 What an expansive topic we have today. Mastery through love, the relinquishment of fear. Well, if that topic doesn't take us all the way, I don't know what will. That's like an invitation from spirit to dive in, to really go for it. And, well, you know, the Course is pretty straightforward about love. You know, Jesus tells us at the very beginning that this Course does not aim at teaching the meaning of love, for that is far beyond what can be taught. It does aim at removing the obstacles to the awareness of love's presence. And so when I first read that, I allowed myself to let go of trying to understand love, or trying to somehow bring love into the world of concepts and think that even though we call many things love in this world, that line from the Course is really pointing and saying, we don't really have a clue of the vastness of this love. We may get glimmerings, and we may get glimpses of it, but we don't know the fullness of the divine love of God or heaven or our identity as Christ. And so he does say, when you have achieved the faintest glimmering of love, you have advanced in distance without measure and in time beyond the count of years. So we're going to work today on approaching an experience that is love that is extremely vibrant and extremely vast. We've used words like unconditional, divine love, and we're going to approach it through the topic of mastery through love and the undoing of this belief in fear, the relinquishment of the fear. Because when we come into a course in miracles, Jesus is teaching us that actually love is beyond our curriculum. Love simply is. At one point in the workbook, Jesus says God is. We say God is, and then we cease to speak. So if there had to be the last two words ever spoken, God is, and then that's it. Divine love and stillness, pure total telepathic communication and gushing love. He does call it like a song in the song of prayer. But in terms of the curriculum, which is we're talking about waking up to this, basically the two perspectives that we have on anything is one of fear or one of, I'll call it forgiveness, because forgiveness is in the sleeping mind a reflection of this divine love and that's really our responsibility is learn to choose the atonement and choose to forgive. And then it says God will take the final step. It's merely that's just a return to creation, to return to that purely abstract divine love. So with these two perspectives, basically the forgiveness would be our right mind and the personal perspective of perceiving the world through the five senses and through the perception of yourself as a human being surrounded by a vast world and vast cosmos. That is the perspective of fear. That is the lens of fear. The personality self and the personal perspective is a representation of the ego's perception of this invented fictitious, unreal world that was made as a self-concept, not the reality of the Christ, but as a concept of self to take the place of our divinity, of our love, of our light. So to forgive, we are being asked to reach a place of mastery through love. We're to come to a place of readiness in our mind where we're ready to learn the lesson of atonement, of complete forgiveness which is in our mind and that is the gateway back to the kingdom of heaven, back to eternity, back to our divine love. So as with many pathways in the East, they have a saying called neti neti, not this, not that. So we're going to have a bit of neti neti going on today because I think when we start to go into this about the thought system of fear and trying to find a sense of mastery or stability through the thought system of fear, you're going to find that you will be astounded at how much your mind has been and is attempting mastery through fear. You will be astounded to look at this idea that, oh my gosh, I'm addicted to mastery through fear and no wonder this topic draws me, mastery through love, because that is the complete opposite of mastery through fear. What would mastery through fear be? Well, I wanted to kind of give us a little bit of a jolt at the beginning, a jolt from Jesus, a Jesus jolt to try to give us a sense of the context of how much investment there is in mastery through fear in using fear for survival, in using fear to overcome loneliness, in using fear to overcome sense of lack and using fear to overcome hunger, in using fear to overcome meaninglessness. The ego has set up an entire self-concept, a false identity that's based on the belief in time and space and it's projected out through the sleeping mind and seemingly involves a body and other bodies and the earth and other planets and stars, all of the cosmos is part of this self-concept. The self-concept is not just your personality self or the person you believe yourself to be, that's the teeniest part of the self-concept. The self-concept involves everything that you perceive. When you look out on a clear night, like a Vincent van Gogh night, a starry, starry night and you look up at those stars that are way off, the scientists are telling us now, those stars are light years away and that light is just seemingly reaching your eye from many, many millions of miles, light years away and yet those stars, that light that seems to be stars whether they're burned out or not, those stars are part of the self-concept too. Pluto is part of your self-concept, Jupiter, Venus, self-concept, self-concept. So when I say self-concept, I'm not talking about the personality self, the person you seem to be, I'm talking about the entire cosmos that you perceive is a make-believe fictitious concept that was made to be a substitute and take the place of your Christ identity. Why is that important? Because the contrast is enormous. The actual light of Christ, the vision of Christ which we're coming to through all this mind training and working the course and doing all these exercises and transferring the training all just to come to the vision of Christ is something that, it's like a new lens that replaces the way that we look at the world through the ego with Christ's vision and eventually we see our brothers, our sisters, our self as pure light and we have this expansive self-realization or self-awareness of who we really are. So it's important to realize that the one thing you have to remember about the Course is the Course is teaching us in order to wake up to who you really are and escape the belief that you're time and space bound, you have to forgive and you have to do that through bringing the darkness within to the light. We're also told that when the mind believed it had separated from God a traumatic, horrific experience, in fact Jesus says, into eternity we're all as one, there crept a tiny, mad idea at which the Son of God remembered not to left. So that's the Adam and Eve version of the Course. No snakes, no men, no women, but still taking a tiny puff of an idea that you could be separate from God and taking it serious and forgetting to laugh at it, that's what this whole awakening is about now, is coming back to that gentle laughter of seeing that that's impossible to separate in that way. So now for the Jesus Jolt. The Jesus Jolt is that everything that's perceived through the five senses, everything that you perceive without exception is a block to the awareness of love, is a block to the awareness of truth. You know, when I grew up, I had all kinds of sayings, you know, only God can make a tree. Well, I finally discovered that God didn't make trees. God didn't make no little green apple. God didn't make anything of this world. This time, space, cosmos is a projection of the ego. And so most of us were raised with Genesis in the Bible. God created the heavens and the earth. Well, at least Genesis was half right. Let's give it some credit there. God did create the heavens and the ego projected everything else. And that's where the problem is. That's where the fall from grace and all the difficulties that you've been writing in. Some of you've been writing in questions to me here, so I'm glad you did. I'll try to get to some of those as well. Now for the Jesus Jolt. Well, the ego is a false belief and so not only is the whole cosmos that is perceived, generated from the ego, but all of the egoic laws of competition, reciprocity, all the ego laws of anything you can think of. Economics, that's ego. God didn't create economics. Education, exercise, all the laws of thermodynamics, all the laws of physics. We'll say, to be safe, we'll say all the laws of Newtonian physics. All the laws of this world are part of this mesmerism. And so the mind has fallen asleep and forgot its reality and now it believes a bunch of make-believe laws. And it's seeing a world that reflects those make-believe laws. And so this is why I'm pointing out that all of attempts to improve the world, to improve your body, to improve your personal situation, to better your life even, to better your life as a person. Think of self-help, all the attempts to make a better self, to have a more happy self, a more vibrant self, a more loving self, and that self is still a person, that's all still within the realm of the ego. That even attempts to improve yourself as a person are attempts to make a better illusion. Actually, that's what if we call a spade a spade. It won't help you escape from this world because even attempts at self-help, personal self-help and personal betterment are all still egoic attempts. It's kind of like your car's stuck in the mud and you're spinning your wheels in the mud and then you seem to make some progress and go, look, my wheels are spinning a little faster and the mud is flying a little bit faster and your car is still stuck. You're not really going anywhere. So I just wanted to read a little snippet from Lesson 76 from the workbook because I think this little snippet I'm going to read is going to give you a sense that all of these ego laws, these laws that the ego made up, if you believe in them, if you are following them and you believe that you can actually escape the ego or find true freedom which is in the spirit, if you believe you can find it in this world then that is the ultimate of self-deception. And we have to really face that. We have to say, my gosh, all this self-improvement takes a lot of energy, work, education, skill training, coming back for more training in services and so forth. All the training, you know, getting degrees and developing skills and working with mentors and building these skills are all part of that system. Here's what Jesus has to say in Lesson 76. Think of the freedom in the recognition that you are not bound by all the strange and twisted laws you have set up to save you. He's saying that all of these ego laws have been set up to save you and basically it's just that there's a darkness within, there's a shadow that Jung talked about, there's an unconscious mind that includes the belief in separation and it has engenders enormous fear to believe that you can break away from God. So even though most of it's unconscious, it's very, very dark. In fact, at one point Jesus talks about the self-concept as two tiers. The top tier is the face of innocence. The bottom tier, he says, is draped with sin. That's the words from Jesus. It's so dark. But think of the freedom in the recognition that you are not bound by all the strange and twisted laws you have set up to save you. So these ego laws are more of like trying to find salvation in something other than love and it's basically mastery through fear. You really think that you would starve unless you have stacks of green paper strips and piles of metal discs. You really think a small round pellet or some fluid pushed into your veins through a sharpened needle will ward off disease. And death. You really think you are alone unless another body is with you. It is insanity that thinks these things. You call them laws and put them under different names in a long catalog of rituals that have no use and serve no purpose. You think you must obey the, quote, laws of medicine, of economics, and of health. Protect the body and you will be saved. These are not laws but madness. The body is endangered by the mind that hurts itself. The body suffers just in order that the mind will fail to see it is the victim of itself. The body's suffering is a mask the mind holds up to hide what really suffers. It would not understand it is its own enemy that it attacks itself and wants to die. And it is from this, this desire to die, this desire and attack. It is from this your, quote, laws would save the body. And it is for this you think you are a body. So this entire scheme of all these ego laws of this entire cosmic self-concept is all a giant cover-up to cover over the belief in separation and to literally save the mind. Like, oh here's, you threw heaven away. The ego says, so now you better identify with something because you blew it. And then the ego not only says you blew it, but you don't think God's just going to let you go off wandering scot-free and making up your own identity without punishing you, without there being some kind of consequence for breaking away from God. And therefore this ontological sense of guilt and fear is there. So I give you this whole context because this is the self-concept. This is what we're going to be looking at in order to escape from the attempt at the mastery through fear. You have to see the full extent of everything that you believe and everything that you're thinking that is based on this mastery of fear to reach salvation, ego attempt. Because as soon as you start to realize what the ego's up to, you're going to want to unplug from its thought system. You're not going to want to keep feeding it. You're not going to keep wanting to believing in these make-believe fictitious laws and its make-believe fictitious world when your whole purpose is to wake up from these crazy laws and wake up from this world. There's a lot of points. Some of you know in the mystics and saints throughout the many centuries there's been a strong attempt by the mystics and saints to transcend the body. And Jesus in different ways says that in the Course. He will say, you still have too much faith in the comforts and conveniences of the body. He will say things like, what actions do you take that do not involve the protection of the body or the betterment of the body or the pleasure of the body in some way? He's basically saying that your mind is filled with so many ego beliefs and schemes to reinforce the body as your reality that you're terrified of hearing the Holy Spirit and you're terrified of this pathway that will take you back to the light. There's a huge investment in this substitute identity and this body identity is not the light. It's very dense and he will even say in obstacles to peace, one of the second obstacles to peace he says is the belief that the body is valuable for what it offers. And that doesn't mean just physically, psychologically. If you think education makes you more valuable, if you think intelligence, intelligence makes you more valuable, or if you think anything of the body brings you something of value. What you are really saying is that there are things that are valuable in perception in this self-concept. Once you start to realize, my gosh, anything I invest in where I believe I can better the world, I can better the body, I can better this self-concept, anything at all will actually be nothing but a block to remembering the truth and waking up. As long as you have investment in the body in any way, shape, or form, I mean physically, psychologically, if you believe in the value of the family, of the lineage, of the children, the grandchildren, the babies, anything of perception, anything in the realm of perception is part of this self-concept. There's a great line in the Course where Jesus says, Nothing so blinding as perception of form. The sight of form means that understanding has been obscured. I'm just going to repeat that because it's so profound that absolutely nothing, nothing so blinding as perception of form. The sight of form means that understanding has been obscured. And then the goal of the curriculum, regardless of the form you choose, is know thyself. There is nothing else. Know thyself as the Christ. The ancient Greeks called it know thyself. That was coming to truth, coming to the oneness. So when I have said repeatedly over these last 20-some odd years that it's a perceptual problem, the very idea of perceiving through the body's eyes and perceiving a fragmented world is the problem. The problems aren't relationship problems. The problems aren't economic problems. The problems aren't problems of disease or environmental problems. The problems are not of an interpersonal nature. The problems are not of a personal nature. The problems are not even of a personal psychic nature. The problems are a perceptual problem of believing in a world that has no reality and existence and having an investment in anything of that cosmic projection. If you believe that you want something from the world, I've often said the world will seem to want something from you. When people say, well, you know, I have trouble with society and the rules of society, I have trouble in my own household, the rules that are in my household. I have trouble with the laws and the rituals and the rules of this world. Well, they came from the ego and as long as you believe in any aspect of the cosmos, you're saying that you want those limitations. These are all limiting laws. These don't have anything to do with heaven or the law of love. They're all limitations. Now let's have one more aspect of this Jesus jolt because I'm trying to expose here what is mastery through fear because how are you going to relinquish fear if you're still attracted to it? Talk about schizophrenic. Why would you want to relinquish something that you still are attracted to and you still find valuable? You know, Jesus is like saying to us, it's okay, you can let it go and you've got your fist clenched around something and Jesus says, please let it go, you want to be happy, right? Yeah? You want to be peaceful, yeah? And okay, why is your fist still clenched? Why are you still clinging to these make-believe fictitious laws that God didn't even create and they're bringing you hurt and havoc, they're depressing you, they're making you feel pain and suffering and you've got your fist so tightly clenched. He's like saying please, can you give me one finger at least, open up your fist a little bit and let's loosen this up. So let's jump ahead to chapter 20 because I thought we all need a good Jesus jolt before we get into this mastery of love talk. We really have to understand, first of all, how invested am I in fear and if I am super invested in fear and maybe I've forgotten that, maybe I think I'm just a human being, I'm only human born to make mistakes and I'm doing the best I can and everything and okay I might have a few crazy things going on in my mind but I'm not like a major addict or anything like this and you know I have some fear, yeah I get some fear, comes up every once in a while but it's not like it's like total fear, I'm not like psychotic and just totally overwhelmed by fear so let's look at some of the subtleties of what this mastery through fear is about. I remember the first time I read this section, I was reading it in a course group and you should have seen the looks on the people around me. They were looking at me like I was from another planet, like who wrote this and what are you talking about and you can't be serious, he's not serious right, he's just joking here, he can't possibly be serious but it starts off with a very nice title, the gift of lilies, some of you want to follow along, it's from chapter, looks like 20, the gift of lilies, look upon all the trinkets made to hang upon the body or to cover it or for its use, okay, talking about some jewelry, hang upon the body, maybe a hat, scarf or to cover it, okay, talking about clothes, shoes, okay, all right, okay, look upon all the trinkets made to hang upon the body or to cover it or for its use, see all the useless things made for its eyes to see, oh wow, that's a lot, how many useless things have my body's eyes seen in 61 years, I can't even count that high, how many images have I gone, okay, think on the many offerings made for its pleasure, going out to eat, sex, watching a beautiful sunset, just imagine, think on the many offerings made for its pleasure, the body's pleasure, and remember all these were made to make seem lovely what you hate, you mean every single offering that I've ever perceived in these 61 years that were offerings made for the body's pleasure and remember all these were made to make seem lovely what you hate, what I hate, you're saying that I hate my body, some of you can relate to it a little bit, but that seems like pretty strong to make seem lovely what you hate, that basically this false identity contains a lot of fear and a lot of guilt and a lot of anger and a lot of hatred and it's going on in the mind and then the mind is using the body and all these trinkets and all these other things of time and space as a giant distractive device to what, to face the self-hatred that's in the mind, to face the unconscious mind, it's like a giant hologram to use the Star Trek term, it's a giant distractive device to distract the mind away from be still and know that I'm God, it's a giant distractive device to keep from releasing darkness, exposing darkness, letting it out, letting it out and healing, coming to true healing, would you employ this hated thing to draw your brother to you and to attract his body's eyes? Wow, would I employ the body this hated thing to draw your brother to you and to attract his body's eyes? Learn you but offer him a crown of thorns not recognizing it for what it is and trying to justify your own interpretation of its value by his acceptance, yet still the gift proclaims his worthlessness to you as his acceptance and delight acknowledges the lack of value he places on himself. Well that first paragraph is an expose on on how any investment or seeking any worthiness or any value whatsoever in a body or anybody or trying to gain pleasure through it, which most of us grew up, you know, that was part of our dualistic perception of the world, whether it's pleasures and pains and you try to maximize the pleasures and minimize the pains, he's basically telling us to the extent that you're invested in the body as part of your identity, then you will be using mastery through fear as your attempt at salvation. You will try to find your peace of mind and your happiness through that body identity and you may try many variations and you can talk about it as lifetimes or you can talk about it as all of the attempts, part of the human condition, to alleviate pain, loneliness, emptiness, lack, suffering through using something what Jesus would call external, it's really external to you. He says the body is outside you but it seems to surround you so when he says external, he's saying anything of the body in the cosmos that you're looking to to fulfill yourself, to find that peace, that wholeness, that happiness, that completion that you truly want is basically you're using it as an attempt with fear, you're trying to reach a mastery, a stability, you're trying to stabilize your identity through fear and he's telling us throughout the course it will not work. He doesn't care how predominant it is, it may seem to be legion, it may seem to be most everybody you know is doing the same thing but he's saying that entire perception is a giant deception from knowing who you are. Now here's an interesting line to start the second paragraph, you know the first one is just it's kind of a wipeout, it's a Jesus jolt, the first paragraph and then the beginning of the second paragraph, you know, I was raised in a family where we exchanged gifts at Christmas, we exchanged gifts at birthday, you know with your partner or your relationship you you give lots of gifts, it's fun to give gifts and gifts and gifts but but basically you know all the gifts that I was used to giving in Christmas and whatever candy in Easter or Mother's Day, Father's Day, we have events all during the year to give gifts. This is what he starts off with in the second paragraph. Gifts are not made through bodies if they be truly given and received. Okay another atomic bomb, you just wiped out my entire history of gift giving there with one sentence. Gifts are not made through bodies, all the gifts that I ever gave to mom and dad and all of them were all gifts were material gifts and he's saying in the first sentence, gifts are not made through bodies if they be truly given and received. For bodies can neither offer nor accept, hold out nor take. Only the mind can value and only the mind decides on what it would receive and give. Now that can seem kind of harsh based on our experiences human beings and earthlings, it can be like oh come on now gifts are not made through bodies well it's gonna be kind of hard to give them away if I can't use my arms and you know it's it's it's gonna be really difficult but actually he's preparing us for our miracle working function. He's gonna be saying you know you have a lot of miracles in your mind, a store house of miracles that the Holy Spirit and Jesus wants you to give away and they will radically change your perception of everything and everyone. In fact as you give you will receive and as you learn to accept your function as a miracle worker you will transcend your entire perception of the world. Your little tiny personal perception of the world will be lifted up and as it says and every gift it offers depends on what it wants. In other words what the mind wants is what it's giving. If it's valuing the body or material things and things and stuff you know it will it will adorn its chosen home most carefully making it ready to receive the gifts at once by offering them to those who come unto his chosen home or those it would attract to it and there they will exchange their gifts offering and receiving what their minds judge to be worthy of them. You know to me when I first read the course back in 1986 and then I just started reading it for like eight hours a day I really took it on. This was not some kind of an intellectual exercise of reading a book or doing lessons over and over for years upon years upon years. This is actually asking you to have a transformation of your consciousness by actually taking this on and transferring the training and really linking into what Jesus is talking about and I noticed that I would like take it so much to heart that even when Christmas time came I get around or I would go to a birthday party or whatever I really started to practice this that my mind had all these amazing gifts of happiness and joy and peace to offer. I also took a I also let go of my job my career my future my future plans my future ambitions and so I decided I'm just going to live in the miracle and really take this on to be he's saying I have to take it on to be the savior of the world to know myself myself as ruler of the universe the salvation of the world comes through me I mean I was reading the workbook lessons and I thought this is a whole system that is telling me that I need to live in a completely different way than I've been living I need to think differently I need to have different thoughts in my mind and it's not going to matter if I make a few changes in form here and there or if I just continue on trying to bring the light of truth down into the personality self or into the perceptual world because it was clear from the course it doesn't work that way you can't bring the truth into the illusions you can only bring the illusions of your split mind of your sleeping mind to the truth and they will disappear and I remember one year my niece my niece was having her birthday party and I remember going to the birthday party without without a physical presence and I remember I thought well okay Jesus I'm trusting you but I don't know how this is gonna go after these years of bringing presence to show up there and just be in the joy of being a miracle worker and it was really beautiful because I think at one point when we were alone she looked at me with her eyes and she said Uncle David didn't you get me a present and and I thought here we go you know this is where the rubber meets the road and I remember Jesus said something to me like every time I play with you and all the joy that we share and happiness and everything of being there and sharing all this joy that's the present and you know she totally reflected that back to me she said okay and that was it that's the sad face was gone in an instant and it was swept away by the joy of the miracle and we played and did all kinds of things and the love was still there without the physical presence it was just a moment of hesitation where she looked at me like what's there something different about this picture and that not that only was there but it transferred to everything in my life I started to value my attitude I started to value sharing the love in my heart with everybody I met to really be with them listen to their heart listen to what the Holy Spirit was speaking through them to me and it was so joyful it was so miraculous it just transformed everything from going from a life of trying to have the body be the recipient of all this work why do you work careers and jobs except to earn money for houses and cars and clothes and and stuff and more stuff and more stuff and Jesus was saying listen you've got to release the value you place in that body I'll use your body to speak through it I'll take you he took me speaking these ideas to six continents and on many many forty some countries and on and on and around and around but all it was was me allowing the Spirit to use the body just as a communication device and not as an end in and of itself in other words to the ego the body is is your home it's your identity and it says it's good and fine to improve that identity to let that identity be the recipient of all the stuff and things of the world fame fortune recognition adulation all kinds of things that are really just pride the ego wants us to puff up this little personality self and have a puffed up prideful identity that takes the place of the Christ because it's got to make it into something you know it's it's a huge distortion to forget that you're the Christ and to to believe that you've taken on a bodily identity so I just went through that paragraph and a little bit of the second one there to give you an idea of how different this pathway is from what we would call conventionally living make the best of it on planet earth this is a radical departure from make the best of it on planet earth because make the best of it on planet earth involves the body being the end not the means involves a total valuation and focus upon the body as the recipient of many many things and the course teaches us no it's just part of your perception but there's no difference between a baby and a button there's no difference between a person and and some perfume there there is no difference all of the images are equally projections and none of them is you not any single one of them there is a forgiving forgiveness there is a real world or a happy dream in your mind and that's an illusion too but when you find this illusion in your mind it's the one illusion that takes you out of all the rest it's the one illusion forgiveness that cures your identity confusion of thinking you're a human and your flesh it takes you back so far toward the light that it's literally the forgiven world and the happy dream are are actually the gateway to heaven the gateway to nirvana now what does this have to do with mastery through love well the course is so simple because everything that the course teaches is about forgiveness everything teaches to bring it all back to your mind you know in lesson 132 Jesus says there is no world apart from what you think in other words you have a powerful mind if you think egoic thoughts and hold on to egoic beliefs you will have a perceptual hallucination that will convince you that you are something that you are not and that how powerful is that mind lesson 152 the power of decision is my own he says you may think that's kind of extreme but everything you perceive in the cosmos and I mean throughout all of history of the cosmos Hitler Mussolini everything you've ever perceived the stone age is from your mind you know everything in the entire cosmos is a projection of this one mind the sleeping mind and it has not left its source it's still in the sleeping mind that thought it up it's not really out there and the only way to turn things around is Byron Katie would say turn it around is you need mind training there has to be lots and lots of mind training to reach this state of mind this forgiveness and so how fantastic that we have an opportunity to go for forgiveness together and actually go for mastery through love that's what forgiveness is is mastery through love it's letting the power and the strength of the Holy Spirit solve every problem that you perceive