 David and Jenny, we are really excited to have you here. I'm a member of ShareMine Stockholm. If you want to ask anything about our organizations, talk to me, or Kristoffer over there. We will have two breaks, half an hour each, which I think is great. And Anna, we know David will save you a lot of time. Thank you. No, I'm just going to say welcome. Welcome to David and Jenny. I was the one who found David first in Sweden on the map and saw that he travels around in different places and said, but now David has to go to Sweden. And it was the autumn or the autumn of 1995. And then he continued to come back every year, in fact, on the 3rd of May. The whole north. And what is so wonderful about David is that he is so simple and easy, like the best friend. He felt it once. So it's really fun to have him here. And it's really nice to see all of you. Many, or at least a part of us, who feel the same way. Hello again. My name is Jenny. I have traveled with David since January last year around Europe and Australia, New Zealand. If you are here and I shoot the film, if someone doesn't want to be on film, you can go now. I will try to avoid it. It's okay for all of us. And if someone has a mobile phone on, it's good to turn it off. I'm a little nervous, but it's okay. You can just turn off the sound. Yes, because if I don't turn the sound on, it's okay. Let's begin. Very good. Well, thank you for inviting me to come here. Is there anyone here that requires translation that you have already worked that out? Is everyone under? No. Is there anyone who needs translation from English? You need it. Okay. We thought somebody could film her in if you have anything that you need to know or we could have anybody else do the translation. We thought we might be one or two people or someone who is free will that feels that they can fill in in Swedish. Just sit, relax. Is there anyone who needs translation from English? There is. Maybe I can do it. I need to have a little bit. I don't believe that I can do it. I think so you can manage the time. Okay. Should we do that first? I'm listening to the translation so I can say that I understand the most, but I'm not sure if I can do it. Translate. Yes, that would be good. Very good. The title of this talk today is the fear of redemption. And so you could translate that to the fear of love because love and redemption are the same. Redemption, we might say, is like a synonym for salvation. And that term has a lot of different religious connotations. So we could use another synonym of correction. We could say that in Christian terms, sin just means error or missing the mark. So redemption or salvation means the correction of the error. And that's what this journey through life on earth is about. It's about learning to accept the correction to the error of separation. So in A Course in Miracles, Jesus says that that only the mind needs to be saved or salvaged. And it's only salvaged through peace. So that really makes it simple if you keep those two points in mind that we're not trying to save souls, we're save people or do missionary work where we're trying to save other people like traditional Christianity. This is about salvaging your mind coming to self-realization or enlightenment by accepting the correction that the Spirit offers for the error which has been called ego. So redemption is really the correction for the error called ego. And the ego as people have said many things about the ego one time someone told me that I think maybe in 12 step programs they call ego edging God out. When you just try to move God out of the center of your mind at the core of your mind and you try to put something else in the place of love or God, then that's what the ego is. It's a belief that you can separate from God and from each other. So when I traveled around the world in like 22 countries and I like to say that what we have on earth is we have 6 billion people that seem to all be afraid of dying that's what survival is about all the struggles of life but underneath these 6 billion people afraid of dying is one mind afraid of living. One mind admitting that it's been mistaken and accepting the correction to that mistake. So it was interesting I was staying in a hostel and I said new shopping new shopping and Jenny went out and she said you know what the title of the talk you know is and I said what was it again and she said the fear of redemption so you might want to take a look at what 420 242 242 in the English version so I did go out and I glanced over it and I was just reading through the words and basically what I was reading was that Jesus was saying you can tolerate your hostility you can tolerate hatred but the thing that you are terrified of is redemption or love so it's kind of an interesting situation where we have 6 billion people 6 billion different personalities and the personality by definition is the ego so the persona or the mask is the ego trying to hide from this redemption or this love and there's a tremendous fear of what's underneath the hatred that the ego made the hatred but the mind that believes in the ego is most terrified of what's underneath the hatred that's why people can say well I have good days and bad days or yes I've got some hatred and some love and a mix of emotions but what this mix is about is holding on to this mask that covers over this deep love and so the purpose of spirituality the purpose of spiritual awakening is to open up to accept the correction and to experience this love and to drop the mask to drop the mask entirely means also to drop the personality self but also drop the environment that surrounds the personality self which is all time and space so it's not just a matter of saying all I've got to do is drop one little mask but it's also the context of the mask in other words the environment the mask exists in is all of time and space society that's why it seems like such a big undertaking when you go deep into spirituality is because you have to literally empty your mind of everything that you believe about time about the cosmos I remember one time a friend of mine was looking at the course and she came in and she just had this staggered look on her face like she just had been in a boxing match and she just got hit in the chin and I said what's wrong and she said I just looked at the course and it's just it's staggering and the line was not one thought the world believes is true she just said that's a staggering idea when you consider all of the concepts and all of the ideas in this world and that not one of those thoughts is true that's a very very staggering idea but that also gives you a little bit of a grasp of what it's going to take to open up to this love because every scrap of this world was made as a defense against the truth so anything that you believe about the world is going to be something that you have to question you have to bring into question Years ago I had a student back in early 1990s and she was working on Michael's workbook lesson and she said she started working with the early workbook lessons and she said like this first lesson David for example she said it's insulting it's offensive it's insulting nothing I see means anything she said surely he's just kind of warming up here this is not where this is going this is not where anything is leading it's just a preliminary lesson she says you know it's actually kind of she says who does he think that I am to start out with such a humiliating lesson I said well actually that lesson if you can just fully get that one lesson then you've got the whole book you don't need to go and do the other 364 lessons and what that lesson is pointing to is that all of the images of the cosmos is part of the defense and so whenever you think you can find meaning in any of the images or in any of the words or the symbols then you're still looking for meaning outside of yourself because the images are a projection of this idea of separation so if you go further into the workbook you find Jesus saying things like you could receive vision and when he's talking about vision he's not talking about like 20-20 vision with the eyes he's talking about the vision of Christ he says you could receive vision from a table if you would withdraw all of your ideas from the table and instead of telling the table what it is you open your mind up withdrew all your previous past associations and then you ask the table what am I and Jesus is saying it could tell you because it shares the purpose of the universe it's just that this image of a table is just a concept and all of the past associations of what a table is size, texture shape, color all of the things and associations with tables what are tables for associations with bodies and maybe eating all of those memories and associations are part of this ego defense mechanism so when you work with something like the Course it gets to be very much like with Zen Buddhism where they say empty your mind of everything that you think empty the contents of consciousness and then what you're left with is a forgiven world or healed world so starting back with the Course in 1986 that was what I undertook to go into an experience where I would have to be shown how to trust and how to forgive and how to watch my mind very carefully but more like to be the observer just to be able to watch the world as if it's a theater or a play Jenny was actually saying that feeling more and more like a theater what were you saying when you first got back to Sweden I had an experience now when I came back because I've been with David and traveling and done a lot of undoing in my mind and when I came back it felt like people were playing a theater when they spoke to me in Swedish it felt really funny you were watching the theater was it where we were? new shopping? yeah, new shopping even on the plane when I heard Swedish people it's working yeah so how am I going to manage the Course if I don't have a job and I can't manage a job I mean it's pretty it's very hard and you have to practice the Course perhaps in your work and things you have to be able to work as a human being first, aren't you before you can practice the Course isn't that true? yeah it's kind of like Maslow's hierarchy of needs in the sense that you have to meet your basic needs first you begin the Course as a path of practicing with wherever you are in your awareness whatever your life situation is you start working with the tax and with the workbook yeah, whatever your life situation is yeah, yeah so we can say where the Course is leading is leading to a place of trust and an opening more and more to your intuition but you would start practicing so in terms of your situation with not having a job you mean you can tell me a little bit more about your circumstances yeah, I have I don't know how you say this I am on sick leave and it's good we have that here in Sweden so you can have money and things but I am on sick leave and I have been that for about 10 years and I think I have kind of I have difficulty in doing things working getting in the shower and I'm kind of depressed I have been that for many years depressed I think I would say that I am I think because yeah and very immature in many areas to very difficulties very unsure in a working place in a situation where you have to manage your work you know I am very insecure there in front of people and I yes very sort of perhaps in a show but very very tense and things so I haven't I haven't got a job yeah I have got jobs but not a job with the real wages sort of real money from yeah so that so I have got this different job kind of with different aids to it one of my jobs was in a store in a where you bought food and and I worked there for two years and it was very difficult it was very difficult yeah well I think the first thing to keep in mind is the context so for example whether we are talking about relationships or working in a job the context of everything that you will do as you work with The Course in Miracles is undoing the ego so I know for myself that when The Course first came to me back in 1986 I had to start with it right where I was in my awareness which was I had been in university for 10 years I had student loans to pay back I had basic debts and basic survival needs that most people have and so on and so forth so as I began doing The Course Workbook Lessons and reading the text and so on and so forth I realized that that whatever job that I would be given would first and foremost be for my mind training opportunities in other words it's not just The Course isn't something that you theoretically just go off and read by yourself and try to ignore your worldly situation can't kind of think it out in your own hand it's almost like the world is your laboratory yeah so just like in the science class you read the textbook and then you go into the lab to actually see to try the experiments well those workbook lessons are the opportunity yeah so and I've worked with many people that are talking about the same situation you're bringing up I had one friend who hadn't worked for some time and it was she'd gone around and around about this thing of working and found it difficult working and she finally made a prayer to the Holy Spirit and she just said please whatever would be most helpful in terms of a job please bring it to me bring it into my awareness and she said and I will take the first job I will be open but I will take the first job that is offered to me and she had some a number of interviews kind of sprinkled around and the first job that was offered to her was working in a school and her first reaction was oh no I don't like to work in a school and it had more to do with her ego preferences and also her fears and insecurities because she did not graduate from high school and so she had all these insecurities that were projected on to schools so it took a moment for her to go oh that's right I asked the Holy Spirit to send me a job and I said to the Holy Spirit I would accept the first job that was offered and the first job that was offered her was to work in a school so her initial reaction was oh no please not that but actually it was very helpful for her because she had these insecurities and fears and the first thing to keep in mind in one sense we can say whatever job that you are guided to whatever job the Holy Spirit has for you will be used in a way that will be undoing the ego and that's the first and foremost lesson to keep in mind yes jobs do bring in money pay off bills and helps you with basic survival things but first and foremost you have to remember that what comes you is just for the undoing of the ego and if you read the course and the workbook is to do the workbook then it can help you so you can get more oh you can take these perhaps more jobs and choose from more jobs that you can think of yeah I mean it will help you it will help stabilize your mind it will help get the stuff that's underneath in my case I had a very intense job that went on for 8 months that it was a very very steep undoing of the ego and I would say it was certainly not a job that David would have picked when it came to me I was like oh my gosh I didn't know if I would last 2 weeks at the job because I had 10 years of university and I thought I knew something and with this job I was a case manager working with people with disabilities physical disabilities mental disabilities schizophrenia, multiple personality disorder so for me when I got into this job I was just thinking oh my gosh I don't know if I'm going to make it here and what the guidance I was getting was you need to learn how to pray you've been in Christianity for all these years and you still don't know how to pray you still don't know how to ask for help and a lot of the worldly learning that I got in psychology and 10 years of university was a lot of techniques and theories and so on and so forth yeah when I got in with the clients before I would go in with the clients the Holy Spirit would say to me you need to pray and when you see this client you need to practice seeing them for the first time don't read all their case histories don't have any preconceptions and judgments about who they are don't think you know how to treat them what's right all the typical things that you would need as a case manager the Holy Spirit was saying no and she let all that go and I want you to pray for those remarkable experiences with these clients and it lasted 8 months and sure it helped me pay off to the loans it was very practical in all of those terms but I'd say more than that it was really it was almost like we all had like a chip a chip on the shoulder we had pride of thinking we know how things work this was more like oh you're not going to be a miracle worker until we get the chip of pride knocked off your shoulder so I think at times during those 8 months the ego perceived that job is actually humiliating you know I thought I knew something and I felt like everyday things would come at me so fast that I couldn't really react I couldn't control the situations that came at me so fast that it actually helped me learn how to trust instead of trying to think my way through things to become more intuitive and to listen and to follow I had one client that basically other case managers warned me they said he's been and oh you're in for it David this guy is all these multiple diagnosis he's on multiple drugs and he's been in and out of the system for years everybody nobody wanted to even work with the guy and I remember he was assigned to me and I remember asking the Holy Spirit okay what do you want me to do all I kept hearing was just pray and just see him as perfect and innocent when he comes in don't read all the stacks of past writings that all these counselors had accumulated for years don't look at any of it just practice seeing him as perfectly innocent when he comes in the door and disregard everything that all the counselors have told you about him don't put any faith in any of it so when he came in I took him for an intake interview and I basically just saw him as innocent and I listened to him and after five minutes all this profound stuff started coming out of his mouth and I just was like staggered I just listened and listened as he kept talking and talking and talking and finally I said where did you learn this stuff that you're talking about and he said the Holy Spirit of course all this build up of what a terror this guy was and it was really beautiful it was one of those moments of don't think you understand don't think you know what's going on just be willing to show up and to be helpful and don't try to add on anything else and don't try to say oh but I can add this diagnosis or this interpretation that's how we heal as we show up with willingness whether it's a job that you may have or I have or whatever the job seems to be we have to show up with willingness and then not try to add any more onto that but just let the Spirit do it through us so that's how it worked for me in a very practical way and it was a good start I think before I started to travel and have the Holy Spirit speak through me I was guided to a series of jobs that were all about undoing the ego but also that helped me pay off basic debts that I had because I think to do God's work He needs you exactly where you're at but also he had to clear away a lot of things in my life before I would kind of launch on my life's purpose or my life's calling and all of this was very important too I couldn't skip over anything Yeah You know I don't know I was thinking these feelings you have you shan't hide you must look at the ugly things that you have to say you can't go around just feeling nothing and that's and if you're on work you will confront feelings and that's good to get it out they do have to come into awareness in that section I was reading today on the fear of redemption he's saying you do have to raise into awareness these obstacles and these feelings you have to let them out you have to let them up and you have to let them out so for example you mentioned depression and in the Course Jesus says depression comes from a sense of being deprived of something you want but do not have so so basically underneath all depression this is a sense of of lack or scarcity in which the mind is in an unnatural state of mind where it's wanting things and of course a job becomes very important when you want things in order to purchase things that's what the job is for but underneath it you might say that everyone who comes to you in the job setting in the job situation is part of the healing plan so it's part of practicing seeing people innocently over and over and over to the point where you admit to yourself that you are not seeing anyone clearly you're just seeing reminders of the past that are still in consciousness so we never really meet anyone for the first time we're always just seeing something from our past that we're holding on to coming up again and being acted out right in front of us so in that sense it gives us a great opportunity to thank you my sister for mirroring for reflecting what I'm still holding on to in my belief system that I have not raised up into awareness and released and you're acting it out and giving me an opportunity to see it and to release it so in a practical way that's what a job is about a job just like a relationship just an opportunity to use the opportunities to heal that way now I've been in 22 countries and Sweden has like you said it has a system here for those that are unemployed to receive money to live on now I do talk a lot I've written magazine articles on divine providence and living in trust because I don't own anything at this point and I don't possess anything and so there are people that I used to be the director of a non-profit organization so I had some duties and some things to oversee but I kind of recently I said no my hands out of the pie so I really just stepped away from all of that so my one job you might say is just to go be happy and shine my light wherever I'm invited and so forth but to come to that what I would say is that you have to everything is good practice for integrity but also you start to realize that everything in your awareness is part of divine providence even when you're working in a job and you're receiving a paycheck it's really gone it just looks like and a paycheck but all of us are under the same law of divine providence so when you receive money from unemployment or from being sick or on sick leave or whatever that's part of the divine providence as well the divine providence well it takes we have to kind of see what is going on the divine providence that you are at home okay so everyone's really living under that law of divine providence whether you believe it's coming through a job or not but we could say that the course in miracles what it does is it makes you more and more humble so that you start to see that everything that seems to be in this world that's part of your life that's helping you on the plan of awakening is all coming from the spirit it's all the spirit using the symbols so that's very important step in that way it doesn't have to feel a sense of a stigma or a darkness around not having a job it's not so much whether you have a job but it's just that to be willing to have the ego undone and to allow the Holy Spirit to use the symbols in a way that supports you in a maximal way yeah so I had a friend who came all the way from New Zealand to spend some time with me and she was on disability at the time for she told me that she was very very independent strong-willed very young, independent successful and the first thing that got her attention was she had she was skiing and she went flying off of the slopes and out of control and smashed her head she had a head injury and that really slowed her life down from bigger better faster, more go-getter kind of lifestyle but she told me she didn't really get it she was back out doing more extreme sports and whatever after that she recovered from her first head injury so the second time she was on a mountain bike she was going over she was riding with these guys and they were ahead of her and she was on a mountain bike she went over some very high mount and she lost control of the mountain bike and she had her second head injury and that got her attention when she broke both of her wrist and she was like a baby bird and her mother and father had to feed her because she couldn't even move her wrist she lay there and she started to say well this must have a purpose and it was you might say it was the beginning of the undoing of the ego most of us hopefully don't have to go through such extreme things although some of us I'm sure can tell our stories we've gone through some pretty extreme things people go through near death experiences and whatever before they start to say wait a minute something's up here but when she came and met me she started traveling and working with the course she was still receiving disability payments well that's still part of the divine providence and she would just we talked a lot about integrity because as she got her energy got more and more she was able to stay up more she was much more alert and she got to a point where she actually started feeling a little guilty for taking disability money that she started to feel better and better and better very quickly when she was traveling with me we were working through a lot of things so at one point I said to her well how does it feel and I said she says it feels like I should contact my disability manager in New Zealand and just tell this man everything that's going on and not hide anything and not hold anything back I said yeah I think that's a very good idea this is a pathway of not abdicating responsibilities to dodge anything or get something for free that you have to deceive or that you have to lie about so she actually wrote to her disability manager and said I've been in the United States I've been traveling I've been working on my healing and working on forgiveness and things are progressing and I have much more energy and the manager said well it's really good you're progressing we still want to give you another three months of disability and she said what should I do and I said well if they're going to offer to you you might as well thank it the key thing was don't hide anything don't withhold anything but that was part of Divine Providence too so sometimes the Divine Providence comes through a job or being paid on a job or coming through a sick leave many many different ways people have told me stories of finding money in the street and on and on and on anything that seems to support you as you're doing this inner work you have to start to say ah this is just the Holy Spirit using the symbols and I don't have to judge the use of those symbols I have to kind of be where I am and accept and try and use I am quite active anyway I'm doing things not a real job right now anyway but I am trying to stay active on the things like that and so I'm going to be looking for a job now and you can offer before you even do the looking offer up a prayer and say to the Spirit whatever job you want me to have please bring it to me bring it into my awareness make it obvious I would say that over and over to the Holy Spirit make it obvious and it sometimes comes in various ways but the important thing is to have the context to realize that the job is for the undoing of the ego and everything that you're doing now even in this active phase when you don't have a job can all be used in a very maximal way too so it starts to wash away the guilt of feeling like you're less than or it washes away the comparison you know with other people and where other people are at those are all ego devices to kind of keep you down yeah to keep thank you very good thank you yeah about fears I got very old fears like it started when I was young and I was blushing and people started to scold me and it spread to that I was afraid of trembling on my hands of my voice then it came to with women that I was afraid to perform or I put some pressure on me that I was afraid all the time that I would not be able to perform and it feels like it's deep down it's a great fear of being abandoned of separation and also it's like a play in my head where it's one part of me bullying the other part schooling myself doing the same to myself again and again and one part getting very submissive afraid fearful and this is just going on and it was right today that I saw this play I quite was quite clear to me what's going on in my head that I'm trying to get the distance to it but it's still there it's something I'm afraid of if I meet a woman will I perform will I be abandoned and it's a great great pain it feels like I could just scream and scream and scream out this pain this is my cornerstone could you comment I know I've mentioned this to you I need a lot of angles to look at it yeah I also say it's clear that I'm doing this to myself but I keep hurting myself yeah yeah there's a line in the course that says until you're willing to look on the full extent of your anger or your hatred you will not be willing to let it go in other words when you go on the spiritual journey the closer you come to the core to the origin of the ego belief system like you were going down a spiral or down a funnel the closer you get to the core the more intense it gets because on the other side of the core is love and the ego the system of the ego is built as a defense against the love all the unworthiness all the guilt all the shame the feelings of abandonment that are certainly projected onto the characters through your life feeling abandoned by people in your life even Helen Shuckman wrote a book called The Gifts of God which was her poetry and she had some pretty dark poems in there but they were abandonment poems directed at Jesus she was hearing Jesus's voice for seven years he's talking to her like a friend like a guy like a confidant for seven years taking down this book and then she writes these poems you said you would always be with me you know from the Bible I'm with you always even to the end of time how could you abandon me how could you say such a thing so the ego is the belief in abandonment and it either gets projected onto God or onto Jesus or onto the Holy Spirit sometimes and certainly onto certain characters that are part of the dream and all those projections do is just reinforce the feelings it's almost like drawing forth witnesses and evidence to what you believe and that's what makes this world such a convincing hallucination it was made by belief and then when you believe in it you draw forth all these witnesses that confirm what you believe kind of like Pygmalion self-fulfilling prophecy whatever you believe about yourself the cosmos will witness back over and over and over so there's a term called circumscribed when you circumscribe something it's like you're completely surrounded so Jesus is saying you believe in separation and you circumscribe yourself with this environment that completely witnesses and reinforces what you believe about yourself and now in quantum physics they're teaching us the same thing but no two people see the same world and everybody's seeing a subjective world based on their own preferences so we have 6 billion people that are literally seeing 6 billion different worlds and because we have some elements of of congruity or sameness about the sky or the ocean or the weather or things that's what makes it convincing it makes it look like it's a real thing, a real environment but it's more like in Star Trek terms it's more like a holodeck it's a holographic projection that looks very very very real and then when you start projecting people out as part of that environment that speak and seem to speak the same language as you that agree with you about certain things and that makes it even more convincing of not seeming to be a hallucination at all so what you're talking about is this has been your history and now you need an intercession or the miracle to show you that there's another way that's why we have of course the miracles it's like an intercession to break the pattern and for example even feeling like fear of rejection with women or feeling like you have to perform performance anxiety all the things fear of abandonment and so on and so forth start to gain more confidence with miracles in different aspects of your life it will begin to transfer to other areas and so it's typical for myself and people that I've worked with and people that I've heard they will have some very significant experiences that actually show them a different way show them another way of seeing themselves they have one experience Jesus calls it an out of pattern experience because it's not like the typical pattern it's an out of pattern experience it shows you wow there's so much more here than I was aware of and that starts you on a momentum to take your awareness your consciousness higher and higher and expand it I use the example from my own life I was in high school I was so shy and quiet that I was voted most quiet in my senior class so out of 200 and some people I was in the yearbook they gave us actually a microphone to hold me and this other girl as we were both voted most quiet so I have to laugh now that I go all around the world and it started off with most quiet that's where the personality was and then the Holy Spirit just said okay let's wash that that's just an impediment that's going to be a hindrance you can't be shy and quiet if you're going to let the voice for God speak through you so it just kind of got washed away washed away I read that too about Moses Moses had a stutter and he had to deliver the Ten Commandments and Gandhi was also very shy I read his autobiography and he seemed to be kind of a mover shaker in terms of this world in terms of non-violence and so forth but those were inspiring for me to be aware of too because it just showed me that as I gave my mind over to miracles I had new experiences and those new experiences were like lighting up my mind like saying oh it can be different it really can be it doesn't have to be the same way that it's always been and so I think you have a lot to look forward to in your life really because as you work with this journey the Course for example is such a powerful tool that you don't really have to have a lot of money or a lot of skills or abilities for it to be impactful but if you have willingness and you work with this tool you can go so far so fast just from the willingness and what happens is you get new experiences that cancel out the old experiences you know you keep getting these new experiences over and over and over and over and they actually do a fine job of washing away or cancelling out the past in fact you know that's a major teaching is the past is gone it can touch me not you know what time but now can truth be known now is the only time that there is and so the more that you work with it the more you have an experience of just being in the present and that present experience is full of confidence is full of joy and you actually have loads of joy that come and yet performing or comparing or all the typical ego devices just get washed away so that you don't have those same devices operating anymore so you've got a lot to look forward to I look forward to hearing about these things but I don't allow myself in the thoughts I try to live so well than in the course and I think the more I try the deeper into the fear the pain the black thoughts and what I am I have made a great effort and the doubt it just comes very very it's like the pain feels like I can't stand out is it necessary to meet all of this the pain or sometimes I sit and jump home I want her up a bar so that I feel alive and everything together so is it necessary to be free from this it's very difficult to have the blackness to have the experience to be free from this sometimes it feels like it's just getting worse and worse she is trying to live as the course is teaching and practice forgiveness but it feels like it's getting worse because the doubts are just increasing and more darkness is coming up and is it necessary she wonders it's necessary to have that experience yeah suffering and pain are optional but the experience is that you must go through the darkness into the light how how well first thing you do and the most important thing you do is you don't try to protect or cover or hide any emotions that are arising into consciousness so for example for me I feel like the first two decades of my life two and a half almost three decades I could see there was a lot of denial and repression that was going on I could look back at photographs at my face and at my eyes were like halfway closed and I could see this almost face of I was in denial a lot of emotions that were in there in my awareness in my consciousness that I had never let come out that I had never got in touch with so yeah the first step is to allow yourself to get in touch with those emotions and then when you do it's staggering for many people there are mystics and saints like St. John of the Cross wrote a book Dark Knight of the Soul most everyone who goes on this journey and really starts to go deeper inward comes into these intense waves of hurt and deep sense of fear and guilt and so on and so forth and that's why comparatively speaking of all the people on the planet there are a lot of people that would never consider making their spiritual journey their top priority in their life because it's almost like opening a can of worms it's opening something that's so dark that they don't feel like they could handle it even if they open it a little bit they quick put the lid back on I didn't see that I don't even want to I'll forget that I'll forget that I ever looked because it's so dark