 A lot of the questions that you've written in really had to do with body symptoms. Like, okay, I read the course, I study the course. I still seem to have body symptoms, and I try to practice the course the best I can, but it still seems like these body symptoms are preoccupation. And there's such a preoccupation that I find myself, you say, I find myself praying, help me heal the body. Even though what Francis shared in the first night, Friday night, was the body suffers as the mask to hide what really suffers, which is the mind. So it's like there's some kind of a trick going on which the body's suffering is used as such a major distraction to keep the mind from seeing that it is the one that's suffering. It's not the body that's suffering, it's just the mind tells the body what to feel. And the mind also projects symptoms onto the body to make it very convincingly seem like there is an external problem to be solved among many external problems. Yeah, and I think out of, we have so many questions about body symptoms and bodies, but I thought maybe I would just read Dennis's question just as a representative of it all, because he put it in a very articulate way, and I think that really is a description of the struggle. Okay, hi, beloveds. I have had a good deal of symptoms for years. I've tried different magical remedies to help with the symptoms. I can see that my thoughts are reinforcing the beliefs that make the idea of disease real for me. I hear myself talk about the symptoms and their causes coming from outside, giving them power which I continue to act on. Many other areas of my life have been much easier to forgive and let go with miraculous results, but not so with bodily symptoms and their erroneous beliefs. It seems to be very much like an addiction to thinking in the same pattern. Is it because I have so heavily reinforced these beliefs that they seem so entrenched and I feel so incapable of having the ability to really fully take them to spirit to be seen as unreal? I can feel that I'm identified with the ego and its point of view and don't really want to let them go. Of course, it all seems so insane and unreasonable, even irrational. I can see the ego wants to make it seem real, making me feel weak and powerless. Can you shed any light on this? Yeah, that's a good one. That's getting back to the thing about the mind and not the body. Yeah. That's a decision-maker. Yeah, that is the... Actually, this morning, David was reading this part of the course and I thought, you know, that is such a beautiful way to have an analogy or a visual... We can really have a parable of what is truly the body to the mind. You know, Jesus says the body is outside of you. You think it's surrounding you, surrounding the mind, but it's actually outside of you. This is such a perfect analogy to get us to understand. Yeah, I've read it during the Mr. Nobody movie, but it's so good. I can just read part of it again. Jesus is making the analogy of children who play with toys. And, of course, children play with toys to be entertained. When children are playing with toys, they can be really mesmerized by this play. You know, they're not paying attention to what's going on. They're kind of like in a world of their own with their dolls. And they're playing as if they're grown-ups or as if they're telling the dolls what to say to each other and what to do. And basically, Jesus says, You do but dream, and idols are the toys you dream you play with. Who has need of toys but children? They pretend they rule the world and give their toys the power to move about and talk and think and feel and speak for them. Yet everything their toys appear to do is in the minds of those who play with them. But they are eager to forget that they made up the dream in which their toys are real, nor recognize the wishes are their own. Then it goes on. It says, Their reality becomes his own because they seem to save him from his thoughts. In other words, the reason that children play with toys is it's their playful imagination and they're telling the dolls the toys what to do, what to think, what to feel, what to say. And that's what the whole entertainment is. How fun! I can give reality to these little dolls. And this is what's going on in the mind. When you're asking about symptoms, physical symptoms and sickness and disease, the mind assigns the disease to the body as if the body has the disease. And of course this is reinforced by all of our conditioning as we grow up. The medical model tells us it doesn't tell us cancer is in the mind. It doesn't tell us heart disease is in the mind. It doesn't tell us blood pressure is in the mind. As we grow up and we have the conditioning of the world, we have two different categories for sickness. And one category is mental illness, like mental retardation, schizophrenia, psychosis, depression. Those are all mental illnesses. And then we have another category which we would call illness and diseases of the body. And this is all part of the trick of the ego to think that there are external diseases. Francis was mentioning again today because Jesus tells us that the body is outside you, but it seems to surround you. But the body is outside you, meaning inside of you is your spirit. Inside of your mind is the light. And the body is outside. The body is a projection. It would be like if you went to a theater with your wife and you had the story of Dennis. And on the screen, Dennis was saying, I've got these symptoms and here's what I think is going on. And this is what I think caused it and everything like this. But you would say, well, that's a motion picture of Dennis. That's an image on the screen of Dennis. And you would say, well, that image up there on the screen doesn't have these symptoms. But I do. But wait a minute. Dennis is on the screen too. So when the Course talks about, he thinks he needs him that he may escape his thoughts because he thinks the thoughts are real. This is what's going on from a deeper level and a metaphysical level. That the mind that fell asleep and forgot heaven believed it separated from God. But that belief that you could leave God is so horrific and so dark that these dark thoughts, we'll call them attack thoughts, were pushed out of awareness and then the mind needed a hiding place so that it wouldn't feel so guilty. So it projected out a world which Dennis is a part of, a world of physical images which Dennis is an image. And then it put the guilt onto the character. So now we have Dennis saying I've got a symptom or it's because of this thing and that thing and it's all part of that false cause effect. All illness comes from believing in separation from God. But like Francis was saying, that's such a high thing. We need intermediate steps to start to go towards that. And we have to start to realize that first of all there's a tremendous fear of thoughts and one good question would be, why am I so afraid of these thoughts? Well, if you believe you separated from God and you think you could think thoughts apart from your source that's what we might call miscreation. Like if God created you as perfect spirit and you said, hmm, I'm going to go play time and space game. Thank you God for giving me such a pure perfect mind of light but I'm actually going to try something else, something other than heaven. And then this belief in miscreation, the belief that you can actually use the power of your mind to make up something that's unlike God is horrendous. It's terrifying. It's called a gap in the mind. It's just a belief but it's in this gap, it's terrifying. Jesus even calls it the unholy instant. And so the trick that the ego does to deal with the horror, to deal with the terror, to deal with this intense guilt is it makes up a make-believe world and then it projects it to its toys. And the things of time and space are the toys, including the body of Dennis. It's one of those toys. It's a puppet. And yet the mind is the puppeteer. And so this is why when people say, I read it in the course that it's my thoughts, is where I need the healing. But on a practical day-to-day basis, what you're saying in your question is, wow, I'm pretty attracted to searching for not only the symptoms, but the causes in the world for the symptoms. It's almost like a game that's become so entertaining, like a child who's playing with the dentist doll and the child is having so much fun playing the game with the dentist doll that it doesn't want to listen to, it's not, it's too entertained. It doesn't want to go and look at the mind. That seems too intense. So it's more fun, seemingly, to play the dentist game and look for the external causes for these symptoms than it is to forgive. It's a mesmerism where the game seems so enticing and so attractive that forgiveness seems like, oh, that's too much. To look in my mind for every scrap of guilt and fear and hand it over to the light, it seems to the ego much more fun to play the game. And this is why a lot of the questions, I think we counted maybe seven or eight questions, were really along the line of your question, Dennis, is that you're seeing these symptoms and you can follow the course teachings intellectually. But in terms of practical application, you're having too much fun with playing this game. You're playing like Sherlock Holmes. You need a Sherlock Holmes hat on there at looking at these symptoms and what are all the possible causes in the world. So now you're actually coming to the point where we have to start to question, is this game really fun? There's a time where children's toys should be put aside. Remember how the adults said like, okay, now you're old enough that you shouldn't be playing with dolls all day. You're an adult so there's a point where childhood play with the toys needs to stop. And that's really what, that's kind of the same boat that all Course in Miracle students and teachers are in. Everybody's in the same boat. Actually Jesus says that there is a time that the child needs to grow up and let go of their toys. His way of saying to us, let's come on, let go of playing with the symbols that has no meaning and do not give them more meaning than they have, but come back to the mind. It is time for that and that is what Jesus is basically saying. And another thing is with the body symptoms, it's like sickness is almost, it's not the causation of anything. It is the effect or the reflection of the mind still. The byproduct. The byproduct. The symptom is a byproduct. If the symptoms are byproducts, then what we're going for cannot be those symptoms. We have to go to where the real cause is. So when we're talking about healing, Jesus says that healing and atonement are identical. And he was saying go for atonement because healing can't help but happen because healing is atonement. There is no other healing outside of atonement. There is no separated healing of a symptom or a body without atonement. There is no healing without realizing that this world is not real. He actually says that there is one requisite to realize that you can't but just say this symptom has no purpose and I don't need it anymore and you be healed instantaneously. He said there is only one requisite for that which is to recognize that the sickness is in the mind and not the body. But he said that recognize, what does that cost you to have that recognition? It costs you the whole world you see. In another word, he is saying you can't really recognize it without completely letting go and relinquish any belief about the reality of this world because when you recognize the cause of the sickness and to be healed, you also realize there is no power over your mind from anything in the world. You're completely free. That is a freedom. That is actually what we're going for. I would say healing is a worthy goal. It is exactly what we're here for and yet we can't keep looking at the symptoms because also Jesus is saying that don't focus on the specific symptoms. If you focus on the specific symptoms you forget the same purpose. They all share all the different symptoms. They share one purpose and if we can really know the purpose we will not be fooled. We can just ask what is the purpose of thinking this, thinking about this, the problems, the solutions and the causes. What is the purpose of this and what is the alternative purpose? That is really we're going for opposite direction now. Dennis, you're not a medical doctor but you love the game of looking for external causes and imagine, let's say you were a medical doctor, let's say you had 10 years of training as a medical doctor. We actually have people that work with us on a daily basis like our friend Sima from the New England area. She's a medical doctor and now she's been following our teaching, she's been following the course, she's becoming more of a Mary Magdalot Chandler and an intuitive, she's just on her journey of awakening but after 10, we'll say 8 to 10 years of medical training, what is medical training except to investigate all the causes that could happen to a body? To a body, to a brain, to all the systems of the body, the cardiovascular system, the blood, the cells and let's say you learn from 8 to 10 years of all the causes that can happen to a body and now she's got to forget them all. Let's say she learned 25,000 causes that could happen to a body. That's probably a low estimate, there's probably a lot more. If you're a medical doctor, you need more than that but it's a lot more and then Jesus says in the course, he says of all the causes you ascribed to these symptoms the one thing you didn't see is your guilt, the guilt in your mind. I talk about the dream that you dream in secret, this unconscious mind that Carl Jung talked about called it the shadow. Jesus is saying all the symptoms are selected by the mind and projected onto the body and it's all coming from guilt. In fact, I have a friend right now Alan Dalla who's studied the course for like 30 years and I always joke about his email signature his email signature is seriousness causes reincarnation. Seriousness causes reincarnation. Remember Jesus says you remember not to laugh at this belief in separation. You had your chance but you took it serious and now the world you perceive are the consequences of instead of laughing at the belief in separation the belief you could separate from God you took it serious and now there seems to be a lot of serious effects called history and wars and diseases and plagues and everything that God didn't create God doesn't even know about but in mind it seems like a pretty dark dream. This pandemic is just a mile when compared to the Great Plague and some of the other pandemics on the planet. This is like a mild version but what he's saying is you're selecting your mind out of guilt is selecting the symptoms and is projecting them on to the body. Right away that would end the toy game because you're not going to be searching for was it my diet was it something I exercised too much and I overdid it was there some kind of a cause of radiation for the cancer or maybe my diet over all these years of eating pigs and cows had an effect on my cardiovascular system you see how the doctors are supposed to tell you how your diet your lifestyle the medications you took the actions you did that maybe were not so wise doctors try to come up with all of the external causes and Jesus says well the one thing you haven't considered is your own guilt the guilt in your mind of believing you separated from God is really the one thing that's behind all of it and that's why he's saying you need miracles more than medicine you need miracles more than diet changes it's not saying that you may be guided by the Holy Spirit to change diet to change things like exercise the spirit is very practical the spirit is not like trying to rip the world away from you in any way to scare you but the spirit may give you some guidance and I've worked with people over the years that will tell me the spirits guided them in terms of their medications like Svava always said she was part of the system of meds where she was on so many different medications for psychiatric problems and then she had to be guided by Jesus about how to unwind from all these meds not just go cold turkey and Wamo stopped all the meds one day but she had to be guided step by step by Jesus you can reduce the dosage here you can reduce this it was a program over a period of weeks where she was able to release from the meds from the addiction to the meds the spirit can be very practical but what we're talking about is a very underlying idea that the mind is so powerful but the ego made the world to keep you mindless to help you forget about the mind and get all caught up in the time space game of false causation and the movie was really good with that because you can see Nemo was dealing with as an old man as a 117 year old man ready to turn to 118 situations and all of these relationships and he was trying to come to a place of peace in his mind and he finally did on his 118th birthday he got the biggest smile on his face and he said this is the most beautiful day in my life out of 118 years it was the most beautiful day because he started to realize that he hadn't made any wrong choices or right choices among all those relationships and all those scenarios even though the journalist was trying to say did you stay with her or did you not stay did you have children did you not have children did you drown or not you know the journalist was trying to string it together and he came all the linear questions and he couldn't even answer by the end he just got very quiet and then he got so happy the biggest smile came on his face when he would just realize all of it he could appreciate all of it without trying to look at all the images what he did right and what he did wrong what choices were wrong and that was all the ego's trick to keep him confused and he got happy at the end by seeing that's impossible I am not held responsible for my personal choices because he made a choice in his mind and as soon as he made that choice in his mind he burst into laughter and his body started going backwards the collapse of time the world is expanding the cosmos is expanding it reached that equilibrium point the big crunch before the big crunch started and everything went backwards he reached that point of happiness I think that's the I need to do nothing moment when he reached that point of realizing nothing had gone wrong and it was symbolized of course by seeing he was like Anna that was his love relationship that he couldn't let go of and at the end the symbol of him and Anna embracing and coming together was like yes the love is complete I don't have to think of Anna as something outside of my mind that is apart from me that we are together we are the same one we're the same spirit we're the same love so to me it's a good question this symptom thing but most people don't think oh well I just selected this symptom because if they would say why would I select a symptom from my body like this then they would have to go into the guilt and they would have to face the thoughts they would have to face the thoughts expose the thoughts and give them over to Jesus and it seems more to me it's a destiny to the ego to play the sleuth what is it that caused what it's always trying to make a complex puzzle out of something that's actually not complicated at all and I actually also like what you refer to it then as an addiction because it's almost like the mind is addicted to think this way to search for solutions outside so if that is the surface addiction thinking the mind direction goes this way then what is the alternative except that you know normally when addicts are trying to recover they go to rehab center to allow themselves be taken be healed be guided they don't rely on their own willpower necessarily or their own decision making so in a way the alternative of that is trying to give this decision making power to the spirit like David was talking yesterday that that decision the spirit is coming from outside of time space and time space is this big addiction that you know the byproduct of the time space is the symptoms so the decision come from outside of time space and the form the specific form are just reflections but really for us we're not choosing the specific forms by not giving them power what we're choosing is the spirit constantly we're choosing the spirit and as a reflection of it we are following what he was pointing us to do say go there go there because you don't want to rely on judgment of time and space so in that way we're really just making this one choice choose the spirit choose the purpose of waking up choose to do whatever the spirit let us to do to choose miracle as the flip side of how to heal ourselves and the miracles you cannot choose by yourself either you cannot direct miracles but to choose let this completely be guided and I think that is really the opposite the solution to the addiction the guidance and you know the best thing about it is Jesus knows our mind so well he knows us like the back of our hand he knows us so well that he knows what we can handle he knows what we can do he knows how ready we are and for example if we're talking about the mind and becoming mindless and getting all distracted by time and space let's just say that anyone who goes into spiritual healing realizes they have to get in touch with the power of their mind they have to get in touch with their thoughts even if they've avoided that for years or decades at some point everybody has to come back and get in touch with their mind like for example I know some people and they say I finally realized that I needed to face my thoughts even though I distracted away through all types of drugs, addictions and I use all kinds of things, distractions in the world but I finally realized I had to face my thoughts so they tell me they say well I signed up for a vipassana retreat and I said well tell me about it well there's a lot of rules you can't talk to anybody you're not allowed to look people in the eye, you have to just sit I said how long oh for 13 hours a day you have to sit for 13 hours a day you can get up if you have to go to the bathroom you can't look at people you can't talk and you have to do this for how many weeks I think 10 days minimum 10 days minimum that's the baby, the preschoolers the 10 days of 13 hours a day sitting and no looking at anybody no talking to anybody now will that help you face your thoughts oh yeah you start to sit there, you have a little discomfort in your back whatever you'll be aware of your stiff back thoughts believe me it's like right there you see what I mean for most people that's like pretty extreme like minimum of 10 days some people go there and they don't make it to 10 days because their mind is like are you kidding me to sit for 10 days for 13 hours a day in stillness we have a movie Dharma Brothers where they took Vipassana into prisons and they had these prisoners sitting there on mats for huge long stretches of time that was a program that was invited into the prison and what I'm using this example for that's just an extreme example now Jesus knows your mind Dennis so he's like the games that Ego's been playing you had a little co-living experience you're there in your house with your wife right now Jesus is right with you both he's like saying I'm still here we've got to still face these thoughts and these beliefs because as long as you feel guilty even unconsciously guilty then you will experience discomfort in the dream world that makes sense guilt and discomfort are really the same one's projected so it seems to be involving the body and the others in the mind which is where the source is the guilt in the mind is the source of all illness the guilt in the mind is the source of all sickness all discomfort even emotional discomfort irritations, annoyances anger, depression rage even matter the degree or the direction of the upset it's all coming from guilt in the mind and yet now at this stage of your life you are saying to Jesus I'm ready I may be not ready for vipassana I may be not going off on a 25 day vipassana retreat I rather have my wife and my dog to do this mind training Jesus if you don't mind Jesus is like yeah that's okay that's great I can work with that you see how Jesus always is working with our mind he's not working with our bodies and the Holy Spirit doesn't really work with our bodies because they're projections it would be like going to a movie theater and one of the characters on the screen says I'm having these body symptoms and you get up out of your chair in the theater the big screen in the theater and you start to tap the screen oh poor baby I'm here to help you you wouldn't do that to a character on a screen of a motion picture because the shadows are coming from the projector inside the projector from the film or we'll say modern day digital it's coming from the digital projector it's not coming from the screen and that's the same analogy that Jesus uses with our mind and the screen of the world he's saying the problem is not on the screen but the problem is always in your mind and it always without exception arises from guilt of believing you're something that you're not you're the Christ you literally are the Christ a perfect child of God and yet he's forgotten the amnesia like in the movie yesterday he didn't get the angels to do the thing on his lips so he remembered the past and the future he was even telling his mother I see the future, I know the future mother no you don't no you don't yes I do no you don't I do that's just deja vu everybody has that way but clearly Nemo was seeing all kinds of things before his father had that thing happen with the car and the car hitting the mother he saw it in his bedroom he literally knew things before they would seem to happen but his mother couldn't handle that and then later on when he was having dinner with her mother and her mother's on a date she's like behave yourself don't say anything strange or weird and then Nemo says you're going to die in a car accident where it explains it very vividly of a train hitting the car as the car is he's unaware of the train coming you're going to die it wasn't like on a Sunday and he explained he explained the death really like really upset like talk about a way to ruin a date your teenage son forecasting a prophecy of your dates death you can see from the mother's perspective this is not what she wanted and then when she finally said be honest with me and he said I just don't want to be like I don't want to grow up to be like you with a serious face from mom that was like not what she wanted to hear but this is how it goes where Jesus is so patient with us always helping us look at our thoughts and look within where the source of the guilt is because deeper still underneath the guilt is the light of heaven but the light of heaven in our mind is just covered over by these ego thoughts and beliefs so that's why it takes such it's like you can say wow I'm at the beginning of this discipline in mind training I'm happy to be at the start you're wondering I kind of get it intellectually but it doesn't seem very practical in my daily life and Jesus is like yeah you're at A of the alphabet A to Z let's cheer you on of the alphabet and you're at A of your mind training and he's so happy that you're at A he's so happy that you're on the alphabet you know because you're on the way towards Z or they say Z we say Z they say Z over in in Australia you're on the way to Z to Z but you should rejoice in A you know that Jesus is with you and you're going to start to actually pay attention and be aware of your thoughts because underneath those thoughts are the beliefs and we do have to as Francis said you can't just say intellectually okay all my problems are simply because I believe I've separated from God what does that mean intellectually that sounds good sounds like it could be helpful but practically speaking you know that's where the rubber meets the road and for us our whole life has been based on guidance not knowing where we're going what we're doing we don't know from day to day what's coming next everywhere we've gone and Francis and I have traveled around the world many many times but it's not like we had a plan for it it's not like we sat down and say okay let's get out our vision board okay let's put our vision board there like the secret you know okay we can attract our reality to us all that humbo mumbo jumbo oh look Francis we've not been to this country let's do the prayer Jesus take us to you know whatever Switzerland okay you doing it okay Switzerland let's do this for a few hours Switzerland Swiss Alps Chalet Chalet you see we're not trying to use the secret or the law of attraction to draw us to what we believe is best for us because we know we don't know what's best for us maybe it's not the best for us to be a chalet at the Swiss Alps usually we never have been to a chalet in the Swiss Alps we end up in Beijing Shanghai or whatever at a hotel with a bunch of course of miracle students doing what Jesus wants us to do not doing what we're personally trying to visualize based on our past preferences we're here to undo our preferences we're here to say Jesus we don't even know what the best way to go we don't know the best words to say we don't know you're the one who's in the kingdom of heaven who's directing us how to get back home so why would we think we know the way even in the Wizard of Oz Dorothy just follows but she has to face flying monkeys a wicked witch she's got some pretty big obstacles and then finally she gets there and it's her dog that jumps out of her her hands Toto jumps out of her hands goes runs over and pulls the curtain who's behind this whole trick pretending he's this powerful Oz when it's just this frightened man but the dog with the dog's mouth pulls the curtain that's kind of what the same boat that we're all in we have to trust Jesus and the Holy Spirit to pull the curtain on the Wizard and show us this frightened little puff of nothingness called ego is trying to scare us like the Wizard was to scare us and to make us afraid when really Jesus is saying no God's not like that at all God is just pure love and you do have to face your thoughts and forgive so thank you your question has helped us handle about seven or eight questions there thank you Dennis