 Hi everybody! Merry Christmas Eve! Welcome to our all-day movie workshop. We've got a beautiful day ahead of us. I'm Peter for those joining you and yeah I can just let you know about the day. So we've got David who'll be joining us from Florida today and he'll be showing, giving the movie commentary this morning and then we'll have a 10 minute break afterwards. That can be a time where you submit your questions via our question form and then we'll have a Q&A session at the end. So I'm going to pass it right over to you now David. Thank you Pete. Hi everyone! Welcome! There we are! Christmas Eve! Merry Christmas everyone! We're gonna have a beautiful movie to dive into the heart of Christ and remember the real true meaning of Christmas is, is basically that you are the gift. Who you are is the Christ and that is the gift to the world. So you are the gift. I remember many years ago I, I did volunteer work and I would go and visit elderly people during the Christmas season and I was part of something in Cincinnati Ohio called the Holiday Project and this and the slogan, the key slogan for the holiday project was you are the gift. So me and all the volunteers we went out to spread our joy and our happiness to people who were elderly and they couldn't get out. So we had so much fun sharing love and joy with everyone and I think that's a beautiful thing to remember during the holiday season that who you are, who your identity is as God created it is the gift. It's not really these packages and trinkets that we, that we often use in our Christmas rituals. It's actually your very being, your very presence of love is the gift and you can offer that anytime, anywhere, any place. Why not have Christmas be 365 days a year? That's what I say. We, we might as well celebrate the birth of ourself as the Christ every moment of every day of every year. So as you know we usually have, we have a set of whole themes that people vote on and then we, we call upon Jesus to give us a movie, select a movie for us so we can have the actual experience of the themes. And here's what you voted for, for this beautiful Christmas Eve Saturday presentation. Coming in at number one. Have no fear of consequences. Isn't that a great way to live? Live every moment of your life without fear of consequences. Who wants to fear a bunch of hypothetical future consequences that don't really exist at all? Why would we live our life based on fear when we have everything that we need and we have everything that we want when we, we simply say, God, I want to, I want to live in happiness. I want to live in joy. I want to live in peace. And that request is granted to us in this moment. And the only thing that prevents us from experiencing that joy and happiness is the beliefs in, in a hypothetical future. And that future is a projection of the past. So when we are afraid of consequences, potential consequences that come could come to us as a body or as a personality, we're just into erroneous thinking. We're just thinking thoughts of nothingness with the ego. And we don't have to hold on to those thoughts of nothingness. We can be free right now. So number one, have no fear of consequences. Number two, let love orchestrate the miracle. In a course in miracles, Jesus tells us that miracles are involuntary and should not be under conscious control. Wow. That sounds to me like let go and let God, God, you lead the way you shine the light. I will but follow whatever guidance you give to me knowing that your guidance is for my happiness. It's for my peace of mind. It's for my joy. So I'm so happy to let the Holy Spirit let love orchestrate the miracle. I have to say that that once I got to a point in my experiences with this world where I just let go of fear of consequences, I said, I'm not going to live by fear anymore. This is ridiculous. I'm not I'm not happy trying to prepare for these future consequences based on these past beliefs that I believe were real. So when I really let go into guidance and let the Holy Spirit lead the way and Jesus lead the way, then things got happy real quick. Because because when you let go of trying to control the world, and you let go of even trying to control your body or control the bodies of anyone else, it's such a relief, you know, to just let all things be exactly as they are and enjoy everyone, just accept everyone as they are right now. Don't put any kind of plans on top of them. Don't put any kind of expectations on them. The third theme is being uncompromising in what I really want. I think for most of us, you know, we've had ambitions and we've had future goals. And the only thing about future goals is sometimes they seem to come about and sometimes they don't come about. And even when they don't come about, we don't really have to cling to the belief that we need certain things in this world to be happy. We have everything that we need to be happy right now. Our connection with God is what we we need to be happy. And that's available to us every single moment. There's nothing in the world that can take away our happiness, our peace and joy. The fourth one is let go of investment in the future. That's a pretty big one. You know, most of us have been, you know, raised up and programmed to be very future oriented, you know, I'll be happy when I used to call that my I'll be happy when game. Well, I'll be happy when my bank account has this amount, I'll be happy when I have a relationship that looks a certain way. I'll be happy when I achieve my career goals. I'll be happy when I move to the perfect place. And I don't know about you, but I'm starting to discover there is no perfect place. I woke up in Florida this morning, and it was 27 degrees. It was it was five degrees below freezing in Florida. So that just shows me that you can't count on anything informed to be a certain way. Most of us think of Florida's as beaches, not, not having icicles hanging off of our cars. You know, it's a little different. But see, that just shows you you can't count on anything informed. And we're not, we're not supposed to count on anything informed. We're just supposed to stay present and be happy. And then last coming in in the poll with 33 votes was go all in, give everything to this moment. Wow, that sounds exciting. I don't know about you, but that sounds really exciting. Give everything to this moment. If I could just put my full focus and attention on this moment, and really be fully present with everyone and everything. That sounds like a recipe for happiness. But put put my full attention on the present moment. If somebody asked you what are you plans for tomorrow? Hey, I'm just going all in for this moment. That's a good answer. I'm going all in for God, because God is in this moment. And God is not a God of the past or the future. God is a God of the present moment. And Jesus tells us that in a Course in Miracles, he says, the present moment is the closest approximation of eternity that this world offers. That's all I need. Jesus Christ to tell me that. And I'm all in for the present moment. And you can feel the happiness bubbling in your heart when you realize that if you give your full attention, you're not into hypothetical thinking. And hypothetical thinking is, is thinking about the past in terms of could or would or should have. If any of you ever thought about past scenes and scenarios in your lives with the could or would or should have, I could have done better. I would be happier if I would have done this. I should have done this. And my life would be different. Now, Jesus is laughing. The angels are laughing with all of our could or would or should have hypothetical thoughts of the past. But the only thing that makes the angels and Jesus left even more is our hypotheticals of the future. Because it's, it's like we think that we're hoping things get better in the future. And Jesus is like, Why would you put your hope into the future when you have cause for freedom right now? Right now you are, you can be free, you don't have to figure out the way in the future, you can be free right now if you just surrender over to the Holy Spirit, and to the Holy Spirit's guidance. So those are very exciting, very exciting themes. And during this Christmas season, I'm reminding reminded of a friend of mine one time who told me the story where she went to she went to a metaphysical church. And they told her, you know, that's great that you're here. But really, we would like you to join our master mind class. And she said mastermind. And they said, Yeah, we have a mastermind class that meets every week. And we all gather together, please come, we all sit in a big circle. And she said, Well, what's the mastermind class about? And they said, Well, we, we learn the power of our mind through manifesting. And so we all learn how to manifest. So my friend went to the class, and she sat in a big circle and one by one, everyone in the circle went around and they spoke out loud, what it was that they were going to manifest in front of everybody. But when they came to my friend, and they asked her, what is it that you want to manifest? Her answer, what she told the whole group was everything. And they said, what, no, miss, you don't understand, you don't understand what the group's about. So we'll just take a moment, everybody recenter, let's get re centered here. And let's try this again. So they waited about four or five minutes. And they said, All right, now, please tell us what you want to manifest. And she went everything. That's all she could say. They tried three or four times. And all she could say was everything. And they said, We got to move on. You don't understand what this group is about. Well, I'll tell you what, I read a line from Jesus in A Course in Miracles. And this is what Jesus had to say about everything. This is from chapter 26. Jesus says, What is the will of God? He wills his son have everything. And this he guaranteed when he created him as everything. It is impossible that anything be lost. If what you have is what you are. This is the miracle by which creation became your function, sharing it with God. It is not understood apart from him, and therefore has no meaning in this world. Here does the Son of God ask not too much, but far too little. Oh my gosh. That's what this world is. It's asking for far too little. We have a very powerful mind. We have the power of prayer. And we were created as the Christ as the as a holy child of God with everything. And and when we believe in the ego, we limit our asking to tiny things. We don't really believe that we deserve everything. We believe they were only entitled into just a little bit. And we live our whole lives as if we need to be satisfied with just a little bit. And I remember that from my early years of studying A Course in Miracles, where Jesus I remember that so strongly, he said, You do not ask for too much. You always ask for far too little. And then at one point, Helen Schuchman was taking down a Course in Miracles. And Ken Wapnick was talking to Helen saying, you know, I think I think there's more to this topic of prayer. Maybe you could just ask Jesus if he would he would give us a little more information on what prayer really is. And Jesus delivered what's called the song of prayer. It's called a supplement to A Course in Miracles that goes with the material is called the song of prayer. And in it, Jesus is saying that while you believe in the ego, you limit your prayer, you limit your prayers based on your limiting ego beliefs. And in the end, what Jesus is telling us is that as we learn the power of our mind, and we learn to let go of our limiting beliefs, and our limiting thoughts, then we've come closer to God by removing all the limitations from our prayer life. And finally, we learn how to pray, and just say, God, what is your will for me? In other words, at the beginning, when we feel like we're lacking, and we feel like we're not enough, we can't help but ask for things. We can ask for attributes, we can ask for specific things, we can ask a lot of specific prayers. But in the end, Jesus says, you will learn that the one prayer that you really want to ask of God is not really a question at all. It's just, it's, it's a desire to merge with the will of God and know that God's will for perfect happiness is your own will for perfect happiness as the Christ. So I feel like that's what the message is for all of us on this Christmas Eve is that Jesus is giving us a movie today. And it's about the theme of letting go of limitations and not putting any limits on the prayer of our heart. The movie today is called last holiday. And this movie is starring Queen Latifa. And it's the story of a woman who basically is living a cautious life. She's, she's working her job. She's collecting her pay. She's, she's living what we could call a very cautious and conservative and quite limited life because of her belief in unworthiness. She doesn't really believe that she's worth more than what she is holding on to. So she's trying to live a very cautious life. And in the movie, there will be circumstances that will come to her in which she will begin to question her direction in life. Now we've got a lot of great movies in our movie Watchers Guide to Enlightenment. And some of you maybe have seen the one, the movie called The Guitar, which was the movie was made by Robert Redford's daughter. And it's a movie about a woman who feels kind of, kind of trapped and kind of unfulfilled in life. And then she receives a diagnosis when she goes to the doctor of a terminal illness. And this movie we're going to watch today is very similar. Because basically, we find that this woman, Georgia, her name is Georgia Byrd, Georgia has pretty content content with her everyday life. But but she keeps a book, a scrapbook of possibilities. So you might say her scrapbook is her wishful thinking of, wow, if I really could, I wish I could do this and this and that. And those are her hypothetical wishes that she is not brave enough to go for. As we were just talking about the present moment is where we have to really go for it. And the present moment is where we start to realize that there is no such thing as hypotheticals. It's not like you can really imagine something that's different than what's right now. Because what is right now is everything. So what you're experiencing right now is everything that you believe in. How you experience the world and how you experience yourself is a motion picture of what you believe yourself to be right now. And the purpose of the Holy Spirit is to say, why don't you let go of some of these beliefs of who you are right now? Because you're much more than you think you are. You're so much more than you believe yourself to be. If you could have Jesus and the angels show you even for an instant who you really are, you would be stunned at how magnificent you are. You would cry at how beautiful you really are. You would feel a rush of joy at how expansive and unlimited that you really are in your true essence, in your true being. So Georgia, she she lives and works in New Orleans, Southern City in the United States, New Orleans, Louisiana, and her entire life, she has never left Louisiana. Unlike our friend Ricky, who has she's long gone from Louisiana. She's she's been flying the Coupe a long time. But but in this movie, Georgia has never left Louisiana. She goes to church. She's got a church in Louisiana. She works at a department store in Louisiana. She doesn't have a whole lot of friends. She likes to she likes to make gourmet meals, but she doesn't like to eat them. Because she's afraid she'll get fat. So she makes amazing gourmet meals and she eats lean cuisine. She doesn't give herself the gift of even the food that she cooks, she cooks for other people. She sings in the choir, she loves to sing, like Ricky, she loves to sing. And she loves to belt it out and sing for the glory of God. But as far as relationships, you know, she's got her possibilities book, she's got her eye on on one of the guys that she works with in the department store, but she's got her lips sealed. She's never told this man that she has a crush on him, even though she works in the same department store. She she has she has been saving her money for years. And so she's got savings and she's got some bonds that she has. But she's she's basically not been using her money. She's basically been just saving it up and storing it up. And she's got this growing possibilities book of all the things that she wished she would do with her life that she hasn't done. She just writes them down and she puts, she puts photographs and she puts descriptions. And she writes about the man that she has a crush on at work and the places she would like to visit and the things she would like to do. But she stores them all in her possibility scrapbook. And then we will see in this movie one day she will be diagnosed with a terminal illness. Oftentimes for human beings, this is part of the spiritual awakening process. When people get so accustomed to their world and so accustomed to their limitations, that sometimes it takes a diagnosis of a terminal illness to kind of shake them out of their slumber and help them start to open up to the idea that there's more to life than what they have perceived of themselves. And they're worthy of it. A lot of people who are diagnosed with terminal illness, you know, if they are told they only have three or four weeks to live. Wow, they will do things that they had never really fully given themselves permission to do. I'm thinking we have so many movies in our movie Watchers Guide to Enlightenment and Tom Hanks is starting in some the movie The Guitar is another example. We have we have quite a few movies where the main character is diagnosed with a terminal illness and then it shakes them out of their slumber. It shakes them beyond just having a possibilities book to actually going for it. I think probably my all time favorite movie for this is Joe versus the volcano where Joe, Joe is told he has a brain cloud. And he believes it. And he feels like he's only got a very short time to live with his brain cloud. And so suddenly he goes from his very limited little world into miracles, cascading miracles as soon as he opens up to to following the guidance of his heart. Now the good thing is we don't have to wait until we get a diagnosis of of a terminal illness. We can have all those miracles right now, starting right now and extending forever and forever and forever. And all we have to do is is believe that we're worth it. That's the main limit that people have with in terms of miracles is they become so accustomed to these limited definitions, limited beliefs, limited thinking. And if somebody had showed me a motion picture of my life for the last 3035 years, I would have either run the other way in fear or I would have just been in total disbelief and said, you got the wrong person because I've had so many miracles I could not write. I couldn't write 100 books and put all the miracles that was still not be enough books to put all the miracles I've experienced in these last 35 years. But it wasn't because I got a diagnosis that I was going to be dead soon. It was more that I started to feel like there has to be more to life than than what seems to be just the human person going through the days. There has to be much more to life. I remember when I was even in graduate school, I would talk to the other graduate students and they would all have their future plans and goals. And I kept feeling like, I think the only thing I wanted out of life was to never die. Try telling that to your colleagues. What? I said, yeah, I really don't feel like I don't want to taste death. And they said, well, sorry, you know, you're on the wrong planet for that. And I said, no, I think Jesus, I think he found something. I think, I think he was onto something actually. And I really think that he he found that it's impossible to die. So that that'll really free your mind of fear of consequences. When you get into the reality and the actuality that you can never die. And I feel that so so that means that when I go through my life, I can live each moment each day to the fullest. Go travel if I'm feel to travel meet anyone I feel to meet. I'm not worried about time. I've got all the time in the world. I feel like I've got eternity. So it's no problem for me to to have a nice long phone call with somebody or go take a long walk or or spend the day together and lose track of time. I like that. I like losing track of time, having so much joy that you lose track of the passage of time. But I think it comes from this feeling this miraculous feeling you get where you start to feel like you can't die. There's nothing you can do to make yourself die. So so then you start to live in a very spontaneous and open hearted way. And I think that's what this movie is about. I think that's what Jesus is really going to encourage us today. Because for this woman Georgia bird, you know, she's she's playing it very, very cautious. And she's afraid to speak up. And I think, like many people, you know, because they're they're afraid of what might happen, they don't really shine their light. They get into people pleasing. They try to please their boss or please their landlord, please their partner, please their family. And at some point, you know, you start to feel like what have I been doing here? What kind of bargain am I making? I want to be a free spirit. I want to be a free spirit who never dies. I want to know my true reality as a spirit that can never die. So we're going to enjoy this movie. Today, I will stop in from time to time, joining you at certain points along the way. Because I think you're going to be able to relate to Georgia and her story. And when I first saw this movie, I was like, cheering her on. Go for it. Don't hold back. Say what you need to say. Speak up whatever you need to speak up to whoever to your boss, to your neighbors, to your, to your church, speak up what you really want to say. If you're in the choir singing and you feel like there's something that the that the congregation needs to hear speak it up. If you think there's something that the minister needs to hear, speak it up. When we speak it up, we realize that that what we teach is what we learn. And when we speak from a place of expansiveness, from a place of unlimited trust, then suddenly the world starts reflecting back our unlimited trust. That's what happened to me. I find that as I began to really trust my intuition, and to trust my guidance, that suddenly the world started to light up. I thought, this is a very bright place when I'm trusting. But when I was doubting, it seemed like a pretty dark place. Whenever I had doubt thoughts, then I seem to draw forth all these reflections of doubt until I just thought I don't want to do that anymore. So sit back, enjoy this beautiful Christmas movie. And let's watch Georgia go and open her heart up and open her life up to miracles. As an example for all of us, what we all want is just to open up to miracles, everyday miracles, lots of them. Okay, I'll see you all very shortly.