 Okay, welcome everyone. Thank you for choosing to spend your rainy afternoon over here. We'll be in here, it'll be nice and cozy. Well, we just want to welcome everyone and say to, you know, some people have to leave early. Feel free this weekend to come and go whenever you need to go. And we're just happy to have you here and we know that people have schedules and there's other courses going on. And so this is kind of like an Easter weekend celebration where we'll have some music and we'll show some movie clips. And if the weather, the sun comes out, we probably will go outside and do some experiential exercises during the weekend. So we'll kind of mix in a lot of things. And we've been on kind of like a world tour through the South Pacific, so we've just come from about a month in Australia. So I was just saying to Jacob, we've been lugging our equipment along. And we just felt like we would do a lot more singing on this trip than we've ever done. So that's one thing that's been doing. We've been doing a lot more singing. And so Helen said, let's have a sound system if we're going to be singing. So we did bring the sound system. We've been lugging that speaker. That came from Sweden, so it's going around the world. But we thought to start off with, since everybody's coming in from their busy days, we start off with a little music meditation and then Helen will sing a song just to kind of get our gathering going for the weekend. So just sit back and get comfortable and take some deep breaths. And we have a lot of fun doing these gatherings. And they're kind of like, you might think of them as healing gatherings in the broadest sense of the word. A lot of times we use ideas that are in a script called The Course in Miracles. But actually for the line in the course that says to heal is to make happy. So that's a really nice high definition of healing. Because I think everybody just wants to be happy. And everybody searches for happiness and we do the best that we can. And so when we come together in these kind of gatherings, we can gain more insights from each other on what has worked and what hasn't worked. And it just speeds up the awakening for everyone. And so we talk a lot about forgiveness, not the typical kind of forgiveness where you kind of catalog all the wrongs and the bad things that you've done or other people have done. And you try to figure out a way to forgive what happened. But we teach that all grievances, all pain, all suffering is just simply a misperception that you can let go of any time that you want. And you have to really want to let go of it in its entirety because it's just like there's no partial pregnancies. You're either pregnant or you're not and it's the same with healing. You don't have a partial healing until you heal then it just seems like you get bunches of opportunities to heal. And they come in many different forms and they just keep coming and coming and coming and coming. Just like in droves until you reach a place where you accept your own healing and then the whole universe is healed along with you. The way perception works is that we're all connected so that when you heal, everyone heals. And so we're all in this together and that's why it's such a collaborative effort. But it really does come down to taking 100% responsibility for your own state of mind at all times. And not falling into any tricks of trying to project the blame anywhere else. Or including onto the body that you seem to be. That's just another favorite ego device of projecting blame and trying to see the causes outside instead of in consciousness. So the way we got to be here is very similar to the way things have been happening for the last about 18 years for me. I've just kind of been like a wandering mystic just traveling tens of thousands of miles meeting with many many people. And initially Joe wrote me an email and said come to Kalani. And then before long on Lisa, Lisa was doing corresponding and then Jason started writing an email. He said oh you must spend at least a couple months in Hawaii. You can't come to Hawaii for a few days for a pop-in visit. So I think with Jason's influence there and expanded to instead of for several days to about 13 days. So we landed in Oahu, Honolulu then we went to Maui and then we came here for the bulk of the stay. But that's typically the way things happen with me is to start out as a visit visiting somebody's house. And then before you know it we're doing like a two week retreat or a week long retreat and it's just kind of very organic. It just opens up and there's a lot of joy and a lot of word spreads. Sometimes when I'm in South America I just I've had anywhere from like 12 to 15 translators down in Argentina and word of mouth spreads so that by the time we do several gatherings the rooms are never big enough. You know we have people like you can see their ears outside lined up along the screens because they're all listening to ear. And you know or if there's a door the door is you can't open the door because there's too many people squeezed in and you can see all the little ears lined up along the crack of the door because people want to heal. Everybody wants to be happy and wants to reach a stable state of peace of mind. And it goes by many names and different traditions you know enlightenment or self-realization salvation. And it's just a state that seems to take quite a bit of mind training. I mean it doesn't really matter what path you take whether we're talking about yoga or we're talking about Buddhism or Christian mysticism or course of miracles or whatever. There seems to be a bit of mind training effort involved. And I think my job on the planet is to make this mind training as fun as possible for everyone because I've discovered ways to make the journey very joyful and fun in fun ways that work but are also very effective but they're fun. Most people don't like for their spiritual journey to be like crisis management where you go along and you're just kind of floating waiting for the next big crisis to land and then when it does then you have to use all these techniques and mantras and whatever to try to get yourself out of the crisis and then you're kind of like okay I made it through that crisis and then you're waiting for the next big bomb to hit and that's just not any fun to have a spiritual journey like that. It's more fun that when you have peaceful times it's what can I do during these peaceful times to be the most effective so that I can literally eliminate the crisis so that instead of going from crisis to crisis with these soft spots in between you can actually be carried by the strength and by the joy of your mind training and your practices so that you can be a happy learner. You don't have to be a resistant learner or you don't have to be a reluctant learner. You can be a happy learner. It's always available but it's just in this world it's pretty rare. Most people do the ego thing of fighting and kicking and screaming and letting it come up and then going to a major crisis and then kind of recovering from the crisis and then cruising along with some caution and then boom when the crisis hits and it's very intense. So what we're going to do this weekend is really go through some metaphysics. It'll be opportunities for you to ask any questions you want, raise any topics you want and that's typically the way my gatherings are that just you can raise any question you want, ask about my life, how I put these principles into practice in my life or hell in that. You can ask her questions, we're very transparent in terms of this journey and we feel like that in the end it's like there is no mystery in spirit. It's just the ego that wants to make the journey very mysterious so you'll be afraid of what's happening. The ego always paints the picture of being like you're moving into the unknown and spirit or love or God it has become the unknown, the big question mark and all of these doubts and worries and concerns, struggles, frustrations have become the status quo of the human condition and so it seems like the deeper you go down the rabbit hole of consciousness the more frightening and scary it can get but what we'd like to do this weekend is make it less scary to give you a little bit of an idea of a roadmap of what's going on in your consciousness so that you're not so surprised and shocked by some of these twists and turns sometimes it feels like you're going through a minefield and you just happen to step on a mine and it explodes and you say, what was that? Where did that come from? So we try to make it very, very practical and I used a book called A Course in Miracles starting back in 1986 that it says in the introduction, nothing real can be threatened nothing unreal exists herein lies the peace of God so that got my attention I would like to just experience what that state of mind is nothing real can be threatened really tune into the reality, what's real and then I'm going to let go of all my illusions the false appearances appearing real the tricks of the ego and so that's what my life has been it's just been a place where I feel like my perception was upside down and now it's kind of turned and turned and turned to the right side up so it's just a very stable experience for me where I realize that I'm not in control of anything so that's why sometimes when it turns into a week-long retreat or a two-week retreat or whatever I just kind of go along with the flow and make space for it where there's a strong willingness and where we just keep floating along and going along and then it just kind of has an energy of its own just kind of carries you along then there's these pauses of rest that come in between where you're just basking in the stillness and resting and then the next call comes in and it's just a joy to go and to constantly be answering the call the calling of your heart and so I lived somewhat of an untraditional life I mean I had ten years of university and undergrad and grad I worked jobs and went through the typical experiences like most human beings but then around 1991 I just started following this inner guidance which has led me around the world into many different places and it's been very much like a fairy tale it's been more like a fairy tale life than a real life because there really aren't problems along the way it's like everything that seems to be helpful along the journey just comes so effortlessly so there's really no struggles with it but it's just from like being carried along by this divine guidance that's what makes it into this kind of an easy life and also allows me to come together with people and groups of people where we can explore these issues very deeply because as long as there's beliefs they're held on to and as long as you're not in the present moment as long as you're caught into the game of time and preparing and planning and rehashing the past and analyzing and trying to figure out and all those things that's where the difficulty comes in so this is your retreat we're here at your service and we really stay really wide open in terms of how the weekend will unfold we have a lot of great movie clips but in terms of topics we didn't really set a topic we just know that this is like an Easter healing retreat over the weekend and we left it wide open so you can pick the topics you can pick the questions and we've had a few nights we've had three movie nights here so we've got into some pretty good discussions and some people have gone home with some food for thought after these little movies that we've watched we watched Star Trek the Thaw the first night and then we watched the movie The Island the second night and then last night we watched Illusion which is a real forgiveness healing movie do you have some things like this here? no? okay yes I have two simple questions to start at