 Okay, hi everybody. Nice to see you all. Welcome to our all day movie workshop. Looks like David's camera might be off right now. He might need to restart his computer or something if he can't get his camera on, but we'll just see. So yeah, I'll just let you all know about the setup for today. And so for those who are new, I'm Peter. I'm going to be hosting and how we run the day is we have, we're going to have David showing the movie to start with. And then afterwards, we'll have a 10 minute break. And then we'll come back for our breakout rooms. And that's where you can express any emotions or anything that came up during the movie. And then afterwards, we'll go into a 45 minute break. And then we'll come back for the Q&A session. And so we'll see if David's ready or not, but we might, oh, there he is. I can see him there. Great. I'll pass it over to you now, David. Just in the neck of time, I was going through some zoom settings because for some reason, the body wasn't appearing on screen today, but either way, we would have some fun if it was just my voice. You can have some fun. You can just imagine me wearing a Hawaiian shirt sipping a pina colada somewhere if it's just my voice. So how beautiful to have you along today. We're going to go on a beautiful journey and a deep dive. And yeah, I've been working with A Course in Miracles for 36 years and really teaching it for probably over 30 years. And I think some of you who are familiar with A Course in Miracles knows that Jesus uses three basic schools of thought and words vocabulary with His Course in Miracles. And those three are education and Christianity and psychology. So I've been teaching the Course for over 30 years using those terms because I was raised Christian and I have a psychological background. And I spent 10 years in full-time in university and before that, of course, yeah. High school, junior high, grade school, kindergarten, basically 20, 25 years. Maybe some years in education. But my guidance that's coming in now for myself is that I've been using all these different words that people have found very helpful. But I'm going to start in a couple of weeks, I'm going to start really speaking the same content in Christian language. I know some of you are like, you have different views of Christianity and you may have some grievances with Christianity, what the ego did in the name of Jesus. So basically you probably will enjoy what I'm going to be doing because I'm going to sound like a Christian preacher. Oh my God, David's turning to an evangelist. But I hope you've enjoyed my last 30 years of using psychology and education and Christian terminology because I'm going to shift much more to Christian. It's the same me, it's the same Jesus. There really is only one Jesus. I think anyone who has taught that there's two Jesuses, there's a Jesus of the Bible and a Jesus of the Course, miss the mark. There's only one Christ. And this Christ has always been with us and it's who we are. And so the terms that came from Jesus have been misrepresented by the ego and twisted around for many years. And that's why people have such reactions. You're not really reacting to the people, you're reacting to the meaning in the mind. And really there's nothing about Christ that isn't love. Christ is all-inclusive. Christ is one who brings this all together and realizes we're one mind. There aren't two different Jesuses. There's only one and that one is who we are. He's a symbol of our very identity. So in doing this, I decided to devote the last two weeks, which will be this Saturday and then next Saturday to wrapping up my use of teaching, using terminology and things that are kind of like thought to be a bit beyond the Christian realm. Most people consider psychology to be of the mind and Christianity to be more just like a religion, a theology. But actually the mind is very powerful and I'm grateful for Sigmund Freud and all the psychologists that gave their contribution to show how powerful our mind is, to show that we have defense mechanisms that are guarding against the light, guarding against the discovery of who we really are. And I take my hat off to all the Carl Youngs, the Abraham Maslow's, the Carl Rogers, the great psychologists who have made their contributions. Even Carl Rogers, he's known for unconditional positive regard and his amazing sweetness and gentleness. And Carl Rogers was a Christian who got into the study of the mind and believed that everybody was good and everybody was discovering their true nature and the people shouldn't be guided that way by psychologists. They should just be loved unconditionally. Just love them unconditionally when you're with them and they'll find their way to God. They'll find their way to truth. Just love them unconditionally. And that's really the teachings of Jesus. Just love unconditionally and you will see that you are loved and that everything and everyone is love. There is only love. So, and when I start, in a couple of weeks I'll start speaking, you know, I'm gonna have to do a lot of teaching. I'm gonna have to reinterpret sin from a black mark on your soul that you'll pay for and burn in eternity for to, it's just an error to be corrected. And it's already been corrected. That's why I'm so happy. I'm here to share the good news. The error has been corrected. And that is important. Also, I'm here to teach and learn that there is no value in punishment. There is no value in guilt. There is no value in fear. There is no value in any type of terror that God is purely loving and we can teach that God is loved by our attitude, mainly by our attitude. And of course our actions flow from our thoughts and our beliefs. So that's why we're emptying the mind and we're clearing things out. So I hope you enjoy these next two episodes today and next Saturday. These are my last episodes. And of course what would I use my final two Saturdays for to emphasize except the mind, the power of the mind. That's what psychology is for is to come back and remember the power of your mind, your divine mind. Psychology is also for learning what's going on in the mind so that you can release the error and the distortions and the defense mechanisms and you can accept the wholeness, the completeness, the singleness, one mind. We love the sound of that. One mind, one mind. That's what psychology was intended for. That's what therapy was intended for. Remember that there's only one mind. There's only one of us. Isn't that amazing that the whole field of psychology has one purpose and that's to remember that there's only one of us. That's to remember that that wholeness doesn't need defense mechanisms. That wholeness doesn't need to study ego dynamics. It just has to be as it is. You see how fun that is? We're going to basically the next couple of weeks we're going to kiss the need for psychology and enter dynamics between people and all those stuff that was learned. I know Carl Rogers. I can feel Carl Rogers with me today with a big smile on his face. Mr. Sweetness of psychology is just smiling saying, I love you. I love you. That's what it was all for, to remember the love. It was never for anything else. We were never here to analyze or dissect anything. We were only here to remember the love. Nothing else. And that's the purpose of education too. If we're going to have education, why not learn forgiveness? That's the one lesson that we can learn. We can't really learn any other lesson. We can't learn anything in learning anything. Meaningful. We have to learn to release our perceptions of fragmentation and distortion. So the themes that you all voted on this week that have propelled me into this little chat this morning are this. The first theme that we're going to use today is that the Holy Spirit can use anything the ego made. That's your number one theme with 44 votes. The Holy Spirit can use anything the ego made. Isn't it great that the Holy Spirit can use the body as a means of communication for eternal love and for forgiveness? Isn't it great that the Holy Spirit can use everything as a means of communication for eternal love and forgiveness? Every breeze, the sky, the planets, even the black holes can use the galaxies and the cosmos of time and space to point back to the singularity of the mind that there's only one of us. Every molecule is there to be used by the Holy Spirit to teach us that there's only one of us. The Holy Spirit that we perceive is only one purpose and that's for us to forgive the world and remember our oneness as that we are a child of God, a perfect innocent child of God. So the Holy Spirit can use anything the ego made. The Holy Spirit can actually even use plant medicine. I know some of you probably have some ideas about plant medicine and psychedelics. Well, today I hope we rinse all those beliefs away. I want you to have a smile on your face. So when you think of psychedelics, you don't think of crazy drugs. I want you to think of the Holy Spirit's use of plant medicine to reach an experience, a state of mind that's so joyful and so happy that you can't even contain it. It's just so blissful, so harmonious that you just have a big smile on your face and you go, aha, of course. Because I think many of us have grown up with conditioning around drugs. We all have grown up with ideas of addiction, of substance abuse, of kind of using drugs, including psychedelics, for more for recreational, temporary pleasure, recreational things. And those who have studied the use of psychedelics have basically said that the context is important, the context in which the psychedelics are used and the purpose, of course, is extremely important. Because Jesus teaches us the one question you can ask with anything is what is it for? So if you realize that the purpose and the context are very important, then you see that recreational use of substances for temporary pleasures or temporary highs is not really the best use. The ego will attempt to use the things of this world to generate pleasurable experiences. And we all know the flip side is painful. And that's why most of us have a conditioning to saying, well, there's highs with drugs and then there's withdrawal periods or there's deep lows and there's deep darkness, madness that's associated with psychedelics too. So today I'm going to take you on a journey today and next Saturday of completely dismantling every belief you've ever had about psychedelics. You know, I also want to mention that I really like the examples we have before us. Has anybody ever heard of Ram Dass? Ram Dass was a psychologist. You know, Richard Alpert and Timothy Leary were psychologists at Harvard University. And then they kind of got into experimenting with different substances like LSD, for example. But I like the story of Ram Dass because he starts out as Richard Alpert. He's a psychologist at Harvard, one of the most respected Eastern educational institutes in the United States. And then with Timothy Leary, they start experimenting with LSD. And before you know it, basically Timothy Leary drops out from Harvard and so does Richard Alpert. He heads off to India. And basically he encounters a guru over in India and basically his guru upon meeting him says, bring me your suitcase. And Richard Alpert, at the time, the psychologist has got a bunch of LSD in the suitcase. And of course, Shrimp Curly Baba, you know, basically says I want the suitcase. And he's like, he's very concerned that this guru is going to see all this LSD in his suitcase. So he goes with much anxiety and some fear. He goes, he gets the suitcase. The guru says, open it up. He opens it up. There's the LSD. And then the guru puts his hand out and says, give me some. And Richard Alpert's thinking, I don't even understand this LSD stuff. But now my, oh my God, what am I doing? And the guru wants a bunch of it in his hand. You know things about LSD. It doesn't take much. It's a very potent drug that takes small doses, produce big effects. So the guru keeps going like this. So he empties and puts, he fills the guru's hand with LSD and then much to his horror and shock, the guru swallows the whole handful of LSD. The whole handful and is completely untouched. His state of mind is completely unchanged by a whole handful of LSD. What does that teach us? Mind over matter. There is no causation in form. Jesus is teaching us the mind is causative and there is nothing in form, not plant medicine even is causative. Isn't that wonderful? So that's important to me. That told me a lot right there. I love reading that parable from Ram Dass. He later became a spiritual teacher. He let go of Richard Alpert and he became Ram Dass. Much like Siddhartha let go of Siddhartha became the Buddha. Richard Alpert became Ram Dass. And wow, I think that's a powerful lesson for all of us that there is no causation in form, that plant medicine is not causative. So even when Timothy Leary got blamed for starting the drug revolution in the United States, let's take the blame off of Timothy Leary. That wasn't Timothy Leary's fault because there is no fault. There is no causation in form. As much as it seems that way, for the untrained mind that believes in externals, then it seems like these plant medicines, LSD commonly referred to as acid, magic mushrooms, you know, basically the things of this world. And also we want to talk about ecstasy. Ecstasy is a drug, I think it's technically called MDMA. And the magic mushrooms are called psilocybin. I've had to learn new words. I'm not, I'm not kind of entrenched with the whole psychedelic situation. So I'm like, I want MDMA. I'm like, hey, psilocybin, LSD, of course we've watched enough movies, we hear about people on acid. That's what LSD is. But what I'm going to do today is actually start to take your themes and start to go into the mind. And so we can have a reinterpretation of psychedelics as being something external. They must be something that's being used as just symbols being used by the Holy Spirit to help us remember that we're the Christ. That has to be actually what's going on. So the second theme that we have here is 40 votes stepping into the unknown. I have no direct firsthand experience with psychedelic drugs. But I do know that anyone who goes on the spiritual journey feels like they're stepping into the unknown. And I know that anyone who's taken any one of these plant medicine things, they have to have something inside of them that has a bit of adventurism and a bit of exploration, a bit of courage to face the unknown. Because basically a synonym for the ego is control. And when someone seems to take a psychedelic drug, they realize, I think, before they put it in their mouth or before they ingest it in some way, that they realize that they are in for an experience that will be beyond their familiar perception of the world. They have to have some courage to let go of what they think is the known. Because we know that when you have expansive experience in consciousness, then you do start to perceive everything and everyone, including yourself, in very different ways than you had. So that's a really good theme stepping into the unknown. Anybody who really wants to know Jesus, if you just pray your whole life, Jesus, I want to know you. Jesus, I want to know you. God, I want to know you. You are stepping into the unknown, because God and spirit is the big unknown. And the perceptual world has become the known. It's backwards, you see. What we perceive every day through the five senses, we think that's the known. And God is the big question mark. Spirit is the big question mark, but it's reversed. So what we're really praying for is show me my true identity. Show me the light. Show me the source of my being. We're really praying for what Jesus would call the known. We're praying for the known, but the ego would say we're praying for the unknown. And the ego would say you're praying for nothing because the ego doesn't even believe there is a God. Or if there is a God, it's a punishing God, you see. And the ego either way is going to have you avoid God. The ego doesn't want you to know your source. Okay. The third theme is changing my mind about my mind. That's a teaching from a course of miracles you need to learn to change your mind about your mind. But we're not really talking about perceptual changes. We're talking about a shift from perceiving with the five senses and perceiving a fragmented world of distortions and illusions to accepting our divine mind. That's a pretty significant change. We're going from a fragmented perception into the light. And that's what it means to change your mind about your mind. You have to actually accept your divinity. You have to accept that your nature is spiritual. So when Jesus was talking about the kingdom of heaven, he was talking about the realm of spirit. He was not talking about changing the conditions of the linear time space construct. He was saying, you need to learn to forget this world and remember God. You've had a case of amnesia. You've been sleeping and dreaming of a fragmented world and you forgot God. God is pure spirit. And our true identity is the light. We're pure spirit as the Christ too, but everything is flipped. So when we say changing my mind about my mind, if you want the simple definition of what that is, is I need to accept my eternal nature. You see, that's what it means to change your mind about your mind. If I believe my nature is physical, I need to learn to accept my eternal nature. And Jesus would say that means you need to forgive the false and accept that the truth is true. Anybody who's studied psychology knows that if you study the DSM-3 or DSM-4, because I studied psychology, that it's a very thick book about the diagnosis of all the many, many disorders associated with the human condition, of all the addictions, of all the defense mechanisms. We've had schizophrenia as a diagnosis. We've had psychosis as a diagnosis. We've had PSTD as a diagnosis. We've had so many different diagnosis, and you're going to see some of the characters in this movie are coming from a psychological diagnosis, like OCD, obsessive-compulsive disorder. That is a very dark dedication to obsessive-compulsive thoughts and behaviors. And in this series, I'm going to show you, actually what I'll show you today is we are going to see how the Holy Spirit can use the plant medicine to transcend the distortions of the mind. Even OCD, which can seem to take many years of treatment and oftentimes without success through psychological means, it is possible to transcend by having a shift of perception, which takes you above the control mechanism. The ego is the control mechanism of OCD. The ego is the one that brings in the obsessive-compulsive behavior with the obsessive-compulsive thoughts. And then the transcendent experience shows you in one instant that you're not that, that you are not that at all. You are not the control mechanism. How beautiful. That's the purpose of A Course in Miracles, too. If you practice The Course in Miracles, it's the same aim to realize you have no control over the world you made. That's a quote from A Course in Miracles. You have no control over the world you made, meaning control is an ego mechanism and you have to transcend the ego to realize your true nature. The next one is I named it after Jesus's, his little pamphlet that he dictated to Helen Shuckman, psychotherapy, purpose, process, and practice. It's now integrated into A Course in Miracles curriculum, but originally when the first notes came, The Course in Miracles came, and then we also had the song of prayer and psychotherapy, purpose, process, and practice. This session today and next week Saturday is really dedicated to that pamphlet that Jesus gave us because he's teaching us that the therapist and the patient are not different. He's teaching us that healing occurs the instant that the therapist forgets to judge the patient. Isn't that amazing? If any of you have ever been in therapy, that will amaze you. Healing occurs the instant that the therapist forgets to judge the patient. Power Rogers, unconditional positive regard. That's what heals, love, love heals. And the final one is the helpful use of magic. So the helpful use of magic would be the helpful use of all the symbols of time and space. Words are magic. Winter coats are magic. Medicine is magic. Plant medicine, psychedelics, they're magic. Anything where you give causation to something in form is magic. If you believe that you need a device to communicate with all your 7.8 billion brothers and sisters in the world, and maybe you believe an iPhone is necessary for communication, that's just because you don't really understand how powerful the mind is and that you can telepathically be in direct communication with everyone and everything right now. If you believe it, if you withdraw all the limits, all the false learning in the mind on communication, you will see through direct revelation that you are in direct communication with everyone and everything simultaneously. Now that's communication. And in order to do that, all you have to do is give up the belief in private thoughts and private minds. That's all. You see personalities, private thoughts, secrets, private minds, that's the only requirement to have perfect communication with everyone and everything. So I have chosen with Jesus' help to show two episodes from a series that's on Netflix and the title of the series is How to Change Your Mind. What a lovely title. That really got my attention on Netflix. How to Change Your Mind. That's exciting for me. What's the simple answer to how to change your mind? Well, I can tell you right now that the Holy Spirit is the how. So there's a presence of love, the great corrector, the great comforter that Jesus referred to in the Bible. The Holy Spirit is the how. Most of the times when we think of how we think of a procedure, we think of an event or a situation. But remember the Holy Spirit is the great reinterpretor of this world. And the only problem that has ever been experienced is a misinterpretation of time. Time was invented by the ego to keep the mind asleep and dreaming. And you might say that probably the ego's two greatest inventions to keep you from knowing who you are, they are linear time and judgment. Hey, if you get past those two defenses, you're back to eternity. Those are the main blocks right there. Linear time, the perception of time as linear, past, present, and future, which even Einstein said is a trick. And the belief in judgment. And of course that is why the Holy Spirit is the how. How to change your mind is to tune into your internal teacher, which is the Holy Spirit. That's how Jesus did it. Jesus was an example of someone who believed he was a human being. He believed he was a man. He believed he was born in Judea to Joseph and Mary. And he believed he was human. And then there came a point where the Holy Spirit convinced his mind that he wasn't human. You see. And that's what the Holy Spirit is doing with all of us. Jesus was just the first. He believed he was a man. He saw he was mistaken and he accepted himself as the Christ, an eternal creation of an eternal God. So that's what we're doing here for all of us. Now, because judgment was invented, judgment didn't exist, doesn't exist in heaven, but it was invented after the seeming fall from grace, fall from heaven. Judgment was made to minimize fear without letting it go. So that's very sneaky. Minimize fear without letting it go. That's why judgment never serves us because whenever we're judging, we're blocking the light. It's plain and straight and simple. We're just blocking the light. And our goal is to remember the light, to remember the light, the perfection of eternal love, eternal life. So in this presentation today, basically what we're going to see is we're aiming to return to the source, return to God. We're admitting and acknowledging that the ego made time space. The ego made the world. The ego made the body. The ego made time space and everything of time space in hatred. The emotion that was behind the big bang was hatred. Jesus tells us that in the Course, the world was made in hatred. So, okay, it was made in hatred. But what was the purpose behind that hatred? It had been something underneath it. And the purpose of time and space is to make you mindless. It was to forget the power of the mind. So that's why the ego invented a body and a brain. To think that you're something else other than a mind. To think that you're a body and a brain. In a world of time and space, instead of this realization that you are a divine mind, you are an idea in the mind of God. So that's going to be our purpose. I would say when we look at these beautiful experiences with psychotherapists and plant medicine, these are really inspired therapists. I mean, these are very inspired therapists that have the faith to allow the spirit within them to use plant medicine as part of helping themselves and their patients remember the mind. Remember the power of the mind. Remember, the ego made this world to keep you mindless. It doesn't want you to remember the power of the mind. It doesn't want you to be empowered. It wants you to be disempowered. It wants you to believe in it and feel like a victim of an external world. It wants you to feel weak. It wants you to feel sad, depressed, angry, fearful, guilty. The ego is a death wish. So it wants all of these death emotions and this kind of a heaviness to be accepted as natural. And then, of course, the ego's main goal is death. Everything of the projected time space world seems to end. The stars burn out. The bodies of the plants, the bodies of the animals, the bodies of the humans all seem to decay and pass away. They seem to age, decay, and then finally break down. In science, we call this entropy. You know, it's moving towards disorder. The era of time that seems to move toward the future is the era of disorder or entropy. And so now, how do we escape the entropy? Well, the entropy is just a belief. If we learn to forgive the belief in the ego, we forgive entropy too. We're letting go of disorder. We're saying, sorry, I'm the Christ. I'm one with my creator and bye bye disorder. We're letting go of diagnostics. We're letting go of all medicines, of all attempts to alleviate the pain of false existence. So, you know, for example, OCD, obsessive, compulsive disorder. I said, oh, yeah, that sounds like a wicked, wicked diagnostic obsessive compulsive disorder. And Jesus said, yeah, when you just keep repeating the same day over and over like Bill Murray and Groundhog Day, you've got your own obsessive compulsive disorder going. You're living by rituals. How many times do you have to brush your teeth and take a shower before you remember God? How many times do you have to go to work and punch in and punch out? How many times do you have to mow your grass or clean your living room before you wake up to God? Jesus is saying, you've got a real good case of obsessive compulsive disorder going on. Don't point the finger at those people that are in the hospital. You've got your own. I said, well, I don't know. Do I have obsessive compulsive disorder? Jesus, do I have OCD? And he says, no, no, it's really more. You have FRD. FRD, what's FRD? False reality disorder. You have a false reality disorder going on. You've got a major case of FRD. False reality. Reality is eternal. God is the creator of reality. God creates in spirit. You're an eternal being with an FRD diagnosis that the ego gave you. Because you're believing in time space and God didn't create time space. You're believing in the body. God didn't create the body. You believe in the personality self. God did not create the personality self. God created you as Christ. And there's only one of us and we are the Christ. And we may deny it. And we may resist it, but it's our destiny. We're destined to wake up. There's nothing we can really do to stop from waking up to be the Christ. We can try to put up a fight, but in the end, we have to see that resistance is futile. As the Borg used to teach in Star Trek, resistance is futile. So in this, these episodes, I'm not just going to talk about just the psychedelics and the use of psychedelics. I haven't ever experienced a psychedelic and I'm happy. I don't even seem to need them right now. I'm just, I'm enjoying my psychedelic experience as a miracle. And for me, that's why it's called a course in miracles, but I want to demystify all the false ideas that have been projected onto the psychedelics, you see, because that's part of our forgiveness. We have to start to realize that in the end, the psychedelics are not positive or negative. They're just symbols that the Holy Spirit can use in a temporary way for some people. And for some people, they're very, actually very helpful because they give a glimpse of something beyond the everyday perceptions of the world. And that should not be discounted. If anything gives you a reflection of something that you're much more than you thought you were, that there is a much higher perspective than the everyday human perspective. Let's not discount that. Let's not just toss that away. This is a world of label and dismiss. So in politics, people just label something as bad or wrong or evil, and then they dismiss it. Let's not dismiss anything. Let's say, Holy Spirit, show me the helpful use of everything that the ego made. Whatever it seems to be, that's our top theme, that the Holy Spirit can use everything that the ego made. So sit back, enjoy the ride. You're going to be, I think, really blessed in this experience today. And then we'll continue on next Saturday with the second part. But enjoy the first part, and I will stop in and visit you during the episode here.