 We're talking about coming to this purpose. This purpose is so denied. I mean, I use my analogy as a nice paper. The purpose is literally that light in the basements. I mean, that's the Holy Spirit's purpose. And it's so buried and covered over. That's why it takes a lot of practice at letting go of our investment. So long as I have expectations and those cover over that purpose. But I'm still wanting to back it up again because I'm still making the choice for peace. Both of these are peaceful. I'm still making the choice. If I hear what you're saying, doesn't there a sense in which, if you really have peace, you would feel that what would occur is that when you pulled into a parking place, there wouldn't be anybody upset about it. Yeah, I wouldn't be upset. Don, you're looking at anybody upset because if we're all one, and if you have achieved a relationship with first person peace, there should be no construct in which there's another guy to be upset. So that's having an expectation to get outside of myself and towards the bottom of the piece, the whole world, the bottom of the piece. And I hear you. Thank you. What? Maybe this means you're to look at your mind and to look at the guilt that comes out when you choose to talk to someone. But I'm totally at peace with that. You sure? Yeah, why? Because I'm choosing. Well, I hear a lot of ego, but the way you do it... Joe's got a key point, and I'll throw this out to you, but it's a key idea. That's what the workbook is trying to teach the mind. The cause and effect are not separate. In other words, that there aren't any hypotheticals. Now this is, the ego does not like that because the example that Joe's pointing out, when we get into all of our examples, including the examples of parking spaces, we're out into the hypothetical. What is? You know, you can see how it works. And literally that's like hit it on the head, because that's what the ego does. The ego's saying, what else? All our considerations, all from the ego's thought system standpoint. The way it is, if we really took it that way, we'd have to have a formula, or we'd have to have a gigantic work home, or something. Yeah, a huge catalog. Because you wait for 4.899 million, and they pulled it in, and they got out of there frowning at me. You know, I mean, you can see the variables are like endless. And it really gets back to what Joe's saying in the sense of the simplicity, you know, that prayer on page 24, I did not have to worry about what to say or do for he who sent me will direct me. You know, that's like a principle that in the moment, you know, we will be guided. So if we bring it back to right now, and this is a good example now, it's how am I feeling right now? This is why, if you go, whatever you go to, course criticism, this and that, it's always good just to monitor your own reactions and your own emotions. Right now in the moment, how are you feeling? If I will be guided, and my guided according to all the criticism written? I'll give you another line. The course says that guidance is a value thing, but you will receive guidance at the mind level, because that is where you need it. In other words, bodies don't ever get guidance. Mind is always your guidance. So you will get guidance. If you really are open and willing, you will be guided. So when you say the script is written, do you mean the script is written at the mind level? Perceptual form. Everything has already happened. And let's come out from another angle. And I think the script is written. You notice written is half-time. You've got a written at the end of it. Jesus comes out of the same angle when he says, lesson five, six, and seven, I am never upset for the reason I think it. I am upset because I see something that is not there. That's the reason. I see only the past. Now, I see only the past, but Jesus is literally restating the script as written. So what the mind is perceiving, when it's perceiving bodies and cars and stars and airplanes and rubbers and everything, is all the past. But it gets very upset about the past. Because it believes that the past isn't over. So if that was the reason that the script is written, is that because with our minds we perceive only the past? Is that what that means? That's what that means? Wow. I got it. And where is Chris available? Leslie Coleman? Always available in the now. So whenever we are getting upset about what's the past, we obviously don't believe that the past is gone, otherwise I wouldn't get upset. So really, the Course is just the past to help us see that the past is gone. So let's take it a little step further now, because we've only got up to lesson seven. Lesson seven explains the first seven. Number eight is, after I see only the past, my mind is preoccupied with past thoughts. That's where, now we're getting to the thought level. The only reason I'm seeing all these shadows of things in form is because in my mind I've got these dark thoughts. Like, here's the light, here's the dark thoughts, and here's all the forms on the screen. You know what happens if you let go of the dark thoughts? Light. And you just have pure light. Because there aren't any expressions to it. So that's the escape. There's lesson number 23. I can escape from the world I see by giving up attack thoughts. He works all the way up to the first twenty-two to bring it to that. So really, it gets to be simple. All I have to do now is get in touch with those attack thoughts. Not be afraid of them, but I've got to be able to raise them to awareness and look at them and see them for what they are. A bunch of backwards thoughts, and then let the thoughts go. And that's what salvation is. That's simple. Either the last night or the night before, the one I thought was on memory, the neurosurgeon made an interesting point that without memory, we had no sense of self. I think it's delicious because that's what we're really trying to do. To have a sense of self comes from ego. Without it, we just are. We blend. So that memory is what they said it is. That's what makes us look back. It's not even Jesus saying it. I've always, when I thought of the word memory too, I've always associated with the past. And there was a section in the course pretty late in the text where Jesus is called the present memory. And he says, memory is an ability that you made after the separation. But he says you can use it to remember the present. There's a shock. Because you can see how the mind associates memory, past, memory, past, past, memory. I don't have you remember the past. Yeah, and I mean it's kind of a stretch when you even read that section, but basically it's back to that thing about the present moment is like, is revelatory. It's pure light. It's not perceptual. It doesn't have anything to do with images or forms. And really it's like the mind is terrified of remembering the present. That's why it keeps trying to hang on to the past. When you come to a point where you can see or remember the present, you still see the script coming in. You're still seeing the past. Well, the way the Course describes the present is the holy incident. It literally says you, in those revelatory points you don't even, it calls them the great rays you might have read with a capital G and a capital R. Another way it describes it is in the I be do nothing section it says the body is never, the body does not exist in any single instance. It is always remembered or anticipated. In other words, when we think in our mind that like, what am I going to do in the future? How will someone still react? It's like using those thoughts they're all projected out of the future or what happened? How that guy reacted to me at that meeting that night or whatever. You see how it's always the past or the future. But the Course is describing the present as something that is pure light that literally is an experience of revelation. It's the holy incident. It's not even perceptual and that's it. I don't understand the memory of the present Here it is, the present. Like you said, it's past. So what's the memory of the present? What's the memory of the present? Well, if we went like this and we said you know that analogy that I sometimes use about the World Trade Center and the Holy Spirit from the basement and the ego from the basement and all these dark layers are stacked because the mind is afraid of the light. The light is the present. And that's our gateway to eternity is the light of the Holy Spirit. So that's a memory that's buried very, very deeply in the mind. In other words, the whole world, the whole self-contact that the mind is constructed is made to forget that light. And that's why it takes that's why the mind has to completely cease from judging before it can remember that light. So you have to fill in and really even when we use peeling the onion that kind of gets into our process. But last night we were getting the idea that all the layers of the onion are the same. And I know Edie brought that up a lot of times about, you know, isn't it a process? Do you have to know what the specific belief is or not? And basically what I'm saying is that the ego is like a tree trunk and here's the branches of the tree. That the ego and the branches are identical. That until you see that the branches of the trunk are identical, you can go through a lot of different twigs and start to, it seems like I have a belief in time and space and concepts of size, concepts of bodies, concepts of, you know, on and on and on. And those are like all the limbs and the branches and the twigs. But the instance that the mind can see that the image maker, the trunk and the images are identical that it's dispelled. It's this thing of self-contact that it seems like who am I attached to this body or who am I attached to this car or who am I attached to this person or this job? Those are all the branches in the limb, you know? But the thing is, the mind doesn't want to look at what is the thing that made up all these branches in it? And who is this I, you know, that's so attached to the body and so attached to all these different people and everything? You see, ultimately you have to get back to the image maker. You can count those images forever. That's just, you know, 499 million, you know, it just seems like there's all these images but ultimately we have to get back to the image maker. And as soon as the mind can see that the image maker and the images are the same, then what is it that can see that? It has to be a very clear mind, a mind that is not seen in any way. That is, now it steps back from the image maker and goes, ah! So can it partially clear mind with the Holy Spirit? Even? It wouldn't be partially with that instance. It has to be, Jesus says it in many ways but He says you either see or you don't see. You're either... There are times when I see that I don't feel like I have a clear mind or at least I have a clear mind. I mean a clear mind forever. But for moments I can have a clear mind and one of the things that keeps happening to me is that I try to unravel this stuff with the ego and it just makes me feel crazy. But what I can remember that, oh there's the Holy Spirit in the Holy Spirit I want you to see this part of what's going on right now that all of a sudden can just feel the peace coming in. But I don't feel like I can always retain that clarity. It's like remembering to ask the Holy Spirit. Those moments. It's like when you spread it out into time there's a section in the Course called immediately salvation. Where would you really follow Jesus' thinking in that section? It makes an awful lot of sense. He kind of says why would God put your salvation in the future? You know, when you stop a minute and you think about it that's what's to deceive my belief in this world. It's that, okay now I'm working on the Course in miracles and if I do this enough and I really practice this enough that eventually in the future I will achieve salvation where it's a totally clear mind. And Jesus comes in that section and he kind of says well here's some logic for you. Why would God place salvation in the future? Wouldn't that be cruel? He kind of runs it through the logic. Wouldn't it be cruel for God to put it out there in the future? If God gave you salvation which is the assurance that he gave us the Holy Spirit which is redemption and salvation wouldn't he have put it in the present instead of in the future? Wouldn't it be cruel that God had like a little carrot and they kind of pulled you more millennia? You know? We make that future. It's obvious it's there. The problem is that that's the only problem I have. I think what's helpful when you're out of time is that in the ultimate sense time is this projection of the ego that's made up. But if I believe I'm in it okay and that's not helpful in the sense of you know it's like in terms of denial. But what the Course does is the stepping stone to realizing that time is an illusion is what it does with everything. The same thing it does with the body, relationships and everything else. It says okay, you made time, the Holy Spirit can use time too. He can use everything you made. You made a world, he can use it to lead you out of it. You made bodies, he can use them. Now how does the Holy Spirit how does the ego use time? In the ego's view it really wants to promote a linear view of time. The Holy Spirit is trying to teach us that there is one time. Now. And the ego is trying to say oh no no, there's the past and there's the present and there's the future. So it's helpful to look at well what else is this ego in my mind teaching me about time? If it's trying to teach me it's linear. It's saying basically you are guilty in the past. You're a body. Look at all the things in your whole life that you didn't do that you should have done. And look at all the things that you've done that you shouldn't have done. Look at all the things back there that you feel