 You respond to what you perceive and as you perceive so shall you behave So in any he jumps into the golden rule and everybody's familiar with the golden rule do unto others as you would have them Do unto you he says the golden rule ask you to do unto others as you would have them do unto you This means that the perception of both must be accurate You have to have a correct perception of others and you have to have a correct perception of yourself otherwise We're back to that behavioral thing do unto others as you would have others do unto you and Jesus is saying it goes much deeper than than just trying to Return kindly acts or to act kind and hope others will act kind to you It's like you have to perceive correctly And the way that first sense is there you respond to what you perceive and as you perceive so shall you behave It gives you a real sense that behavior is just like this This effect that comes automatically from after the perception In other words if I perceive attack My behavior will will be a response to that perception of attack It's not responding to what somebody is seemingly doing on the level of a form But it's my perception or the meaning that I'm giving to What I see on the level of form A good example would be that I think the movie being there with Peter Sellers And he plays this Chauncey Gardner this innocent real innocent like childlike Gardner who goes out into the world after these years in seclusion and a Group of like a gang in an inner city. He's been in this in this house his whole life He's never been out and a gang comes up to him as he's walking down the street the first time out in his life You know, he's he's up in years and they come up to him and they start You know hey honky and then they're cussing at him and they pull out their knives and they're going up to his face You know with their knives right up to his nose and he's just just looking at him, you know real innocent You know all he's ever known is television and after they persist with with the language and cussing at him and Pointing these knives at him he finally reaches into his pocket and he's got his little TV changer and he goes like this like I don't know if I like this channel I think I'm gonna I'm gonna change the channel, you know, but it's like this total defenselessness, you know He's not he's not flinching. He's not ducking. He's not running. He's not space is intending up and Basically, that's kind of an extreme example of you respond to what you perceive, you know It's it's you have to perceive attack before you can respond in a defensive way and So that's I mean that's a real basic metaphysical cornerstone tonight when we go into things that that you have is what you Perceive it's the meaning that you give to the images that are in front that the eyes are seeing that that really is crucial in Psychology for years they've they've tried to figure out what comes first, you know, it's kind of like when you see a bear And and you start to run, you know, do you think oh, I'm afraid I have to run Does the fear come first? Does the what comes first, you know, because the you start to get all sweaty and your heart starts to go fast in Psychology for years. They've been wondering, you know, what comes first What's going on in the mind or what's going on in that brain that's having it making it come out that way? And of course, here's here's the master psychologist Jesus who's laying it out and saying well, you have a mind and Your thoughts is where it's all happening that basically, you know If you have a fearful thought or an ego thought he would call it, you know Then fear is produced as an effect of that ego thought It's not like the emotion comes first and determines the thoughts Or the emotion doesn't necessarily determine the response like of heavy breathing or sweaty palms or whatever But it's the thought that comes first So once again, that's helpful if you're studying metaphysics to say, ah If I've got to get to the source of the problem, I need to get to my thinking If I'm feeling upset if I'm feeling jealous or I'm feeling hurt or abandoned or I'm depressed or One of thousands of emotions the course simplifies and says those are all just sprays of fear There's basically only two emotions. Isn't it nice truth is simple instead of having to learn you got 15,000 emotions No, he says you got two emotions Love and fear and then he goes even further to say that that there's two thought systems in your mind Once the egos and once the Holy Spirit When you're listening to the Holy Spirit and you're lined up with that thought system You're going to feel loving peaceful joyful when you're listening to that other thought system in your mind You're going to feel fearful or one of those thousands of emotions that are not don't feel good Can be bored of me even boredom is a spray of fear You know envy just it doesn't really matter so that really simplifies things that there's these two thought systems in the mind There's not three or four, you know Just two and that you're choosing one or the other Every single second of every single day even in nighttime, you know when you're sleeping and dreaming the mind is very active and powerful And it's continuing to choose between these two thoughts is you have a nightmare You know you wake up in the sweat of terror or whatever, you know, it's still the same thing still choosing the fear-based thought system So that's good news now. We got it to that point now it's like well If there's this confusion going on I'm choosing between love and fear I've got to start to be able to tell them apart and I've got to start to get clear in my mind and have some discernment About these thoughts that are going on in my mind because other than that then it seems to be like the emotions just come It seems to be almost like the emotions are the first cause You know, sometimes it seems like there's something that happens and we have a reaction But other times have you ever had those times when you're just kind of having a melancholy day and you don't know Where it came from Or you're feeling a little down or depressed or a little fearful and anxious, but you you're trying to think what is it? You know, it's like it seems to be buried way down there and really it comes down to the mind is either choosing love or fear So we have to get into talking about the mind. We have to get into talking about beliefs Unconscious beliefs in the mind, you know to really get down to to get at what's going on So this is what the course is about Now to spring on the idea we just had I was going to jump ahead to page 200 and I don't know what that would be in the new one It's just a continuation of our first idea And it says but truth is real in its own right and to believe in truth. You do not have to do anything Not a nice idea to believe in truth. You do not have to do anything I think a lot of times we think of the spiritual journey is like oh It's going to be a long hard journey with lots of work And I'm going to have to do lots of stuff to get there and he says to believe in truth You do not have to do anything Understand that you do not respond to anything directly, but to your interpretation of it Your interpretation thus becomes the justification for the response So that's kind of just carries the idea that we've talked about where it's it's an interpretation that the mind's making Of what's going on on the screen. That's that's where the problem is That that really the only problem we have is we have an interpretation problem If you grab the lessons from the course, it would be lesson number two I have given everything I see all the meaning that it has for me You know, I'm giving it the meaning to three people see an accident happen on a corner eyewitness account They take down What did you see? You know, well you get Three interpretations now you go to a movie you go to a theater It seems to be quiet movie and all of a sudden the guy in the back just starts laughing one guy out of the whole Laughing he's he's there's something funny there in his mind. He's interpreting what's happening on the screen. It's funny That's not the way that we've been raised to think in a sense of that's not the way in the past In the past we've learned it's been like that movie made me laugh that person's funny He makes me laugh that person hurt my feelings, you know, that person just aggravates me so much I can't stand him at work or whatever. It's all Something that someone is doing, you know behaviorally is his cause and my mind is upset because of what they're doing and And all the only thing the course is doing is saying well, you got it backwards. It's the other way around That it's your interpretation of Your brother's behavior it's your interpretation of If if it's gloomy and cloudy for 12 straight days and you're down in the dump If the backward thinking would say I am really sad because I haven't seen the Sun for 12 days And I love the Sun in the course it turns around and it would say your interpretation of 12 cloudy days Is what's upsetting you? It's not the cloudy days Or 12 90 degree days, right? so You can start to get a sense that that the interpretation problem is a problem of of cause and effect being reversed You know where the ego's thinking is in there is saying Your little your tiny your weak your frail your vulnerable You're a little bitty body a little bitty person in a gigantic world And there's all these big powerful forces outside of you and you better be careful you know because The economy could collapse or AIDS could spread or you may have a hurricane or a flood or you know there's all these things that that you got to be afraid of that are out there in the world and Basically all that the course is doing is it's saying that's all the fear and all the upset is coming from our interpretation problem It's in our own mind That's good news in the sense that gee if I have made my mind up one way And I'm seeing falsely that I can I have the power of decision in my mind to change my mind about how I look at the world Then I can can give up fear Now that's the good news. It seems it can also seem like well wait a minute here It's seems like a pretty big job because there's lots of things that I'm afraid of in the world And there's even things that I'm not even sure but I feel like that are buried in my mind And I'm not even sure but there seems to be an awful lot of fears And it can seem like a big job going into the mind and looking at all these these thoughts and beliefs Get into a relationship That's the course's path in the sense that the course says you know whenever you're in relationship or you know you're in close proximity or It's this these beliefs get flushed up like rapid Because the mind has tried to deny them and and when you get into a relationship that the ego's basic urge is to project the guilt And project the pain outward onto the onto your brother and so really when that happens It's it's not it's not about You know poo pooing in the relationship or saying I've got to get out of here or this or that But it's like okay what there's something that I'm seeing in you My brother that that I have denied or that I'm unwilling to look at in myself And it just comes flying up and another way of course is to study the course because he lays it out You know he he starts to talk about these beliefs He talks about beliefs of time and space, which are pretty deep He talks about beliefs and levels of the mind and and he starts talking about beliefs in the mind and everything And as I've done computer searches through here It's been fun for me just to go through and print out all these different beliefs that he talks about all of them false But all of them things that that I need to look at you know And so I think just as you just study the book you you get a great shot Yeah, it's like raising all these unconscious beliefs to the light that it's not like you have to fight them Or it's not like you have to destroy them But all they have to do is be to be raised up so that you can see oh This is just a belief that I've believed in you know, and I can see I can hold it up to the light of truth I can see that it's backwards and cause an effect or I can see that it's it's not in line with the Holy Spirit Such system and then you once you can see it then it's dispelled Now there's a whole in another sense So the reason it seems to go on and on and on and take a while is that that basically there's all these beliefs but they're all sprays of the ego and Basically, it's a matter of going down deeper and deeper in the mind and being able to see all of the beliefs as false or I usually analogy sometimes you could think of them like a skyscraper and This it's night and all the office When the all the office windows are black because the lights are turned off at night if that's like the mind and The surface of the skyscraper where the flag's blowing that's that's where the experience is of being in the world It's like not really being aware that you're standing on on this giant skyscraper full of dark corner beliefs So you're up there and then basically the thing is of going down and literally it seems to be the experience of starting the top and going down by the floors and Going with the Holy Spirit and turning on these these light switches In each room and you can it seems like oh boy This takes a while to go down and get all these but but there's a there's a big shift that can occur And it only takes an instance because there is a main switch for the whole building If you can get down to the basement Where the main switch is the ego is out of business because then it flink the whole thing lights up The main thing too is remember we said that there's only two voices in the mind and that's the Holy Spirits and egos and You're deciding between one or the other every instant but When it comes through all the