 I can finally let go I am free, free I can let my true self show I am free Isn't all this time It's been here inside I can finally let go I am free Yeah, I think it starts for me back in university I was at university for ten years undergraduate and graduate and then during the middle of that as I began getting ready for graduate school I started to get more into psychology and new age books and self-help books and begin to open my mind towards healing and opening towards truth or ultimate reality and then the last few years was spending a lot of time in the psychology, philosophy, religion section of the library delving into deeper questions becoming more spontaneous so that I could just formulate a question in my mind and then pop open a book in the library and start getting answers in very synchronistic ways and it was kind of amazed at how that all worked instead of just grinding everything out from covers to covers it was more being more selective in my questions and then popping books open and getting answers so by the time I got off the wheel of academia and I didn't know what I was stepping onto what was my next wheel that was the summer when A Course in Miracles came into my life and it was out at the Humanistic Psychology Conference in San Diego, California and I didn't go there to find A Course in Miracles I think the course came to me then and I canceled a lot of the workshops when I was meeting with a couple students of Tara Singh and watching a videotape, a DVD that had been done and the teacher Tara Singh was on the DVD and was speaking a lot of ideas that I had pondered myself and were in my mind but I had never spoken them to anyone so it was a very profound experience and then I bought The Course in Miracles at that point and felt this feeling that my whole life would be changed forever that I would be doing things and experiencing things that I had never done before in my life and the course seemed like an answer to a prayer like if I had an unspoken prayer or the fastest way to clear my mind of all judgment that that was like the unspoken prayer and then when The Course came into my life it was like an answer to that prayer and so I felt like, well this is it, it's in English it uses the education that I had psychology and education and Christian terms and I was raised in the Christian faith as a Protestant so it was really in my language that I felt like I had no excuses I could just go for it at that point really go for it Yeah, it's a book of over 1200 pages that's a very practical tool for spiritual awakening it has, as I said, terminology that uses, pulls from three main disciplines which is Christianity and psychology and education it's written with very contemporary words and it's from a source that is beyond time leading the mind to a point a leaping off point to you might say leap back into the present moment and then follow that gateway into the eternity which is really what spirituality is about finding God or finding the divine within the mind and so it's got three books basically the text gives you the theoretical foundation and then the workbook is your practical application your laboratory for putting all the principles into practice in your daily life and experience and then there's a manual for teachers for those that feel guided to teach this course as part of a calling like a function as a teacher of God or a miracle worker or a minister of God and those are all just symbols it's not like you get certified and of course in miracles some people do have certification programs but it's actually a book that helps put you in touch with your inner guide or the Holy Spirit or the higher self and that's what it did for me it helped me make that connection I think when I first picked the book up I felt like I was called into a function and I didn't know how that would unfold and so I just was there was a preparation phase that came first and the spirit is very practical I was asked to go back to the relationship that I was in in Cincinnati, go back I had student loans that had to get paid off I was guided to a job and a series of jobs which helped kind of whittle away at the pride of thinking I knew something about anything after ten years of education that's a problem of thinking you know something that was a whittling away then I was guided to a conference that was being held in Cincinnati at a retirement community and I went there and it was a student of Tara Sings that was leading it and then I met and there was like another phase of starting to let the Holy Spirit speak through me whereas the beginning it was opening to listen to the voice speaking to me and then phase two was allowing the spirit to speak through me so that was an important phase as well and I did have a job where I was teaching psychology in an art institute and I was asked by the spirit then to let the Holy Spirit teach the class through me four hour classes no syllabus or we had a syllabus but no lesson plans so every day I would have to go in and spontaneously for four hours let the spirit give me as many techniques that I still use today in teaching but that was the primer that was the preparation for my function of traveling around the country and the world and teaching a Course in Miracle traditions you hear about guidance and prophets receiving guidance and letting a voice speak through them even in the ancient days the Old Testament of the Bible they were like a voice in the wilderness in Israel and Isaiah and some of these prophets so this has been going on for a long time in many different cultures and traditions and it's just the spirit the light of wisdom and understanding that's beyond this perceptual world that's using the words of this world and the languages of this world to reach the mind that's asleep and dreaming that has forgotten the light of heaven and so it's it's using all these symbols and tools and words and images to help the mind go back and to wake up from the dream and how to listen to it you have to be ready and willing sometimes even if you're willing and many people I meet say I'm very willing I really want to hear this voice but I'm not hearing it and you might say it takes a certain level because the ego is very terrified of this voice the ego is against this voice you might say because by listening to this voice it will undo the ego and the ego one of its main traits for Tennessee is survival and it wants to exist even though it doesn't really have existence it wants to seem to exist so it avoids hearing this voice and tries to use many different tricks and techniques to not hear this small still voice that's there really for everyone to wake up well distractions of the world or you might say in A Course in Miracles it says that the ego always speaks first so it wants to kind of get in there first and round out the small still voice which is loud clamoring and sometimes you hear people talk about this chatter or this judgment that's always going on in their mind or like a radio station it has static and it's just called the Holy Spirit in A Course in Miracles in other traditions it goes by many different names yeah I think there could be some practical steps I mean it varies the curriculum is highly individualized but for some or different techniques that help clear away the blocks because as long as you have blocks and resist so when you hear that from the Course then it reminds me of a gathering we did here last night where one of the questions during the breaks was before I leave tell me can you give me a quick summary of how I get in touch with this Holy Spirit and how do I listen to it and I said well initially when I couldn't hear the voice I would get intuitions, feelings like a little feather tickling in my heart that let me know this is the way to go, this is the right path I just took the parameters off of my mind and I just said well all right I'm not hearing the voice consistently and clearly so I'll just listen to it in a restaurant or music coming in into an elevator or music coming on the radio it's just taking the parameters off and saying it can be very frustrating if you put all the pressure on I've got to hear the voice and you're not hearing a voice then it just shuts you off and closes you down that was one of the main things I did was I just opened up and I had a friend who would take me we would go out to eat we would have heart to heart talks and right in the middle of the heart to heart talk and the speaker right above us in the restaurant and the very time he would do that he would say listen and the song would be singing to us directly of what we were speaking of and it was friends like that that were very helpful to pay attention to where yeah it's error you might say that one sense we could say is the belief in separation from God and so it's not only a belief but it's a belief system and a thought system that is closed that it's basically separation and anger and hatred and death and it certainly doesn't mean the mind well it's basically a death wish Freud had called Thanatos in psychological terms a death wish and that's what the ego is so there's nothing helpful about it a wish for death or murder you know doesn't really have anything good about it and therefore it needs to you might say the spirit uses what the ego made and hate the spirit uses to retranslate the world retranslate the symbols and the images into something that's helpful that's just a phase the joy that I experience is of course that it's not real and therefore you can never really understand the ego because it's insanity so you kind of you can't change the tricks and then to see that the ego and its tricks and its world none of them are real and that's when you experience the peace and happiness and joy the phase one is exposing so when we went out to the cafe yesterday you were saying it to be authentic to give your mind permission to feel everything feel all the feelings not discriminate, not repress, not deny it's almost like there's something that's buried and the reason it's buried is because it's been kept down it's been kept hidden so the first step is to open the doors so to speak of your mind and let it come up and sometimes this doesn't look or feel pretty so that's part of so now you're opening the wound and saying let the light let the air come in to heal the wound let the error come to the surface and then you reach a phase I call it the happy dream or becoming a happy learner where you realize that the lesson is always happiness to feel the joy and the peace and the love and the happiness that's the reason for for anger or fear or pain or upset of any kind that nothing upsetting has any kind of reason or justification because all is perfect and all is love so the phase that's then when you get into forgiveness which is not first finding errors and then figuring out how to overlook them it's really getting into an awareness that there is no error that you overlooked the error how do you do that? well you have to do it with the spirit there's not a human being that can overlook that because the human construct is part of the error so that's why you have to join with the spirit and with that willingness to clear the filter at eliminating or clearing the mirror of the mind and when you clear the filter then you don't see the error anymore because the error was in the filter and so it's not a matter of fixing people or changing the world it's just a matter of cleaning your own mind clearing the filter and then once the error is cleaned then just the blazing light reflects and you see the light and love all around you because that's all that's left that's all there is well you might say that the experience that the world is transitory or temporary and therefore from the standard of eternity it is unreal and an illusion you might say that's the final realization and so really it doesn't help you to use affirmations or platitudes or phrases like that when your mind believes something to the contrary it would be like having a cake and putting lots of sweet sugar flowers and a sweet icing on top and saying all is love, all is love but there's a cake of mud underneath and when you slice through the cake and all the sweet icing is just dark mud and dirt you have to clear that away so it's much more practical and authentic and when people come to me and say David I know the world's illusion but I'll say no you've got it backwards there it's more practical to start out I think the world is real but I'm willing to be shown I'm willing to have an experience that shows me otherwise otherwise it's just another ego trick I know the world's real but it's still in the blank it's just a denial statement because the but contradicts you don't need a but if you know the world's unreal then that's a glorious state of mind you know love is real but the but gives it away it shows there's a contradiction in there well to the world sin is real and mistakes are real and the world's real has been created and discovered and then through some kind of hocus pocus of mind or great blessing from a mystic or a saint or from God or from Jesus it's supposed to absolve you very much like going to a confessional in the catholic church and confessing your sins But you forgive your brother, you forgive your sister for what they have not done. And so instead of making errors real and saying you've done this terrible behavior, you've done this action, you've done this terrible thing, now we're going to work together to try to find healing, it sees that it was a misperception. So a misperception means that you've completely misperceived what seemed to occur, and it was all in your own mind, and that you're simply releasing a misperception from your own mind. And so therefore forgiveness is always a gift to yourself because you're freeing your mind of misperceptions, whereas in the world forgiveness seems to be personal. It may involve apologies, when you can go back to the movie Love Story, which is a famous line from the movie Love Story, love is never having to say you're sorry. This is more in alignment with true forgiveness because apologies admit that there's been an error done wrong to somebody, and it's almost like saying I'm sorry, sorry for what I did, true forgiveness goes in and you realize you were completely mistaken about the offense about what you were perceiving, and thereby you release that perception and you free everyone, of course you free your mind from the misperception. So it really requires that you realize that there are no problems apart from the mind, which is a key idea in A Course in Miracles, because you can't really forgive a problem that you believe is in form, because you've already put it out there, so to speak, you've put it outside of your mind. Yeah, it's really that the physicality, all those interactions between bodies, in truth, in reality, in eternity, have not occurred. And one way you could look at this is the belief, first of all, in linear time, that all those bodies acting out on a stage, it's a very linear stage, you know, it's a three-dimensional stage where there's actions and reactions, there's people talking and doing things and other people reacting and responding, even like an interview where you have an interviewer and interviewee, you know, that's all in the stage of time, and the teachings are as the time itself is an illusion. So that's why when you really forgive from the deepest perspective, you would say, first you come to an awareness that the time is simultaneous instead of linear. If it's all happening at the same time, that's a very different perception than strife, the whole cosmos, all of history is concluded. It was over the instant it started. That again is mind-boggling, mind-blowing, and it just shows you how deep it goes. But it does give you a little bit of a context so that when you're perceiving that somebody has mistreated you or harmed you, or even that things have occurred in the world on a big scale, you know, like the Holocaust or Genocides and so on and so forth, that you have a context for true forgiveness, which is, okay, I need to learn to forgive the belief in time, and that it takes time to wake up to God. It takes time to heal, you know. Those are still beliefs, a journey without distance, yeah, yeah. It's deep, it's really deep. You could say that it doesn't break the world apart and say that some are projections and some are extensions. It's saying that the very process of image making, of seeming to perceive images is part of the projection, just like if you went to a movie theater and you, you know, had this bright light in the projector and you put the film in on the roll and you started running the film, that those images would be projected onto the entire screen. And so in psychological terms, you know, those of people who have studied psychology and talk about projection as more of a dynamic of trying to get rid of something, to see something in another person, instead of recognizing it in yourself. It seems very interpersonal, like it's just some kind of psychological interpersonal dynamic, like denial or repression, projection. The Course is saying, no, your entire cosmos, the planets, the stars, everything that you see, the sun, the moon, the people, the mountains, the trees, the lakes, the ants, the animals, the people, everything is a projection. And you're trying to see outside what you've denied within. So I always say, if you spot it, you got it. It doesn't matter what it is, you see a lazy neighbor, you see an arrogant politician, you see an angry general or a war monger or something, you know, and you say, that's terrible. But it starts with a belief, and a belief system in the mind, and then you perceive in the world what you believe. So projection makes perception. The very way that the world seems to arise in awareness is coming by projection. And that's why you have to, in the end, heal or clear away all of those ego thoughts and beliefs before you can see a purified projection or a happy dream or what the Course calls the real world. The same world that Jesus saw when he was on the cross and seemingly through his mind could speak the words, forgive them for they know not what they do seemed unbelievable, that someone could say that when there's spikes going into their arms and legs. But with this healed perception, of course, it's just about love and forgiveness. Well, the Course says God takes the final step, and once the world gets so bright and so happy and so reflecting love that you might say that then you're ready for the disappearance of the universe. And that's the disappearance of perception. And what comes with the disappearance of perception is the mind is returned to creation, which is pure abstraction, pure abstract love and light. So when there's no more film, no more guilt, no more world, then all is universal love and light.