 the one Course in Miracles book, that's for sure. This is certainly not the truth, in that sense, because it's just a tool. But it's like he does give a statement in the Course that everything, that you will learn this Course entirely or not at all, and he keeps pointing at the same kind of thing, that this is a system, that if you find this Course difficult, it's just because you're interpreting against it. It's just ego resistance, because this is such a direct and kind of a sharp tool. So to me, a lot of times when people ask about that, I'm feeling drawn to stop some of my other readings and devote more time to the Course. I think that can be a very important step, not to say that you won't then be guided to do a lot of other readings, but in a sense, you'll have like a more of a stability. You can run the ideas in what you read and what you hear through the Course system. And to me, that's where the confusion starts to abate. It's been really helpful for me to just plunge my mind into really working with the Course in a very intense way. And now that I've done that, I enjoy, I mean, I hear John Bradshaw, Interchal, work, Deepak Chopra, you can hear a lot of things with a real discerning ear. And in that way, no, I'm not trying to exclude any approaches. In fact, I don't wanna exclude any brother that I meet. We may come together and Paramahansa Yogananda or Hinduism or Buddhism, you know, you can just have a heart-to-heart connection without trying to put the course on them, but just to look at my own ideas. And that makes a lot of sense to me. That's been kind of an experience. I still hear comments and some of the Course in America's reading remind me of what I've heard in organized religion, that if you sit quietly and do nothing and endure, then you're gonna have great happiness in the next life. And that never fit real well with me. And sometimes I feel like I'm hearing that in Course in America's meetings where there's no real purpose to any of this. And it's like, what's it all for? You know, it's like, why don't I just escape into the next realm? And that doesn't fit right either. You can found on that one? I think what a key word is about escape, escape from this world or whatever, but it can, and very subtly, it can get into the following of the trap of making the error real. In other words, if you believe that this is a world that I've got to escape from, you know, in a subtle way, it's still judging it in a negative way instead of seeing it in a neutral way or instead of asking to see it differently and let the Holy Spirit, you know, have the Holy Spirit's vision and the vision of Christ. And I think, you know, I really feel that that's been the path of a lot of times, Jesus talks in the workbook about many have tried to renounce the world while still believing in it. And to me, that's what that's a demonstration of, that it's also talked about as an unlearning and an undoing process. And so a lot of times people will say, well, that means I have to unlearn everything. I have to unlearn how to drive a car and I have to unlearn how to do the dishes and I have to, you know, the thing that gets me is that the body is a framework for developing skills and all of us have developed skills. I mean, some of them seem to be more mental skills and some of them may seem to be more focused on the body, you know, skills of doing certain manual things and so on and so forth. But skills are neutral too. In other words, yes, the mind believes it's here, it's made special relationships with everything. It's ordered the thoughts. Jesus is saying, yeah, I know you believe you've done that. And so now we're gonna work it back. And for me, it's been a process of seeing, of not really degrading the skills that I've developed, but just seeing that how do they work, how do they fit into the Holy Spirit's purpose and how do they fit into the Eco's purpose? Skills in and of themselves are just neutral, but if I'm using them in subtle ways to keep a body identification, then I'm still trying to hold onto the guilt in my mind because as long as the mind remains identified with and associated with a body, then it's still believes in limitation and is unwilling to question what some of those beliefs are. So for example, I know we were one gathering somewhere and somebody was saying, well, this is an ego activity and that's an ego activity and that's more of a spiritual activity, that there aren't, I've come to really start to see, there aren't any ego activities and spiritual activities, but it's the purpose in the mind that's the ego or the Holy Spirit, that everyone who comes to this world, it gets so used to thinking about form and thinking of everything in terms of form. Jesus even says, you can't even think of God without a body at one point in the text because the mind is so conditioned to specifics and particulars in form that it takes a lot of discernment to start to get to weave these two purposes out. I'm noticing like I've been reading Miracles magazine and just lots of different things where they, when they were talking about the channeled, Lazarus was channeling that there's a positive ego and a negative ego and the comment was being made that, well, ha, here we go, that Jesus doesn't really focus on the positive ego in the Course, he just focuses on the negative ego in the Course. There's just all kinds of subtle ways that the mind tries to not look at what Jesus is saying. I mean, the ego is the ego. There is nothing positive about the ego. Another common error that comes up a lot of times too is love your ego. Don't fight it in this and that, but if you really look at what the Course is saying that the ego's purpose for you is death. It wants you dead, but not itself. Well, that's pretty strong language, you know? It's not love your ego stuff, you know? It's like, and not only that, he literally spends a lot of time in the book unveiling it, giving it metaphors like skeletons and bones and flesh and, you know, put all this stuff. And you know, when you really look it's like, what is going on here? But I think he's just trying to paint the picture that the ego is a singularly poor advisor to choose. But in no instant has the ego ever brought anything but sorrow and pain and guilt and fear. However, you know, that because the mind is in a deceived state and pleasure and pain seem to be very different. You know, we kind of start to touch on this and when we're in catering and it's different times. But, you know, now we're getting into, the reason the ego is so deceptive is because there are things in this world that seem to be attractive and there are things in this world that seem to be very unattractive that are where to avoid. And most of our education and judgment has been learning which things to pursue and which things to avoid. The course is coming along and saying, my little child, you know, you're in a very deceived state and you can't tell the difference. You know, that some of the things that you've pursued are still different forms of attack. And as long as you can't recognize them as forms of attack, then, you know, you'll continue to buy into it and pursue them. That's the attraction of guilt. I know that's some of the sections in the course where people will go, attraction to guilt. And then the next section is attraction to pain and on the surface that seems so strange to think, I'm attracted to guilt, I'm attracted to pain. I wanna die, I wanna let go of guilt and pain. When you really read some of those sections on special relationships and this and that, it's that there is a Holy Spirit's purpose and the ego's purpose for relationships, for time, for the body. I know Pat has a handout that I made, that I made two columns and I would pick a topic like body and then put the ego's use on one side and the Holy Spirit's on the other. So you can see them side by side. And that is something where it's like, as soon as you can start to get into those purposes, you can start to say, ah, I want to let go of the ego's purposes for the body, for relationships in the world. I don't want to continue to give my mind to this puff of nothingness. Because when I do that, when I give my mind to it, then I remain asleep, I remain built-in. And so it's really important to try to get at those subtle distinctions. And that's what we have an opportunity to do here is to kind of take a look at some of those kind of things.