 But what people will do will take an idea like I'm responsible, you know, one of those kind of ideas, and then, oh my gosh, I just went to my doctor today and he told me I've got cancer or I've got this or that or that or even more like I've got a flu, you know, I should be able to do better than this, you know. What happens is, is still an identity confusion. In other words, to say I'm responsible and then to put that with, oh, look I've got cancer, is to try to combine two different levels. Remember, we're responsible for the way we look at things. And then you bring it down to, and I have cancer, there's an eye confusion there. If you get fancy with the course and you say, well, sickness is just projection of guilt onto the body, you know, you learn it in here, you go to the lectures and everything, and you take something like that too, oh my gosh, what am I doing to myself? You see, there's a level confusion there. It's Christ projecting sickness on himself, but that's my body. There's a real strong identification of the mind with this is me. And that's the whole thing that the Course is gently trying to guide us to see that it's slowly guiding us away from this body identification. You know, to a point of seeing that we're in mind, when we can really get clear on what the ego is and we can pull our mind from it. In other words, take the juice away from it, take the power, then we will choose peace at that point. But as long as we think the ego offers us something, and we still buy into it, then it's like our minds are not willing to choose the peace. Or we want to make exceptions. We want to say that our order of difficulty is a miracle. This one right here is more difficult than that one. And basically we just want to hold on to exceptions in our mind. What you're saying is what we did. Because it has to change on the outside. If the cause is the bend, then it has to change out here if the cause changes. If it's not changing out here, if it's not manifesting itself out here, then it hasn't changed in here. Yeah, a good one to look at would be like Lesson 23 though, where we'll just go to that one. Because Jesus has some real powerful lines about the world and not trying to change the world or fix the world. And basically this really gets at what we're talking about. We were just talking about the idea that what we see within is what we see without. And if you look at kind of the middle of the first paragraph, he says, Every thought you have makes up some segment of the world you see. It is with your thoughts then that we must work if your perception of the world is to be changed. If the cause of the world you see is attack thoughts, you must learn that it is these thoughts which you do not want. Okay, these attack thoughts would be analogous to these backward thoughts that we're talking about. That the cause is outside of my mind. They're ego based thoughts. There is no point in lamenting the world. There is no point in trying to change the world. It is incapable of change because it is merely an effect. Now those are pretty big sentences. A lot of times people will say, Well, those are pretty strong sentences. No point in lamenting the world. No point in trying to change the world. An effect is kind of like if we go back to our analogy of the movie screen. I like that one because in a sense if you go to a movie and you've got this projector and you've got this film going through with dark images on it. The light goes through the dark images and then comes out and you see all these shadows dancing on the screen. Basically Jesus is saying that whenever we try to change things in the world or to look to the world for things to change, it's like there being a problem. You ever go to one of those films where there is a glitch in the film? It would be like going up to the front screen instead of going back to talk to the manager about the projection. It would be like going up to the screen and banging on the screen and saying, Come on, get this thing out of here. We can start to see that that would be silly to do that. And literally it's that film that's going through the projector. Except when you change the film, it's not up there either. In the ultimate sense it would be like once you were able to overlook those dark thoughts that the world would kind of light up, so to speak. And the Course even talks about light episodes. You'll have light episodes and kind of get some metaphors for that. That definitely that's what will happen when we let go of these attack thoughts that our perception will literally light up. Now that's not to say that what's going on out there. In other words, when Jesus accepted the Atonement, it didn't seem like the world exactly changed a whole lot in the sense that there still were Jews fighting in the Roman Empire and so on and so forth. The world seems to still be kind of a mess. But what Jesus is saying is that's just twisted perception. When you see war and conflict and fighting, it's your own lens that you're looking through that's twisted, it's not anything out there in other self. I think that the world, no matter what your perception is, is always going to be screwed up. Because it's like our BCR. If you don't like a certain scene, you can fast forward to it. But then after a while, another scene you don't like will come up again. And like we have this thing in this world, if it's not one thing, it's another. And it's going to be another and come up. You can take care of a problem and maybe not have that particular problem again, but then you'll have another problem come up again. But you can even make this world a pleasant place to live in to a certain extent. But in the final analysis, you're going to have to look at all those problems and say, who cares? Because that's the way Jesus did it. He said, in the world you will have tribulation, but be a good cheer, for I will overcome the world. And you've got to rise above it and not even see the problems. As problems, it's sort of like who cares? It's a real healing to be able to rise above them like that. That's what I meant and mainly is that it's not so much to heal the world. It's to heal yourself. And once you heal yourself, well, the world doesn't matter anymore. I mean the problems in the world doesn't matter anymore. Because you won't even see them. That got me going. Initially, I talked earlier before we started about not being able to reconcile what I was seeing with these eyes with God. I was hearing and I had a feeling of God. I kept hearing God was all-knowing and all-loving and all-powerful. And that all seemed pretty to resonate. Like, yeah, yeah, yeah, that sounds right. That sounds true. And then I got these eyes and ears. It's like watching the nightly news or whatever. And that's what the great thing about the Course is. When you say don't care, it's literally saying that's the good news. That the world as you perceive it through the distorted lens is not reconcilable with God. I mean, trying to fit them together was always like, I gotta find a way to put these together. And philosophy has tried it and science and all the different ways of trying to reconcile how this happened. And what the Course is saying is Jesus is saying, God did not create sickness, God did not create war, God did not create these things. But when you're looking through a twisted lens, you see it outside you because your own perception is twisted. So you can see how this is really getting us to the healing because if I can see that the split is in my own mind, then I can see that the correction is in my mind because I can see where the split is. Male-female issues, if we could come back here, probably do an all week seminar on male-female issues because there's all this stuff about equality and everything, but it's all being projected onto foreign things. Quotas and this and that, and I've seen shows on TV where they've had male bashing and then blaming it on the society, the paternal society and on this. You see how it's still in subtle ways, it's still like, it's the problem of inequality is it's in the world. It's not the split in my mind. There you go, just projected out of body and then I use the analogy like teachers, did you ever have teachers in high school that used overhead projectors? Does anybody remember those where they had an overhead projector and then they had these little overlays? It's kind of like this beautiful pure white light on the screen, and then they bring the overlay and then we can imagine drawing a body line so there's an overlay with the body. So now we've got form. And then the ego says, well let's overlay male or female and let's put some skin color in there, black or white, there's something, another difference we can really make and take advantage of and then we'll put age in there, ages. And you look at all the problems of ageism, sexism, racism, it really seems like those are big problems in the world. You hear it on nightly news all the time about the ageism and sexism and racism and here comes the chorus saying, ageism is in your mind. Sexism is in your mind. Racism is in your mind. The ego believes it's in your mind. It is the physical mind. Because a girl from my world, let's see who lives in Montana now, we were talking about if we're an idea or a thought of God and we're created in God's image and like this, so therefore if ideas truly do not lead their source, therefore if God is, therefore we are. Then we say God is good, we are good. But to have good, then there must be bad. So therefore God is, we is. So if I is you is, they is, he is, she is, we is, so we're isn't. So if we got into the isn't of it, then we simply is. I is, God is, God is, and it stops there. It's like I am, I am not good, I am not a mother, I'm not a father, I'm not black, I'm not male, I am. So you can see where it really is an unlearning or a subtraction process, which that's not the way I proceeded. I proceeded, I had to go to X amount of seminars, read X amount of books, and then someday, if I was lucky, in the future, you know I would finally arrive at it and here comes the chorus saying, well, it's the subtraction thing. You're it right now, you is right now. But it's the other thing, you know, laid on. And that's why when we come together, it's really valuable to start to look at these constructs in our minds that we kind of believe that we are, that they're just beliefs. All those overlays on the overhead projection. And it keeps diminishing the light, we think. Yeah. And so that's what we look at. Can you talk about the role of, how you see meditation, kind of, you know, especially not always, do you always recognize that? Mm-hmm. Yeah. It might help some of these women who have problems trying to figure out how to get their thoughts straight before the reality gets straight. Mm-hmm. Yeah, there's lots and lots of, I kind of call it mind training exercises in the course. In other words, if you do take the course and you do just go along and try to understand the text to some extent so you have the workbook has meaning. But as you go along, you'll have literally guided meditations in here and also just basically instruments and exercises that are basically designed to sink down beneath the thoughts. And I feel like that's a really important point of the course. In other words, that this is a course in transforming your mind and it's not a course in just memorizing the book or, you know, going around and being able to talk about the course, but literally the practice of meditation we're sinking down beneath them is very, very important. It's like the rest of the book for me helps me start to just be aware of these backward thoughts and about some of the concepts and ideas that I have. But really, it comes down to mind watching, I call it, where it's a constant job.