 Well, dreams are wish fulfillment and the nature of all dreams is that they are the past without exception. So when we talk about our future dreams, we're dreaming of the past. When we talk about the past dreams, we're dreaming of the past. When we talk about our nighttime dreams, it's the past. The content of dreams is the past. The content of consciousness is the past. I know people have a lot... That's what consciousness is a word that has a lot of different definitions, but I'm talking about how Jesus uses consciousness and, of course, the miracle. Jesus says consciousness is the domain of the ego. Isn't that interesting? Consciousness is the domain of the ego. There was no sense of a split in consciousness or awareness until consciousness did not arise until the belief in separation. So strictly speaking, if you follow Jesus' words, when you talk about God consciousness, what that could be interpreted to mean would be forgiveness because that would be unified consciousness. But consciousness has levels and it can be trained. Even when we think back to the sixties and free love and everyone was going for what? Higher consciousness. What does it imply if you're going for higher consciousness? That there's lower consciousness. That consciousness has levels and Jesus agrees. Consciousness has levels. It's the domain of the ego. So dreams are the domain of the ego as well and consciousness is the domain of the ego. Now we're getting somewhere. So I can start to see that that's my classroom, that consciousness is the domain of the ego. But I want to unify consciousness. I want to release the judgment that breaks it into levels and breaks it into segments and a higher and a lower or a subconscious and a conscious. You might say the way to wake up from this world is first to be fully conscious. To have a subconscious is kind of pushed out of awareness. To bring the darkness to the light is to become fully conscious or forgive. And when I think of improvisational, it's like improvisational theater. There's a spontaneity aspect. It's not rehearsed in like an actor rehearsing lines and just spewing out those lines. It's kind of like there's a spontaneous element to it. It's in the moment that Thomas is here and Thomas actually uses improv from the spirit where he will just say, okay, you're this character, you're this character, here's the setting, go. And amazing healings occur through the spirit's use of improvisational theater. Because it's just a tool that the spirit's using to bring up the things that need healing. Actually, Thomas was just me in Mallorca, an island off the coast of Spain, and there was one woman there who had sat there, she'd watched the movie, she'd gone through the discussions and everything, and she's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not doing it, it's not doing it, I'm not having any breakthroughs. And then she went out and she did Thomas's improvisational work where he looked at her out of the whole group and said, you, you're this, you, you're that. And all of her stuff came up in the improv. And when it was over, she told me, I said, what did you do? She said, I just, I made it into the kitchen, my knees were shaking, I could hardly stand, stand up through Thomas, through the improv, got in there where whatever else wasn't working. She was like, oh yeah, we can get there, we'll get that stuff flushed up and out of there. So I would say it's mostly everything, it's not so much rehearsed, but it's, it all sprang from the unholy instant, this ancient moment of imaginary time in which all illusions seems to spring forth from. All the scripts of the world came out of one instant. And the beautiful thing is they haven't, they haven't gone anywhere. They really haven't been projected out into myriad of forms for many millions of years. They're all still in that same instant. And they're all still simultaneous. And the Holy Spirit has already healed all of it. And that's why in the end it's much to do about nothing. Because, because it wasn't really spewed out. The ego made it look like a big trick. Like it was spewed out over millions of years and time and space. But it's really not that at all. It's healed. Okay, we're back to the atonement. It will escape from the past and total lack of interest in the future. The atonement, it's a word in the course that means correction. You know, the correction for everything. A correction. If the ego is a problem, then the atonement is the correction. It's like the antidote. If you're taking the poison, the most thing, you've got to get the remedy. That's what she's asking about. She wants to know about the remedy. You could say that I've described it as like, you know, the old analogy of the needle in the haystack. There's a golden needle that's in a stack of hay. And it's in there. And it's covered, seemingly, in awareness. It's buried. And there are a lot of lessons. I remember one lesson in the workbook that says, salvation is in your mind among all your thoughts. Find it. You know, you're reading this book and you're like, okay, that's my job today. Salvation is the thought in my mind. Find it. Do you know how many other thoughts are in there too? Yes, find it. You know, you're on a find mission today. Sure enough, that's why we talk about the spiritual journey as kind of negation. You know, we were talking about that this morning, eliminating, you know, 2000. That was Thomas Edison. She was telling the story of all the times he tried to find a filament. You know, what would work as a filament? And he went through how many? Ten thousand? Ten thousand things to try to find the filament. Well, this is the same when you go through your mind. It can sound really good, like salvation, atonement. It sounds good, but you might say empty your mind, like the Buddha said, and Jesus is teaching of desires, of thoughts, of pursuits, of beliefs, of thoughts, of images that you were going after. And it's more like what remains after the process of elimination is atonement. Now, sometimes people will pronounce the word atonement, but actually atonement is really referring to the oneness that's beyond time and space. And Jesus is using the word atonement specifically in the Course, not as atonement, but he's saying, no, this is the correction that comes right before atonement, before the oneness experience. So, it's an illusion too, because in heaven there's nothing to forgive and there's nothing to correct, there's no error to correct. But it's the one, it's the absolute one and only illusion that leads out of all the rest. So, it's kind of cool to think about going in your mind and searching for the illusion that ends all illusions. And that's really what atonement is, or forgiveness. It is a decision. And if you think about decisions in this world, like decision to come to Hawaii or take the retreat or decision to buy a car or have a partner or so on and so forth, all those decisions are decisions that are made from unconscious beliefs. And once you raise all the unconscious beliefs to the surface, then you're ready for another kind of decision. Not a decision that just keeps you in illusions, but a decision that actually releases you from illusions. And that's why it's so important. We cannot emphasize enough this exposure of not trying to keep secrets, hold things in, hold things away from everything else, because that's so important to reach that point so that you can accept the atonement. The only way you can accept that decision is kind of to eliminate all the other distractive decisions that aren't really decisions at all, except to stay in separation, which is not really an option in the ultimate sense. So atonement is the decision that ends decision making. In heaven, there's no decisions. In heaven, it's pure oneness. You have to have at least two to make a decision, because you have nothing to decide between in heaven. But atonement is a decision of purpose in mind, like last night we were talking with our friend, and I was saying, do you remember all the things that you've gone through, all the intensities and so on and so forth and all the distractions? You need to come to that purpose. I was talking about like a rattle for a baby when you have a rattle and the baby comes to attention and moves their eyes over to the rattle. When you come to discover your purpose, when you come to attend to align with that purpose, then that's a higher order of decision, because you're making a decision of what is the purpose of my life, what is the purpose of the world, not what is the purpose of a tarpaulin or a shoe, or what is the purpose of a watch. You see, the ego made up all the images, and it made up separate little purposes for every image. If we went around the room and I said, okay, everybody give your vocation, and it would be like the ego's separate little purposes for these little bodies. I'm a writer or a construction worker. I'm a retreat manager. I'm this, this. I'm retired. These would be all little purposes, just like the ego gave meanings to tarpaulin and shoe. It gives meanings, actual meanings to identities. So that's why when people say, you know, I am a construction worker, I am retired, whatever, they're really saying I am this vocation. And that's really not the truth of it. That's just, again, all the meanings that were assigned by the ego, but those don't have anything to do with spirit or Christ. So it's you empty out all the concepts and what you're left with is the state of unified awareness or the quantum field or the forgiven world, and that's what the atom is. And if we look at the needle in the Haystack again, too, that the needle is representative of only mine is causative. And all of the strands of hay, each one of them have in common that there's something of the world that's causative. So people have asked me, what's the master switch? Do I actually have to do this through years and years and years and years and lifetimes and lifetimes and lifetimes? Or can there be more of a direct approach? I said, yeah, if you can understand true cause and effect and the impossibility of causation in form, then you go through that haystack in a hurry because all of the hay is the same and the needle is different. The needle is the empowerment of your mind. It's a choice for peace of mind that's always been there, but it's been covered over all this false causation with the belief that there's causes outside the mind. So somebody, I talked about that this morning, your aunt wastes, your aunt, I don't know, whatever, wastes 220 pounds, she steps on your dog's tail, your dog yelps, and then you say, come on, her foot stepping on that tail is what caused the pain for the dog. Spurious cause and effect relationship. All of Newtonian physics is spurious cause and effect relationship. When I've lived with people over the years and I hear about food allergies and food poisoning and sour milk and all these kind of things that I don't experience and really have never experienced because they aren't real, but I've had to go in my mind and start to see that there's no cause outside of mind. When we say the words, all healings at the level of the mind is to say that is one thing, but to practice that with everything, with all considerations, you know, as the little pine cones are falling, even as I'm talking, you know, they can't even, they have no causation, they're not hanging on there for some reason, they're just kind of floating down, wee, we're free, we're free, of all spurious cause and effect beliefs, we're free, we're free. That's where the rubber meets the road, you know, and it takes a lot of practice because everything in the world was made as if there's causes and effects in the world. Somebody has emotional things they're dealing with because they had an abortion and it says if the abortion was an event in their lives where their parents got divorced when they were three years old and they feel like that, they've had emotional traumas ever since then, or they lost an arm in a fishing accident and they feel like that changed their life, nonsense. There's nothing causative, there are no causes and effects in the world because the world is a world of images of unreal effects, and what is the unreal cause of all these trillions and trillions and trillions of unreal effects? The ego, God did not create this world, God didn't create this world, we can't start pinning it on God, if God went wrong, went haywire, something went haywire if God created this world.