thoughts about specific persons, places, events, thoughts about what is coming next in your life or thoughts about something that just happened fairly recently in your life, maybe even during this retreat. I don't know if it was a little unsettling or something, but something that seems to kind of be bubbling up in your consciousness and that you would like to use this instrument to work through. So that's what we mean by it's very practical. So you just start off with and take a little time and if there's anything in your awareness that you feel any bit of upset with. Any bit of lack of peace with. Then just start off with number one and fill in A with what I think about A, which can be a past or future action situation or event. Or it could even involve persons. Just feel free to write anything that comes to mind in there for A. And then you can see where B is. We'll follow right after that. In B, you just really are trying to name the specific upsetting emotions. It could be like when we did the little workshop on the cloud and the heart where you may have even several specific emotions that come or maybe it's just one that comes to mind that you want to kind of focalize if you want to work with. And then as soon as you've got your action or situation event person and your feelings that are associated with that action event situation or person. Then see where you would try to name who or what seems to be the blame or there's a second part of the second line there and see or what you're afraid will occur in the future. Just filling in the specifics of what you're afraid will occur in the future or who or what seems to be the blame. This could even include blaming yourself. In many cases people feel like there's nobody to blame in their life but they blame themselves for the feelings and so that you can certainly fill your own name in there. Yeah, you could fill in both of them if you have someone to blame and you still have these ideas of what could happen in the future that is part of the worry or the concern or the anxiety. Okay, now number one is about completing once you've kind of been able to articulate all of that bring it out and write down. Then number two what we're going to work at is going a little deeper. You might think of D for deeper because it takes it a little deeper into your mind than what you're perceiving and thinking what you're feeling and the justifications or reasons that you're telling yourself. That's all encapsulated in number one. Number two is stating A, B and C. The action, situation, events, persons, all the feelings associated with those actions, events, situations of persons and also the justifications of why, who's to blame or what the recurrent thoughts about the future that are troubling. All of those prove that I am right about D and D is basically what we have been calling in our workshop our retreat the self concepts. Everything you think and feel and believe about yourself that's related to the images of the world. Not only your personality self, which seems to be who you are, your persona or the mask, but everything that's part of the mask, the environment that seems to surround the person is also part of that mask. So it's not just like, you know, the indigenous people, the Maori, maybe put on the paint and the mask, it's not just like wearing a Halloween mask. It's also including the entire environment that you perceive yourself as in. So you might say that that's part of the ego's disguise. It's not only made up of false body identity, but it's wrapped the identity in a cover or a shell, which is the world. And so it's not only about having to release your personality, but it's having to release what you think you know about the shell too. For instance, like things like gravity, you know, that's something you learn in science, you know, all this gravity and centrifugal force and so on and so forth. That's all made up. That's all part of the self concept too. We didn't get to watch it yet, but we have a movie called The Truman Show, where the whole world seems to revolve around Truman. And at one point, when Truman goes missing, it's dark, it's night, and so Christoph, which is like the ego figure in the movie says, queues the sun. In other words, they have to let the sun rise. They can even tell when the sun's coming up. And the sun is even part of this artificial environment for Truman. And you might say that things that are even in this world that are accepted as natural, you know, the dawn and the dusk and the sun rising and falling and the moon rising and falling, that seem to be part of such a deep cycle of human history that people call them those are natural phases, they would say. That's the natural movement of the planets and the stars. Nothing's natural. This entire cosmos is artificial. So even what is talked of as the natural environment, like what we're surrounded in versus the manmade or the built environment, sometimes people make the distinction, no, it's all part of this self concept. So you can just write D out in any way that you feel comfortable. You can call it my self concept, my self image, the self I made up to take the place of God, the self that God created, the role that I play, the mask that I wear, you know, any words that are comfortable for you about the means that I think I am, anything that feels comfortable about that thing. And I think the key word in there is A, B and C prove that I am right about.