 10 characteristics of a teacher of God, and one of the characteristics is generosity. And Jesus says that in the truest sense, the generosity means the exact opposite of what it means in the world. So everything that we would commonly think of as generosity, Jesus says it's not that. It's the exact opposite of what you would think of as generosity. I love it when you're reading the book and you go, wow, this upside down perception must really be pretty distorted if the true meaning of generosity is the exact opposite of how it's perceived in the world. Because if you went around and you polled and asked hundreds or thousands of people, what does it mean to be generous? And you took their answers and you kind of built a definition based on a pool of all these answers. Then you go to Jesus and he said, now it's going to be the exact opposite of that. Oh, wow. What he says in there, he goes on further. He says, the teacher of God does not want anything that he cannot give away. What would he want it for? He could only lose because of it. Okay, there we go, exact opposite. The teacher of God does not want anything that he cannot give away. So he's not just starting off with that saying from Psalms, the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. That's very Buddhist, empty your mind of everything you think you think you know. Empty all the desires, all attachments. That fits in very much with deep Buddhism and deep non-dual teachings. But he's saying, he's using it more in the context of during your mind training, which is what a teacher of God is. It's just a symbol of going through a purification. The teacher of God does not want anything that he cannot give away. So he's actually using generosity and giving in a whole new way because he's not talking about philanthropy. Now, for most people, some aspect of their generosity terms in this world would be philanthropy. We think of people who are philanthropists and who give a lot to humanitarian aid or support for starving children or medical supplies for doctors. We could have a whole definition based on that and he's saying it's not that. That that's all attempting again to provide help. And there is aspects of helpfulness, but we're talking about what is truly generous and truly helpful. He's going to try to really raise the bar here. And what he teaches us in the Course is that ideas are strengthened as they're given away. And that's what it means to teach what you would learn and teach only love for that is what you are. That is, we extend pure ideas. We're coming closer and closer to what God is because God extends pure love. And he says Christ is an idea in the mind of God. So God extended love from God and Christ is an expression or an extension of the love of God. And now he's saying we're going to practice with your mind and we're going to give you a whole new form of generosity where you're going to be giving away love. Giving away the experience of love. Giving away the demonstration of love. Giving away the attitude, like the Beatitudes. You're going to give away the attitude of love and you're going to keep it in your awareness by giving it away. Because the only way that you can know what it is is by giving it. Because it is giving. It's giving and extending emotion. It's not a static emotion. It's not like you can't bottle it up and put it, oh I got three ounces of love here. You can't put it in a bottle and put a lid on it. And so a teacher of God does not want anything that he cannot give away. What would he want it for? It does take you into non-possession. Not just physically but mentally. You know when we say my car, my house, my wife, my husband, my children, my bank account. My, my, my. When we have that my word where we have a sense of ownership with anything of this world, then that is an expression of possession. And love does not possess. It's going to take us to the exact opposite of that. I remember when I first came across the course and I went up to spend some time with Ken Waak like up in Roscoe, New York. I met his, a woman that was there, part of his community who lived in the, lived in the community and she worked in the kitchen and the garden and this and this. She was from England and she was so happy. She had big rosy cheeks and just this radiant love that was pouring through her. And for Dorothy, and it was Dorothy, Dorothy and I, it was a huge recognition. It was almost like we, we had found each other. Just, we were just so high and so happy. And she would work with a lot of the teachers there who were PhDs and educators and everything. And we're kind of working with the course more on an intellectual, conceptual basis. She was, she didn't even graduate from high school, but her state of mind was just soaring and radiating this love. And when she finally left there, she drove across the country to the state of Washington back to his mobile home that she had on Whitby Island and she wrote to me and when she first got there to this mobile home where she had left behind there's some, some people to watch over it. They apparently not only didn't watch over it, it was totally ransacked. I mean, in fact, when she first got there that her neighbors don't even go in there, stay with me because it was nighttime when she arrived. Just stay with me and we'll look at it tomorrow. The next day they went in there and the carpet was red ripped up. The furniture was ripped up all over the place and chopped up. There was food sticking on, apparently there was food fights in there because there was food sticking and hanging down from the ceiling. Bugs, urine, carpet ripped up with urine stains and urine smell. It had a stench and everything. And her state of mind is just, she wrote me a story. She wrote me a little letter and she said, I'm sitting in, I'm in the bathroom now, my mobile home and she's describing in the letter how the commode, she's sitting on the commode like a little girl playing because the bolts that hold the commode to the floor have been taken out and she's sliding around playing like a little girl on this commode as she's come back to her mobile home and she writes, ha, ha, ha, ha. And I could just see her in this ransacked mobile home swishing around it like a little girl gliding around like it's a little toy commode because it had no bolts to even hold it in and she's sliding around going, ha, ha, ha. She writes all these ha, ha, ha. And that's what I mean by it's all about the state of mind. If you believe that you own something, if you believe that you possess something, if you take on anything in this world, whether it's a body or a house or a mobile home or anything and you're identified with it and you really do believe the my. If she really didn't believe it was my mobile home then ha, ha, ha, ha is not what she would have been writing as the commode is swishing around on the floor. She was demonstrating that the love is not generated by the world. It's the love that's coming from within her mind. And then I got to listen to this more e-mail, her e-mails back in those days, which is letters, came and she had all these different encounters with people who would come. She didn't just leave it. She stayed there and her mother had put an ad in the paper for something like weeding, weeding because she did some gardening work to try to find her daughter a job, but they had misspelled weeding and it came out wedding. So it was an advertisement for weddings and it classified that her mother had misspelled weeding because it was wedding. So she's in this ransacked mobile home. The next day this guy shows up and he said, I'm here to inquire about a wedding. And she goes, what? And she looks at the paper. Oh, my mom, she's put this ad in, it's misspelled weeding. Anyway, it turns into a holy encounter where the guy just goes, what's going on? What happened to your mobile home? He comes in there, helps her rip all this urine stained carpet out and for the next month and a half it was just holy encounters with people, angels being sent to her as the whole thing was completely restored. And since she was over 55, they had programs for seniors and she was just there to show it up. It was so beautiful. It was just a litany of miracle stories that just came. And the joy comes from, of course, just being in a state where you feel the love in your heart and then you just let the reflections of that love come. And I have to say that's how my life has gone. Everything works out, everything is so taken care of. I feel so cared for. But it's not like I'm using my past learning to try to make something happen or to figure something out or change the world or fix the world. It's just being the presence of love and then letting the witnesses to that love just show up very gently. You know, not trying to go out and trying to make anything happen. Just let it come. And I think that's been our experience. It's certainly the ones that I look with, with Francis and Jenny. That's been our experiences as we watch these witnesses just show up and have so many dear, dear friends around the world. But it's not a friendship that's based on time. It's not a friendship that's based on shared interest in the world. In fact, if you looked at all this giant global family, spiritual family, we don't really have anything in common from the past. It's just a vibrational connection where we're teaching love and extending ideas of love and strengthening them in our awareness and calling forth more and more witnesses to that love. So to me that's what true generosity is about. You can't really define it in material terms. And if you look at the teachings of Jesus, some of the Sermon on the mountain, blessed are the poor for they shall see God. I know with Catholicism and a lot of spiritualities there's this message of trying to reach the poor and concern for the poor. And then I remember one day I was reading the text from A Course in Miracles and Jesus said, poverty is ego thinking. And I was like, oh, that's it. That's so amazing. Because I met people all around the world that were happy and some of them seemed to be rich in the worldly sense, that were happy and some of them seemed to be very poor in the worldly sense. And the poverty and the happiness don't have anything to do with the material condition. It has everything to do with the state of mind. So whenever we try to interpret some of Jesus' teachings about blessed are the poor for they shall see God, I mean I should try to be poor. That should be my goal in life to be as poor as I can. He's talking about poverty being ego thinking. And we're back to this purification process that all those traditions have talked about that we need to go through. So it starts to make sense.