 We started our discussion with Purpose. It's really the main thing I wanted to talk about before. The deeper I got into this, you know, I kind of became to this sense that you were talking about, okay, I'm this mind and I don't know who I am, but I've got these two voices and I'm always listening to one or the other, so I've got to tell the difference. I mean, it's obvious that if I'm feeling upset and guilty, then there's still confusion in my mind where I still think the ego has some gift that I want. So what was really helpful was when I started going through this with the idea I've got to get clear on the ego's purpose. If the world is just the world, it's just the screen, if the ego has a different purpose for the world than the Holy Spirit, I've got to know the difference. I've got to really become clear on how the ego uses the world versus how the Holy Spirit does. And probably right around page 52, it started talking first of all about instincts, which I had learned in my physiology classes for kind of like in the body, for warmth and sex and food and reflex instinct when you worked on the knee. And basically Jesus says, no, the instincts on page 52 and 53, instincts are not in the body, but the mind makes the decision and then the ego wants to gratify itself through the body. The body is just like this neutral kind of learning instrument. That was another big one. I thought my body is learning things. Like when I played tennis over the years and I would hit hundreds of backhand cross-course strokes, it seemed like that I learned as a person or a body how to hit a backhand cross-court. It seemed like unconscious or like a second nature. Then I get to the course and Jesus says, the body doesn't learn. The body is a learning device, but the mind learns. The mind has learned this world. Now it's kind of unlearned the world. So then I got to page 97, which really helped me because he spelled it out. He said that what the ego uses the body for and what the Holy Spirit uses the body for. I need to know that if this ego has a purpose in my mind to use the body and the world to reinforce guilt and to keep me asleep, I want to wake up. I want to know the difference between the ego's use of the world and the body and the Holy Spirit. So page 97, he says the Holy Spirit uses the body solely as a means of communication. Period. The ego uses the body for pride, for pleasure, for attack. Okay, now we're getting somewhere. If this imposter in my mind is using the body and using the world for these purposes and it's keeping me asleep, then that's helpful. So then I went a little bit further in the course and it was the same kind of a thing. There was one part when it was the special love relationship and basically said that all guilt in the special relationship comes from the use of the body. There was a sentence in there. It was like, that helps me too. It's not because the person I'm dating or the person I'm with a lot has inherently anything good or bad about them, but it's the use, it's like, am I going to give my mind to this ego to use or am I going to give it to the Holy Spirit? And there were other passages like around page 301 where it said, you know, I talked about the great rays, that's capital G and capital R, which is just the brilliant light in our mind, the remembrance of God. And it said, in order to really approach or to understand the great rays, you have to give up all of the uses that the ego has for the body and the world. It makes perfect sense, you know, that if there's this imposter in there and you give your mind to the purposes of the imposter, then, you know, you stay in guilt and fear. Now, we may come back and there may be time to go into this today, but when we go to groups over and over, people will frequently say, okay, now I've been in this course for a long time and I really want to get down to the bottom. You really helped me shine the light on this ego, you know, in a sense, because I really want to know what's going on so I can withdraw my mind from it and wake up. And basically, if you look at the obstacles to peace, there's sections in there, he talks about the attraction to guilt. That sounds kind of funny on the surface, doesn't it? Why would I be attracted to guilt? Attraction to pain, what in the world? Why would I want to be attracted to pain? I don't want pain. And then he talks about the attraction to death. And not only that, he says, you worship death. I worship death? I got to know how I worship death. If Jesus can teach me how I worship death, then I'll stop worshiping death, you know, I don't want to worship death. So, you know, the deeper you go into these things, those sections are very deep sections and the mind can get very resistant to some of this stuff on special relationships. But it's good because the more we can get clear on these things, the more you can just see the imposter for what it is and then you can withdraw your investment from it. So you see how important that is. You know, if we all really want to wake up, if we really want to be committed to this, then the more we can be clear on the ego's tricks, the more we can see past them and then we're free. There's nothing to keep us from being in peace of mind. Hey, there's one thing that you said that really helped me a lot on. You said the sole purpose of the body is communication. Get where I heard it, but the sole purpose of the body is communicating the love and that. I heard that through all of that. It really gave me a lot of meaning and sense to get where I might go. It just throws it into a different context. Like, I think most of us, when we think even like of death, I was looking through the course on death the other day. And most of us have a sense of death is equated with death of the body, or death of the body, whether it's death in the animal kingdom or whatever, or just death of relatives and friends and everything. Bye-bye. And there was some lessons in the course. I was kind of going back through the workbook and lessons 163 and 167 where he started describing death, you know? I mean, I'll just pop to one of those because it was like, it really takes his definitions of these things or not sometimes what he would think of them. Not Webster's. Yeah, Webster's, and Jesus has some interesting ones. But the very first paragraph of 163 when he starts talking about death, he starts off with a beautiful idea. There is no death. The Son of God is free. And then he goes, death is a thought that takes on many forms, often unrecognized. It may appear as sadness, fear, anxiety, or doubt, as anger, faithlessness, and lack of trust. Concern for body. Someone got me. I mean, all the time you say to somebody, have a safe trip. I'll call you when you get to the air end because I'm concerned that you'll make it all right. You know, it's kind of like concern for body, death. I didn't think that was death. You know, but you can start to see. I thought that was love. I thought that was love, not death. Envy in all forms in which to wish to be as you are not may come to tempt you. And then he kind of, a few pages later in 167, he gives a few more, he says, in this world, there appears to be a state that is life's opposite. You call it death. Yet we have learned that the idea of death takes many forms. It is the one idea which underlies all feelings that are not supremely happy. And then he says, here he goes with another sentence, all sorrow, loss, anxiety, and suffering, and pain. He's in a little sigh of weariness. A slight discomfort with a mere frown acknowledged death. Well, we've got a little bit different definition than I've been used to. A frown, you know, a sigh of weariness, three times we come home from work and go, boy am I tired. So what he's doing is kind of like he's slowly starting to teach our minds that there aren't any small upsets, you know, that there's this thing called supreme happiness or joy or peace. And that's our natural condition. The only thing that's a deviation from it is death. So what you can see where this is like, it really gets into, we need to really get clear on what's on these beliefs and everything before we can totally be free of death. It takes it out of that context of, you know, all those questions of where am I going to go when I die and dah-dah-dah-dah, which is still kind of presuming that there's life in the body somehow and that, you know, when this body dies, there's an afterlife where, you know, in Jesus' candle office, there's no life, there's no life on this planet. Sometimes he'll say, or when they ask him, is there life on another planet? He'll say, there's no life on this planet. That seems to be, there's like, oh gosh, that's a mind-bender, you know. But when you think about it, if life is our will lined up with God and the Holy Spirit, then it starts to make sense that our true life is in our mind. You know, then it's been, you think, oh yeah. But it sure seems to be a real kind of flip from a lot of times that we believe. On the one hand, of course, later, the late part of the course, Jesus says, don't try, you know, it's inappropriate to try to deny the body. In other words, you know, it's such a deeply rooted kind of a thing that it would be denial like the Oscars with his head in the sand to say, you know, you didn't hit me or you're not here, I'm not here, we're not having this conversation. You know, one of those kind of things, that's the denial of what's on the screen. But Jesus does say, deny the belief that error can hurt you. In other words, you always have the power, when we get back to this interpretation level, to really look at your interpretation and to start to see, to really see that this is a belief. You know, there's a lot of beliefs that have to be looked at though, but eventually you can feel that companionship and lost in real as long as there's still an investment. I was aware though that it was a funeral where, in the last few years, I don't have the anxiety level. I don't have that, just, you know, that I'm just okay about being there because, you know, I'm aware that there's sadness and grief and so on, so I just don't have the investment in it, which has really helped me in terms of taking care of my father who's 91. You know, I can do that in a very loving way now without feeling this overwhelming sadness and grief and it's just, I don't know how to explain it, it's just sort of different. It's kind of so important to go deep because a lot of times, you know, people can have catch words or phrases like, okay Jesus, I want to take your hand or Holy Spirit, help me see this differently or whatever, but until we start to really get it to the ego thought system and really see it for what it is, then, you know, the mind can still try tricks where it can try to say the right words. Okay, one, two, three, here's the magic word. Help me to see this differently. You know, and then, why am I still feeling so upset? That's why it's so important to really, you know, kind of get into looking at what the ego system is because until you can really see it for what it is, then there's a part of the mind that says, one, that believes that the ego offers something. Put you in that line about, see your brother, see the Christ in your brother. I mean, stand there and just stare. Stare at me. I can remember that was the hardest thing for me. You know, I would go in this restaurant, I remember going to a restaurant one time and it came this woman in a wheelchair. Okay, I could feel the anxiety. I let my thoughts come to the surface of my mind. I took a look at the thoughts that I was afraid across the screen in my mind, which was, oh, there, but, you know, God, that could happen to me one day. Oh, now I want to see the Christ in her. I don't want to see this crippled in the part of my mind screen, but all I can see is this crippled, you know. So, all of this mish-mash role of trying to see the Christ and somewhere along in the course it did say something about just be aware that there is something beyond the appearance. You don't have to figure it out. Just know that it's supposed to be kind of a little bit easier that way. I believe to be told it is not necessary to see for what is true, but it is necessary to see for what is false. You know, how many of us have kind of gone like, all right, I'm on this passionate quest for truth. You know, I'm going to find it and everything, and then it gets back to that subtraction thing we were just talking about, you know. It's like, what is false is what needs to be subtracted away. The truth is like right down to your nose all the time. It's not like it's somewhere way out there. It's like it's always, the presence is always here, but it's like starting to see that. Oh, a lot makes sense that the mind is not in the body. I always thought it was in the body for so many years. It's the mind in the deceased state can equate with the brain, which is of course in the body, but once again the brain is on the screen, just like the body is on the screen. And remember what we're talking about is the screen comes about from projections of thoughts that are in the mind. So the brain is just a projection of what the body is of the thought in the mind. Now that's an important distinction to make because otherwise when you get into course groups people will start to say, well, I kind of get this thing about self-responsibility and choosing and this and that, but they'll say things like babies born with spina bifida or children that are abused or raped or whatever. There's things that go on where it's like, well, I don't know what the course could mean. I mean it's kind of like the child is helpless or doesn't even have a fully developed brain or how could a child make decisions. And the only way to really get clear on that is what you were just saying, is that the mind is not in the body, that a guilty mind believes this guilty and will call forth witnesses on the screen.