 we have a lot of friends from around the world or with us in Spain and Mexico all over the place. So welcome. My name is Peter and I'm going to be the host today. If you're joining us new I can just let you know how the day is going to flow. So we're going to start with a movie with David and then afterwards we'll have a 10 minute break. Then we'll have some breakout rooms where you can share your experiences with the movie or anything that came up for you. And then we'll have a 45 minute break and then there'll be a closing session with me. And so I'm going to pass it over to you now David. Okay thank you Pete. Welcome everyone. So grateful to have you all here. I just love coming on the gallery view and seeing all your smiling faces. Yeah we've got Piles of Group. We've got our Tabula Rasa Mystery School there all piled in. The Miracles Monastery. I see a whole gang down there. Andrea, Marci, Neda, Angie, Wesley all piled in there. And we've got people from around the world. It looks like, Toa, is that how you pronounce your name from Finland? Yeah from Finland's joining us today. We have another new friend from the United States joining in. So we are thrilled to all be coming together for the same purpose and that's just to open our hearts up, to feel the love, to feel the joy and feel the connection that we all share and that we share with God. And so after like I mentioned last week, after three pretty heavy movies, Violet and Needle and Time Stack and then last week, the week before, Mary Magdalene. It is pretty pretty dramatic and pretty heavy. So Jesus has come in now again today with a comedy. Jesus will never go too long with heavy movies. He will bring in comedies and relationship movies. And last week, we were treated, Bill Murray at his best. We were all laughing our way back into the kingdom of heaven. And today, again, Jesus says, oh yes, we're rolling on with the comedies again today. This is not only a comedy, but it's a relationship movie. We love love stories. We love to wake up to heaven with love stories. Our hearts swirl when we experience love stories, especially those that start off with some grievances and start off with friction and start off with difficulties. You know, for those of you who fall, of course, Angie and Wesley are with us and they know how that goes. It's you got to work through the darkness to come to the light. You got to go through the shadows to come into the love. And these two today in this movie, the movie is titled Just Like Heaven. It's Dreamworks. So this is anything that's Dreamworks has Steven Spielberg behind it. So I think every Dreamworks movie I've ever seen in my entire life is just amazingly done with amazingly, amazing stories and and a script, a plot, great acting, great special effects, great everything. So you're going to see a treat because this is Steven Spielberg at work with a very good movie today. So every week, we just put out our movie poll and we ask you to vote on the themes that you feel are most important in your life because we like to keep the movies very relevant and very practical to where you're at, what you're going through. So this week, we have the top three vote getters we're committing to God's will, which is perfect happiness. That was the top vote getter. And when people think about God's will, you know, most of us have been raised with hearing a lot of things about God's will. And most of them relate to specific things in the world. That's why there's so much reaction to religion, so much reaction to theology, so much reaction to our parents and to our cultures, because nobody seems to be able to agree on planet Earth what God's will is. I mean, I've even heard people say when one country invades another country, some people say that's God's will. And I'm like, that doesn't really resonate. I've heard some strange things attributed to God's will. But in A Course in Miracles, Jesus says God's will for you is perfect happiness. He doesn't say kind of happy. He doesn't say predominantly happy. He says perfect happiness. But if you read the fine print in A Course in Miracles, Jesus also says that a child of God is only happy in his natural environment. And he goes on to say that our natural environment is heaven. So this perfect happiness God's will is the state of heaven. It's the state of being one with God and one with everyone and everything. And it's pure light and pure love. It's very abstract. It's what creation is. Creation doesn't have anything to do with form or planets. Nothing to do with stars. Nothing to do with quasars or black holes. No light is abstract. And so perfect happiness is our natural environment. And the implication is while we perceive ourselves on planet Earth, we do not experience perfect happiness because perception itself is a veil to cover over the light of who we are. So perception by definition is a block to the awareness of the light. That's right. Even the flowers and the pretty colors and the birds and the bees and all the things in the world that we judge as beautiful and the things that we judge as ugly are all part of a fragmented perception that was made by the ego. It was invented by the ego to block the light, to veil the truth. So it's important to remember when the number one vote-getter is committing to God's will. But we have to remember that God's will is for perfect happiness. God is not taking sides. God is not believing there's some outcomes and perception that are better than others. He's basically saying until you forgive the world and see the world with the Holy Spirit's perception or with Jesus' perception, then it's best to just conclude that you don't know anything and you're willing to be shown. That's the best way to wake up every day. Your eyes open in the morning in bed, you look at the ceiling, you go, I'm clueless. Show me. I need help. Show me. I need to see beyond what I'm perceiving right now. And God will answer. The second theme was relying only on the miracle for solutions. So that means that instead of relying on past learning, instead of relying on past problem-solving formulas on all kinds of tricks and different kind of methodologies, Jesus is saying that only the miracle, looking for miracle solutions is the way that you will become miracle-minded, consistently miracle-minded, consistently right-minded, and then finally you will go beyond right-minded and wrong-minded. You will transcend and merge with the light, which is where the happiness is. But the goal is to become more consistently miracle-minded as you approach the light. That's how you approach the light. If you don't have lots of miracles in your life, I mean daily miracles, consistent miracles, then you will be too fearful of the light. You will perceive the light as threatening. But when you follow the spirit and you open up to miracles and you have a very consistent experience of miracles in your life, then that means your resistance to the light is going down. And you're about ready to say, okay, God, I was completely wrong. Show me the truth. And then the truth sets everyone free. But you have to ask for it. You have to pray for it. Okay, the third one is with 62 votes is give up striving for perfection in form. That's where we have in psychology. I see Hermes with us. We have psychotherapists here. We have all kinds of beautiful beings joining us today. But in psychotherapy, we might call this perfectionism when somebody comes and they have to have everything just perfect in form. And they believe that they need that to be in control or be happy or be peaceful. It's a very difficult lesson because there is no such thing as a perfect form. You might say the best form would be forgiveness would just be seeing the falsity of form. In the beyond idol section of the text, Jesus says one sentence, he says God knows not form. Wow. That's a pretty powerful sentence because that fits in with the entire metaphysics of a course and miracles. And I know a lot of times people say, well, I need to be, I need these metaphysics to be really strong in my mind. For example, if some of you know, there's like, there's about five versions of a course and miracles that are floating around. And we used to be able to sit around in the early days and just read from the same text. We'd say page 42 and everybody would turn to 42. Nowadays, you say turn to 42 and you don't know what you're going to get. If the group has five different versions of course and miracles, we don't even know what's on page 42. But to give you an example, there was an original version of a course and miracles and it's basically has a line in it that I use as an example sometime. And here's an example of a text of one version of the course and miracles that contradicts the teachings of the entire course and miracles. So anybody who says all the, all the versions are the same, listen up, I'll give you a little clue here. There's a little line in the original version of a course and miracles that says God created time as a learning device. Well, the problem with that line in that book, which is called a course and miracles there, Ertex, is that God did not create time. The Holy Spirit can reinterpret time and use time as a learning device to bring you home, to wake you up. But God is pure spirit and God creates only in pure spirit and time is not pure spirit. So here's an example of a distortion of the teachings of the metaphysics of a course and miracles. Also in the same book, it's got, it starts to talk about sexuality. And this is why these parts were edited out of the course and miracles by Ken Wapnick and Helen, because, because once you get into sexuality, they kind of, it makes a distinction between procreation, being a better form of sexuality than homosexuality, which of course many Christians would say, of course, that's the truth. But you have to remember Jesus is teaching that form is unreal and there's no hierarchy of illusions. So there's not a better form of sexuality or a worse form of sexuality. This is a clear example from the Ertex of things that were taken out by Jesus and Helen and Ken and for people who are trying to promote ideas. And then they're wondering, they're saying, you know, this stuff in the Ertex is very confusing. Well, yeah, that's a pretty good conclusion because it doesn't really fit with the metaphysics of, of simply seeing the false is false and starting to realize that there aren't any better or worse forms that anything Jesus says that brings you toward eternity, even reincarnation, he says in the course, in the manual for teachers, he says, if it, if it helps strengthen your awareness of, of eternity, then that it can be helpful. It can be a step in the right direction. So those are the three themes we're going to focus on today, committing to God's will, perfect happiness, number one, number two, relying only on the miracle for solutions and three, giving up striving for perfection in form. Now, that's the thing that came to me today for some of you, some of you are doing the Course in Miracles workbook lessons and you started on January 1st, or maybe you have an app like the ACIM Remind app and it's, it's basically today, which is the 12th of March is workbook lesson number 71. And I was, I was looking at workbook lesson 71 today and Jesus was just saying, don't you see, David, how perfectly this lesson today dovetails with the movie. And I'm like, tell me, tell me more. And he's saying, well, basically the lesson for today is that only God's plan for salvation will work. And why is that important is because if we're going to know God's will, which is perfect happiness, then we have to follow God's plan for salvation and not the ego's plan for salvation. You see, that's the difference. There's two different plans for salvation. One is based on seek and do not find and that is the ego's plan. And the other you may recognize from the Bible 2000 years ago, seek and you shall find knock and the door shall be opened. Jesus was referring to the Holy Spirit's plan of salvation. So before I start talking about the movie and the characters and giving you a beautiful setup for the movie today, which is going to be absolutely spectacular, I would like to go into just a little bit of workbook lesson 71, our lesson for today. And I want to explain how this relates to the movie and to our, our goal of experiencing God's will of perfect happiness. First of all, that we have to forgive in order to experience love. It's pretty obvious that when we're judging, we're not loving. It's obvious when we're holding opinions, we're not loving. When we're criticizing, we're not loving. When we're comparing, we're not loving. When we're holding grievances, we are not loving. That basically if I had to put one word to the ego, it is, it is to get something from this world to find happiness. And forgiveness is to give from your heart, give the perspective, the beautiful perspective of non-judgment. Extend that through your mind to the whole universe, and then you feel the peace and the joy and happiness that comes from non-judgment. That's one of the short teachings from the Sermon on the Mount, Judge Not. So I'm just going to read to you a little bit of today's lesson and then I'll apply it to our movie today. And Jesus teaches us in lesson 71, only God's plan for salvation will work. You may not realize that the ego has set up a plan for salvation in opposition to God's. It is this plan in which you believe, since it is the opposite of God's, you also believe that to accept God's plan in place of the ego is to be damned. This sounds preposterous, of course. All of us are like, wait a minute, I am not trying to damn myself. And Jesus is like, well, stay with me, we'll see if you agree with this after you follow my logic. Basically, he says this sounds preposterous, of course, yet after we have considered just what the ego's plan is, perhaps you will realize that however preposterous it may be, you do believe in it. So he's giving us a little bit of a warm up saying that what we believe as being a separate being and perceiving separate beings in a fragmented perception, it's a preposterous perception. But you take it for granted, you take it to be reality, you don't take it to be preposterous. And what he's trying to show us is that what we have believed in from our past learning and our beliefs is preposterous. That's why we get upset is because we have a preposterous belief system and a preposterous perception that comes from that preposterous belief system. You follow my logic here. The ego's plan for salvation centers around holding grievances. We all can nod with that. And Irma, back me up on this psychotherapy, backs me up on this holding grievances, is not good for your mental health. It's not good for your sanity. It maintains that if someone else spoke or acted differently, if some external circumstance or event were changed, you would be saved. Thus, the source of salvation is constantly perceived as outside yourself. Each grievance you hold is a declaration and an assertion in which you believe that says, if this were different, I would be saved. You could say, if this were different, I would be happy. If this person acted differently, talked to me differently, had a different tone of voice, said different things, believed in a different outcome, I would be happy. I would be saved. The change of mind necessary for salvation is thus demanded of everyone and everything except yourself. The role assigned to your own mind in this plan then is simply to determine what, other than itself, must change if you are to be saved. Does this sound familiar? This is the human condition. What other than my own mind must change for me to be happy. And you can see that this is part of seeking outside yourself and it's a bad habit because it never succeeds in bringing happiness. We call it the blame game, pointing the fingers, justifying and using the world to stay miserable while claiming that there's certain things in the world if they occurred would make us happy. It's quite a trick. So the change of mind necessary for salvation is thus demanded of everyone and everything except yourself. The role assigned to your own mind in this plan then is simply to determine what, other than itself, must change if you are to be saved. According to this insane plan, any perceived source of salvation is acceptable provided that it will not work. This sounds funny when you read it, but basically Jesus is saying, as long as you keep looking to form to find the happiness, you are in a situation where not work. If you look in your mind, you'll find it. If you look in the world of projected form, you will not find it. This ensures that the fruitless search will continue for the illusion persists that although this hope has always failed, there is still grounds for hope in other places and in other things. Another person will yet serve better, another situation will yet offer success. Such is the ego's plan for your salvation. And this is based on the ego's doctrine of seek and do not find. I've talked about the country songs, looking for love in all the wrong places, looking for love in too many faces. That is a country version of workbook lesson 71. Always looking for something informed to save you, to make you happy, or something informed that will offer you something. And yet, the mind is always upset when this game falls apart. The only reason you would even play this game is called magic, which is that sometimes you actually think you see witnesses and results of your plan for searching outside. When you think something happened in form that is so wonderful and ordained by God, that finally an external has been given to you by God, that you have been praying for and wishing for your entire life. And it's a trick because salvation, happiness, peace is found within. We know that from prayer. We know that from meditation. We know that from Jesus, who wanted nothing from the world and was at peace. So in this movie, as I said, it's a love story. It's a forgiveness story. But our main two characters in Just Like Heaven are David and Elizabeth. David, he is a man who is a landscape architect who basically is heartbroken. We soon discover he's heartbroken because of the loss of his wife. He is grief stricken. He often drinks. He drinks a lot of beers to cover over his grief and his loss. And so emotionally, he is hurting. And we discover more about how deep this hurt is as the movie progresses. And then we have Elizabeth, who is a doctor. She's very self-sufficient. She's basically, she works so much that she would fit the category of workaholic. She'll work for one, two, maybe three shifts in a row without taking a break without going home, working for 20 some hours in a row without sleeping, or maybe taking a little catnap in the area where they have some snacks so she can get a few winks and then jump right back in. So basically, Elizabeth is very career-driven. She is so focused on her work of being a doctor that she doesn't have room for a relationship in her life. She doesn't have room for dating. She basically spends a lot of time in her apartment in San Francisco and that's her life. What is this showing us about the self-concept? Well, even though David was a successful landscape architect, it shows that if you're looking for love and for fulfillment and happiness in something external, even something as simple as a partnership that if that partner dies and you experience heavy grief almost like you can't hardly go forward in life, you're just trying to survive. In his case, he's just trying to go to bars and drink or stocking up his fridge with lots of beers and drinking himself to sleep at night. You can cover over the pain but the pain runs very deep and the pain runs to this sense of loss. The beliefs, Jesus says in the Course, you have many strange beliefs but perhaps the strangest of all your beliefs is that you can lose the ones that you love and that shows how deep this grief and this loss goes. It's really an ego belief in having an identity apart from God and so the ego is saying God left you, God abandoned you, God just left you in time and space now to struggle and try to make it through, survive and then you die in the end according to the ego's plan and really this whole cosmos is a self-concept of denying God's will, of denying God's love and pure spirit and happiness. So David and Elizabeth are our two main characters. Now they are basically, they have been set up by Elizabeth's sister to meet in a blind date. But as the script would have it, they don't ever make it to that blind date because Elizabeth is going to be hit by a truck and so her whole scenario as a doctor and her life comes to an abrupt end when she is in her car and she's got the music playing and she's just hit by a big truck and that brings the end to her life. However, the movie continues on even though they did not meet in the blind date, they do meet in her apartment, her former apartment has been rented out by her family and David is looking for a place to rent and he rents the apartment. So you have Elizabeth and David in the same apartment, we'll just say they're in a little bit different dimensions. She's more in what we might call in-between dimension, in between being in the world and being in another realm and so she's there in a different dimension we'll say of time. But you know what I always say it's all simultaneous so we're not surprised when Steven Spielberg comes out with a movie and he puts a man and a woman in the same apartment. One has seemed to gone into a coma we'll say and she's in between realms and and David is seemingly in the physical realms. So it doesn't really matter how two people are brought together or even what dimensions of time they're in, you know that whenever two people are brought together it's for forgiveness. It's always for forgiveness. It's always for letting go of everything that you believe about time and space like the mystics and saints have said for centuries empty your mind of everything you think you think think you know just empty your mind and come into the stillness of being and recognize the light that you truly are. So with David and Elizabeth they come together and he's pretty sure that he has rented this apartment and that he has moved in and it's his apartment. He's paying the rent. She's pretty sure that it's her apartment. She says no this is all my stuff these are all my things and she's will even try to convince him this is her apartment that she is in that he is in her apartment. The thing is they're brought together and all of their unconscious beliefs are going to get triggered. This happens every day in all relationships. All relationships on earth so to speak are being used to raise up the unconscious beliefs of the ego just to see that they're not true and in the end you're left with realizing wow nothing I ever really believed about time and space was true not a single thing because time is not linear it's all simultaneous all seeming lifetimes all seeming dimensions are all happening simultaneously. That's the great joy when you start to experience simultaneity then the ego disappears because the ego is incapable of perceiving time simultaneously all it can do is perceive past present and future. The ego only knows one perspective and that's linear time. The Holy Spirit knows that everything's simultaneous and so all of our lessons in relationships are helping us empty our mind of all of our time beliefs all of our linear time beliefs that's that's the straight truth of what's happening even when you have an expectation that your your room will be a certain temperature in the morning when you wake up that's a time expectation even when you have an expectation that your cat will do its do do in the litter box not on your living room carpet that's a linear time expectation even when you have an expectation when somebody says I'll call you at 4 p.m. and they give you the time zone and everything and then 4 p.m. comes and they don't call and you expected them to call that's a linear time expectation you know that's that's the thing of ego it's it's all just projections of unconscious beliefs in in linear time so we're going to have a beautiful love story that starts out with a lot of antagonism sarcasm petty judgments finger pointing a lot of intense emotions that come up because it's two beings David and Elizabeth that both believe that they're in their apartment and they both value their privacy and they both value their autonomy and they both value their sense of ownership with things and stuff they both value their actions and behaviors this is very typical in relationships where there's seemingly two selves interacting but it's really just an interaction that is a projection of the unconscious mind helping the mind release the unconscious beliefs now some other characters in it there is going to be a man who works in a new age bookstore who's who's a little bit psychic and his name is Darrell I don't know if you remember that movie chances are when Robert Downey Jr starts having these past life memories coming into his mind and so he goes to a new age bookstore and he starts reading up on reincarnation and he meets a woman there who basically tells him that she's she was Cleopatra and in this movie it's Darrell now Darrell is so he's such a funny guy he's kind of a he's kind of a young kind of a young San Francisco hippie working in a bookstore and he is absolutely hilarious because David in the movie is going to open up to him on can you help me understand this idea of spirits of a spirit of someone who's in my apartment and how do I deal with this he's actually going to go to the new age bookstore to try to get some help also David has a friend called Jack or his nickname is JJ but but Jack is a psychotherapist and it's like David's buddy you know and he's a psychotherapist he knows that David is going through great grief and loss and he's trying to offer the advice as best he can for his buddy to help him out but we also know that really the Holy Spirit and Jesus are the great healers of grief and loss we it's great when we have friends that reflect some beautiful advice from them but but we have to go very deep to be free of of those beliefs also Elizabeth has a sister named Abby she's married she's got a couple cute little girls who are Abby's nieces and one of them actually is capable of seeing toward the end of the movie is her young niece is able to actually see Elizabeth and then we have we have Brett who's like a competing doctor where Elizabeth works a friend is like her supervisor and we have Katrina who is someone who lives in the same apartment building where these were David and Elizabeth have this apartment and she's kind of a flirty and a bit aggressive sexually and that provides some very interesting lessons for both for both David and Elizabeth so this movie I think is a great Spielberg classic which is going to show us that we want to perceive the witnesses of forgiveness we need to have hope in peace and happiness and it is very helpful when we see relationships starting to be transformed sometimes very gradually by a power that's greater than each person there's something inside that starts to spark them towards coming closer together there's something inside that pulls us together even when we judge against the people that we are put with we find that that is part of a plan to help us release our judgments that there are no accidents in the plan and no two people ever meet by accident and at the beginning of this movie these two are brought together and they they just don't like each other but there's nothing more powerful than a witness of two people that don't like each other being used in a way that by the end of the movie they actually fall in love that all of the grievances are washed away all of the the finger pointing the opinions that the judgments just are slowly rinsed rinsed rinsed by the spirit and that's to me that's the best love story where it starts off with antagonism it starts off with friction it starts off with resistance Wesley Angie are you listening this is the best love story your your relationship has been for all of us to see you are in the middle of the greatest story on earth because the holy spirit purifying your relationship purifying it every day is the greatest story on earth it's the greatest story for all of us when we have a very difficult relationship that has light breaking through it that that is being lifted higher and higher every single day by the desire and the prayer for for healing and purification so I hope you enjoy it I will be with you I will come in from time to time and enjoy the humor too yeah Reese Witherspoon she is is amazing in in this movie I mean really all all of the actors are are absolutely amazing but it's because they the willingness is shown to heal and that is the greatest miracle that there ever could be just a willingness to say please help me heal please take me toward the light also the psychic Daryl is just so hilarious because we've seen some of these movies whether they involve after lives or in between lives or whatever so we're all pretty well accustomed to these kinds of movies but I want you to pay close attention to the tiny bits of willingness to open up to open up to another way another perspective okay enjoy the movie see you all very shortly