 It's a good set of topics to dive into today. All of us is coming to mind as an invitation to mention about the theory in there about you need your function, you need the vitality, the joy, the energy of being in your purpose or your function in order to be able to handle the darkness when it comes up. And one thing is really allowing yourself to really hear that function and be given that function. And the other thing is just your willingness to devote your whole being to it. And oftentimes I'll talk about how when I first came across the Course and after I had studied it for some years and immersed myself into it I went through this kind of feeling of being called by God and feeling a little bit of fear of saying a big yes but then all of a sudden this big yes came out of me improving. And there's a passage in the Bible that says something to the effect of for those who much is given, much will be asked. I never really understood what that meant until I said yes to God. And God will ask a lot of you. If you think you've had full-time jobs before, no. You don't even know what full-time is. For those who much is given, much will be asked. It basically turned into 24-7, about 20-some odd years ago where it's just been like an activation. And I think that's characteristic of us. We could share a little bit about that because sometimes when people enter in they get a sense of that. But for us, we don't really have days off. We don't really have vacations except in the state of mind that you experience the joy. It does feel like every day is a vacation, every moment is a vacation. But in terms of the world, you don't have my time and his time. There's no division in that way. When you work in the world, you get their time, the company time and your time. You don't have that anymore. It's just one category. It's all his time. To the ego, it's a bit daunting because you basically just go full-on. It's almost funny that you can hear the thing time off. Do you have downtime or time off? It's like, no. There's no time off. It's just full-on. That's part of what we're talking about. That's the energy of it. When we've had even centers where people have come, people will say, do we get the weekends off or whatever? To me, it's funny that I say, what are you talking about? It's incomprehensible the idea of off time at all. In the world, it's a very common dichotomy. For us, we just don't have that. Happily, it never ends. The devotion part of it is just full-on. To me, that just feels so natural. It's something people come to visit us, come close to us. We live in community with people who do retreats and everything. That's what the Spirit is always saying. There's a lesson to learn and that lesson is to be in the flow of forgiveness, just the flow of this Spirit pouring through you. To be done through is a good metaphor. It's as if your body's like a puppet. You're giving the Marianette the crossbar, the Marianette to the Holy Spirit saying, you speak through me, laugh through me, hug through me. Do whatever is necessary to serve the whole through me and then you undo the me. Pretty soon it's just the Holy Spirit and the puppet is not really an awareness. You lose awareness more and more of a puppet and you just become aligned with that. I remember one time I was reading Ghandis out of biography or a article about Ghandi and there was somebody who was a very sincere seeker that was following Ghandi around, walking with Ghandi and looking at him and had all these questions, many questions for Ghandi and he rattled out maybe 15 or 20 questions to Ghandi and Ghandi was just smiling and he said, come and be with me, follow me around for a while. In other words, he wasn't going to do like a discourse or a giant dissertation to try to answer the 20 questions. He just said, follow me around and watch how it goes and you'll learn more from watching the body in action than a bunch of words. You'll see it in demonstration. Ghandi was also very good about that, the story of the woman who came and wanted Ghandi to tell her, brought her daughter along, to tell her daughter to stop eating so much sugar and Ghandi saw the girl and the girl left and the mother said, okay, did you tell her? Ghandi said, well, it won't work out then. But the mother got home and found out that basically Ghandi had not told the daughter to quit eating so much sugar, came back about a week later when Ghandi would see them again and the mother was like, what's the deal? I told you to tell my daughter to stop eating so much sugar and Ghandi said, I couldn't. He said, I ate too much sugar. Now that's integrity. That's integrity. He had to stop for a week his sugar intake to see the daughter again. He couldn't speak something that wasn't in practice in his own life. And that's pretty much how we feel. When we say come, come closer, come closer, we're very transparent. Come as close as you want. Look as close as you want. We've got nothing to hide. There's a flow that comes. But one thing I always say is Holy Spirit is so very, very practical. For example, a lot of us read the Bible when we had our four Gospels to learn about Jesus, the Apostles and everything. Some of you might have come across the Eurantia Book, the last section of the Eurantia Book, which is kind of an expanded version of the life and teachings of Jesus. You get a real close look of what's going on with Jesus, the Apostles, the Women's Corps, which kind of got written out of the Bible. There's like 40, 70 some women I think that were with him. All these things that are like details, which I find very helpful. I would like to know really what went on those 2,000 years ago. I mean, the intimate details. Like, did they have a bank account? Did the Apostles have a bank account? Yes. Did they have seemingly kind of roles? Yes, among the 12 Apostles, there was two who were called the Alpheus twins. And basically, their main function throughout the 3 years of Jesus' public ministry was they were ushers. Isn't that great? To be called by the Lord and given the test of being ushers. That seems pretty practical, but there was crowds. You see, crowd control was an aspect of the ministry that they had. We... She's talking all about tech support and everything. She's like, we don't have any ushers. But we never know. If a message has ever expanded, people are like, OK, I'm going to be a mess of it. Yes, you're a usher. I'm a usher. My biological father and my biological grandfather were ushers. They did that for a living part of their ushers. It's practical. It's crowd control. They had... The Apostles had Andrew was the steward. They had a steward. We had stewards. You were a steward once. Stewards basically handle a lot of logistical things. Like, even with this, it's almost like Linda's stewarding this house. There's a lot of logistics that go into retreat. And if you do this on a daily basis, like you live this way, there's things to be taken care of. There's logistics. There was lodging. When they traveled, there was lodging. They needed donkeys. They didn't have cars back then, who's going to handle the donkeys. There were very many aspects in a very practical way that these things had to be handled. Even 2,000 years ago, things haven't changed that much. The technology has shifted a little bit, but there's still basic things. Out of the other 12, there was, like Jesus would do a lot of the teaching, but they had another primary speaker who was really quite articulate and eloquent and was quite good with speaking, named Peter. We remember Peter. And so Peter would do a lot of the speaking, the public speaking, and so forth. And then you could go through James, and you go through the rest. There were functions, and certainly even over the so many odd years that we've been together there have been an enormous amount of functions because we've had communities on how many different continents. Four continents. There's been long-term retreats. I think the longest retreats we did was like six-week retreats, but you start to get into some of those functions I mentioned like a steward. You need that for a six-week retreat because it's like living together, there's lots of things to be handled. The Spirit is so practical, and then even in terms of guidelines, people will often ask me because there's a lot of literature on boundaries, on setting boundaries, setting healthy boundaries, and so forth. I put that in the category of guidance. There's just, again, the practical guidance of the Spirit is what would serve the whole. It's not exclusive. It's not intended to push anybody away or push anybody down or segregate anybody. The state of mind of forgiveness doesn't hold on to any kind of judgments or divisions, so the Holy Spirit in this high state of mind doesn't see hierarchies. There's nobody actually who's at the beginning or the middle or the end. There's no beginning and there's no advance. All the things that seem to be the categories of the world that seem to be very meaningful are not in this state of mind and yet the Spirit knows what is best, what is helpful, and will actually give very practical, very consistent guidance that will come through that is all just like ladder steps, like runs on the ladder, those steps that you can take. And I've always loved that about the Spirit. I feel like, you know, whenever I pray and ask for guidance or instructions, I get really clear, specific instructions. It's not like, you never get the brush off of Jesus. You're going through something, you need some good, clear, specific guidance and I love you. What? It's quite the opposite. You get the very specific, helpful guidance that sometimes it's in terms of what to do, what to say, where to go, who to talk to. That's the whole point of this. And opening your heart up to really be guided is, again, guidance is the Holy Spirit's use of judgment. The ego made up judgment, but the Holy Spirit uses what the ego made to take you home, to unwind you from the world. So it's not like you're told, you know, never speak or never do this. It's very rarely you have these never all statements. It's just, what's the specific guidance and what is most helpful right now? Very, very practical. So for us, there's nothing special about form and there's nothing special about specifics. We're very grateful for specific guidance. Sometimes spiritual teachers and seekers come to our community for a while and they marvel. Sometimes they just marvel like, how is this happening? And it's just seemingly guidance or years of guidance and things just come very easily, very naturally and it's no big deal to us. We aren't, you know, questioning every single move. In fact, the Course is teaching us not to analyze the motives of others. The Course is teaching us not to doubt motivations. It's really to become clear of your own link with God, your own connection with Source and to listen and follow to that Source. And so, you know, it's not a good practice to try to point out errors in others. There's a whole section in the Course in the text on correction of error. You know, never correct a brother because he is always right because he is the Christ. Okay? That's pretty solid advice not to judge. Never correct a brother because he's always right because he's always the Christ. You know, that takes you into a humbleness, a stillness where you're not looking and asking people constantly about their motivations. Why did you do this? Why didn't you do that? You yourself are taking on a practice where you're working with the Holy Spirit on what is it for? You're working with the Spirit inside of you help me look honestly at what is it for? It helps you unwind from the world when you clearly start to see some of these ego purposes coming up in your mind. I don't want those. Those are not serving me anymore. I will let them go and then you go through this purification process.