 I just mentioned about prayer without ceasing. And then Anu was asking for more of an explanation of description over my experience with prayer. And I was raised in Christianity, too. So I grew up with Jesus as a teacher, as a role model, and as a role model of praying, lost praying, going off to the mountains to pray, and so forth. And at one point, when I was working with The Course in Miracles, Jesus would speak to me very candidly, very friendly, and about all kinds of different topics, and also guide me where to go, who to see, what to say, what to do, when not to do anything. It was very much Jesus has always been my teacher. And with prayer, I remember asking one time, can you give me a context for what prayer is and what it looks like? I would like to also have a map of the mind so I could understand what's going on in the mind. And I was given these concentric circles, which culminated at the very core, which is the very core center of being prayer. And what the circles were were the outside circle, the outside ring was perception, the perceptual world of images that we perceive as human beings. And then underneath the perceptual realm, the ring inside that was the ring of emotions. And he said, yes, your emotions produce the world that you see. So if you have predominantly fearful emotions, you will perceive a fearful world. And to the extent that your emotions are purified and you experience love, then you will see the witnesses to love out there on the perceptual ring. So that was a very helpful start. And I said, well, what's all those other rings for? What's underneath there? There's a couple more rings and then there's the core. And then Jesus said, underneath the emotions are your thoughts. And again, your predominant thought system, whether it's in alignment with God, which is the thought system of love, aligned with the Holy Spirit, will produce the love as an emotion and also loving witnesses. And when you experience fear or doubt, shame, pain, hatred, those are coming from thoughts. And there's an ego thought system that's underneath that perception. And all those emotions you experience, that roller coaster ride of emotions as a human being, are coming from thoughts. And you do have the power to control the direction of your thinking, but it will take a lot of practice, a lot of mental discipline to control the direction of your thinking. You have the capability. You have the potentiality, but you need a lot of discipline. Of course, Buddha and Jesus are examples of a very disciplined mind. The mind has come under strong, strong discipline. So underneath the thoughts, I said, well, what's underneath that are the beliefs. So you can believe things about your thoughts. You can actually have beliefs that will determine what your thoughts are, and therefore your beliefs are even stronger, more positive, they cause the thoughts. For example, you can believe that your thoughts are ineffectual. You can believe that you have thoughts that don't have any effect on the world or any effect on anything, and that's just dissipating the power of thought. Actually, thoughts are extremely powerful. And when you have a mind that was created by God, the thoughts are extremely powerful, but if you believe that they're ineffectual, it's part of a mechanism of hiding and pretending you're weak, pretending you're small, pretending you're a human being instead of a mind that's very, very vast that was created as divine minds by God. So there are thoughts, and you could say even your very identity is an idea in the mind of God. Christ's idea is not a perceptual, it's not Jesus the man, or it's not a man or a woman or a Mexican feminine, it's just a pure idea that exists forever in the mind of God. But you don't know it when you're sleeping and dreaming. You have other egoic thoughts that are blocking the way to that experience. So that belief, the belief system of the ego taints all those rings because as long as you believe the ego, which is separation, you will have thoughts of the ego, you'll have emotions of the ego, and you'll have perceptions of the ego. Even though those aren't your real thoughts, it's not your real emotions, and those aren't your real perceptions. It's a web of distortion that springs out from a tiny, mad idea, a belief that you could separate from the source, separate from the one, separate from the creator. And what I said to Jesus, what is under belief? Because we're getting down now. There are no more rings, there's only the center of the diagram, and that's prayer. Our power of prayer is our power of the mind, it's our power of desire, and at one point Jesus said that he equated that center core with desire. So imagine that whatever you desire, springs out into those rings, therefore the desire, there had to be, I gave him what I was talking about before, you gave him what you were saying, I wish I could just forgive myself for that decision to think that there could be something more than my heavenly Father. There could be something more. There could be another direction to go in other than eternity, or something else to experience more than infinity, more than love, something more than love, really. And there had to be a desire, there actually had to be a desire or a prayer for something more than everything. That is what the ego arose from, a desire for something more than everything. If you were everything, and there was nothing more than what you were in your creation by God, then the wish for something more, the desire for something more, is what the ego seemed to come from. So you might say that that's the core of prayer that underneath the ego there has to be a desire for something more than everything. And Jesus says in the Course, truth will be returned to you by your desire as it was lost by your desire for something else. That's a very powerful line. Truth will be returned to you by your desire as it was for truth, as it was lost by your desire for something else. So I was like, wow, that's the core. That's what the prayer is. That power of prayer is everything. In fact, everything emanates from that. And literally it's your prayer life that takes you back. And when Jesus said, let thine I be single, he was really talking about, if you want your perception to be unified, if you want to see holistically instead of in a fragmented way, if you want to see in a whole instead of in parts, you have to let thine I be single and you have to have your desire be unified. So in a Course in Miracles, Jesus says, miracles are for your birthright, miracles are everyone's inheritance. But purification is necessary first. So that's why he gave us a Course in Miracles instead of a Course in Revelation. You need a lot of miracles. You need a lot of purification and convincing of your mind over and over and over and over. Inspired by the Spirit to reach a state where you pierce through the veil or you literally transcend the veil of images. Because the Bible had said, hold no, graven images before that Lord thy God. You might say the ego has made up a cosmos of images. I always read the Bible, the Adam and Eve and then they have this sense that they were naked and then there's a fig leaf is used. So I call the cosmos, the cosmic fig leaf. It's like a big fig leaf. Guess if you can get back far enough, you might see what shame it was, but it's a cosmic fig leaf because of the cosmic attempt to cover over the shame or a fear or a guilt, which is what the fig leaf was covering over, something that was shameful. It's just on a cosmic scale. So in my life, I started to see everything starts and ends with prayer. It is all lined up with the prayer. And the prayer is where the causation is. The prayer is not an activity. Like when I grew up in my Christian household, we would pray before meals, we would bless meals, we would pray at different times of the day. We would go to Bible camp in the summer and we taught how to pray. Oftentimes we were taught how to pray with the words. They would tell us what words to use to pray to God. I, like you, knew I kind of got into meditation and Eastern philosophy and was opened up during my 10 years of university into a wide number of spiritualities and teachings and philosophies. And I always, that was one of my questions, was how does prayer relate to meditation? Meditation seems to be very much the stilling of the mind and an opening and a receptivity. So when you would go into the stillness, you could hear. And I always associated prayer with more talking to God, growing up in a Christian, a Western context. So I could start to see the two coming together that prayer was a mechanism of taking me also, as a mechanism of taking me also, like meditation, into that stillness, but also that God knew the prayer of the heart before a word was spoken. So again, it got back to God knew the desire of the heart. Now, in the Old Testament, there was one named David. Some of you remember from the Old Testament, the songs, songs and the songs of David. And my grandmother led to be 99 and when she grew older and older and she seemed to be diagnosed with dementia, she ceased to be able to remember things about the world. She couldn't tell you who had lunch with her. She couldn't tell you how her morning had gone or whatever. But she could recite the 23rd Psalm. That one could not dementia. Nothing could erase the 23rd Psalm from Lillian. She would grab one. She knew I couldn't remember the whole thing, but she would just start, the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. And it strikes me that the beginning of that 23rd Psalm, the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want, that it's when our wanting, I mean in heaven or nirvana, there is no sense of wanting because when you want something, it's if you don't have it. And you have and are everything in the kingdom of heaven. And you have and are everything in nirvana. So the wanting part is the part where the prayer gets splintered. You might say other things go on the altar instead of just experiencing yourself as Christ or yourself as one with God. Like Jesus, I and the Father are one. These other things start coming on the altar. And that's what is experienced in the human condition. When some of you have read about Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs, very famous psychologists, and all those lower level needs in the first level and the second level are the things that most human beings identify with. That's what their identity are, these lower level needs. You know, what Fritz talked about, survival needs. And then as you move up from the basic needs, the first couple levels, then you start to move up into higher needs, more needs of the psyche, and ultimately you go higher and higher into a sense of being, that sort of sense of self-actualization. Knowing yourself, what is your identity? Really, you start off in the lower realms and you work through those as you work up to what is really the question? Francis tells a beautiful story too of how she went back to China and how we were traveling over there, doing a lot of Course in Miracles gatherings, but as I mentioned earlier, all of my writings got translated into Mandarin. So her mother got hooked on the website of all my teachings in Mandarin and then pretty soon her mother read more and more and more and she says some of the stuff that David's talking about, you know, he's talking about the world being an illusion and then she proceeded on to the point of like, well, where does that leave us? What happened to our mother's counter-relationship in this, and then Francis spends the next hour and a half talking about the relationship of the dreamer to the dream world, the dream figure. And her mother listens with open eyes for an hour and a half as all this stuff pours through. Then that precipitated. Her mother, who was a devout atheist, started having mystical experiences after she spent that time with Francis and more mystical experiences. How do I explain this to my friends? Don't try, as I said, don't even try. Just open yourself to the experiences. It just shows how everything is a reflection that the power of the mind, the prayer of the heart was to know thyself, was to know spirit. And then her mother, who hadn't even dabbled in spirituality, started reading the teachings and then actually after that very direct encounter started having mystical experiences. So really the prayer is the prayer of the heart. And no one can pray beyond their own level of need and recognition. In other words, if you seem to have enemies and there's the curious thing of praying for your enemies and Jesus says, Jesus actually dictated a pamphlet. After he dictated a course in miracles, he dictated a couple of very helpful pamphlets. One was the psychotherapy pamphlet, purpose, process, and practice. And then the other one was psalm of prayer where he did a whole pamphlet on prayer. And he described it as kind of a ladder where based on, if you perceive yourself as a human being with needs and wants and lacks, you can't help but pray for those things because that's where your consciousness is. So it's practical and reasonable to pray for those things based on where your level of awareness is. And then he described a ladder of consciousness going higher and higher. And in which you may initially pray for like needs and you may ask for God's, you may ask God to meet certain needs and so forth. And then you may start to pray for certain qualities, you may pray for patience or honesty, trust, so on and so forth. And then as you go higher in the ladder, you come to the top of the ladder in which you take all the parameters and limitations off of your prayer as you grow consciously and your consciousness goes higher and higher, and you start to transcend these false egoic beliefs and false egoic thoughts. You go higher and higher, and finally you go to the top of the ladder where your prayer becomes so purified that you're not, there's no supposition, there's no sense of trying to ask for anything. You come to a place of what Jesus calls the top of the ladder, which is father, what is your will for me? And you have to be ready to pray that prayer. If you still have prayer for other things going on, it means you're not ready for that prayer. But that final prayer is father, what is your will for me? And God's will for you is perfect happiness. But that happiness is not a perceptual happiness. That's more like the disappearance of the universe and where your perception becomes so unified and your mind is so unified and your prayer is so unified that really you're saying, show me, reveal to me who I am. And God being the creator of who you are is the revealer. Human beings can't reveal identity and nothing of the world can reveal identity. But the source, God can reveal identity. So in one sense, it's very much very similar to Buddhism in the sense that Buddha thought you have to empty your mind of everything you think you think and think you know. And I found that, of course, the miracles was giving the same pathway, except it had a workbook which was like a laboratory for practically taking a lesson a day and devotionally giving yourself over to say show me the truth of this lesson and then letting everything in your day be orchestrated to show you the truth of the lesson. So it became a way of, for me, emptying my mind. Some people use different, like Tai Chi or TM, different types of meditations. There's many, many techniques and many wonderful spiritualities. For me it was the workbook of A Course in Miracles where I just gave myself fully over to it and I saw that nothing was at random and that there were no accidents and that whatever my lesson for the day was is I was giving myself fully to it. I could see the circumstances teaching me the truth of the lesson. So like lesson 136, sickness is a defense against the truth. Of course, on the day that I was doing that, that's the day that I had symptoms. I had nausea, I had diarrhea, I was cooking. I was actually, can remember, I was cooking a plate of food in the microwave and all of this nausea came in, this feelings and then this very strong diarrhea feeling came in and I raced away from the microwave for the bathroom, ran down the hall, took a quick left, got on the toilet and then as I was on the toilet and I'm still in my prayer because I'm always watching my thoughts. The first thing I noticed was in my thoughts were my thoughts. I'm probably catching the flu, I wonder if I caught it from my grandmother, if I caught it from my dad. What's the next thought? I wonder if it's the 24 hour bug or the 48 hour bug. See all these very past thoughts. You go with thoughts with causation going in and then finally after like five of those questions I prayed and prayed and then Jesus said don't forget your lesson for the day. It's like, oh yes, sickness is a defense against the truth. You see how orchestrated the whole scene was? The whole scene was orchestrated by Jesus just so I could practice my lesson. It was for one purpose, it wasn't for anything else and that was so practical because then I had to start going into my mind sickness is a defense against the truth and I had just related ideas from that workbook lesson, very long lesson actually, start to come into my mind. That sickness was a decision that I was just afraid of love, I was afraid of God's love and I was choosing sickness as a defense to prove that I was little and weak and frail and I was not as God created me. It was the no, not me kind of defense against the love. And then when I went into the decision thing I could see that as I went deeper down in my prayer I could see that I was making a decision and it's like exactly what Ian was talking about where I could see I was making a decision for the sickness and I had to follow that route in because it was very, there was some anger at myself around choosing to be sick, choosing to be wrong-minded, choosing to deny love. So I went down deeper in that route, I kept praying and praying going deeper and deeper and I really got down to the point where I had such, I loved Jesus so much I just adored Jesus and as I sat on that toilet I went down, down, down, down and that's an interesting part of it. Down, down, down, through the crevice, through everything. Never thought of it, just a metaphor. Then I actually saw that I adored Jesus and that either Jesus had been truly guiding me and comforting me and telling me the truth all along or Jesus was the biggest liar in the whole universe and that it was germs and all these other things catching the flu, it was either Jesus was telling me the truth all along since I was a little child or Jesus was lying to me all along and then I followed that route down because I knew it had to be one or the other. You can't be telling the truth and be the biggest liar, it has to be one or the other and when I got down to the root of that one I just exclaimed, this is impossible and as soon as I said those words then the diarrhea, the nausea, everything absolutely vanished in this it was one of those powerful miracles it was a miracle, literally a miracle of healing where I came from my wrong mind into my right mind all the praying was coming through the wrong mind coming down to my right mind because a lot of people say to me who in their right mind would choose to be sick? and I say, yeah, got it no one in their right mind would choose to be sick it's a guilty wrong-minded decision and I just had to get to the root of it so it was a time of prayer but as soon as I got to that point of truly loving Jesus and seeing He was telling the truth and I got down to that point that's when the release occurred and then that was very powerful for me I mean, I got right off that toilet pulled my pants up, I went out there one of my thoughts was now I'm not going to be able to eat my the latest part of my career food, no problem I feasted on that food because that was the miracle the whole thing was just orchestrated for me to come into my right mind the whole thing was that's what I call practical miracles they have to have conviction behind them it can't just be a wish I hope a pray, you know, kind of wishful thinking it has to come down to the core of things and then that miracle and other miracles that follow during doing that workbook they just became more and more convincing that I was under no laws with God that's what all of the lessons were convincing me that I had dominion over the world that's what Jesus said in the Bible be a good cheer for I have overcome the world I didn't, when I first read that as a child I didn't know what that meant overcome the world but he was saying your mind is so powerful that if you give yourself to that alignment with God that the world can do nothing to you you have dominion over the world so you might say that it went on for days and weeks and months and it continued on for years as part of a rinsing of the mind and as part of a convincing job the convincing was that I am not a body I am free, I am still as God created me and that he even says in the Course this phrase, you know, whatever you're tempted to be sick I am not a body and my mind cannot attack so I cannot be sick because it's the ego's trick of trying to project the false identity on to form and projected on to a body and on to the world to convince the mind of its timeliness that's the closed system of the world and the five senses are part of a consciousness that was made to keep you feeling small limited, little, tiny not your best Christ self but a very small human identity and then these miracles convinced me over and over if I had an issue with a person, with the country with the government or whatever Jesus would keep reminding me when I would be angry at a politician or a political system or the government or something Jesus would say it's in you that government is in you that person is in you that environmental issue that you're so hot about you're so angry about it's in you, it's in your mind but you have to use your power of prayer to get to the core to have a purification where you see that there's only one problem and it's an identity problem you've forgotten who you are you've forgotten how God created you it's a huge identity issue going on you splinter it out and put it out into zillions and zillions of problems on zillions of different levels but that's still not going to resolve anything you've forgotten who you are and this is your wake up calling out so I was told I wouldn't have a career I was told many things that were really actually helpful because then I didn't even try I'm not going to have a career then well that's fine I had this discussion after I had ten years full time with the university I'm like okay, that's enough of that then I'm going to follow you and you will direct me in all my endeavors as I go forth from here but it's been very I'm almost to say magical it's almost like a the Beatles call it the magical mystery tour is waiting to take you away and waiting to take you away that's how it felt when I said okay I'm on this adventure now I want to learn how to forgive the world I want to learn how to remember my identity it's been a very magical mystery tour the mysteries had started to dissolve away though it's becoming more like oh of course oh I knew that, I knew that it just was covered over oh yeah, oh yeah it's like a remembering of God's love and actually a forgetting you were talking about angry at yourself for that decision to look, think there's something more something better actually I'm going to kind of like a a spiritual Alzheimer's a spiritual dementia following my grandmother who surged and led the way who was so happy that she would have the whole nursing home around her singing hymns from the Bible and she couldn't tell you who she had lunch with she went into extreme dementia where she forgot everything of the world but would sing these inspiring hymns and would rattle off the 23rd song the Alzheimer's couldn't touch the core of what she was about we think remembering is good and forgetting is bad we were talking a little bit this morning Jeremy was talking about the frustration of forgetting things the frustration of not being able to pick up the zulu language in three years or the skills starting to wane and not as sharp, I'm not as sharp and my grandmother would always say to me she said I'm just not as sharp as I was David and I'd say it's working beautifully you're becoming an inspiration to men you're forgetting she'd say oh I'm such a burden I'd say no you actually are not a burden you're an inspiration so she was making that turn what we find in our lives is we just need to know what we need to know we're given what's necessary and the rest we can let go of we don't have to retain the vocabulary retain anything when I give these talks it's just like the spirit is giving the talk and pulling from the pool of whatever's in there but I don't often know where the talk is going I'll even watch a parable start to be told and they'll be a part of my mind years ago I was telling a parable and I was thinking wait a minute I don't even know where this is going and Jesus is like that's right let me tell the parable and you know it was like totally coming through me but there was no sense of how the story goes how it ends and I even told a parable when I was in Argentina one time with two long time friends and they got to the point where one was translating for me the Spanish into the English for my year she was sitting on my left the other was translating from the English to the Spanish she was sitting on my right I started telling this parable and at some point the middle of the parable which was all English words the Holy Spirit Jesus threw in the Spanish word of the name of the guy Pedro and it was like throwing a wrench in the engine they were in such flow one woman they both had been classmates when they were 17 now they were in their 50s they came back together we met through me and they were best of friends now and they were the closest of friends and soon as I said the word Pedro the one who was translating for me she couldn't hear the word I guess she was expecting an English word Peter or something the whole thing was I was speaking in English she was like she started looking at me then she looked at her classmates what did he say we're in the middle of it everyone's waiting for the next line what did he say what what she could not hear the next word the place both of these friends burst into laughter the whole audience burst into laughter everybody started laughing so hard they were crying and we never did find the end of that parable we hit the laugh point there was so much laughing and crying in the laughter going on that I waited for about 10 minutes just getting louder and louder so we needed to go so that ended the whole thing we ended on a huge burst of laughter we all filtered out then we went home and I gave peace to them to their husbands the husbands are waiting waiting up for us it's like 11 o'clock at night they walk in and they go how did it go the women burst and they're like what happens to you you're never like this and it went on that night and it went on until the next day and so that's also a line from the course the world will end in laughter as it was a place of sorrow the world will end in laughter so it gives you a clue of where this is all heading to have one big big belly laugh at the whole thing any of it seriously and that was the most extreme example of that it went past the translating it just demolished the whole gathering laughter was so strong and we've had that on this tour we were in Finland and they got this translator for me and he was sitting right next to me Francis was here or to do the translating and he was he came from England but he lived over there so they said you're really good with Finnish and with the English so the Holy Spirit was so playful with him all the way through at one point we were talking about letting go of the self-concept and letting go of your thoughts and beliefs like emptying your mind and the line came through the only thing that you need to finish there's nothing to finish except being the belief except being Finnish there's nothing to be finished except being Finnish it's the first time it ever came up it's the first time I've heard it because in Finland there's nothing to be finished and the translator he turns to me and he just looks at it again never come on translate that there was so we burst with the laughter so he's translating and apparently I don't know Finnish so I'm just there in my dark self doing and he's supposed to be translating and these are people that watched on my YouTube for years and they know my teachings and the course like the back of their hand like the air on their hands and they know that so every mistakes he makes in translating me they're just like so the whole crowd is like so when finally time to break time people come up right in his face they're like coming up to tell him you've got to get better with your translations it's terrible they're calling out the translations from the audience and he's just so willing so he's sitting there and they're kneeling down with their in his face and my whole talk was on innocence he's doing the best he can people in his face so funny they're he just turns over to me and he's like look at this look what they're doing yeah we gotta let it all go translate it go let it all go to know your innocence so we had so much fun and that's what this whole tour has been now we're winding up this is the love of the country but we've had so much fun just teaching joy and love in the state of mind that there's nothing that can harm you nothing can disturb you nothing can go wrong you can't mess it up and that's the vibe of what we're extending with everybody is you can't mess it up relax just relax and enjoy the ride let the spirit take you and don't kick and scream and fight because you're the current has taken you back to the ocean thing against it you can try to make it a difficult journey but you might as well enjoy it because the stream is going back to the ocean everything flows down and when we flow with the spirit we can really enjoy all the trees and rocks and we can enjoy the bends so that's my little snippet on prayer so sorry after this one confusing session your answer is confusing we all therefore have different opinions ideas, needs, aspirations did you say this whole thing that you can ask and pray for what it is that's on your mind because quite mightily as you said also on your mind is on your mind and something different is on everybody's mind so therefore you pray in your own mind to what it is or do you just say I can pray for what it is with no wish to any prayer well I was saying you can't pray beyond your level of discernment and need just like that's what the oracle told Neo in the matrix you can't receive an answer beyond what you're ready to hear so that's a beautiful quality for example you shared your story about how you came as an immigrant you did what you needed to do not just to survive but to thrive to succeed to fulfill all that out and then when things just started to dismantle and dismantle further and further and further that got down to the place where you lost your hope depression started to set in you started feeling hopeless and suicidal then again through all of that the spirit is there and whatever seems to be appearing on the screen on your motion picture is really what you're calling for it's somewhere deep down in your mind your prayer maybe it wasn't even a verbal prayer but there's something in your mind that's going to help I'm going down I'm losing it here I need help and just even we had a session in Joburg and you were saying I'm living at the back of my ex-wife's house and I said at least you got a roof over your head you said no it's a shed I'm in the shed I lost my house to her and now I'm living in the shed that's great you have a shed you see how the spirit and then being at the gathering and all of you being so transparent and all the people coming up and then the gifts started to come in gift you to be at the weekend gift you to come down here to be here so you see these this is how the spirit is working whatever you believe you are whatever you have circumscribed yourself into these beliefs the spirit is like this ray of light that's coming through and saying help is here and the help is the help is all around you even now with all these mighty companions that are here with the very same purpose they want the sense of hope they want the sense of a spark in their heart they want a sense of a reason to live we can't just go through the motions it has to be a purpose and that's the prayer of your heart and that's what all this is about and we have to just trust the spirit will use whatever it can use the trees the animals it can use the stories the symbols you may meet somebody or talk over breakfast you did share with me that it was when I started talking about purpose that's what really hit you up there in Joburg that's what really helped carry you on to the next gift but that's how it works we just are giving one gift after the next after the next and that's what our testimony is we've been gifted we've just been intuitive and we've followed just the next step without looking too far ahead just follow the next step