 As I always do to anything, comments, miracle stories, questions, expressions, it could be anything. Because we're just here to give it over to the Holy Spirit to bless us all, and you can feel it. I mean, it's a real experience. You can feel that openness. That's the 10th characteristic of a teacher of God, open-mindedness. And you start with trust, and you get your honesty going, and you keep working through. And then, if you really follow it through to the end, you are completely open-minded, which I would say is completely non-judgmental. You don't have an opinion. You don't take a stand for something in the world before or against. You are accepting. You are loving. And everyone feels it too, because it's an attitude that's so apparent that you can't mistake it. There's no mistaking that openness. And so, that's what I offer up and ask for for our beautiful gathering this morning. I love you. But there are things going on in this world that are pretty horrible. There are wars. There's devastation. There's hunger. What do we do if that bothers us? Well, we do what Jesus taught us in 2000 years ago about, you know, before you get the speck out of your brother's eye, you get the beam out of your own, that he was teaching 2000 years ago, long before there was psychology and words like perception and defense mechanisms and ego. He was teaching that as it says in Corinthians, you're looking through a darkened glass. You're seeing something that is distorted. And I would say the first thing that you do, it's kind of like in 12-step programs. I mean, until you come to the admission that your life is unmanageable the way it's constructed or your vision, your perception is unmanageable the way it's constructed, you really have no impetus to change it. If you just say that's just the way it is, like the old song, that's just the way it is, some things will never change. War, pestilence, hunger, greed. You know, it seems like there's a pretty strong case of this has been going on for hundreds and thousands of years. So it seems like there's quite a lot of evidence and it would seem that you could lean it over and fall into the rut of that's just the way it is. Some things will never change. That's the human condition. But what I say is what Jesus taught, what I teach is that it's a perceptual problem that I would say with course groups, just like in 12-step groups when people introduce themselves. Hi, my name is So-and-so and I'm an alcoholic or a food addict. You could say in the course groups, Hi, my name is So-and-so and I have a perceptual problem. If you're seeing war, if you're seeing hunger and devastation is the word you use, you have a perceptual problem and the mind needs to be corrected. So, like when I last finished here in March I was invited down to Argentina and just when I got down there to do all my Course in Miracles gatherings, my 19 consecutive Course in Miracles gatherings, the United States started dropping bombs on Baghdad. Just when I arrived as the ambassador of peace from seemingly coming from America, protests broke out in the streets, thousands of people angry, some of them, spilling out with waving banners, stopped the bombing and so on and so forth. Although I did, a lot of the banners were in Spanish and I did ask them, what does that one banner over there say? And they translated it for me from Spanish to English. It said, Senior Bush, Take Up Knitting. Oh, that's sweet. Nothing like the 60s, you know, we didn't have any kind of banners like that. USSR, Take Up Knitting. It was Take Up Knitting and so I would go to the gatherings and that was a thought on people's minds, the world conditions. Not only the fact that it seemed to be the United States was bombing Baghdad and the war was breaking out, another war, a major war, but down in Argentina, children are starving, the economy has collapsed. The peso has been held so long up with the dollar that it has completely collapsed. So, you know, the conditions are ripe for help. There must be another way. When not only there's a world condition, but you're not so cozy at home either. You've got children dying. The middle class is now, the lower class is trying to get food on the table. And so, one woman down there even said to me, you know, is it actually possible to do A Course in Miracles in Argentina? Is this a sincere question? She was basically thinking the conditions are so bad that I don't even know if Jesus in that book could work. It's gone too far. We're too far gone. It's too much chaos. You know, police on the take, bribery, economic strife, world war breaking out, looking like, you know, with bombs dropping on Baghdad. And I actually told her, I said, this is better. When your world is falling apart and you go to the Course and go to Jesus, you're in a real good position for awakening. They're in the fast track. You've got to come to a point of devastation where you realize that your life, your perception as it's been constructed, is unmanageable. It's not working. And it doesn't feel good either. It must be a better idea. Oh God, you're that desperate feeling. And so, that's really, that's the first step. It's to start to say that, okay, I've been living in denial of the light. I've been living in the denial of the reality of God and Christ. And I've been misperceiving and perceiving a distorted world. Now that's a pretty big leap, admittedly. And so, in my own life, I had to start to really work through it. I mean, I was basically an activist trying to make the world a better place. Really. And I put a lot of energy into that. And as I know a lot of people have, you know, whether it's the environment or bringing an end to war, bringing it into hunger, bringing world peace, nuclear, stopping the nuclear proliferation. You know, I was very much of an activist. And I had to come to a point, working with the course, where it said, you know, seek not to change the world. Seek rather to change your mind about the world. And I thought, what is this about? You know, wow, that is, for an activist, that's a real, that's a kiss of death. You know, to really start to give your mind to that kind of a thought. And I had to start to allow myself to begin, to just begin to think, what if it is my perception that's the problem? What if I'm not seeing clearly? What if I'm actually seeing something that isn't there? And it's so distorted that I'm getting all riled up and upset about something that actually doesn't exist. And I think for all of us, it comes in different ways. I mean, for me, it never really struck home until back in the early 80s, and this was way before I even had the course, was my grandfather was diagnosed with cancer. And so I watched this very jovial, happy, gentle man with a nice big belly of a plexander claws or a criss-cringle or something, who I adored, going down to be a walking skeleton. That will shake you up a little bit, you know, no matter what age you are, when you see a loved one going through that. It's not so much the scale of the World War, but it certainly is enough to hit you between the eyes of the spiritual two by four. And that really forced me to start saying, well, basically I talked to God. I said, I told God, if you had anything to do with what I'm perceiving, anything at all, I don't want anything to do with you. Speaking of Santa Claus, can you picture Dave with a little red cap on his head? It's the perfect Santa Claus. Oh! It's a bigger white. There it is, a happy Santa Claus. He was that way. Harry, actually a very German name, Heinrich Hermann Hofleister. We call him Harry. But anyway, when you really love somebody and they're going through that, then you have to start to bring it back. And I told God, if you have anything to do with what I'm perceiving with this walking skeleton, I want nothing to do with you. And then God spoke to me in my mind and said, I don't. This is your misperception. This is not what I will for you. I've got something that you need to be healed. Your mind is looking through a darkened glass. You are seeing a distorted world. And if you want to be happy, which is God's will for you, you're going to have to follow me inward and go through these darkened beliefs and come through healing. The Kingdom of Heaven is within. It's not going to be found out there on the screen of the world.