 I mean, we have a mutual interest in a special relationship. Can you talk about special relationships? OK, with persons or with particular... Particularly with persons. OK. We will go into a little bit more. There's some upset around a particular person. Yes, going into this. I didn't know whether visiting my life is the reason that I should be with. That's the reason why. That's also the reason for my question. We came down together. We were kind of discussing this coming down here. And I had already said I wanted to discuss first of all. Because, you know, special relationships seem to come in and out of this book. In one place there are no special relationships. Everyone has everyone's brother. I can see truly where you begin to see everyone as your brother. And then special relationships don't really have a place. And then there are certain places where they almost seem to be ordained. A special person has been given to you to... Oh, I forget how it goes. You know. As a teaching thing, you know. And it makes sense. And when you begin to look at a relationship like that, then you don't want to look the other way. Well, I did make some notes. But then I've got so many notes. Oh, here we go. Oh. In one place, in lesson 78, it says, Let me behold my Savior in this one who has been given to me to work through my salvation. Like one person has been brought to you to look after your salvation. Did I read that wrong? And then in the manual for teachers, levels of teaching on page 6, it says that there are very specific contexts given to you to teach, to learn from. Relationships in particular must be properly perceived. So that's what we're wondering about. How do you properly perceive relationships? Okay. Relationships, I think, is a pretty good, ambitious topic to go into. I'm sure we could really... At least, yes. Well, as you said, the course does say that you have made special relationships. In other words, all of the relationships that we perceive in this world are special relationships. In the sense that they involve specific people and mainly, I think, if we had to have one underlying factor that we could talk about, what makes a relationship a special relationship, it's the past. You're seeing the past in your brother. And of course, that's where sin is or that's where all grievances are held. Isn't it when you think about grievances or problems and difficulties that you have with particular persons and people, isn't it things that they've said or done in the past? Maybe you have a particular problem or a special relationship with this person. Maybe you blame what you would consider yourself a lot when you really don't do it as much with others, but it still has to do with the past and that's what makes a special relationship special. So, in a larger context of talking about special relationships, the course says that the Holy Spirit doesn't try to destroy our special relationships, but he wants to take them and purify them. He wants to have us set another goal for our relationships and the metaphor that the course uses for these purified special relationships are holy relationships. So, once we get into talking about special relationships, eventually we'll have to come around and talk about holy relationships as well. Now, as with, this is a tool written for a mind that believes that it's a separate little person, a separate little isolated person. This is a tool for the mind that has forgotten that it's the Christ, that it's this very powerful spirit that's one with God. And so, this tool has lots and lots of metaphors and in a sense Jesus knows that the mind believes in specifics, it believes in persons and everything. So, a lot of the course is written at the level of perceiving, working with other people. In other words, most of the time, when we think about a relationship, what kind of comes to your mind? When you think of the word relationship, what pops into your mind? What do you have to have to have a relationship? Another person? Well, definitely. Another person, anything else? Commitment. Commitment. Okay. Love. Honesty. Honesty. When you talk about another person too, I mean, that involves bodies. And in most cases, we're talking about proximity of bodies. You know, it's still possible to have a relationship with someone, but it's like the old thing of having a significant relationship if one person lives in China and one person lives in Wisconsin, then, you know, most of us, I think, would consider that that would be a rather difficult, significant relationship because aren't part of our relationships involving proximity of the bodies and time together. I mean, whether we're talking about a significant other or even a good friend, you know, what about memories that you've shared together, good times? You know, doesn't that seem to enter in the picture of a relationship? And what the course is starting to do is that it's saying we have a lot of concepts in our minds, including time and bodies and proximity and laws of friendship and I think another word that the course uses a lot with special relationships is reciprocity, kind of like, you know, I'm spending this time with you and I'll do these things, but I expect, you know, you to do certain amount of things in return, that all relationships as we've come to know them in this world involve reciprocity as well. So that kind of, kind of gives us a little bit of a context for the way we perceive relationships in this world and also Jesus comes in and says that you don't really know what real relationship is. So that's quite a significant thing to look at too, that he'll say the only real relationship is the relationship between the father and the son. When we talk about love, I mean, that's really love. That's like a continuous song of praise and gratefulness between the father and the son in heaven. And that, you know, it seems to have no direct bearing on what we just talked about. Bodies, time, proximity, reciprocity. There's no reciprocity in heaven. There's no time in heaven, it's just eternity. There's no proximity, you know, there's no, any of those kind of elements that we talked about. So when we get into relationships with the Course, it's kind of like saying, okay, these are the things I believe in and now I want him to, I want the Holy Spirit to help me undo some of these beliefs in my mind. When we get back into time too about seeing the past, you know, it's kind of like asking the Holy Spirit to come in to be the central focus of a relationship. When Jesus talks about that in the section on special relationships, he says that it's a very big turnaround when you invite the Holy Spirit to come into a relationship. That the two may be, you know, shocked or appalled because the purpose of the relationship has been so drastically shifted from what it was before. In other words, through the ego lens, when we're working with relationships, the basic premise of the ego is to get. That's what relationships in this world, co-dependencies are all about. It's your needs, you meet my needs. And the underlying purpose is I want to get something from this other person. If we take it down a little bit deeper than just plain old getting, what the ego believes is the ego believes it's been wronged, the ego believes it's been hurt, the ego believes it has a terribly dysfunctional past and I've been let down many times in the past and the ego also sponsors the belief that you're unworthy, you're incomplete, you're not whole, that you need to seek outside yourself to find the things in other persons and other places and other situations that will fulfill you. So all the anger and all the vengeance that comes into special relationships comes in from this ego's purpose of what can I get from this other person and I want them to fulfill me and when they let me down that's where the anger comes in. So that kind of gives us a little bit of a context for it.