 We can really turn that up to our talk on Enlightenment that Henry David Thoreau said most men, most people, live lives of quiet desperation. And we really have to take a look at those moments of quiet desperation. We have to take a look at those moments of both at boredom, of dullness. If you are not, right now, living a life that is consistently supremely happy, I would say that there's some compromise going on in your mind. Because God's will for us is perfect happiness, so it's not supremely happiness. I mean like ecstatic. You should have not just an occasional ecstasy, that should be your daily mind. How's your day? Ecstasy! Absolutely in bliss. Soaring in bliss. If you're not having exuding joy, shooting out from you, radiating out from you, then I would say you've got some compromise going on. And the sneakiest thing about compromise is you don't know that you're compromising. You've told yourself that you're not compromising. I'm doing good. I'm doing good. I'm better than that guy over there, better than her. Or even sneakier, I've got it better off here in my life than most people on the planet. Talk about getting into this kind of false sense of littleness, where you think you're little, but you've gotten a lot better than the others, who are littler than you. It's a very subtle form of a superiority complex. You know, even when you can sit down and write your gratitude list, and your gratitude list has all the things that you're grateful for, and if a lot of them are material things on your gratitude list, then I think you really probably should write another list and start to look at what are the qualities in your state of mind that you're grateful for. And if you're having trouble finding that, if you're having trouble making that list, then it's like, it's time to sober up and go, maybe I'm living a life of compromise. Every decision we make is either coming from our spiritual self, it's either inspired in the spirit, or it's coming from the ego. And, you know, there's no, you don't get any brownie points for coming close to heaven. You know, you don't make it through this life and go, well, I think I did pretty good. At least I can count more better good experiences than bad experiences. It's 50.2%. Okay, do I get in? You know, where do I have to do this reincarnation thing and keep improving the percentage? 60 some, 70 some, 80, 90, 99, 99.2, 99.4. And then you get closer, it gets more difficult they say. No, it has to be that if there's any time that you're not supremely happy and joyful, there's some compromise going on in the mind. That's what we're here to discover. We're just not here to just go, la, la, la, la, love, love, love, love, love, you know, and do all that. We're here to expose the compromise and end the compromise. In fact, the Course in Miracles is teaching us that salvation is no compromise of any kind. There's no way that you're going to get it, or we could say more and know it, or even better, experience it as long as you've got compromise going on. There's another line that says this Course will be believed entirely or not at all. This is not like jarts or horseshoes or something. Oh, you knocked it off there, I hit it. You knocked it on there. You know, it's not something that can get knocked off. You know, when you have the experience of who you are of divine love, you know, it's not a matter of coming close or losing it. You imagine how could you lose who you are once you experience who you are? So that really kind of opens up our topic for our Shatakva to compromise because if you don't even know what it is, you know there's something fishy going on that you're not 100% joyful and happy, but you're not sure what that is. That's a golden opportunity to look at. Maybe I have set it up where I think that there's some false benefits that I can find on planet Earth, temporary as they may be because everything here is very temporary, but that while you're experiencing them, you start to get lulled into, oh, I've got it pretty good. I've got it pretty, pretty good, better than most, and that is the ego that's luring you. That is not the spirit that's telling you you've got it pretty good. Loosening up, I call it the status quo, you know, where you think you've got everything sorted in your life and you just want to kind of settle down and you start to get inspiration swirling in your heart that lifts you up and takes you on a journey that you don't know where it's going to go and form and you don't need to know, but you know, you feel your heart opening up. That's what I hear you saying, your heart just started opening up. You went from being closed in and afraid to taking on your function. It does seem like it's a walk of trust and trusting the intuitive prompts will take the place of all of this learning and conditioning that we put our faith in. We've learned stuff from people out of books seemingly and now we're on a path where we're learning to trust our divine guidance, our intuition and really go for that and we may seem to have our setbacks or times where we don't hear something and that takes patience there and that continuing trust is what's going to lift us and carry us. It's just like a whole new way of living and that's the most enjoyable thing for me as I've traveled around the world is just hearing inspirational stories of trust. It's like we're all in this together so it grows stronger and stronger. Instead of a virus or a plague, it's a miracle to spreading and growing stronger in our awareness and like a wildfire really. Non-compromising decision making is the sense that no matter where you perceive yourself in time and space, no matter how far you've seemingly wound into the dream and have identified with the dream figure as a person living in the world with this circumstance and that circumstance, you have some people call it almost like a silver cord that goes with you even in near-death experiences where I call them near-life experiences. They're always talking about the silver cord that's always there. You can't get away from it. It's almost like you're conduit back to source and if you thought of it this way you can think of it almost like it's a pipeline of guidance to help you while you believe in duality, while you believe in the maze of time and space and you've forgotten your true identity and you have to be stepped back towards your source and that source, that cord, that silver lining, that silver cord is always there. It's very, very practical. So there's nothing too small, nothing insignificant in terms of this unwinding and really it's learning to let go of concepts that are part of this make-believe self-concept and come to a point of leaping off back into an experience of your divine self. So for me, that's where guidance comes in and guidance is just one word for it. You could call it intuition, you could call it a lot of things but at every single step, at every single seeming turn it is there for you. There's no point when there isn't a divine guidance and the compromise comes in is when you try to keep that guidance at bay. When the fear level climbs up and you get into this kind of a tight note, I want to keep it the way things are. It's like you're more interested in preserving the status quo than you are opening to where you could be taken when you go through that. So compromise comes up seemingly in the context of relationships comes up in the context of jobs, of careers. You'll even hear stories nowadays of people who have one career and then all of a sudden to a series of circumstances they're lifted and transported to a whole other career that they couldn't even have conceived of but they're happy and they think that's a miracle. I don't even know how I got from here to here I spent my whole life trying to build this career and suddenly I was lifted up and transported over there for people who have get fired from a job and then all kinds of windows of opportunity open up for them after they're fired or somebody who goes through an illness or a terminal illness and they come out just shooting out the other side of it with more pizazz and passion than they ever had before almost like they're thrilled to have the opportunity to take a walk down the street after they've gone through this experience and they come out there like a rocket. So I would say that everything comes down to guidance and when you're not compromising is when you're in the flow with this guidance it could be what to say, what to do, what to wear what to eat, what to not eat if you're to fast, if you're to meditate if you're to call somebody, contact someone it's all in the alignment of that guidance and when you have an awareness of that guidance and you go, I don't think I want to do that I really don't want to do that the guidance is still there for you but when you turn away from the guidance that's a compromise and that's why I say people can live lives of compromise because there's all this glorious guidance that's in there perfectly available for you to live a supremely happy, joyful day and when we turn away and we hold on to past learning, we hold on to images that we've held of ourselves and others from the past we don't let the glory of that light pour through into our mind it's like we're clinging in the darkness and we're holding on, clutching it and that's a compromise but the more deeply you go on the spiritual journey the more you find it's difficult to compromise and it becomes extremely difficult to compromise the more you become into alignment with this guidance so to me that's where it's at that's why it's so important I don't think there's any more important topic really on the planet how do you bring the heart into it do you feel that the heart is where the guidance comes from and the vessel toward and how to balance that that's where it started for me at the beginning I wasn't hearing any voices or prompts or anything I just feel a little tickle like right at the core of my being right in the heart chamber it wouldn't matter whether I was listening to a song or reading a poetry or looking in someone's eyes and all of a sudden the little feather was tickling in the heart chamber so to me it starts and it ends with the heart the heart is the core of our being it's like it's calling us back to live there, to live in the heart and radiate that love so it started there and it ended there for me and everything else was just those symbols along the way to help me do that the heart is a great symbol because it's one heart it's all about unification and feeling that union and unification so it's been a journey of letting go of concepts and going into experiences and really seeing that there really isn't any pleasure in accumulating concepts for even what the world might call better concepts in the end it's letting go and just letting the love pour through your heart and radiate that's what I love about life that's all that's left