 The problem is not out there. Sadness is just a form or a version of depression. And what Jesus has to say about depression is He says depression comes from a sense of being deprived of something you want and do not have. And then He says, remember, you are deprived of nothing except by your own decisions and decide otherwise. You know, it's like, wow, that makes it real simple. So depression or sadness comes from a sense of being deprived of something you want and do not have. So it's easy for the mind to make an association even with a place or a group of people or even a process that seems to be going on here. Even if you say, well, it's not so much the place or the people, but there's a vibe of openness and joy and clarity and whatever. And what the ego will do is it will take that feeling and it will project it out in terms of a specific form. So that's a little bit like one of the early questions we had about whenever there's a sense of... I think Kathy was talking about leaving this place or leaving a conference or we talked about that yesterday. There can be a sense, oh, I wish it could be always this easy. Why isn't it this easy elsewhere? There's associations that are made in the mind with various memories and various images. And we do it with people and places and even processes that we go through. So that's where the sense of loss or sadness can come in. It's in a sense that in some very, very subtle way there's been some kind of an ego association. And another way to look at that is too, like with prayer, for example, it's never the things in this world that bring us the experience. They're more the reflectors. Like we actually call upon in our consciousness and our awareness for a specific experience and we receive it. And then whatever seems to be going on in the script, it's tempting to associate that feeling and that experience with what's going on. It's very subtle. Like you might have a certain kind of feeling when you are just in this free flow and it seems to be coming out as only dancing. Just dancing and dancing and dancing. There's a movement with it, the body's involved with it. Maybe it involves the body in a particular location, like your bare feet on the grass or the bare feet on the sand. There's always some kind of a phenomenal association of images that go with the experience. But the phenomenal images never are the source or the cause of the experience. The experience is coming from within our consciousness and that's just the way that it looks. People have that experience sometimes with certain drugs that they ingest. They take ecstasy or LSD or some marijuana or something and all of a sudden they start to feel some kind of an expansion in their consciousness in some way. And it's quite easy to then associate the experience of that expansiveness with the ecstasy or the LSD or the marijuana. It's the same thing with around sexuality. It seems to involve bodies and body parts and positions and all kinds of things, touch and so forth and that seems to be part of the whole thing. But even in the movie What the Bleep Do We Know, I remember Ramtha talking in there about it's totally coming from inside and that all the decisions and all the choices are being made in consciousness and then even that is being reflected in terms of the body and the peptides and the neurotransmitters and everything that's going on even chemically in the body is not cause, it's effect of what's going on in consciousness. So the feeling of even thought like, well, leaving in two days, oh gosh, it can be like, wow, I'm just getting going here or I'm just at the beginning of a nice long swim and you're just taking your first strokes and it's like, get out of the pool. I was like, what? I'm just getting going here. I'm in a free stroke. I'm really getting my stride down here and you're saying get out of the pool. But it's more just starting to see everything is working together for good and everything is really a choice in consciousness and that's what all the mind training will do. That's the point of taking all these steps is to become so empowered to see that the power of decision is my own. That's actually a workbook lesson in A Course in Miracles, the power of decision is my own. I think it's like 152. And what it is, he says that everything that you experience in this world and really the whole cosmos, the whole universe is the result of your decision and he says you may feel that this is too all inclusive to be the truth. It just seems like you might tell that to a psychiatrist and the psychiatrist might write down on the tablet, delusions of grandeur. My every decision I make influences the whole universe. Delusions of grandeur. But it's actually true and Jesus says you may believe that this is too all encompassing to be the truth but then he goes on to say but truth has no exceptions so there are no exceptions to this magnitude, to this glory. You may have pushed it out of awareness and you may have unconscious beliefs that are telling you it's different than that but it doesn't change the truth of the power of the mind, of the magnitude. And so I think that's very, very common on the spiritual journey that when there's a sense of time and still a sense of leaving it's very common for a sense of loss or sadness to come up. There's a sense of we call it even sentimentality like sometimes we have such a great experience and then we associate it with a particular person or place and then when we go it's like oh so long I will remember you but it's very sentimental and I have to say that the holy instant in the present moment is not sentimental at all it's just glory, glory, glory there's no sentimental, nothing like the end of the Carol Burnett show everybody watch the Carol Burnett show I'm so glad we had this time together just to share a laugh and sing a song seems before we know it seems the time we have to say so long but see the holy instant never says so long it's just saying I'm here, I'm here I love you, I am you there's nothing else but us in this moment you know it's so happy and joyful because there are no goodbyes in the holy instant there are no transitions in the holy instant it's only linear time this belief in time that teaches us that we we have to greet and say hello we have to say goodbye I mean the Holy Spirit saying through the Beatles I don't know why you say goodbye I say hello, hello, hello I don't know why you say goodbye I say hello, hello, hello hello you know the Beatles are channeling the Holy Spirit it's that welcoming hello of the spirit that's what I was just saying the spirit's like saying I'm here hello it's always calling our attention back to the joy of the moment like I am with you I am with you always I can never leave you you are me and I am you we are one you know that's that presence and the whole spiritual journey is just getting more into that to really feel that experience and we're meeting with the facilitators and Christian was saying that the topic of time came up and Christian was saying that the first movie that was shown when he first came here to the monastery was that movie Next with who was it Nicholas Cage, yeah and it was all about he had a little two minute window on seeing the future and we got, it was a whole session on time and I think I had to actually leave at the end of it I think the whole thing just shut down and I went, oh, and gotta go after I had just spoken on time and undoing time and the part of undoing the sadness is undoing this association with linear time which is where all the comings and goings come on and all the sentimentality comes in that comes back full circle to it the first thing I mentioned about guidance you know, we're really getting away from the do's and the don'ts and the shoulds and the shouldns the typical things in families and even in religious paths where it's like this is the form this is the formula to reach God and you've gotta plug into the formula we're getting into this intuitive guidance even so much as, okay I'm to get up and leave the movie and just go up and I don't know what's next oh, dance and then dancing maybe you were whirling dervish in the past life and it's like oh yeah, get back into the dance you know, you see there's got to be that spontaneity and that permission really to follow guidance and that was also something I mentioned the very first day when we had the orientation that I said nothing is required here in form all these sessions are optional including the movie session and that if you feel something strongly comes in follow it and go with it because it's getting away from rituals and getting away from several forms of people pleasing and when you get a strong feeling to go with it and the joy that you feel by just following is glorious that's why with this whole sense of a spiritual pathway in the end you do have to leave the concept of a path behind what you studied, what you did and another part of the story as well you just want to be so into that spontaneous listen and follow and flow that there's nothing else the whole world disappears in that and that's exactly how the world will disappear only through that through listen to the small still voice within and follow and then the spirit will unify perceptions so perfectly that the world will then disappear because it has no longer any meaning or purpose there's all these parts of the Course that talks about the body and the purpose of the body and the Holy Spirit's use of the body and then at one point it was only one point in the Course Jesus just slips it in there in the text the body has no purpose He just throws one of them in there I was like, what? you put that in here after all the other references to communication device and all these things but you gotta figure he's gonna slip one of those in there slip a Mickey in there slip it in there I mean because if God didn't create the body and the body is an invention of the ego and there's no body in heaven then you better believe he's gonna slip one of those in there I'm like, what? and the ego's like, wow so that does take a full circle back to that guidance that's really what you're honing in with it's not from the negative perspective it would be like, wow what can I do about this sadness and really you're just saying I just want to just have full awareness that it's a decision in mind and that I can decide otherwise and I am empowered to decide otherwise that's really all that you're really asking and what I'm saying is yeah, it's like giving yourself full permission to go deep and it sounds like that's exactly where it was going reading cause and effect section on cause and effect that's like getting right to the root of it all thank you, Melody