 The topic of relationships has come up a couple times, particularly people who are already in relationship. I'm wondering, for those of us who are single, about that dance that we dance, you know, as we're discovering a relationship or perhaps looking for a relationship. Yeah, yeah, these single, there's still, you could say that really everyone that you meet, and certainly we can talk about that here in the climbing, because you meet a lot of people over and over and over at the Linai and at different gatherings and places. The same mirroring that goes on in relationships goes on. And in this role, we could say there's definitions of what it means to be in a relationship versus being single. We also could make distinctions between something like a casual encounter and what seems to be a much more sustained relationship, whether it's a significant other relationship or a working relationship or family relationships and so forth. And there seems to be a great difference between casual encounters and lifelong relationships. They don't seem to be in the same ballpark. They seem to be so different. And in the Teacher's Manual of Course in Miracles, Jesus says there is no one that you cannot teach because there is no one that you cannot learn from. In other words, we're teaching and learning about ourselves with every interaction, whether it's a sustained interaction or it's just a casual encounter. Or even if we're just thinking about someone and they aren't even physically present to us in proximity, we're still teaching and learning. There's a process going on in our consciousness, and it's all based on thought. And so when we tend to think of teaching in the world, it's very much like teaching in terms of having an instructor and having a pupil and so on and so forth. But the way it's talked about in the Course is you're teaching all the time. And in fact, you're teaching the whole universe with everything you think and say and do. So you see it's a much larger context for teaching. I would say teaching is more analogous to thinking. So in terms of desiring a relationship, I think the purpose of all this mind training and mind planning is just to get more tuned into guidance. And that part of the plan of awakening is that there will be relationships that will come. You could call them relationships, you could call them assignments that are part of the plan. And the purpose of every relationship or every assignment is to maximize the time to learn as much as you can or approach forgiveness, true forgiveness, as deeply as you can with that relationship. And it doesn't matter even if it seems to be a casual encounter, those casual encounters offer the same opportunity for forgiveness that the more sustained and lifelong relationships offer as well. In terms of a partner or a mate, I know there's a lot of literature written on soul mates and so on and so forth. It's kind of interesting in the Teacher's Manual of the Course in Miracles because Jesus does describe casual encounters and then fairly intense teaching learning situations that were they appeared to separate after a period of time. More, we could say, short-term or mid-range ones. And then he describes lifelong partners. And he describes lifelong partners by saying they're very rare in this world and that the partners, they kind of guns down the romantic soul mate notion. And what he's really saying with that is this unconscious is very deep and very dark. And you may actually have an assignment. It's a lifelong assignment. And it's not all going to be peaches and cranes. There's going to be a lot of chunks of darkness that come up in this lifelong assignment. So it's kind of good. I always feel like it's good to get it straight. If I'm really in this for peace of mind and everlasting life, then I have to know that it's going to be a dark unconscious and I may have relationships that seem to be longer lasting ones in which there's a lot of antagonism, a lot of things that come up. And that's where the value of commitment comes in. Because in order to really stand in there and face those thoughts and those beliefs that are coming up, there is a sense of having a commitment to hang in there with it. And when we talk about relationships, that's usually a very big centerpiece of relationships is a commitment. The ego doesn't even know what commitment means. It has no clue what commitment is. It's totally impulsive. It's kind of like a wild child. In one of Amy's songs, she talks about the wild child. And so the spirit works with the mind and is successive, you might say, a successive kind of one after another run of commitment-building disciplines for the mind to approach the escape hatch or you could call it salvation or you could call it true liberation, true freedom. But there's going to be a successive number of experiences and commitments that will lead you towards the total commitment that's required for releasing the mind from this world. So yeah, I think it's beautiful that you can just be very open-minded and try to be as intuitive as possible because there will be assignments that will be coming. And it's just important to be as tuned in as possible so that when this assignment comes, you can really answer the call and say, OK, I'm ready. I'm ready to commit. There are also many other commitments where you talk about yoga or Tai Chi, martial arts. I mean, having a job, being a volunteer at Kalani, you could go on and on. There are many, many ways that the spirit strengthens this awareness of commitment for the mind and disciplines and relationships is just one of those. It is part of a broad spectrum.