 Sometimes you hear the phrase, you know, two steps forward, one step back, and sometimes the spiritual journey seems like that, two steps forward, one step back, because if it's truly is when you really have that purpose and inspiration and you really do tune in and go for it, with your two steps forward, we kind of call it ego backlash, or sometimes ego whiplash. The ego goes from suspicious to vicious, the more loving you are. So when you really tune in and make bold steps and strides in the direction of your purpose, the ego will recoil that part of your mind that's afraid of being undone, and it's a major backlash or whiplash. And so, you know, in one sense, that's not necessarily how it has to go, but in many or most cases, that's the way that it seems to go. And so, once you start to experience that, which I had that experience a lot in my journey, which was quite a long journey, you just, every time you get that one step back, you learn to kind of just watch it, and observe it, and not react or conclude something because of the one step back. You just get better and better and better at that. I remember years ago, before the course came into my life, I remember I would do this with the universe where I would just, like, go through my thoughts and my frustrations, and I would just pray, and then I would turn on the radio, and I would just get the messages from the song on the radio. So, it was just as good as, like, the course is an oracle. And I remember one time, I just was so discouraged about my latest ego backlash, whiplash, viciousness, and I'm never going to get this, and it's throwing me back, you know, and this and this, and I remember this was back probably around, I don't know, around the 1980s. Billy Joel, the Stranger album, the words from the song The Stranger, don't be afraid to try again. Everyone goes sour every now and then. You know, this is the kind of stuff I would get from the Holy Spirit back in those days before, you know, I was really into the course. But I would flip it on and I'd be like, oh, thank you, you know, but just having, don't be afraid to try again. Everyone goes sour every now and then. You've done it. I can't someone else. You should know by now. You've been there yourself. I'm like, okay, all right, got it. But it was a pep talk. So for me, it was like a burst of a little pickup. And I think, you know, that's what we have to do is we have to open ourselves to those reflections of witnesses. Because for most, it's there, you have to deal with this kind of backlash thing that happens in the mind. And the ego wants you to make some kind of conclusion. Like, look at you. Look at you. You're not going anywhere, you know, you're treading water, you're, you know, and the one step back, it will emphasize that, you know, as if your two steps forward never happened. You know, when you're in the one step back, it just feels like it's a thousand steps back. You might as well just be drowning and submerged under the water because that's how it feels. This just totally blocks the awareness of the miracles. Even if you go through this and you have lots of miracles, it will just block out those lots of miracles and just make it really dark and grim and pessimistic. And it's just the ego has a one track mind, like a broken record of just, you know, always trying to sabotage any sense of hope, any sense of progress, just always coming in there really, really hard. So that's one of the things that hopefully as you get deeper into your spiritual practice, you just, it's more of that light heartedness, that laughter we were talking about, where you can just start to watch it and not draw conclusions from it. Like, oh, here we go. Okay. All right. Thank you for sharing. Thank you for sharing. Thank you for sharing. And then, you know, then we're going to move on now. We're not going to, we're not going to harbor these things. We're not going to just go through and grind them through the grinder and grind them and regrind them. You know, it's, you just have to let them come and really helps also of course with your relationships because, you know, that's, that's the reflection of your mind too. That's really why you have these teaching learning partners, these mirrors, these reflectors is not to harbor and hold on the grievances and the, and the snubs we were calling them earlier or the mistreatments and everything. You know, it's not at all what Jesus and the Holy Spirit are encouraging us to do. I remember there's a part that's just so poetic in the text of the course where Jesus says, dream softly of your sinless brother. Think, think of his kindnesses that he offered you, you know, instead of the pain. He's like, please, he's pleading. Dream, it's such a soft, dream softly of your sinless brother. You know, what an answer to that son of a guy. If I ever get my hands on and he, and here comes, dream softly of your sinless brother. You know, it's just like, it's not even close to that just grinding when I just want to rip somebody up and tear somebody up and just grind it through the grinder. You know, it's like, no, softly. I said softly, you know, you could just see how light that is. There's no way you could not even read that sentence with harshness, you know, dream softly with your sinless brothers. If you put the tone, you know, to the words, you know, it's gentle. It's encouraging. It's lifting you. It's just like, no, come up here. Don't, don't go down there. Just stay up here with me. So that's what we, we practice and we need those reminders and we need to remind ourselves that we need to be reminded and we need to remind others. It's all part of this building that momentum up, you know, to remember his kindnesses, you know, instead of the pains, you know, instead of the hurts. It's like memory is selective, just like perception is selective. And we actually have a choice of which memories we're going to remember. We're going to remember the memories of love or the memories of hurt, pain, grievances. The choice is there. It's just that with this linear trick of time and this causation thing, it's like the ego just points out its targets, you know, points out its enemies. And, you know, it's just, it just keeps replaying those characters over and over, even so sometimes the faces change, sometimes the circumstance change. You know, if you really step back, you could start to see this looping pattern like a groundhog day of the same kind of thought patterns just play out over and over and over, just with little slight variations of characters' names and changes, you know, to make it look just like it's happening fresh and new when it's the same old past just coming along, coming around again like that song. If you're willing to play the game, it'll be coming around again, coming around again. So we're just getting wise to these tricks and to this sense that just beginning to open up ever so slightly to this awareness that actually, oh my god, what you're telling me is that I have never been mistreated, never, not once, that every single time in this lifetime or past life regressions or whatever till the beginning of time, every single time I perceive myself unfairly treated, snubbed, you know, backstabbed, you know, whatever, that every single time that was just a misperception, it was still trying to cling to this grim death, it's like a funeral dirge, just a death wish, a funeral dirge, just trying to desperately cling to it and make it true. And we're told over and over and over, you know, your past is gone, it can touch you not, you know, you don't try to bring it with you anymore. It's a time thing that you're stuck in, you're stuck in a loop, you keep going back to this vault and bringing out all these wicked memories and pulling them over your clean, fresh, present moment that you have here just to experience and bask in. You could just bask in it forever if you wanted it, it would just take you away into eternity but you keep dragging, dragging, dragging, these past memories as if they're still real and true. So we're just really getting practice when people come and we're tempted to react, when we're tempted to, you know, have a defense come up or become defensive in any way, it's just past thoughts in our mind that are just spinning around there again, you know, trying to get our attention. So, you know, that's the incentive is to just for us to really, really firmly join together in this and say, you know, we are not going to allow ourselves to get tricked by this yet again, another facet of the diamonds spinning around, it's the same thing, we have to become, start to see it's the same trick and we don't really have to keep falling for it. We're safe, we're actually very, very safe without having to fall for these defenses and get back into these spinning gyrations and everything, these dramas. You know, I always think of that, they talked about the Chinese curse, may you live in exciting times. And I always used to look at that as like, that's a curse, you know, it's such a positive word, exciting, exciting, exciting, but that's the Chinese curse, may you live in exciting times. It's more, don't get lured into the drama, don't get lured into a false sense of a sensationalism excitement that really just another distraction. You know, I love that part in the course workbook where, you know, it says some try to put by the sadness they feel with games that they play. And when Jesus says that in the course and I was like, I said to him one time, I said, what games? What games are you talking about? He said, do you really want me to tell you? I said, yes. And so he just, well, he just went on and on and on with the games and the distracted devices like, like he could just go on for hours. And then there's this and then there's this. Well, what that's life. And then there's this and then there's this. It's like all these tens and hundreds and thousands of games that are just generated as a ways to put by the sadness to keep push really keep the sadness pushed out of awareness. When, you know, even if you look back in philosophy, you know, you can look back at all all the different philosophers like Sarge, you know, and the existentialists, you know, I remember when I was in philosophy reading about the existentialists and they were like, you know, life sucks. You know, they their own each in their own way. They just said, yeah, Nietzsche, I mean, just you went on with all these existentialists. It was like, it's, it's just grim, it's dark, it's bad, it's everything and so this and and it's interesting that that they would have a whole branch of philosophers that would basically, which you take all the whipped cream and the icing and and all the ice cream and everything else off the glitz and you just, you just, you just skim off the whole top thing. Then you've got this black band of death, just the death wish in every angle you look at and it's like, I don't wonder there's made up so much whipped cream and banana splits and all kinds of things.