 Of course, phase two is unlearn the world, stop judging the world, stop trying to analyze and break apart. That can seem a bit scary when you've been trained and taught, or literally you've taught yourself. It of course says, when you've taught yourself to, that you're, you know, we say people who are intelligent and who are good judges, who can have maturity in this world are good judges. You know, they know what to avoid in this world and what to pursue. And the course comes along and says, wisdom is not judgment. True wisdom is relinquishment of judgment, and that's a profound kind of idea. For me it's like I was in college for ten years and I was kind of going through all this and degrees and everything, and finally right before the course came it was like I just hopped off. I just got to the point where I said, you know, I saw the frustrations of, I'd studied all these different disciplines, I had searched so deeply and I had seen all these different underlying assumptions about the world. The physicist and the sociologist had huge different views of the world, the chemist and the psychologist, my gosh, you know, the musicians and the art, you know, what I saw was that there were all these world views and it's like how are we ever going to have harmony if there's all this variation in what the world is, but the course is like it just cuts through all that, you know, it literally is helping us train our minds to get to that true perception where we give up judgment. So, I mean, that's a lot of stuff and we're throwing it out, but now if things are coming to your mind, like particular things, and that's good, we'll go with what comes to my mind is in the manual, it says, and into this impossible situation, these teachers have got to sit up here at the villa. There we go. Yeah, we're in the maze, yeah, we're in the maze. So, what's the solution? I mean, yeah, but so, the mind is so stuck in its pattern and how do you, like, okay, I was feeling great for a whole long time and then I had two days where I just couldn't get my mind to think or it seemed that way. I just couldn't get it out of my head or whatever it was in. And so, is that, I tried whatever I, you know, doing the lessons and whatever and begging, whatever you go through, help, please, and it just stood there. So, then what I would do. Yeah. So, what, how do you handle it from there? Well, the next floor. Is that what a vodka is? Open the door. I know that it's there. I don't even know what the black was. I mean, maybe that's the black, I don't know. I was talking to Zola yesterday about, and today I was studying the course and the answer came to me and I had given her the answer yesterday. I was telling her, I said, I've been doing all right, except I really raised hell with my, with my ego. You know, I even had an excuse. I could talk about where it said in the Bible that Jesus said to Peter, get behind me Satan. I figured he said, get behind me Satan. He wouldn't, he says, get behind me Satan doesn't mean anything. I have to not judge my ego either. That was the thing. Because I was always judging my ego when he's done judging and doing this. But thinking the wrong way, that's judgment. There's no judgment to it. It doesn't mean anything. Yeah, it's the song of prayer and the course does stay in a sense. That's where I read it, this is the song of prayer. When you believe you're in this separated world, once again, the guidance of the Holy Spirit will seem to at times take a specific form. You know, a lot of us have maybe had inclinations or hunches or maybe even heard a voice or seen a billboard or heard something on the radio or had a friend call us or something. It seemed to be very specific and very helpful. And a lot of times really though, the only thing that you need to receive that is his willingness. But a lot of times, a little willingness can seem like a lot. When the mind seems to be in a stuck spot, it really seems to be blocked. In the rules for decision, Jesus kind of goes through and gives, that's a good place to go if you're in a stuck spot because he gives little stepping stones to help the mind. Yeah, to help pull the mind back from its stuck spot. And one of them is kind of like, one of the middle ones is kind of like, at least I could decide how I don't like how I feel. Right. It's like the mind is so close to the light and so close to Jesus at that point that at least when we can go, yeah, I can at least decide that I don't like how I feel now and then he'll kind of go along. So I hope that I've been wrong, that I've made a decision in my mind and I actually hoped that I've been wrong about it because I want to see things differently and kind of leaves us out to that point. So that's one way of doing it. But there isn't any kind of like formula that when we talk here and we continue going into it, hopefully there'll be more clarity that you'll be able to kind of inspire you to get over the stuck spots. Do you get over them or do you just wait them out? It's all up to you. It's really just a now kind of proposition. When you were talking about the trade center and how many stories it's got, I said the other thing that the ego does is keep building higher buildings. Going in the other direction. Yeah, keep building higher buildings and more floors. Well, I can give you what I can do is share some experiences from my life because for me it's been a process of so I see that my mind is filled with judgments. So I see that my mind is full of attack thoughts. It's like, yuck. When you really start to pull away from the distractions, maybe you've been using entertainment or drugs or something or just busyness. You've made your body so busy because you don't want to look at your mind that you kind of get so busy. When you really start to pull back from it, usually the first experience is yuck. My mind is a mess. This is a big job. I want to go back out to the distractions because the mind feels so attached to these attack thoughts. That's where the guilt comes in. It's not attached to the real thoughts. Those are buried over in the basement. So really forgiveness is what we need to talk about. You know, what is forgiveness and how do we really come to a clearer understanding of forgiveness? Because that's the way that we come out of this thing. One way of coming at forgiveness is the idea of purpose. Because remember we just talked about the form-content distinction. That purpose is always in the mind. And what happens is, is that when we perceive ourselves as these little teeny bodies in this vast world, we've just splintered our mind into hundreds and hundreds and thousands of different functions for purposes. I'm a wife. I'm a mother. I'm a medical technician. I'm on the border of such and such. You know, or I'm a grandmother. I'm so many years old, you know, it just goes on and on. We all have these different things. Then we could even go further. I've got good reasoning ability. I'm terrible athletically. My right arm is a little bit stiff and sore. We break the body into different, we see the body in different lights, in different functions. It goes even more mindlessly. It's like, you've just taken these images and we've fragmented what's a hand for, you know? What's a leg for? You know, if you think about certain different body parts, you can think about different functions. So we've splintered this idea called purpose into many, many, many, many functions. Now the good news is, though, forgiveness is so simple. I mean, you know how Jesus will say many times in the Course, this is a very simple Course. If you do not understand it, you are interpreting against it. But it's a very, very simple Course. And that's what I've discovered, you know, is I've studied the Course for years. It's like, the deeper I've really gone into it and looked at these false concepts in my own mind and just let go, let go, let go. It's like, it just gets simpler and simpler. It's like crystal clear. Because what happens is, it just merges. It's like, your life merges into one purpose. And that is the purpose of forgiveness. In other words, in a workbook, he says, you know, you have a function here. You're here for a reason. You might have seen Oprah Winfrey where she says, I think I'm here for a reason, you know, to bring love and to bring healing. And literally, that's our function, forgiveness, healing. That is our one purpose. That's what's going to lead us out of the maze, you know. Now, what happens is, for me, it's been something that's like, it's grown and grown and grown. Where the deeper I've gotten in touch with this purpose, and the more it's become like the center of my life, it's become my joy, you know. The more I really hold on to this one purpose, the simpler things get. And the more things just start to, almost like magically click in, you know. I mean, I lived a life I could say, probably the most complicated it got was, I think back to when I was in college for 10 years and I was in grad school and reading papers and trying to do all these things, I had a relationship going, trying to juggle 10 things at once. And I think what's happened in the last, since the mid-80s for me, is like my life has just gotten very simple, but it's a simplicity that's come from shifting my mind. So it's not like I've tried to change the form first and then get a simple mind. Because we, I mean, that's been tried for centuries. You know, give away all your possessions or do this, do that fast or, you know, something like that. Somehow, magically, if we do certain behaviors or rituals that will, our minds will get immediately, get clear, we'll be in the kingdom of heaven. But just, it doesn't work that way. It's almost like it's the reverse way. We have to look at all these concepts that we hold of ourself and we have to see the falsity of the concept and then kind of like leap out of it. So that, you know, that's been the experience for me. It's been like, you know, I've kind of like withdrawn my identity from, for example, the idea of career and profession. You know, I started examining that in the mid-80s as a concept, you know, really looking at it. It was very linear. It was very much projected into the future. Of course it's teaching me, you know, that the future is imagined, you know, and to give up your pursuits and everything, but it's like, wait a minute. Everybody's got to have a career, you know. This is not a concept. This is important. But, you know, I started to really examine it and really look at it and really question it and then, like, I was able to start to just say, okay, I don't know where this is going, but I'll trust, I mean, that's the key word, I'll trust and I don't know how you're going to use me and I don't know how things are going to work out. But I know I'm feeling this purpose starting to grow and I want to follow it. So that was like one example. You know, it takes place in all of our areas of our life, too. Like relationships is another one, you know. Everyone who comes to this place forms special relationships, the course says. But what are special relationships? What's a modern, good John Bradshaw word? Codependence? That's my special relationship, because it's a good old codependent relationship where, you know, where you need another person where you want to get your needs met. You know, a lot of the workshops still nowadays, if you listen to the words, you know, how to get your needs met from your partner, you know. That's still a codependent relationship because when the partner up and leaves or decides I'm not going to meet those needs, then where are you? You know, get back to what do I do now? So what the course does with this new purpose is like even when we start to shift our purpose and give it to the Holy Spirit, even our perceptions of relationships start to alter and start to shift. You know, a big way. We try to go around and just talk about, you know, the different ways that it's happened. There's a lot, a lot of times there's a lot of upheaval because if you're, if you're, you've been in this pattern, heavily rooted pattern for a long time and then you start to pull your mind away from it. The ego is fit. It's grief work. Yeah. I've lost myself. I have nothing to live for. It used to be this way. Now I have nothing. What can I do? Oh. Yeah. And unless we have a function, and that's why I keep bringing about forgiveness or purpose because we have to have something positive to grab on to. You know, if we start to lay aside these self concepts that we've constructed, these little tiny false selves that we've made to be so important. You know, we've forgotten spirit. We've made these self concepts. As you really start to work with the Course and you start to examine these concepts, the ego is shrinking in there because ego is saying, well, you gave up that, you, you let, you saw something else. If you keep letting go of your concepts, there's going to be nothing left. And the ego's version of that is when you go to the basement, you're going into the void. The ego describes the light as nothingness. And that's why, when you start doing your inner work a lot of times, that's why I'll... Take your flashlight. Yeah. Yeah. You're going to have genius in the hand when you do it. But that's why it can be so painful, you know, when you start really looking at your mind because you're starting to look at these concepts and these false beliefs and the ego is in there advising that, you know, you better stop. Don't go within. You know, stay outside to stay distracted. So that's the idea of purpose that another thing he says is that a single unified purpose will stabilize your perception.