 The deeper I've gone into the course, my life has really slowly started to simplify. But it's not been a simplification based on the ascetic path. The old way was sacrifice. If any of you have studied some of the old mystical paths or asceticism, where people would literally do harm to their bodies to sacrifice or I guess in Catholicism, you know, doing all these different things like paying for sins that even take place with projected out onto the body. And I think there was a group that really helps, this example helps bring it clear to me. There was a group that came right after Jesus, right around the first century, after Jesus called the Gnostics. Some of you probably heard of Gnosticism where the Gnostics were right around the time of Jesus and a lot of the Gnostics got part of his teaching. My kingdom is not of this world, the kingdom of God is within you. And the Gnostics really got the fact that the world wasn't real, that Jesus was speaking of a spiritual kingdom, that it wasn't an earthly kingdom, that the apostles and the Jewish mindset was looking for. But the belief and sacrifice of the ego is so deeply rooted in the mind that they kind of fell into the ego traps that would maybe be called making the air a real where they thought, if the world's not real, then the world must be bad. So the body is part of the world, the body must be bad. And therefore, I'll starve the body or I'll go out in the desert and I'll do things to harm my body, to prove to myself and to God that the world isn't real. And unfortunately, the ego loves that, that's like playing into its hand because whenever you judge something as negative or bad in the world, you make it real. That literally, remember we get back to our thing about projecting the duality and judging things good and bad and so forth, that once you judge something as negative in the world, then you reinforce it in your mind as being real. Then there was another sect of the Gnostics who, it's really interesting how they kind of went off on the world's not real so we can indulge in all the vices and pleasures of the world and they taught that if you didn't get them done in one lifetime, you would reincarnate and come back and you could just keep indulging in the vices of the world until you were free of them. But as the Course teaches us, that doesn't work either because the vices or pleasure and pain basically both make the body real. I mean, in the sense that if any of you have had a splitting headache and you're trying to do your lesson, you know, I could see peace in this or there's nothing to fear or something when you've got a splitting headache, they just don't go together. Pain reinforces, pain is like a witness that says, I am hurting here, I am guilty or I'm fearful or I'm frail or something. And pleasure does the same thing because pleasure focuses the mind or identifies the mind in the body. I mean, the sensations of the world, the Hindus and all the great mystics of the world have kind of got to this thing of pleasure and pain. That Khalil Gibran, you might have read the Prophet, I mean, it's just come through in so many different ways that really they're like two sides of a coin. The ego doesn't tell us that. The ego says, maximize pleasure and minimize pain. Avoid pain. Isn't that pretty common with them in the world? The mind, in a deceived state, actually believes it can tell the difference. Doesn't it seem like that? Does pain and pleasure seem the same to you? You know, in a deceived state, they seem to be very, very different. But what the Course is teaching us is they're just two sides of the coin and there's all these passages. Those who seek for pleasure cannot avoid pain as well. It's like this connection. The Course calls it the attraction to guilt. People with addictions have to try, whether it's alcohol or marijuana or sexual addictions or food or these physical things that seem to be attractive, that seem to be like this little band-aid over this terrible loneliness and emptiness that's spelled inside. It's like this is a little quick fix, you know, that food. I can have that hot-fudge sundae that I love and it brings me a lot of pleasure and it takes my mind off of the loneliness and the emptiness and the despair that I feel for about ten minutes. And then it's like, okay, another couple hours, you know, what's next? What am I looking for? You can use movies, you know, wanting to just sit in your house all day and watch movies, you know. I don't want to face the world. I want to just be distracted. It's the same kind of dynamic. And the Course is so great because it's finally starting to unveil the ego and all of its schemes. It's saying, you know, to the mind, to the deceived mind, it whispers that the pleasure is good and to itself it whispers it is death, you know. I mean, it's just the Course is starting to unveil how kind of crazy and insane this ego thought system is.