 It's only the construct, self, that has a need for money or anything money can buy. That's what you're saying. The construct is a construct in lack. To deny your selfhood as the Christ, and to accept a false self that's been made up, make belief fictitious, then that is to accept belief in lack. And from within the construct, if I believe I'm a person, then I'm lacking. I mean, just a simple lack of, I'm lacking warmth. I need to put a coat on. I'm lacking coolness. I need to take some clothes off because I'll burn up. I'm lacking food. I'm lacking sex. I'm lacking, you know, water or something to quench my thirst. I'm lacking love. I need people to stroke me and touch me and love me. Affirm me, validate me, encourage me, support me. I'm lacking prestige or position or respect. I need and want that. I need awards or I need things that give me recognition. You're saying all that. One of those things is just part of the construct. It's not real. It's just part of the construct. And money, of course, finances ties into that. Money is tied in the world with prestige and status. With freedom of the body, I can have money and I can travel. I, be it small, I can, the body can move around in this fictitional world. And go where it wants to go. Do what it wants to do. Enjoy the finer things in life. Yes, find dining and find this and find that. Just a menu of ways that the construct has contrived to have the good life in quotes of what it would call the menu of the pleasures and the great things of the world. And it's a big deception because the guilt of believing in such a construct is concealed in the mind. Mind's kind of run into the form and actually seems to be having an experience even though it's a hallucination of an experience that things are working well in this world. Things are coming out very well. So the guilt is hidden. And at the same time, it's held in place. It's perpetuated in the mind as it were. It doesn't go away. Even the system where it seems like, gee, I'm a person. I'm starting to get all the good things in life. Find dining and comforts of the body. And I have a sense of respect for my peers and community and everything. Security. Security. Stability. There's still these doggone things like sickness and some of these moody periods I have where I just feel all alone and that break in to this nice dream world of an illusion of happiness and satisfaction that I've made up. They're just broken into by these periods. In some cases, it seems the other way. I've seen that they have this big alcoholic addiction or this great scarcity that I'm constantly fighting to make ends meet, to pay the bills, to survive poor living conditions, so forth, the poverty end of the world. It's the same in a sense that instead of being run from and the lack and the scarcity being handled by more stuff that seem to provide an illusion of security, then the scarcity and the lack is experienced on the other extreme as being very real again. And it still comes from the mind's belief in the construct. That this is more of a direct overt thing. The world then is constructed in such a way that it's witnessing to my belief in lack, my belief in unworthiness. I'm stupid. I'm uneducated. I don't have enough food to eat. I don't have proper medical care and so on and so forth. But this is just another end, another extreme of the construct which still is made to witness to the lack. So it seems like it's always either witnessing to the lack or it's covering over the sense of lack or belief in lack, one or the other. Filling in the hole with something in the world, solving the problem with an external means. Except if I perceive myself as poor and deprived, how does that fill in the hole? I mean, I can see it if I perceive myself as wealthy and able to have everything I want. But at the other extreme that you were just describing, how does the mind see that that's filling in the hole? Well, in that case it's not so much filling in the hole, but there still is a wish in many cases, a wish I had, all that stuff in my mind to fill in the hole. That's like, for instance... It's a belief that all that stuff can fill in the hole. A lot of times with lottery tickets and everything, people in this world, so-called low income, just line up hoping for that big score and the belief is still in there. There's still a belief that something outside myself can fill me up. Okay, that's how they're really the same. It's because the belief behind each manifestation is the same. Is that wealth and power and all that, is what will make a difference, is what will fill up the void, the emptiness that I feel. And I mean, we aren't going to make that generalization that's completely for everyone. There are those who just have a disdain for wealth and possessions. We could get into the aesthetic realm where there's the thing of, I'm still a person, you see. I still believe I'm a person in this realm, but it's seen that I will, the less possessions I have as a person, the more I deny my body things. I deny it food or, for instance, fasting, or I deny it comfort and luxuries and so on and so forth. But somehow that will mitigate the punishment that I still deserve. Like I'll do it to myself first and God will back off. Yeah, that's one thing. Or just this sense of, it really is still the level confusion. The belief that I'm still a person, the belief in the subject God has explained is still held on to. But now instead of it being valuable and favorable, to collect as many things and possessions and associate as a person with these things, now there's a dissociation, but I'm trying to dissociate as a person from the world. I'm trying to step out of the world, trying to escape from the world, but I still believe I'm a person in the world. So I go to the mountain. So I go to the convent, to the monastery. So I don't associate with people. You see people. Because the mind believes I'm a person and I'm going to just get away from other people or other objects. He's not going to do this and that. And of course there's still the belief in personhood and that hasn't been questioned. So we're still, the mind is still made up of construct. It's time of poverty. Poverty in the material sense and that seems to be the way to go. That seems to be the most valuable. That it's more valuable to be poor and to not have for a person to have objects than it is for a person to have objects. And once again, that's just a different construct. That's not the escape from the construct that I made this whole thing of. It's still not stepping back and saying that it's just a construct. That's what you're saying. It's just a different one. It's still saying that there are certain forms that are evil in the world. And I'm going to avoid those evil rich forms and I'm going to pick a poor form that's better than the rich forms. In a sense, the old stuff about Jesus, the line could be useful, Jesus was a beggar and therefore, you know, I'll just take on the form of a beggar and magically I'll be a healed person but personhood has to be questioned. It has to be stepped back from. So is there any construct that's any more valuable or more helpful than any other construct? Yes, there is one construct that is more valuable and that's forgiveness. That's the construct that I was talking about earlier that when you step back, step back, step back, step back, well, you can see it as a construct. It's still a construct, but it's like, forgiveness has been described in the Course as like this blanket that just covers everything. I mean, in a sense, you've stepped back so far that you've got this purpose in your mind, this purpose of healing, of wholeness, of not ordering and not judging and not valuing or arranging among the thought forms anymore and then you have like a blanket that literally covers the thought forms in one metaphor or it's seen as a fabric, I've talked about before, that there's no hierarchy among the thought forms. There's no meaning read into them, no association. Forgiveness is a meaning in the mind that is given to everything in form and obviously it's still as a construct in the sense that it's perceptual, but it's the one helpful construct. It's the all-inclusive construct where there's no ordering among the thought forms. What about other constructs? I mean, doesn't the Course say something about changing concepts as you go along and that as you change the concept that you're holding onto at that time will be more expansive than the one that you let go of until you finally get to the point where you let go of all of that. But in that sense, isn't the construct that keeps getting broader and broader, isn't that more helpful than the one that you left? Yeah, in the sense that's the only value that can be put on a construct or form of any kind is what is it for? You could talk about it in a religious sense of a heaven in the hell and so on and so forth and then we could throw in the idea of something like a reincarnation perspective of a soul that is immortal but keeps going through, keeps returning again and returning again to the world learning lessons until it finally has remembered itself and seen past the veil of the Maya or the illusion. That can be a helpful construct, for instance, reincarnation could if it gives a sense of the eternal of something that's beyond the temporal world. But obviously it's still a construct in the sense that it involves the belief in birth and the belief in death and the death of birth of what? The body still involves the body, still involves time like we could call them lifetimes or whatever so there's a linear sense to it and it's obvious that all of this is still part of the construct of the world because it involves all these temporal things time, space, birth, death, body. It's helpful. You could talk about it in terms of different lifetimes but even within what is called a lifetime doesn't the mind keep expanding? Well, I guess it depends at least our purpose in undoing and unlearning and examining and looking at things is so that you can see the construct and step back from it and it just seems like the construct in the mind keeps changing keeps loosening up as it were keeps letting go of more and more than once thought that it was like the wheels you were talking about each of those though the mind seems to be still on a wheel it can see the smaller wheels within it that it's already stepped off of in a sense but knowing that it's still on a wheel it's just maybe a