 awakened mind here that literally has has transcended the ego entirely and so I mean that's what makes it such a powerful tool is that it's so clear that's also why there's such enormous resistance to working with it because the ego is very resistant to it because it's like it's so if you say it's a tool with a very sharp tool we're cutting away and dissolving the deceptions and at the bottom of it it's kind of like time would be like time and space are at the very bottom floor of the World Trade Center but those are things that when people wake up in the morning for their 6 30 meetings or get to get together to go to work whatever usually that the mind is not at a place where it's questioning linear time or it's questioning space you know usually it's it's off already on it's plan of action so to speak you know in pursuing so on so forth so what the course does is is it literally works it down from relationship issues to you know basically all the way down to the issue of of time and there is there hasn't been a lot of psychoanalysis or in any psychotherapy gestalt and there have been a number of them that have kind of talked about living in the present present moment but they haven't gone quite so deeply into how do you how do you live in the present how do you undo the belief in the time and space so what I want to do now I mean okay we've got the metaphysics down and that's what the idea is okay my life I don't believe that you can just talk about this stuff and read about it you've got to live it and my life has been literally a process of rate of going down and raising this stuff and really coming to the point where I've examined concepts and literally stepped out of it once I could see what they were then I could say well this is I'm not this I'm not this it's kind of like I'm not this you keep going I'm not this and to and literally start to move ourselves to a point where it's like you know stepping out just trusting that things will be provided and letting the spirit come through but what we want to do is if you have issues or you have things that are going on in your life is to try to come together let the spirit come amongst us to try to get some clarity on those because we have a metaphorical framework now we've got a basic kind of an agreement on some of the metaphysics but now we want to really try to to put it into application how do we live with the now how do we actually apply this so that we're not in this you know planning for the future worrying about the past how do we get into the depression well the concepts in other words when we have concepts of ourselves remember we said that there was a God substitute made or a substitute self made in place of the Christ and basically that's what the self concept is so the self concept of Jesus says that this is the purpose of the learning of the world that everyone comes here without a self and makes one as he goes along and that's kind of our experience in this world you know we learn things whether we think we learned from our parents or we learn them at school we learn we learn how to judge you know these are the good things in life these are the things that will make you secure and safe these are the bad things in life these are the things you need to avoid and basically that's all part of the ecosystem that the judgment that we learn in this world is to which things to pursue which things to avoid is still part of the defense system of trusting in the holy instant the spirit can do it so in this world mature judgment is someone who has learned the ways of the world very well and Jesus comes along and he says wait a minute what what what wisdom is is relinquishment of judgment and that can be unsettling when you've put your faith in your forte is is having come here and learned to be a good judge of the good things and the bad things to start to see oh my gosh my whole system of good things and bad things is still part of the ecosystems actually that good stuff is all on the outside within us it's kind of neutral isn't it there really isn't any any good or bad it's neutral and it's how we have applied it how we have judged it the thoughts we have judgment thoughts yeah and I'm not talking about actions no we're not necessarily I mean we're talking about look back to that hierarchy of illusions in other words you could you could be actions but it could be the weather good weather and bad weather okay you know like sunny or cloudy if any kind of of an evaluation in a positive or negative way literally denies that everything is equally illusory so so that's where it comes in and what the course is saying is it's like you've constructed a maze with promote your judgment she's got a maze of complexity going here and the Holy Spirit is your guide now he's going to guide you out of the maze the Holy Spirit Jesus says is evaluative in other words the Holy Spirit does judge but he is capable of judging truly because he can see the past the present the future think of think of when you're trying to judge in the maze do we have cognition of the past the future we know the the results of every decision that we make how it will affect everyone else the course is saying not that we shouldn't judge do you think you can't you aren't capable of accurately judging that's why you need the Holy Spirit and so in that sense the Holy Spirit is judgmental so it's like an amazing you know you can only go left or right at every point that we have all these seeming decisions to make and that the Holy Spirit is in there guiding us go left go right go he knows he knows the way out of the maze someone who's evil is affecting you affecting your but that's what that's a good thing to go into I've been working I could tell you a story about a year ago I went into business with this man 24 years old has the ability to make hundreds of thousands of dollars per year he is in my eyes evil he has the ability has power I've been reading this but Charles film on I believe that he has power in his voice he can walk into a room and just steal your blind you don't even know it got into business with this guy with all these big expectations I'm gonna you know I'm gonna make millions right and come to find out this guy is the biggest crook I've ever met in my life he's got me all upset what's going on right now is he wants to sue me I you know I feel my heart I did not throw he's the one that wrong he's the one that wrong me it's it's crazy and now you've picked up the Course in Miracles boy you like it is that I mean what we're getting and what I'm hearing too is that you're feeling the tension you're feeling the fear you're feeling the frustration the anger and everything and what the course literally helps us do is Jesus comes right out and says you have no idea of this extent of the hatred that's in your own mind and it literally this is a course in unveiling the extent what happens with that is that like we were saying before with this intolerable split in the mind this intolerable hatred is that that it does that's the way that the ego deals with it it wants to protect me that's this whole idea of evil out in the world or a devil or a force is something that's sure that we've all had considered at one point and Jesus addresses the devil he calls it the devil in the course and he says that the that the devil is is a seems to be very active very powerful and very destructive and that literally he turns around and says that that is the ego that is the belief in your own mind kind of like Gandhi's thing about you know they asked Gandhi about the devil one time and he said well the only devils that are running around or they're running around in our own hearts you know and but it sure seems I mean it can seem once the project in this projection it can seem like there are evil forces and everything around us but now you've picked up a book that's going to be telling you and literally teaching you systematically it's already released me like I say within eight lessons because literally paralyzed situation I'm in right now is that is a place that I don't particularly care for but I've come to it I go to it I should say with the idea of learning and this place that I'm working in a factory setting is is the I don't know you want to call it the universal mind's way or the higher consciousness or God's way of saying mark this is this is what you believe about yourself and the only to learn about who you are is to experience it right out in front of you and that's what I had thought about about your experience that sometimes the things we don't like about ourselves we thought I had was if you didn't if you thought that the situation you were in well you wouldn't be sitting here for one thing you you would you would think that that particular person was it and you wouldn't be seeing the discrepancy one time we're shown the very things that we need to learn about ourselves right in her very experience and I was thinking I said wow how great that is that you know that I am I'm aware of that you know that I'm aware that that this is this is who I perceive myself to be and I'm getting the opportunity to learn more about myself so I can go beyond that it's to we talk about this idea that our brothers are mirrors for us these unconscious things we that's why the course is that it's such a strong path of using relationships to flush or flush this stuff up because it's unconscious and people a lot of times will say well wait a minute now I can see that mirroring thing to a certain point but I've got you know they'll say I've got witnesses and witnesses and examples that it only goes so far they'll say like for example you know I know a person who's very sloppy and lazy and I am not sloppy and lazy I don't care what the course says you know but what the course is saying it goes it's not a being at the behavioral level in other words it's not a mirroring it takes place but it's a mirroring it goes back to our beliefs in other words if we do judge somebody as being sloppy or lazy or whatever that there is a box that we have a sloppy and lazy box and we have a certain group of behaviors that we put together in there and we read it onto the screen and we go off there you know and what Jesus is kind of saying is you've got to go back into your mind and kind of look at these boxes that you've constructed and we've got lots of boxes I mean that's what the ego system is it's judgments and categories and boxes you know it goes male female and in business there's a lot of boxes too you know because the ego is so tight in on appearances the more you go into the course the more it's like that to let go of relying so much on our physical senses on what we see and hear and to start to trust this intuitive voice because we were fooled and deceived by what our eyes see and what these ears hear but it's fun to be on a path that's starting to say oh thank you now I'm gonna let go of some of my judgments and start listening and opening to my intuition that's our that's literally our safety and our joy and our happiness it's great that you can just be like it seems like it's all coming right up there right now I'm not that kind of situation but I have a person in my life that's going through these kind of reactions and I'm listening to him and I think why can't you see what's really going on you know and I really tried to explain to him what's really going on and then all of a sudden I got caught up in and I was reading instead of seeing him up you know through love instead of differently you know just seeing that he's a son of God like I am a son of God and I love that term it's just so nice because if he was all the same if I forget I scared my and then I was doing the same thing and it took a couple days for some of the things I learned to catch up and I was acting out of fear you see I couldn't change him it's also I said I want to change and why couldn't he see what he was doing because he was seeing all this bad and I'm trying to hang in you're missing the point you know we don't judge because what we see you know it's not real and I'm on it didn't work we had a question last night we did a gathering north here in Lansing and the question came up like you were saying about getting frustrated starting to see things more clearly and yet the frustration of like can't say to another person can't you see this so and Jesus talks about that in the beginning of the text where he basically says that you've so much in the past you have so much suppressed and denied the ego system that in a sense it was like well someone says going through their stuff but that's the way everyone is you know it's kind of like it's so denied that it hasn't been raised to awareness but once you start to raise the ego to awareness that then and the stuff starts getting flushed up then the tendency is to want to project there's a strong tendency to want to project because even though now it's being unveiled and you're seeing it the mind is still very strongly invested in it and that's where the guilt comes in in other words the transcendence will eventually come where we're able to