 Okay. Hello everybody. Hi. Welcome. Welcome. You're welcome to our all day movie workshop. And we have a larger group with us again today. We're on our online retreat weekend. We have a retreat called reborn in the light of Christ. So we have some with us for the retreat and some just for the movie workshop. It's going to be a great day. So I'll just let you know we're going to start the day with David giving his movie commentary. And then afterwards we're going to have a 10 minute break. And then we come back for a Q&A session with David. So I'll pass it over to David now. Hi everyone. Welcome. I'm so glad you're with me. Some of you are just joining in for the Saturday movie aspect, the setup and movie with commentary and then the questions and answers. Others are here part of our online weekend retreat, reborn in the light of Christ. And as I promised you, we have a very just spectacular teaching device this morning. This movie is, I think it can save you so much time in spiritual awakening because we love to have examples. That's why we like to watch a movie of Jesus because he's an example. A demonstration is not just the teaching, it's the demonstration of the teaching that inspires us. And if you know people who are happy and joyful and peaceful consistently, those are witnesses for your mind. Those are demonstrations. And we can never underestimate how helpful it is to be in contact with people who are very joyful and peaceful and living in the miracle. Because when you begin this journey, it seems like the miracles come here and there, but they're actually meant to be lots and lots of miracles for you to experience every day. And what Jesus is saying is that you won't really come close to the gates of heaven to who you really are until you have really lots of miracles. So you become consistently miracle minded. That's when you can start to really feel like, oh my gosh, I'm escaping from my dark belief system of the ego. I'm actually becoming free in the love and light of Christ. And that's what this weekend retreat is about, being reborn in the light of Christ, to realize that your spirit and that you never were a body. You never were in a body and you never were a body. You always were spirit. But you had a case of amnesia and forgot that divine light and took on the form of flesh in whatever particular form that seems to be. And then as you go deeper and become more consistently miracle minded, you become less and less and less identified with the body. People can say anything about you positive or negative, but your mind doesn't take it personally because you know they're talking about someone else, not you. Imagine somebody has a tirade right in front of you and you just smile and go, hmm, interesting. Because you don't have an identification. You don't take it personally. You're not personally offended by it. And so the movie we're going to watch today is really, again, Jesus always gives us the perfect movie for the themes that you have voted for during the week. And what themes did you vote for? Well, coming in at number one is trust that all is taken care of. Wow. Imagine you trusted that everything was always taken care of. Well, that's a relief. No more concerns, no more worries, no more need to plan and scheme, no more need for learning. Your need for learning ends when you realize that all is taken care of because what we have learned from the ego has been fear. And we've learned a lot of false needs, false desires from the ego. It's tricked us into believing that we're frail, weak, and we are at the mercy of time and space and all the laws of this world, the laws of economics, the laws of relationships. Imagine if you were carefree and you didn't have attachments. That's another great word for enlightenment. You don't have any attachments. It doesn't really matter what's happening. Krishna Murthy always taught that too, the great Indian mystic. He said the one thing about the world that he felt very strongly was he didn't really care about the world. No wonder he had these sparkly eyes. He cared about love. He cared about respect. He cared about honesty. He cared about integrity. And his eyes were twinkling because he didn't really care about the world per se. He had the love in his heart and what a beautiful being he was. So our first theme, and that's the theme that will be shown throughout this movie, is that trust that all is taken care of. Regardless of circumstances, regardless of situations, have an abiding strong trust that all is taken care of. The second theme is strengthen my desire to feel one with God. And we're starting to learn from Jesus that our oneness with God is a state of mind where we're united with the mind of God. Our body is really just a teaching device that the Holy Spirit can use in a temporary way so we can learn to teach only love. And then as soon as we teach only love with it consistently or we're consistently right minded, then we realize at some point you have no need of a body at all. What a relief. Not only don't you have to take care of it or fix it up or pamper it, but you actually reach a state of mind where you become so identified with spirit like Jesus was. That really nothing fazed him. Even him being crucified, he seemed to come right back out of the grave and glow, even using the body to glow just to teach that you can't really kill the spirit. You can seem to kill a body, but you can't kill a spirit. The third theme is shine the light of Christ in every moment. That's really the purpose of your life is to shine the light of Christ. So you do that by your demonstration. When you're happy and joyful, when you're tranquil, when you're free flowing and you're just exuding the present moment in everything you think and say and do, then that's how you shine the light of Christ in every moment. Next is forgive myself for what I have not done. Yeah, this this ego has generated an addiction to believing in the past. And it came very clear to me at some point when I started to realize that it was my thoughts alone that needed correction and my beliefs and the behavior of what the body does or doesn't do. And all the guilt we have associated with things we did wrong, or things we should have done that we didn't do for all the times we said, oops, took a wrong turn there and there and there and there and there. And, and we have a guilt package for what we did wrong. And we also I'll call it a pride package we have for what we did right. That's the flip side of our guilt package. Oh, I was terrible at this and this and this I was a total failure. And well I was better than most at this and this and this and this pride pride pride. What does Jesus is saying about the past and pride and guilt nada, nada, nada, nothing, nothing, nothing. You've upset yourself over nothing. You still are as God created you. You're still spirit. Maybe you don't fully remember it yet, but that doesn't change the fact that God created you as spirit, and you remain as spirit. So in one sense you can't mess it up. You can, you can try to dilly dally a little with the ego but actually you can't mess it up. There is no punishment from God there is no consequence for for separating from God in reality because it's impossible to separate from our source. But when you're asleep and dreaming it seems as if that separation has occurred. So what you're doing is you're going to forgive your your misperceptions forgive your wrong mindedness and realize that you haven't done anything wrong or right. And that is very deep talk about transcending ethics and morality. If you haven't done anything wrong or right that means you've never been moral or amoral or immoral. You're as clean as can be to the Christ and that's why when you feel the love of God you think oh my gosh, this is so strong. God loves me so much that I've never been moral or amoral or immoral. I've, I'm always been the Christ. And the last one is release the beliefs that I can be left out. I think that's a common one for people when they think that they want to be included in a family in a relationship in a culture in a in a society. And what Jesus is teaching is that you made this world up using the ego belief system and you can unmake it. You believed in it and now you can withdraw your belief from it. And I can tell you as you withdraw your mind from the ego you become very happy, very lighthearted. You kind of go along in it's like a song. You're you're waking up in the morning and you're singing a song you're humming a song and you're humming it all day long. Because the song of Christ goes on and on and on. There is no break in the song of Christ. There is no end in the song of Christ. Now, before I talk a little bit about the movie itself, I thought I would, I would talk about some ideas that Jesus wants to teach us from a course in miracles. And for some of you have looked at the course, there is a section that comes in chapter 31, the last chapter of the text. And it's called self versus self concept. And basically in that section, he's teaching us that that you always have a choice between your true self, which is the Christ and the make believe self of the ego, which is he calls it the self concept. And today's movie is going to be a great teaching device for that because we're going to see a story of a priest who lived, who lived about a little bit over a century ago. And he's from Greece, Nectarius is his name. It's not a common name, but it sounds like a very Greek name. We have Nicholas. That's the closest. We can call him Nicholas if you can't, you can't remember it. I probably will call him Nicholas today too. I don't know. Nectarius. It's, you know, it sounds like from some other planet, but that's a Greek name. And Nectarius is a priest. And we're going to see a movie of him, his life starting off. We'll see him working with a parish in Cairo, Egypt. He's doing a mission from Greece over there in Egypt, and he's got a church and a bunch of followers that absolutely adore him because he's so humble. He's just so humble. He is just one of the most humble people you'll see in a movie. He's so humble that he's very still. He's very calm and very tranquil. And he goes along and as he will follow his events as he lives his life, we're going to see a lot of things that seem to come at him that for most people it would, it would make their blood boil. It would make most people hopping mad and angry. We're going to see that this beautiful, simple priest, very humble man, he's going to be slandered against. He's going to be falsely accused. There's going to be lies swirling around him and coming at him, not just for a couple weeks or months, but for years. The ego is going after this simple, humble priest and we're going to watch how he navigates because I know for most people, if you feel like people are speaking badly of you, if people are tarnishing your image, if people are telling lies about you, if people are covering up lies and talking behind your back, this is the kind of thing that drives most people crazy. Most people go crazy when people are lying and trying to deceive around them. But he's showing us that the deception that we feel, the reason we feel mad or hurt is because we have misidentified with our personality self. The Christ is not offended. The Christ is never offended. The Christ cannot be attacked. That's what Jesus proved. Try as you may ego. Sorry, you can't touch the Christ because the Christ is a perfect creation of God and you can't touch the Christ because the Christ is pure love. Love is invulnerable. Love is invincible. Love is unstoppable. It's so powerful. It comes from God and there's nothing that can prevail against the love of God. But what Jesus is teaching us in this final chapter, self-concept versus self, is I'm going to read a little bit of it for you because it's just so good. I mean every time I look at it, I just think, wow, that's the whole summary of everything. And the reason it's important is because the ego made up a self unlike the Christ. It's a personality self. It's a flesh self. It seems to make mistakes. It seems to have flaws. It's definitely not perfect. It can think of itself as good sometimes, but a lot of times it thinks of itself as bad or unworthy, shameful, guilty. It's an artificial self. It's a puppet. It's a puppet self that is not the reality. And when you believe in it, you will try to defend it. You will try to defend the body. You will try to defend it psychologically. If you have an image about yourself, you will attempt to defend that image and by defending it, you keep it. That's how you keep this false self. So Jesus is telling us in this section, self-concept versus self there in chapter 31, the learning of the world is built upon a concept of the self adjusted to the world's reality. Meaning the world is time and space. The world is physical and the concept of the self blends right in with time and space and the physical world. For this an image is that suits the world of shadows and illusions. Here it walks at home where what it sees is one with it. The building of a concept of the self is what the learning of the world is for. This is its purpose, that you come without a self and make one as you go along. So most of us can identify with that. We think we learn things. We learn things as a child, as an adolescent, as a teenager. When we go to university, if we go to university, we learn more things. We're polishing an image and we believe we have to do things to help this image survive as a body. And this preoccupation usually goes on for decades, all the way from birth until death. And he says, and by the time you reach maturity in quotes, you have protected, perfected it to meet the world on equal terms at one with its demands. The ego has this concept and it's a total false image, but it says work hard and make it grow, make it mature, make it self-sufficient, give it learning, give it protection, give it care and eventually it will die anyway. But the ego is like, well you have to do a lot of work just to keep it alive. And Jesus is telling us this image is not who we are. It actually was never born and it never dies. Those are just concepts that the ego invented. Spirit is never born. Spirit never dies. Spirit is eternal. And then he says, the concept of the self is made by you. He's talking about the ego part. It bears no likeness to yourself at all, your Christ self. It is an idol made to take the place of your reality as the Son of God. The concept of the self the world would teach is not the thing it appears to be, for it is made to serve two purposes, but one of which the mind can recognize. And then he talks about the first is the face of innocence and that's when you think, I'm a decent person, but some days I'm just mistreated. I am just some days unfairly treated in this world. It could be from a partner, it could be from a friend, a family member, it could be from your boss or a co-worker, it could be from your neighbor, it could be from someone in your extended family. But this top tier of the self concept is the face of innocence and Jesus says it's wet with tears at the injustices of the world, at the mistreatment of this world. And what Jesus is going to say is that if you believe that you ever were mistreated or ever could be mistreated, ever, you believe in an image that the ego made because the Christ self that you are is way beyond mistreatment. It's just pure beingness, it's pure light. That's being reborn in the light of Christ. And then the second part of the self concept is what we could call the unconscious. That's where the unconscious guilt is. And he says it's draped with sin. It's so dark. And yet for most people as you really start to study this, you realize this is what the human condition is. There's a false self concept called a personality self. And then there's a set of dark unconscious beliefs that's underneath. That's a ring of fear that's so dark that you had to make a puppet to look away from the darkness. Because to believe that you could separate from God is dark indeed. That's the darkest you can think of. That's the darkest thought, belief you could have. Now, he talks about the top tier, you know, it's angry sometimes, sometimes it has tears and so on and so forth. But basically the bottom tier is where the forgiveness occurs. So in our movie today, we're going to see this priest, he's just a sweet guy. He's just a sweet, humble, loving guy. And underneath all of us is this sense of darkness. And that's where these projections come in. This world is like a theater. It's a screen where the ego projects out people, places things. And it interprets injustice. It interprets mistreatment. It interprets they don't like me. It interprets all kinds of seemingly behaviors that seem to be real when you're asleep and dreaming. But as soon as you get back far enough and you start to clear away the guilt, you realize, oh my gosh, I was totally mistaken. I was never attacked even once. I just interpreted that I was mistreated. I interpreted that I was attacked and that was an ego interpretation. God did not create attack. God doesn't create mistreatment. God has nothing to do with injustice. God has nothing to do with grievances. These are all generated from the ego and the world acts them out. But Jesus says in the Course, you never hate your brother for his sins but only for your own. Only those unconscious beliefs where you believe that you separated from God or you believe in darkness, that's where the healing has to occur. The healing doesn't take place in the form. To think that a body can be sick is just as crazy as thinking a body can be well. They're both interpretations. And Jesus is saying, well, you're not a body at all so you can judge it positively or negatively. But you have to learn that your judgments are what is generating the fear and the guilt. And when you give up the judgments, then you're free. You're completely free to be as God created you. So as he goes on in this section, we go down a little bit further. He will basically say that these concepts of who you think you are are learned. They're not real. They don't exist. But one of them is true and while you believe in this self-concept, the role of the accuser will appear in many forms. So he's telling us, as long as you believe in the ego, the world's going to get you from time to time with an interpretation of being accused, unfairly accused. Of course, we not only have that belief, but we also have belief in lawyers in the legal system to judge who is right and who is wrong, who should be put in prison and who should be set free. You see, all of this, including the legal system and including our prison system, has nothing to do with God whatsoever. It's all a projection of the ego. God is just pure love. God is not judging anybody guilty and saying that they have to pay or have penance or be punished for what they've done. He's saying, if you come back deep enough into your mind to the light of Christ, you'll see that there is no condemnation. Like Jesus taught in the Bible with the women, they brought a woman and they said, we have caught her in the act of adultery. And he simply paused for a few seconds and then he drew with his finger on the ground a little bit and then he said that he who is without sin cast the first stone. Well, he was the Christ. He knew Christ was casting no stones at all. But they certainly dropped their stones when he said that because they all had this deep sense of being imperfect, unworthy, sinful. And he was just saying, don't go about judging someone else while you still are judging yourself because it's your own self judgment. That's the problem. It's not the behaviors of people. It's just self unworthiness, self criticism. So he's basically telling us that you have to go beyond this belief in being unfairly treated. I find that just extremely refreshing to think that in no instance was I ever mistreated or treated unfairly that it was always my faulty interpretation that generated that perspective, that perception. And when we perceive that people are not treating us right, then we have a grievance. You know, right away we want to back off from them, get away from them. How dare they think that? How dare they look at me that way? How dare they say that those things? But Jesus is telling us this is just a misperception. It's not something that you should deal with as a reality. So another part of the course I'll talk about today a lot is workbook lesson 135. And basically in that lesson he is teaching us about defenselessness. Jesus is using an entire workbook lesson to teach us the dynamics of what's going on in our mind. And he's always telling us that every time we get upset or offended it's that in our mind we've identified with the ego and the body and then we feel we have to protect that false identity. But he's basically teaching us you're just reacting as if you're being attacked when you're not being attacked. You're a child of God and you're not capable of being attacked because you're spirit. But if you believe in the ego you will respond as if you are actually being attacked when you have attack thoughts in your mind. You will perceive in form that you're being attacked. Now Tanya from Germany she brought up it's funny because Tanya and I were both hearing and reading the same scripture from Jesus from the Sermon on the Mount. If somebody bites you on one cheek turn the other cheek you know pray for your enemies and and I was already discussing this on Friday. I said from the horizontal perspective of the cross from the horizontal perspective you can perceive that you're unfairly treated and you can perceive that you're attacked because the horizontal perspective was invented by the ego. It's a trick past present future linear time linear cosmos. This is where the trick seems to play out. And then there's the vertical aspect of the cross which is your alignment with the Holy Spirit and God. And when you're lined up there you can't perceive attack. And people say well Jesus you know they they made him carry his across and then they they stuck nails in his arms and legs. That sure looks like attack and it's an interpretation of a body in the timeline of course. But what about that I am presence. What about that presence that knows it's incapable of being attacked that that knows that spirit is real. Jesus was simply a beautiful representation of of a mind that was lined up with the mind of God. The father and I are one and in this vertical perception with the Holy Spirit. All you experience is innocence. He experienced innocence with everything and everyone in the scene. Let's say the crucifixion scene. He knew that behind the Romans was pure love and light and innocence behind the Pharisees the Sadducees behind the Apostles behind even his mother mother Mary. Behind Mary Magdala was just pure love and light and he knew that everyone was that love and light because God created us as love and light. And from that perspective he didn't see anything going wrong. But Jesus is so good because what he does is he takes a word like crucifixion which most people think of a bloody mess across and nails and blood and vinegar being touched on his lips. Look at these crazy ideas. And Jesus says no crucifixion is when you're wrong minded. Crucifixion is when you're looking through the ego filter. Crucifixion is anytime you don't feel extremely happy. You're a little tired. You're trying to crucify yourself. You're a little worried. Anxious. Crucifixion. Crucifixion. He says you have reacted for many years as if you're being crucified. And anytime you're not happy in your mind, you're crucifying yourself by saying I'm not as God created me. I'm not happy like God created me. I'm sad, anxious, upset, jealous, envious, angry, rageful, fill in the blank. He's saying all those things I just mentioned are crucifixion because he's teaching us that crucifixion is in the mind. Crucifixion is not in the body. The body is just another neutral image that the ego made. And the body doesn't ever get crucified on the timeline. You know, that's part of the whole story. Oh, Jesus suffered and died on the cross. Oh, whoa, whoa, whoa. You know, Jesus did not suffer and Jesus didn't die either in spirit because he's a perfect child of God. He's still with us now. He'll be, he's with us no matter how long time seems to go on. He's still gently with us saying, my brother, please drop this crucifixion game and be happy. Please quit judging yourself. I told you, judge not. Please accept your pure innocence as spirit because you are spirit. Now, these are really high ideas. I know I'm going really deep with all these ideas, but I'm going to show you a movie today where this sweet priest is going to face all manner of what the world would call injustice. He's going to be lied about, lied about behind his back. He's going to have a swirl of lies following him wherever he goes. It's almost like a hornet's nest. You've got a big swarm of bees. Wherever you go, you think, I'll go across the Mediterranean, I'll go back to Greece. More attacked bees. And then I'll go to another place, more attacked bees. I'll go up to an island off the coast of Greece. No, there's more attacked bees. These attack thoughts are what we're to release from our mind because as long as we believe attack is possible, we believe in the ego. And as soon as we identify with the Christ, we are reborn again in the light of Christ. We realize that attack was never so. God didn't create it. Why would we think something that God didn't create could be so serious? That's a good question. Why would I take so serious attack when God, clearly a God of love would not create attack? God does not have attack thoughts. God has love thoughts. And who we are, the Christ is a love thought. It's not an attack thought. So, and occasionally I will pop in and I will make some commentary and I probably will be dipping into lesson 135. If I defend myself, I am attacked because it's the longest lesson in the entire book. It's the longest workbook lesson. And why would Jesus spend so much time on one lesson unless it must be really important. He must want us to really understand that if we identify with our mind and with our spirit, our divinity, then we realize that we never need to defend ourselves because who we are is beyond the need for defense. When Tanya was writing in, she was saying, I don't know, it seems like, you know, turn the other cheek for giving your enemies. You know, that just seems like that's giving a blessing to mistreatment. And Jesus is not giving a blessing to mistreatment because mistreatment is the ego and the ego belief system. He's saying, give a blessing to your spirit and be grateful that you're just dreaming a dream where you could have such insane thoughts and that you can release these thoughts and wake up from the dream. That's workbook lesson 23. I can escape from the world I see by giving up attack thoughts. It's very, very simple, but we need examples. And so, Nictarius, oh, I'm going to thank you in advance. Oh, Nictarius. Now, after this movie's over, you will see why he's known as Saint Nictarius because he had a very deep faith to keep going on and keep connecting with God and praying to God as a priest when the ego was coming up completely up from the unconscious. And he's going to, I think he's going to save us all maybe five, ten thousand years of struggle here because, hey, listen, if Nictarius can make it through this and we have the training of Jesus using it to show us that we can transcend this ego, then it's going to save all of us a lot of time. So sit back. Pretty intense movie. I think today, you know, we're all on a magic carpet ride together and keep your hands inside of the carpet. Do not let your fingers go out to try to interpret something from the world because you will not like this movie if you do not stay on the carpet with me. You have to stay on the carpet of joy today because if you get off, it's not going to be pretty. We're going to have to all fly down with our carpets and pick you up off the ground and get you back up on the carpet if you fall off. So stay inside the carpet today. Do not attempt to leave our carpet of innocence. All right. Everybody promise me that you stay inside the carpet. Okay, that's good. All right. I'll see you all soon.