 You follow it in and you believe that there is a way to bring about peace on earth in a form sense. You know, have a happy picture, have a happy ending in that sense. The Course is saying that you need to let go of your way of seeing the world as you see it in order to come to peace of mind, that the world was made as an attack on God. It's not like the world has elements of it that are very positive, just by flushing out all of the negatives that you will be left with a positive world, which is a common approach to say. A Disney world. Right. No problem. Michael Jackson, he made this imagery of all kinds of rides and everything, trying to make it there. Yeah. But it's, again, we started to get into the other night where there, it's kind of like anytime you're using the world or the body for the ego's purposes, it's an attack. But many of the ego's purposes seem to be quite nice and that's why there are many forms of attack that the mind doesn't recognize. So it still believes that they're helpful when it's really still attacking. Probably the most subtle and the most deceptive of all of those is what Jesus spends about nine chapters on, is the special love relationship. It seems to be a haven, you know, it seems to offer lots of good things, wonderful feelings of warmth and connectedness and, you know, you could say it's the old you and me against the world. But as the world, it seemed to be, we've got, like, barricades up because we've got a haven here and it seems very attractive and it's not seen that it's an attack, it's still an ego motive, we're still an ego motive behind it and that any attack, again, is an attack on God, it's attacking the, there's not an attack in truth but it's keeping the mind from awareness of truth and reality. So to me when it gets to non-conformized it really has come down to following it down step by step and really questioning what are the ways that I still, or what are the beliefs, what are the concepts, what are the ways of attack that I'm still not recognizing. Help me Jesus, help me understand what those are and help me lay them aside. I guess when I first heard that, I sort of slipped back into this thing of, you know how fundamental this is, you know, there's only one right way to do things and they are uncompromising in that way and I guess that's what I was speaking about at the time. Yeah, form and content, we talked a little bit about how a lot of ways that have been, like black or white thinking, have bogged down into form. This is the only way, this is the only path to reach God or these are the do's and the don'ts in form. You can't do these and go to heaven and these are the good things, the good deeds and you need to do lots of those to get to heaven and what we're talking about is non-conformizing in terms of thought or thinking. That in sense there is only one right way in the sense of right-mindedness. That's at the purpose level or at the mind level. That's contrasted with wrong-mindedness of the ego. So to get clear on that is really important and that's why we try to go very, very deep in all of our talks and discussions and when we get together to get down to a real discernment of right-mindedness versus wrong-mindedness so that we don't tolerate ego thinking in our own minds. And that's where I do my tolerance. I still tolerate it because again I still value some of those and those are the things that I relinquish every day. Every morning after meditations I relinquish those things from the Holy Spirit to us again. I see what's still value and I see what's so real. The question was before. Some of the passages in the Course where it just goes on, like one of them is Get the Lilies, I think, look at all the trinkets made to hang up on the body and you know, on and on. He seems to be getting awful specific. He's talking about clothes and jewelry and on and on and on. But it's kind of like what is it for? And to me the whole thing was going into the metaphysics. If I'm trying to draw attention to the body, then what am I teaching? You know, with some kind of what might be called risque, kind of clothing or different things. What I'm just more and more is, am I teaching my brother and myself that I'm a body and that attention should be drawn and focused on the body or am I focusing on the mind? Again, until you get to those metaphysics it may seem like what's the big deal, Jesus? Does it matter what I wear? You know, that could seem like, hey, what's the big deal? But for me it's one of those things where I just have followed it in. The intention. You know, I went from wearing, you know, browns and oranges and tans, the earth colors, to these bright vivid colors when I had my color analysis done and found out what colors look best on this body. And then I just had the best time. I mean, I love wearing these dramatic colors. And I love wearing really fun earrings. And I got lots of attention from people. People were invariably commenting on my earrings because they were so different. You know, or talking about how bright my clothes were. And I just ate it up. You know? But at some point when I, you know, looked at this very thing David's talking about, it's like, wow, what am I doing here? What is my intention for wearing these fun earrings and these bright clothes? Well, the intention was to get exactly what I was getting. The attention to the body. And when I decided that I really wanted to put my attention on my mind and therefore I wanted to, you know, like model that, then it was been congruent for me to continue wanting to get attention from my body by using jewelry and bright colored clothes for that purpose. Perfumes and low cut dresses and so on and so forth. I mean, you know, you could just go on and on with it. It's the purpose. Is it the body or the mind? And you can also add on to that is when you go and you meet with people, you know, flattery is something that's really interesting to take a look at. You know, this whole thing of flattery. If you really look at the life of Jesus and read about it, his apostles were saying in the Euransia book, you know, he was not a flatterer. Jesus did not go around complimenting and flattering like you would think. And again, it makes perfect sense from the metaphysical perspective because he was interested in their minds. He was interested in their thoughts and them coming to purity of thought and he didn't put his attention onto the body. He didn't focus on the sicknesses even, the types of sicknesses, and leprosy or dead for three days like that. You know, to me it fits again into this thing of means and end. You know, Jesus is saying, if you use the body as your end, if you want to keep all the pleasures, the conveniences, the comforts, the niceties of the world, what is the receptor of that? It's the body. It gets to enjoy all that good stuff, so to speak, in the world. And the mind is a slave to work, to be trained, trained for jobs, educated sometimes for many years to get jobs, to make money, so that the body can get the bucks and all the comforts and conveniences. And Jesus is saying, well, it's got to be turned around 180 degrees. Your goal should be peace of mind and you should want to use your body and everything that you perceive in the world around you as a means to help bring about your peace of mind. Wow, that's a complete turnaround than the other way. And it's one of those things that too, it seems like a loosening and a gradual turnaround. For me, it wasn't something that just like one day I was reading about means and end and went, oh, I get it! One of those things but it seemed like just a little bit of questioning in the situations more and more. What is my purpose here? Why am I going to great lengths to earn this money or to go to to do extreme things for what? The clothing thing, I'm thinking of an example because I wanted to say there are some people that will go wear black or get a mohawk or not shave their legs, you know, because they think that's a way of saying a statement. But I think there's a place where wherever you are teaching you do kind of fit in and not draw attention one way or the other. And I'm thinking about it at the Zen Center when I went and it was time for the service to wear black. So I wore the closest thing to black I could but I had orange socks. Everybody has black socks so everybody looked at me. It immediately drew attention to me and from then on I asked my girlfriend does she have black socks and she didn't have any and so I kind of had to let that go but I remember feeling it was drawing attention immediately to me because everybody was in black. Everybody's in a white so if you come in in black it immediately draws attention to you so it's kind of like what is your lesson and what are you here for not to draw attention. It's good that you bring that up because initially when you're starting to make this shift it's like if you're in a work setting and there's an appropriate professional clothing that you wear and you're just working on changing your mind you forget this lesson it's not helpful to go in there and some rags. It's simpler. That would really draw attention in the work setting. Then they don't want to hear what you have to say. And as you go on and on and on deeper and you really attempt to give up the world then it will come more and more I think word simplicity and things you won't necessarily be giving talks to boards and directors and everything they'll be disciples sitting around you with the training of the level of the mind and it reminded me too of the yellow one today I was reading a little bit of the Siddhartha a book that Herman Hess wrote and they were saying that all of the followers of the Katama Buddha and everything that were following him hundreds and hundreds of them in this book were all going around in their yellow pronunciation robes so you have this forest with all these talking around with these bright yellow robes or whatever but again, we're just trying to That's right For me it came in the form many times of experimenting which made it fine for me in a sense and it also put parameters on it for me well there's any number of things I could probably do for a few weeks or whatever and it would just be a way of me getting in touch with what my beliefs and feelings are around something so instead of saying well, you know, it's like you're going to say good bye not to do this or not to do that that would have been ridiculous and that would have been trying to change the form or the behavior before the change had taken place in my mind and yet I found experimenting with the form was a way to get a closer look at or it would seem to bring up for me some of the beliefs and the feelings that went with it when I stopped wearing makeup what I did was we went on a trip and I thought well, you know this would be a good time to do that because I think I felt like I'll never see these people again anyway they don't know what I usually look like with makeup on anyway so they're not going to say oh my gosh you're feeling okay today you look really pale, you know and so it just seemed like a real appropriate place and it was really easy I never wanted to mess with makeup anyway really it always felt like too much to bother and so for six weeks I didn't wear any makeup just to see how that would feel and how I would feel about myself without makeup on it was real helpful that's where you get the joy that it does thinking about your hitchhiking well what happens usually is when I experiment I don't choose to go back and I may, but a lot of times I haven't chosen to go back into my old way of doing it because I've had a chance to look at why I was doing it and what it would feel like not to do it and just work through some of that stuff and so then I don't really need to I don't need the old way to bring you tremendous fear I didn't say out of fear I was thinking about your hitchhiking because that was an experiment in a way because it was the first time you could tell that story I went down to the trailer and left the car down there and hitchhiked back and I never hitchhiked before we have picked up hitchhikers before and traveling and I've kind of been in that respect related to hitchhiking but not as a hitchhiker and you know, it had been suggest you you you you you you you you