 When you are disidentified from the concepts and the roles, you can be truly loving and helpful. That's what was so great about Jesus is he wasn't identified with any of the concepts and the roles. And it didn't matter if they stuck him up on a cross. It didn't matter how extreme the dream got. He was totally unaffected by it because he allowed himself, he allowed his mind to be washed free of the concepts, the judgments and the roles. He was identified with a Christ idea. He was aligned in that flow, aligned with source and not identified with anything of the world. Now in the Bible Jesus said we should be meek and meek is gentleness and that was our first song here. Be gentle with yourself. But how can you truly be gentle with yourself if you are still tied up and believing and identified with the ego concepts? Because it's only our mind's identification with the concepts that brings in the defensiveness. It's like even in this world you know people can say well you know love does not possess and and you know possessions are the problem and everything. But you know some of us have tried that. If you physically just try to let go of your possessions, you know there's people like Tolstoy who actually did just give away all his possessions to the poor in Russia. He just gave away all his possessions to the poor and he still felt miserable because it's the idea, it's the belief in possession. That's the root of it. You can't just dinker around on the screen and think that you'll free yourself by taking certain actions. You know as if like taking this action that'll be a big deal and that action. You know a lot of times people look at people like Mother Teresa, St. Francis and they seem to live these very simple lives and and people that came to join St. Francis and join Mother Teresa practice what sometimes is called a renunciate lifestyle. You know you know those the young women that would come to Mother Teresa they would literally cut their hair before they would come into it. They would have to take vows, poverty, chess, the obedience and so on and so forth. But what we're learning is that it's not so simple to just snip some hair off or dress a certain way or try to simplify your life and form. The monkey mind of the ego is sitting back there going nice try. So you change your appearance and you changed a few things in form. It's the beliefs in the consciousness is where the addiction is. That's where the identity crisis is. It's an identity crisis of mind but with these expression sessions you first start to get in touch with where you have your attachments with where you still are holding on to false beliefs, false identities and that is so helpful. It's very introspective. It's very contemplative. It's very inward searching. It's very much the way in the story of David the parable of David played out because I was questioning my concept of self early on even before I got to the course. So when I got to the course it was almost like that was just a speed up of what I was already onto. Like there's got to be more to this world. There's got to be more than the limitations that my mind seems to be perceiving. I don't want to just grow old and get sick and die. That's so predictable. It's been done so many trillions of times. There's got to be a new way. Eternity. There's got to be a gateway to eternity and why not go find it? It's an adventure. Go for it. That's what we're all doing together. We're on an adventure to eternity. We're on an adventure beyond time and space. Like in Star Trek to go to explore the galaxies to go where no man has ever gone before. Yeah, well let's go into the spiritual realms. Let's peel back the mask of time and space and see what's there that's truly there for us to experience. And we can do this. We can really do this. This is not like science fiction. We can do this. This is a living experience. You can start to feel it. It's like the matrix. When Neo first goes to Morpheus, he talks about like there's this splinter in your mind that's driving you mad. He's talking about the split mind trying to serve two masters. Like Jesus says, you cannot serve two masters. You can't serve two purposes. You can't live with a split mind. After a while, a split mind becomes intolerable. So now we're being guided to go deeper inside and to say, oh, I don't have to live with a split mind. I can forgive that which is not real and accept that which is real with the Holy Spirit's help. With help from inside, with help from above, so to speak, the Spirit. And we can do it. We do it through movie clips. We do it through experiential sessions. We do it through expression sessions. We do it through mind training and mind watching, even with seemingly every day kind of projects. What you really want to be reminded of is what is my purpose? What's the purpose for doing what I'm doing? It's not like the doings are ever going to get us out. If the world of doings was made so that we would never escape, we can do, do, do all we want. Do dah, do dah. You know, it's like we're just going to be spinning around there all the day, all the live long day. It's just like Groundhog Day, looping in time around and around and around. And you start to wonder, how do I get out of this? And we need to first have a purpose that we can really believe in that will take us out. And second of all, be patient and allow that purpose to work in us and through us. Don't try to put pressure on the purpose. Like, ah, come on, speed it up a little bit. You know, you know, can this be, can this be faster? And then, you know, of course it's saying, no, you will not be hurled into reality. You just will not be hurled into reality. You have to take this, what you can take, a bit at a time, a day at a time. But this does happen. So that's why we use a lot of movies, because the lessons can be learned, you know, through the experiences of others. You don't have to literally play it out with the School of Hard Knocks. As a person in time and space, you literally can start to grasp these mind-freeing lessons. And then, as you experience them, you start to realize that the characters in your dream are reflecting that same freedom back to you. That's glorious. You know, I'm here, I've been doing this for like 25 years with the course quarter of a century, and then I'm always giving the invitations. Come, come, come, come. What Lisa was describing was, yeah, the biological sister and the biological mother show up. Oh, yeah, I know you. Long time no see, but they showed up in the glory, you know. Their eyes were big. They were like, wow, they just were like, what a monastery you have, and what a group of people you have around you and everything. I wonder, I think I've got I haven't got a voicemail. A voicemail from Evelyn. Let's see if we can find it here. This is your mother. Just wanted to let you know that we arrived in Cincinnati, Ohio, about six this evening. We had a great trip from Denver to Indianapolis and got my car. And I just wanted to let you know what a beautiful time both Mary Jo and I had, fisting you. It was wonderful to see your place and see all of devoted women and men that you have around you. So we love you and hope everything goes well for the retreat. Bye-bye. That's a nice reflection. With devoted women and men you have around you, that's a reflection back, you know. And that's the thing, you know, in a course of miracles Jesus says that you are entitled to devotion if you are devoted. What he's really saying is if your mind is devoted to purpose you're going to draw forth all kinds of witnesses of that devotion because that's how it works. We simply perceive what we believe. The world is an outward picture of an inward condition. It's just a reflection back to us of our consciousness. So really whatever you want to know, what is the state of my mind, you could also say what is the state of the world that I perceive? That gives me the best indicator of where my mind is at in its mind training as I open up to the presence of God's love. And as you become more and more focused in this purpose, in this calling, and the fear is washed away, then you don't perceive error. In other words, there's a part where Jesus says do not see error. Well, perception is selective. So you're simply calling forth witnesses in the world to what you believe. And you have the power to change what you believe. You have the power to forgive instead of judge, to forgive instead of condemn, to forgive instead of hold grievances. You know, that's very powerful. That's very empowering to know that you can train your mind with the help of the Spirit to a state of forgiveness in which, since perception is selective, you draw more and more witnesses to your consistency of alignment with forgiveness until you become so aligned with forgiveness that you see the world in a completely different way than you saw it before. So isn't that exciting? That's the excitement. It's not the excitement of things in the world happening, but it's more the excitement of the capacity of the mind to learn to truly forgive and to see the world in a completely different way. You see that you can change your perception, that you are not stuck in a movie. You know, you are the dreamer of that dream and you can give that dream another purpose and therefore see the dream in a different way. And then you're not caught into trying to make all these external moves as if somehow, if I make this move, I'll be happy. If I move to this place or move to that place, if I have this kind of partner or if I do this many rituals or do this many tasks or duties, that somehow I'll reach a point where God will just go, very good. That's 10,957,821 good deeds that you've done. You've made the mark. You've finally done it. It's not through our deeds that we reach the state of enlightenment. It's through our purpose and our willingness to be open and to follow and flow in that purpose in a steadfast way. That's what brings us to enlightenment. And it's not even to time. We don't have to think this will take a long, long, long, long time. That's just another belief that it's going to take that long to be who we really are. You know, we have to start to question that too and say, I believe in miracles. I believe that miracles shorten time. They collapse the Alpha and the Omega. They bring this illusory past and this illusory future together. Chup, chup, chup. I used to say like taking a knife out and cutting a celery stick, you know, with this Holy Spirit. Chup, chup, chup, chup, chup, chup, chup. Bringing the time that it takes to wake up, shorter and shorter and shorter as we practice the miracle and we allow it to collapse this illusory construct of time. Then we free up our identity. We don't feel time bound. We feel content. We feel like we're just watching. We're just witnessing. You know, we, it's just, it's, we don't feel like we're in the situation. When we feel like we're in the situation, we feel like we're in the movie. Then it gets very, very stressful. What have I got to do? What's practical? What's prudent? You know, or even worse, how am I going to get myself out of an impossible situation? That's a conundrum. How am I going to get my personal self out of an impossible situation? In the Holy Spirit, it's like saying by seeing that it's an impossible situation that you have never been in. Talk about a mind flip. You know, that's the way that we wake up. You don't try to heal the body. You try to heal the perception of the body in the world. You give all of your energy to mind training because you see how valuable that is. And you give less and less energy to trying to just survive and make it through as a dream figure. You know, it's, it's a lot of work to try to prop, print and do all these things for this dream figure that's just a figment of imagination anyway and never had any reality. So then it's like, okay, good. Then let me see it. Let me see things as they are. This is it. This is the good stuff.