 Be gentle with yourself. We can't hear that too often because it's a deep, deep journey into the mind. There's lots of ego resistance that's going to pop up when you really go for the target of joy and happiness and enlightenment. So we have a beautiful group of days to really dive into that experience for ourselves. It's the prayer of my heart that anything that you truly desire, the answer for, the insights, the awarenesses will come into your awareness. And the sooner the better. Delay is unknown in eternity, but tragic in time. So it's always my motto, let's not delay this. Let's really go for this. That's what we're here for. That's what the best use of time is for this. I recognize some faces from last year and some new faces here. Some people here that have been doing intensive here for the last five or six days. How many people are not familiar with my teachings? Is this a first experience for you? Okay, I've got a few. That's good. And those of you I'm sure are familiar with Gareth's teachings. That's one of the reasons that you're here too. I'll just say a little note about that at the beginning. Back several years ago when The Disappearance of the Universe was published and Your Immortal Reality was published, I was doing my travels around the world and teachings and people started asking me about those books. And I'd already reached a state at that point where I really didn't really read anymore, including even the Course. So it was really not necessary for that. But I do remember skimming through and kind of just getting an intuitive feeling about The Disappearance of the Universe and Your Immortal Reality. And I just had a big smile on my face. I was like, ah! Heartland and Persa are teaching the teachings that I've been sharing for almost two decades. And it was kind of fun to see it in print at your local Barnes & Noble store. To go see it at Amazon.com or something. Because this wisdom is really precious and it's just beautiful. I know I can feel the resonance of really deep, clear teachings. And I think a lot of times people that come to Gary's workshops and retreats and are very much fans of these books are that way because they have a very deep resonance of clarity. That's one aspect of them I think that are very helpful. They're very, very clear. They're very straightforward. They don't beat around the bush with a lot of theoretical and theological mumbo jumbo. Like, let's cut to the chase, give me the good stuff and give it to me direct. And that's one thing that I like about those teachings. And I think another aspect that touched me too initially when I glanced through it was I realized The Disappearance of the Universe, it was based on eight years of interactions with Gary and Heartland and Persa. And I'm a big fan of disclosure, of just pouring out your emotions and taking the mask off and just laying things out on the table. No matter how they look, just lay them out. Tell it like it is or we could say as it seems to be in your life. I think that was something that was very touching as well in the sense that it was like a great little dialogue going on between ascended masters and one that was struggling and going through a lot of very difficult emotions and perceptions. And so it was almost like a symbol of a dialogue between the human condition and the ascended masters. And I found that very, very helpful because that of course reflects my journey and it reflects everybody's journey. As long as you believe in the ego, there's going to be a bit of this back and forth. You want what? You're guiding me to what? You said what? There's going to be a bit of the ego reaction and resistance to these high teachings because the ego is the belief in separation and these high teachings are the teachings of forgiveness and oneness. And separation and forgiveness don't really have a meeting point and separation and oneness really don't have a meeting point because one is real, the oneness, and the separation isn't. So you can never really bring together reality and unreality. If you could bring them together, then of course one would dissolve and disappear and that's the basic teachings of the Course in Miracles is that this is a teaching and ending dissociation. Ending the attempt of maintaining two irreconcilable thought systems. Love and fear do not go together. They may say in this world that oil and water don't mix. I'll tell you one thing, love and fear, they just don't mix. And when you're experiencing fear, then the love is pushed out of awareness. When you're experiencing the love, it's as if that's all that there is, that there never was anything else. You don't make it back to heaven or nirvana and then sit around and tell your war stories. Remember when I killed you and then you killed me and I got you back the next lifetime? It's not like going to a 12-step meeting where you can kind of rehash over all of that. Do you know what I've been through? Sit down, I'll tell you my story. There's just none of that in bliss. Thank heavens, it's just peace, eternal, total peace in us. I was in Australia doing one of these talks and the wind tried to blow the tent then when I was doing one of my movie gatherings, Exposing the Ego. But these look like nice, bronze, steel beams. I think we'll do okay for five days, no hurricanes inside. So again, I think that was something that was very... I had just a warm feeling reading that disappearance and your moral reality. And then traveling around the world, I've been doing this for almost two decades, so it's just kind of fun to meet all the people and hear all the different thoughts and reactions. And a lot of times I would go and stay with people and they would say, Gary was here and I'd say, wow, that's great. And they would say, yeah, this is good, good, good, but I didn't like this and this and this. And it was kind of funny because some of the things it was being spoke of was, I don't like this, this and this, and it was like, it's too uncompromising. And I remember we hear people say the same thing about the Course. The Course is too uncompromising. And I thought, well, if we're here to discern between illusions and truth, or error and truth, this is something we want to be non-compromising in. How can you be too uncompromising when you're working with a teaching that says, the truth is true and nothing else is true? Or you read a lesson like 152, the power of decision is my own and he says, basically everything you perceive in all of time and space is the result of your own decision. Everything, without exception. And he says, Jesus says in that lesson, you may think that this is too all-encompassing to be the truth, but he goes on to say, truth has no exceptions. So truth is without an opposite. And if we look at that in terms of forgiveness, we could say the same about forgiveness. You're not going to be able to accept partial forgiveness. It's not like horseshoes, where if you get the shoe close to the pin, you get some points of recognition, or some of these games, you get partial bonus recognition. It's not that way with forgiveness. It's really all or nothing.