 Good morning everyone! Welcome on this beautiful summer morning. And being good at it, we can't complain about it at all. We've got a lovely exciting day today, lovely to welcome David and Francis on their world travels. Roeddwn i'n rhan i chi wedi'i arwain, a David yn ymweld ar 40 oedd ymweld ar ymweld yma, nid i'n mynd i'r Gwyrddon yn cyfnod. Fy fyddai Llyfrgell yn Chino. Felly rwy'n edrych yn ymweld yn ymweld! Felly mae'r gweithio i gyd. Mae'n sgwrdd i'r gweithio. Diolch i'r gweithio i gyd, i gyd yn gweithio i gyd. Felly mae'n gweithio i gyd, rydyn ni'n gweithio i gyd yn ymwyfnol. Ieisio'r rysglus cymdeithasol, ychydig y mynd i ddim i'r rhaid i'w rhaglen i gael… …ryd bod hyn am yr oed – bwch ydw i ddim i'w ff Alert, oed..... Rydym heddoruch yn y hof, rhaid i'w ff Alert, oed yn gofynu'r ysgol, wrth fe'n gwneud. ac yn y blynyddu ychydig yn gweithio y dweud o hynny, oedd y gallai'r ddweud ar y ddweud. Chwyl yw'r peth yn ei wneud o'r ddweud ar y ddweud. Mae ni wedi'n meddwl â'r ddweud. Rwy'n ei bod yn rhaid i wneud yn y trafnol. Mae yw 11.30 o'r 11.30. Mae'r eich bowd yn ymdyn nhw. A phobl ydych chi'n arhyf am 150 o fewn. A phobl ydych chi'n 230 o fewn. A phobl ydych chi'n gweithio'n drwy'n gweithio'n 430 o fewn. Yn ni ydych chi'n gweithio'n cyhoedd. Yn ni'n cyhoedd, mae'r CEO, y maen nhw'n cyhoedd. A oedd yn dweud i ni'n cwestiynau hynny. Mae'r angen i gael'r wneud am y bapau yw ddych chi'n ceisio'n gweithio. But those are pre-book marchies that'll just fill you with out to time. Yes, lunch will be over in the fold itself, and they'll have a note of your lunch requirements. So, we can eat there, or you can bring your food out, or sit outside, or whatever. David definitely works spontaneously and inspirationally. We realised that last night, that he lives in the moment. It's a wonderful thing to be able to live in the moment, Ond mae'n golygu iawn o'r troi. A dyweddyn yn y gallu cyfle ddau i'r David. Rwy'n gwybod i'w pethol mewn gwirionedd. Efallai'r ddau'r drwy'r cael ei ddod, gwybod, mae'n gwybod i'r troi, oherwydd mae'n gydigio'n golygu ar y gweithio i'r meddwl. Ac mae'n gweithio'r ddau, ac mae'n golygu'n gweithio gydigio'n gweithio'n gweithio. Dwy'r gweithio ar y gweithio, I don't know how many years, 20-odd years, isn't it? 25 years, by the course, and from that point onwards, trust has been the thing that he's carried with him, and he shares that with all of us, that there is this possibility of living a different way, a way that is different from the way the world runs. And he's a living example of that, and everything he talks about has that underlying feature, trust. So anyway, I'd like to hand you over to David and Francis now, and I'm going to hand you over. Just one thing to mention if you've got your phones, if you don't mind switching them off, that'll help. I'd like to, once again, very warm welcome, and we'd like to welcome David and Francis. Thank you, Nick. I always enjoy coming to England, and Nick and I have had really the honour of doing a number of conferences, and eating some dinners, and just, it's fun. I actually talk about Nick when I go around the world, because Nick brings so much lightness and humour, and remember that's what the course says, you know, that the whole separation is the son of God remembered not to laugh. And so I feel like Nick's doing a huge work with helping to teach these deep teachings with humour and laughter, which is no small thing. You have to come to an experience of lightness in your own mind to be able to authentically extend that. So thank you, Nick. It's always an honour to be here. And I was talking to Ann this morning, too, over breakfast, and she was saying that she gets a lot of feedback from a lot of the work that they've been doing over the last 20-some years. And a lot of the feedback comes back of, I really am hoping for workshops and classes and seminars that really are practical, that relate to my practical experiences in this world. And they're not asking for more theory. I think a lot of us have been raised with religions and philosophies. We know how to read, we know how to use the internet, and it's not like the old days, centuries ago, where you have to make a pilgrimage to Mecca or whatever to come in touch with the scriptures. There's a lot of scriptures all over the place now, and now we're wanting to go into practical application and we're wanting to go into experience and transcend theories and transcend philosophies. And I think that's happening all over the world. I mean, a lot of church attendances down as people have been going to churches and doing the rituals for centuries. And they're wondering, where is this peace that's promised in these great texts and scriptures? They want an actual transformation of consciousness. Even long running religions like Catholicism, going back, Catholicism was supposed to be like the original church Peter and so on and so forth. People in a lot of countries like I go to Mexico, South America, a lot of countries where Catholicism has been very strong, they grow tired of the hierarchies. They grow tired of some of the teachings, penance and punishment and sacrifice, and they grow very tired of it. Actually, one of the conferences Nick and I were at, Hugh McGee, who was over here, I loved meeting him at conferences because he would show up with his priest Colorado at the Course of Miracles conference and it would stir up some things for the people at the conference. Yikes! There's a priest among our minister among us. But actually that was good. I wrote it forward to his book, his latest book in the sense that I've always thought and admired Hugh for he is hanging on to the principles of practicing the Course in a church setting. And I do know a lot of ministers and priests who leave the setting because they feel it's not the most conducive to them continuing on, but he has definitely been one that has not thrown the baby out of the bathwater. He sees it as a transformation of mine and he's using all those symbols. And I think that's what the question when Anne was saying, how do we be practical is how do we trust and listen to the Holy Spirit and let the Holy Spirit use the symbols that we have in our life that we've chosen in our dreamscape instead of trying to run away and make up new dreams and run away from the symbols that we've been given. Why don't we just admit, well we chose these and maybe we just need to have the purpose of these symbols over to the Holy Spirit. And isn't that wonderful that we have a mind training tool like Course in Miracles that has a workbook with 365 lessons that actually says you can do these in practices any day, whatever you are, whatever you're doing. It's extremely practical to take these lessons and practice right where you seem to be, right where you believe you are, we'll say, in time and space. It's that practical to meet you there and then to take you on an inward experience, an inward seeming journey. It's a journey without distance to a goal that's never changed but you're on almost like an inner odyssey of transformation to find peace of mind. And then Francis came in and joined me for breakfast after that and we started talking, we didn't really have a theme for the day but it usually works where someone says something like Anne's saying practical and we go practical, practical. I like that, I like the resonance of that practical. We started talking and then I started to just kind of go into prayer and just feel that coming in because sometimes people will say, well yeah I opened the course and it kind of turned me off because it was too uncompromising. They wanted a little more compromise in their books and I think most books we open on planet earth don't seem to have that presence behind them. I don't think it's necessarily that the course book is uncompromising because it's just a book. It's almost like saying that plant is uncompromising. Still it's not moving, it's staring at me. You know it's not polite in Britain to stare like that. We would laugh if we said the plant is uncompromising but I think even to say the book, the course book is uncompromising, that's not it either. It's the presence of love, of light, of joy that's behind the book. It's the presence of love that the course points to that's what's uncompromising. That love and that light is not budging. That love and light, that's truth. And then we get a book that says truth is true and only truth is true. How was your reaction when you read that statement for the first time? Did you feel like you were at preschool or something like, okay? Do you know who you're talking to? How many years of education I have and you're saying the truth is true and only the truth is true? But Jesus doesn't even stop there. He says you have to accept both parts of the statement to experience what I'm talking about. You have to experience the first part, the truth is true, and the second part, and only the truth is true. You have to understand that there are no exceptions to truth. Well, the human experience is that there's exceptions to everything. That's what we have known in this world. You can say something. Somebody can say something that resonates and they say, well, but what about this? What about, what about, what about? Or you hear something and it resonates, if only, if only, if only, if only. Or that sounds really good, but what about this condition, this condition, that condition? That's just the way the human condition is. So when I was pondering practicality this morning at the breakfast table, I thought, wow, this presence of love is so steady and so true. And it reminded me of that phrase from the Bible, perfect love casts out fear. That love is so steady, so eternal, so changeless, and it will cast out fear, and the fear has to be the complexity and the compromise. That's what it's going to cast away, because complexity and compromise cannot be the truth. It cannot be that which is everlasting, that which never passes away. And then I thought a minute to, when we think about relationships, when we think about our journey through time and space, most of us were raised with the belief that compromise was a good thing. When we think about labor relations, we think about mediation, compromise, finding compromises. Most people think of relationships, they say, well, you can't have a relationship, you can't have a loving, successful relationship without lots of compromise. And then Jesus comes in with the chorus and he says, no, salvation is no compromise of any kind. He's actually taking something that's pretty positive to the ego and he's saying, no, actually that's not going to get you anywhere. And it reminds me of when I read the Bible years ago and I read, let your ye be ye and let your ne be ne. Let your yeses be yes and your nos be no. Well, the human being has a belief system in it. We'll say that's the ego belief system that can't ever tell the truth. It's a deception about identity. It's trying to take on a personal human flesh identity instead of a spiritual reality called Christ. So the very identity, when we look at the word personality, we know that persona comes from the Latin meaning mask. So how is a mask ever going to be true? You have to drop the mask, you have to expose it and see it for what it is and say, this just isn't me. This isn't the way I was created by God. There's a reality that is covered over by this mask. And it's not just a personality mask. I would say it's the persona and the entire cosmos that surrounds that persona. The stars, the planets, the galaxies, it's all part of a cosmic mask that's covering over the light. It's like a veil drawn over the face of Christ. So when we look at spiritual awakening, authentic spiritual awakening, when I started practicing this years ago, Jesus gave me two guidelines to work with that really helped me in a practical way on day to day living, which two guidelines were no people pleasing. In other words, don't live your life trying to please others all the time, trying to act and react to other people, trying to do what you think they want you to do, or you believe you know what they want you to do, even though we don't know what people really believe or think about us. It's an impossible situation. And don't live your life for approval. Don't live your life totally trying to live according to societal standards or parental standards or to educational standards, but learn to be intuitive and follow your heart and open up to what God wants for you. And then the second guideline was no private thoughts. Jesus does address this in the beginning of the workbook where he says, you have no private thoughts and yet that is all that you are aware of. Isn't that a fascinating line? You have no private thoughts. He's saying all the thoughts that you truly have are the ones you think with God. You can share the thoughts you think with God, but you have no private thoughts that you can keep separate, and yet that is all that you are aware of. So that's telling us what the whole workbook's going to be about is convincing us that all of our secrets and all of our dark, guilty thoughts of attack thoughts he calls them, the hide that we pushed down into the shadow or the unconscious mind that Carl Jung talked about, all of those thoughts that we think we think aren't real, and yet we've identified with them. So we've done more than identify with the body, we've actually identified with the thoughts of the ego. And that's why even when you let go of a body, which sometimes we call death or transition, the mind that made a body can make another body. We get on this wheel of karma and time where we just seem to go through what they call reincarnation. We keep acting out the same egoic patterns over and over and over, never coming to nirvana or heaven because we still believe in these thoughts. So what we can talk about is let's talk about a new definition of practicality, because most of us think of practicality in terms of logistics and specifics, and we're accustomed, we're addicted to specifics and logistics. If you look at our jobs, our careers, and even if you had a tape recorder or a recorder running from most human conversations, you would see that if you recorded those conversations, it would be testimony to Shakespeare that the world and the conversations of the world are much ado about nothing. If you listen to them, you probably can listen to a few hours and you can say, yeah, these sound like very familiar, but they don't really amount to anything, because they're so into specifics, they're so into all the logistics, and Nick was talking about Ann going to a local book club and basically saying he was joking that it was a gossip club under the pretense of studying books. But you see, we have to go beyond all those things that seem to be so important in this world and come down into the presence of love, which is actually important. That presence will never go away. That's what we want to find, we want to experience. Now, the one thing Jesus says in the course that most books, I have not found many books that say this, but he says, you will believe this course entirely or not at all. So this isn't a game like JARPs or horseshoes, where you go, oh, how many points do I get? I came close to the pin. It's not like you can forgive 95% and go to the pearly gates and go, can you just excuse the extra 5% and even though I couldn't quite accept the atonement, I did a pretty good job. 95% in most classrooms that would be like an A. Can't you just slip me in there with 95% and he says, you will believe this course entirely or not at all. It reminds me a little bit of that part in the Bible where Jesus is saying, many will come to me and say, Lord, Lord, and will come to me in the day of reckoning or whatever, and the Lord will say, I know you not, go forth from me, depart from me. Sometimes we will read that in the Bible, we say, oh, come on, that's a little harsh. They're saying Lord, Lord, you're the Lord of life, let him in, give him a break, let him go back to heaven. But what we're learning from the course is, if you don't forgive 100%, then you still have grievances. And how could you enter the kingdom of heaven with grievances, with blame, with judgment, with projecting darkness onto your brother? Others and sisters, what kind of God, what kind of purification, perfection, would say, OK, a little grievance is all right. I'm divine, eternal love, but you can come in and we'll sneak you in the back door with some grievances. God wouldn't be God if it was that way. So when you start to work with the course, you can find that the EO will react to the idea that you will believe this course entirely or not at all. Haven't we reacted that way before? I mean, I kind of reacted against Christianity with this all or nothing, I would say, all or nothing thinking. And I think what I was reacting to was all the rules and regulations, like if a woman doesn't wear a hat in church, she's out. I would say, oh, come on, can't be God is concerned about hats in church. But actually what the all or nothing was was in terms of our thought system and we can't have grievances and still enter the kingdom of heaven. So what I found too is that as we open up to this love, there's going to be a purification that occurs. And as Jesus said in the Beatitudes, blessed are the pure of heart for they shall see God, the pure of heart. Purity is important, integrity is important, honesty is important. Now Francis is with me and the life that we live is very devoted to experience. In fact, I've had lunch recently with the publisher of A Course in Miracles, Judy Scelch, and she's 88 years old now. And at one point she kind of looked at me and she went, he's like a prophet. And we know about the prophets of old from the Old Testament. They were usually out, Jeremiah, we've heard about him. John the Baptist was kind of like a prophet. He was the harbinger saying, there's one who's coming and I'm here to prepare the way and he was preparing the way for Jesus. He was basically standing in the river just telling people, baptizing people and telling them repent. Repent means turn away, turn away from your errors. That's how he was preparing them for Jesus, like get ready, turn away from your errors because the light is coming and you want to be prepared for this light. You want to receive it, you want to make your heart ready to accept this light. So for Francis and I and the people that we live with and travel with, we're very devoted to living A Course in Miracles, to actually living and demonstrating A Course in Miracles. For us it's not an intellectual course, it's not something just to be studied and taught. In fact, when I first met Francis, we were just coming out of teaching the course kind of in a conceptual way in Sydney, Australia. And that's all that you knew. You looked around and said, oh that looks good. This resonates and so she was teaching it more conceptually. But what we want to talk about today with all of you and as we move along into it, open up to your questions about our life and how do we deal with this one and arises or that. We want to be very transparent with you because we're all in this together. Because we all learn from each other. Because we all are examples of the steps that we're taking. And when I was talking to Judy, she did tell me a lot of the stories about the original four and what they went through and so forth. Helen did receive a little bit of a vision of a small community. She saw it as a small little community that was living on a coast in Greece somewhere that were actually living and practicing and demonstrating the principles of the book in some future time. And I feel like the way my life is played out with the people that I work with so deeply that we're going so deep into states of mind and experiences that we're starting to feel, oh this is what was prophesized. It's going into the living experience of this. And it's not new. Some of you have heard of the Essenes and of course the apostles were very devoted. They were living, working with Jesus, trying the best to put his principles into practice in their daily lives. And then over the years we've had the Franciscans over here in Italy and a number of different little groups and communities that have tried to really practice and live this. So it's not new on planet Earth. But what we'd like to do is be transparent about things that we're discovering as we attempt to live this. Because it's really for everyone. At the beginning Helen was not sure that the course was really to be public knowledge and she thought it was kind of more of an esoteric text. And so when Judy, Judy was her role to publish the course, you know, said how many books shall we publish with the first printing? What was the number? I think they were praying together and Helen opened her eyes and said four. And Judy said one four, you mean four thousand. Helen said no four. You have one? You have one? You have one? You have one? And I have one? That's for us. Judy said oh no, no, no. We're going to have to do four thousand or something. And then initially too, whenever the discussion would come up about translating the course into other languages, Helen said absolutely not. But why would we put this into other languages? So you can see she, as described, she spent seven years getting this course into this realm. But basically that was her job. She had like a horse with the little blinders on like okay, I did my job but they were not supposed to be asking her how many books to publish or anything else because she had played her part perfectly. And I think that's the way the plan of awakening works for all of us. We have skills and abilities. Maybe we developed them in an ego framework for ego purposes. But the Holy Spirit and Jesus can use everything that the ego developed for the plan of awakening and we all have our part to play. My part and Francis, we do a lot of travel. We go to a lot of countries and cultures and we meet lots and lots of people but we were joking yesterday. For every time I cross the ocean, Nick crosses, swims across his swimming pool from one side to the other. And we're doing the same thing actually. It's not, Jesus says God's son is not a traveler in time and space. There's really no travel going on. We are actually going through a transformation of our consciousness in an awakening to God's love. And then whatever the form is, we could say the spirit's in charge. So that's part of what we're going to talk about too is that when you get into this alignment and connection with spirit, what you're really doing is you're saying I will leave the form to you spirit. I am willing to join with you, to join and connect in mind and I will leave the form to you. And that's the opposite of what the ego tells us where form is so important. The form means everything and to the ego there is no spirit. Everything that is form is all that there is. Very much like Princess was raised in Beijing as an atheist so everything was about the form, the economics. If you can't see it, feel it, taste it, touch it, it doesn't exist. And for Jesus it's more like no the connection with spirit is everything and let me arrange time and space. Let me handle the form for you. That goes against all our programming and conditioning where we're taught you better look out for number one. And if you're not practical, if you can't handle the form, you're going to die. You won't survive. And even so we develop these personas that are doers and achievers and accomplishers. We get really busy and we get very stressed trying to usurp Jesus' role and take on the role that we think we have to handle everything in small details about our life. So we've gone through that too. Francis had a lot of education as a scholarship came to the United States, University of Chicago. I had ten years of university and we seem to learn a lot of things about this world through our university experiences but then at some point we had to surrender all that back over to the Christ mind, to the Holy Spirit and say, okay all this learning hasn't really got us peace of mind. We're still stressed out with all this learning. All this achievement and learning did not free us, it didn't free our mind. You direct now, you lead the way. Whatever skills and abilities I have they're yours now. Whatever houses, cars, the body take everything back and you now pull the puppet strings. You're the one in charge and that's practically speaking what has made the difference in our lives. That's why we enjoy traveling. That's why we enjoy meeting with people. We enjoy the laughter, the hugs, the smiling faces. We enjoy emails and Skype calls. We enjoy being like full time on call for God and happily going along and letting things synchronistically just click in for us. I remember I first started even the whole thing from an atheist, very materialistic and aggressive or ambitious in the world. I first started the whole thing with this question of what is wrong with my life. Because it looks absolutely okay, absolutely perfect actually. And the feeling was very, very empty and sad. So I started with this question, what's wrong with my life? I couldn't find the answer in my mind. I was talking to a friend last week about this and I was laughing because if I look back now I can say the spirit would say everything. But he didn't say that to me back then because that wouldn't go down very well. It wouldn't make sense to me, you know, everything, what do you mean everything? But all I knew was form and specifics. Okay, relationship, career, job, money, health, everything is like compartmentalized in form, specifics. So when I asked this question, what is wrong in my life? I was asking for specific form. Tell me what's wrong and I can fix it. Then it's all going to be okay. Now I can say everything. Also when I first met David, I remember it was after I watched his YouTube video for about a year. I actually went to your retreat for the first time. I watched his YouTube video for about a year and I collected a list of questions, a very long list of questions. I went to his retreat, requested one-on-one talk with him. I was so emotional, I couldn't really talk for a long time, just crying, crying. In the end, we ran out of time. So we said, okay, I'll just ask one question out of my long list. The question was, I could see that every problem at that point, I could see every problem came down to this belief that I'm a person. So I said, how do I undo this belief? And he said, if this question is what everything comes down to and if this question is that important to you, then I will spend my whole life finding out the answer. I said, whole life? Is that a simpler answer? Just give me a how and I'll work on it. There was no how, there was no how to that question. So, you know, at this point, I just really feel, yes, the spirit want to tell us, you know, change everything. But for the mind that believes so much in specifics and form, it is scary, you know, to think the spirit wants me to change everything about my life. No, no, no, there are aspects of my life are absolutely important to me. They are my security. They are where love is coming from. They are, you know, my inspiration, my joy and other parts yet change that, but not this. The spirit is saying, actually, the form is not separate from your thoughts. What I really want you to change is everything about your mind, is everything about your thoughts. And the form is only a reflection. So what I find out is that as I gradually, slowly open up to give more and more permission to the spirit to change my mind, you know, my life started to change on its own. I really did not plan for any of this. And sometimes I thought, you know, I'm glad he didn't tell me the form because I wouldn't have the capacity to understand how that can be helpful. So what happened is that over the last six years when I first came to John David six years ago, and said, you know, okay, I have studied a book and I knew everything intellectually with the metaphysics, but I'm scared with this practice of no private thoughts and no people pleasing. That definitely scares me and I can feel there's something that I was holding on to. So that was the start of allowing my life to change in that way from a private person and holding on to thoughts, grievance, attack thoughts in the mind to gradually allow myself to share, share the thoughts in that way. And really everything started from that point, you know, when the mind started to loosen up to be more transparent and to really get connected with the spirit and inviting the spirit to come to say, okay, show me and guide me, then the form just overtake on different shapes to reflect this shifting state of mind. And yeah, right now the life looks like, you know, I've been travelling very extensively, but I think I would never have travelled this way before. You know, the ideal way to travel is you go to exotic places and pamper the body and spend time just sightseeing. That's the goal of travelling, but now we go almost every place every couple of days. No time for sightseeing, no desire for sightseeing, but it's a complete unified goal behind everything that we do. And it becomes very simple because the prayer becomes more and more simple. It's like, guide me, show me. I actually came this time from the United States to England in May, and when I felt the guidance to go into Spain to set up a centre there early June, I thought that doesn't make any sense to me because I have a ticket leaving Spain in October already purchased. That would make me stay in Europe for a month. I don't have the visa to be able to stay here for that long. But I thought, you know, it's your world, it's your plan. You know, your rule is absolutely above time and space and the laws of this world. If you want me to go, I go, and I trust everything is going to work out. That is the kind of trust and confidence that has developed for the last few years on a daily basis. So just a few days ago, we felt the spirit was guiding us to go back to the States, write a few days short of three months, I'm going to go back to the States. But it's just, it's not even surprising because that becomes a secondary, you know, thoughts of how the form is going to play out, what's going to happen to this body in this world. It becomes secondary because something is overtaking us, and what is overtaking us is this experience and this connection in the mind that is so joyful and so certain and that is living inside the mind all the time. Yesterday, we had a seven-hour drive from South East Sussex over here, and we were talking in the car. And I think, David, you mentioned something about the holy instant. There are two things that Jesus mentioned about holy instant. One is you can't prepare the holy instant without putting it in the future. So basically he is saying, don't prepare for the holy instant. And the second thing that he says is that, but you can't have it by desiring it. And it just resonate with me so much because, you know, for years and years, you know, the question in the mind would continue to be, what should I do? What should I do? What would you have me do? This doing aspect, going to be there, going to be there for a while because that's what is my experience and that's what we believe in, specific body doing. And yet, there will be a point that becomes, what is that I want? What is that I choose in my mind in this moment? Do I choose to think with the Holy Spirit? Or do I choose to think with the ego about what to do? And when that happens, it becomes very, very simple. Do I desire your love right now? Above all else, about being right, about where to go, about whether the body is comfortable or cold and hot, about relationships. Do I desire your love right now? And that is the tipping point of the mind. It becomes very, very simple from that moment on, is what do I want right now? So yeah, so we just want to show up and share our experience and knowing that a lot of the questions, when we come down to practical questions, most of the questions will be about the form and that is okay because that is where the experience is and that is where the belief is. But from every single question, we can bring it down so much deeper to look at what is really going on underneath and what is this question really asking. So let this be the day that we spend together. Just allow the spirit to take us from what your mind and your heart is concerned about in your daily life and let's bring that down and down. And even the idea of questions I think is important because many of us were told just accept what I tell you, whether it's parents or professors or students, friends, siblings. Just do what I'm telling you to do or just accept it. I do it because I said it. My way or the highway. This is my house. You live in my house. You live by my rules. You do it my way or the highway. So we've kind of believed in an identity that's kind of at the mercy of others and others have in many ways given them power to rule our lives. Do it because I say. Now we try to take it back. We try to become educated and empowered. We want to be empowered. We want freedom. But it's still the ego. It's very clever. It's like okay, go for that angle. Now let's swing it the other way. Go for personal freedom, personal intelligence, personal empowerment. A lot of our self-help books are all about personal empowerment. Through education, through learning, money. If you have money, education, you can get property and so forth. You can gain your personal power back. You're not at the mercy of others. You're not at the mercy of the world. The ego is like a little spider sitting back there going, ha ha, still got you. Now you think you can be personally empowered. You're mine. You're slave to me. You're just going to die. In fact, sometimes we think suicide or dying is an escape. Jesus says, the ego will pursue you beyond the grave. It's Freddie Kruger. This whole cosmos is nightmare on Elm Street. The ego will pursue you beyond the grave. Even if you have personal power. Even if you die with a lot of wealth and political power. You're the king. You're the queen. You're the CEO, the CFO. You're on top of the world. The ego will just take whatever you seem to gain in its name and it will be hurled into the dust and come back for another life. Gotcha. You're still going nowhere with this personal empowerment. What we can do is we can say that if we start to make decisions with the Holy Spirit, it will undo this personal identity. Either the personal victim identity or the personal empowerment identity. It will undo this identity completely and say, now let's go home free to God. You are the Christ. You are a perfect child of God. You are innocent and you've always been innocent. But that's your spiritual reality. Jesus came to teach us about a spiritual kingdom. It wasn't a kingdom that there were the sons of thunder. Remember in the Bible, the sons of thunder, their mother is one of them to have a high place in Jesus's earthly kingdom. I was hoping that they would get some of the top positions. That's good. 2000 years ago, mom pushing and advocating. They're really good. She's making a case to Jesus. They make very good warlords, really, in your new kingdom. She's like, no, no, you're misunderstanding me. My kingdom is not of this world. The birds of the air have their nests. The foxes have their holes. But the son of man has no place to lay his head. The son of man, he was still referring to even as Jesus. He didn't have a home in this world. He wasn't here to try to make an earthly home. Or to help everybody have good earthly homes. Because he can hijack Christianity to say that if you're a good Christian, you do all the morally right things, and God will reward you on earth, and you have a nice cozy, comfortable body life on earth. And then you'll die, and the ego will laugh and go, ha ha, got you again. With that one. God rewards you on earth. You know, we know the power of manifesting, the secret and all this stuff, creating your own reality. It sounded pretty good to us, right? Creating your own reality, that sounded good. Use the power of your mind to create your own reality. I've even had people say, that's what the Course is teaching, right? Create your own reality. I said, absolutely not. It's teaching that God is the creator of reality, that reality is spiritual in nature, and you can only accept your own reality by forgiving the illusion. So all these other systems, they help you gain the empowerment of the mind to start to realize your thoughts indeed are important. Don't dismiss your thoughts, but you need to forgive what you believe you've invented and manifested to accept your eternal reality and escape from time and space. That's what Lesson 23 is about. I can escape from the world I see by giving up attack thoughts. So the Course is very different. You can't just mesh it in with a lot of other new age teachings. It really is coming from divinity. The one thing I think I learned from A Course of Miracles, how can I crunch this 1,200 pages down to something that I can really practice, is the one thing I really got from Jesus over and over, and this will help you immensely in your practice, was you cannot bring the truth into the illusion, but you must bring your illusions to the truth, and they will disappear. Why is this important? It's because religions for centuries have been trying to bring God to earth, and we can even say there's even been attempts to bring the kingdom of heaven to earth. Bring the spirit into matter, and what we're learning is matter is an illusion. Mary Baker Eddy taught us that too. There's no mind in matter. There's no life, truth, substance, intelligence in matter. It's teaching beautiful. Jesus is teaching over a century ago. Basically, how does that apply to your daily life? What Francis was just saying, if you keep looking at your worldly life in terms of the body, and personhood, and circumstances, and you keep thinking, I would love to spiritualize my earth life. So come on, light, just infuse this body. And please infuse my parents. I mean, we need some major infusing there. Or it could be the flipside, infuse my children, my teenage children, Michelle sticking her finger up there. My teenagers have gone run amuck, God from your will, but would please infuse them. Infuse the form with your heavenly love and light, and please spiritualize the matter that I'm dealing with, all the matters and issues. And that would be great. Then I'll be happy. I'll have a happy earth life if you just infuse the form. And the Course is saying it just doesn't work that way. This is where the manifesting ideas go awry, because when they say you can manifest anything that you want, what about the mind that doesn't know what it wants? What about the mind that's so deluded that it's forgotten, that it's spirit, that it's wandering, lost in time and space? And now we're saying it's supposed to manifest itself out of time and space when it has lost contact with spirit. So the Course is teaching bring the illusions, bring your illusory thoughts, bring your illusory beliefs that make up this projected world. Bring them back to God. Bring your thoughts and beliefs to the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit will shine them away. They will disappear. That's the Holy Spirit's function. Bring the darkness to the light. Do not attempt to bring the light to darkness. It is the ego that will tell you to bring the light to darkness. In Europe, are there not spectacular churches? Has anybody toured Europe, gone around to France, to Italy, around to Prague, I mean Portugal? These are spectacular architectural developments, but they're all still testimony to the attempt to bring the truth into the illusion. What did Jesus teach 2,000 years ago? Go into your closet, he said in the New Testament. Close the door, go into your closet and pray. Don't paint your faces. Back in the days of Jesus, people would, the priests, the rabbis would paint their faces, and it was a very public show. It was like theatre back then, kind of convincing the peasants, the others. Look how I painted my face today, and I'm over here. I'm going to go to the wailing wall and do some wailing, and it was a big show. And follow me because I wail a lot. I hope you hope. And nowadays we can see that we all know there's something off about putting so much into form and structures. Why isn't that when people donate money to churches and make tax-deductible donations and everything, that a lot of times it goes into building bigger, better structures, into building funds, when there's people that are hungry and homeless on the street, they're going into building bigger structures. You see, this is, again, underneath all of this insanity is the ego saying you can reach God through infusing the form. If you want to go back in history, like to Babylon, everybody knows the story of the Tower of Babel. What was the purpose behind the Tower of Babel? In Babylon, why would you build such a high tower? They were trying to build a tower to God. They thought God was in the sky, and they built a very high, expensive, it took a lot of resources to build such a very high tower, but that was another extreme example of trying to infuse the form and reach God through the form. So how is, of course, the miracle different? I would say, take your thoughts and your beliefs and give your mind, your mind over to the Holy Spirit, and as you do not hide and protect, that's what the subconscious mind is, it's an attempt to push it down and repress it, suppress, deny and hide it, keep secrets. When you give those over to the Holy Spirit, they will disappear. That's the Holy Spirit's function. In fact, Jesus says they'll be gone immediately. The Holy Spirit, it doesn't even take the Holy Spirit any time. It's only the hiding and protecting of these dark thoughts and beliefs that seems to make the journey take time. The more willing you are to just expose, you know how that is with a close friend. When you pour your heart out and you tell a close trusted friend all your sorrows and then you cry, and they maybe hug you and hold you while you're crying and sobbing and you feel so much better. Tons of stress have been released from your shoulders because you exposed the secrets and you were held and loved. That's what the Holy Spirit does, it just takes those from you. So, what Francis is talking about is when you take your efforts, don't attempt to think you already know the best form that your life should take because that's not your function. Your function is to give over your thoughts and beliefs about the world to the Holy Spirit and let the form be given you. If you're supposed to have relationships, the Holy Spirit will bring those into your life. If you're supposed to have mighty companions, arm in arm with you, helping support you on this journey, the Holy Spirit will bring those into your life. Whatever you need, we were talking, Nick was sharing, 20-some years ago when he came across the course, he automatically just devoted his whole life to the course. The same thing happened to me, it was so profound, it was not even a question about whether this book and this path was in my life. Nick and I just dove in without question and it's made a huge difference to us. We could talk on and on about testimonies of how that's happened, but what it was was more giving ourselves over to the presence of love and saying, how can I best serve in the plan, how can I serve you, that has made all the difference. So you see, it's very essential to do this. A lot of the books that I've written on why your mind back to God is just me working with students back in the 1990s where we would talk about bringing the illusions to the truth in very practical terms. Diet, exercise, raising children, financial issues, health issues, education, all the things that the human being has as stresses and struggles when I work with the students, we would just run every day during these sessions, we would run them through, okay, am I going to ask God to come in and grant me earthly favor with these issues or am I going to look at the self-concept, the mask that was made that is generating all these issues and give that self-image, that self-concept back to the Holy Spirit and say here, you use this self-concept, you show me the way to the light, to the kingdom of heaven within. You see there's a big difference between trying to fix the problems as if they're real problems in time and space versus looking at the beliefs and thoughts underneath the projections and handing those over. If you went to a movie theatre, remember those old-time movie theatres, now they all have digital projectors, but remember the old real projectors, the old theatres, it would be like going to a movie and getting more and more upset as you were watching the movie to the point where you got out of your seat, you walked out of the screen and you start pounding on the screen. This movie is upsetting me, it's too violent, and you're sitting there and the screen's wobbling as you're pounding on the screen and all the other people are like, whacko, whacko, call some help, but ruin in the movie, they're pounding on the screen. It would be like going and pounding on the screen and thinking that you would actually have an effect by pounding on the screen when it's obviously just shadows that are being projected from the projector. What Jesus would say in that metaphor would be, come back with me into the projector room and now come back with me underneath, before the film, come back with me to the light. Join with me in the pure light. Do not put credence in this film and do not put credence on the shadows that are being projected onto the screen. That's what his workbook's about. Nothing I see means anything. The first lesson, do not put your faith on the screen. When the television was first invented on the planet, they were having all kinds of broadcasting difficulties and so some of the first televisions, they would just have kind of, it would be this picture that would come on and this high-pitched noise would come on and the picture would say, do not touch your set. The problem is not in your set, because they were having broadcasting problems. They didn't want people messing up the TVs. Do not touch the set. Keep your hands off the dial. Knowing that they'll probably really start. They could get upset. This isn't working. Break the TV. That's what Jesus is telling us. Do not touch the set. Do not touch the screen. As tempted as you are, let's say you're in a relationship, as tempted as you are to change the partner. Oh, they'll come around. I'm good. I'll work with them. We're talking, this is marriage material here. If you give me 20, maybe 30 years, I can take away those bad habits. I can change them. But you see it's going about it the wrong way. And after maybe 10, 15, 20 years, big mistake trying to change another person. But what if you try to change your consciousness with the help of the spirit? Then watch how the characters light up. They will even seem to change. They will seem to witness to your new thought system. Because the whole world will light up when you go about it that way. When you change from the inside, when you change your consciousness, instead of trying to change the projections. Very wise advice. Don't try to change the people. Change your thoughts about the people. Because I'll let you in on a little secret. The people are actually thoughts. They're not real people. They really seem to be living, breathing people. They seem to have minds of their own. Same with horses. They're not real horses. They seem to make noises and interact with you. But they're not really horses. They're not real chickens. This plant is not a real plant. Everything is a projection of thought. That's what quantum physics is showing us now. Everything is consciousness. I even tuned into a live broadcast with Deepak Chopra, our Indian sucer. He said, what are we seeing now? Everything in the world is consciousness. Everything is consciousness. There it is. He's not breaking it into an external world anymore. He was saying, the projection is the projection of consciousness. Therefore, the course would say, it's not only a projection, but you are one with the projection. If you believe in these differences and these grievances and attacks and judgments, that's the world that you will perceive. You're getting exactly what you believe in. We were talking about Wayne Dyer in the drive-up. Remember, the old cliché for many years was, I'll believe it when I see it. Wayne wrote the book, you'll see it when you believe it. You see? Wayne just turned it around and brought it back to the mind. You'll see it when you believe it. You'll see a changed world when you believe in forgiveness, when you let go of the grievances in your mind. You'll see the world light up. Oh yeah, you'll see it when you believe it. But the ego has flipped it around. Oh yeah, right, right. Someone says, oh yeah, I'll believe it when I see it. You see? You could wait forever for that to change and it's not going to change. So, this is where we want to go today. We want to join with you in whatever seems to be practical issues you're dealing with, things that are challenging in your life, things that are struggling, you're struggling with. And also, we're not going to try to paint a little picture of your work with the Course where you're just a human being and you'll just read it and study it for decades and you might see little movements like a turtle moving something every once in a while. We are saying, if you give yourself over to this, the Spirit will work with you in a very rapid way when you start bringing all the illusions to the truth. We were talking of coffee right before. You went through a six-week devotional with Francis and I. I was there for the last four. But you said after those six weeks on the island of Mallorca that there were major shifts, major changes and the mind is still kind of in a place trying to cope with those. But there were some significant changes. You know, we watched movies, we expressed expressions, collaborated on all kinds of different things. When you give yourself over in an impactful, full-hearted way, then you can't expect that there's going to be movements and shifts in your perception. It's like Nick and Ann running their courses out of their house. What is it? One lesson per week. That's a lot of dedication. This isn't one lesson per day. This is one lesson per week. And really going at that lesson, going at the transformation of consciousness that comes when you give yourself over to that. I would recommend that for anyone. I would call that you need a thorough immersion in this mind training for it to work. If the course of miracles is kind of just one among many priorities in your life, which it can seem that way with the ego, there's many, many things there going, and it's only one among many, then you really have to look at how devoted am I to this peace of mind if it's just one priority among many. But if you put it as the top priority, and you say, I want to change my perception of the world, lead me, guide me, reveal yourself to me, show me, and I'm willing to give the form over to you and trust with the notion that you will give me just what I need, then that will have a major impact. That prayer of the heart will have a huge impact in your practice with the course of miracles. And I would say anything from a perception of health issues, cancer, heart disease to high levels of stress, sometimes people will say their life has become so fast-paced, so busy, so rushed that they feel out of control, they feel high levels of stress, they feel taken over by the world, that you can even shift that around with just one sincere prayer in the matrix when Neo is running along in matrix first one where he goes, bullets are flying and he goes, Mr Wizard, get me out of here. A reference to the Wizard of Oz, Mr Wizard, get me out of here. He's praying as he's running, the bullets are flying and he's trying to make it to the phone booth or phone connection to get out. Mr Wizard, get me out of here. If you pray that prayer, many people feel that I almost need to drop down to my knees and say I need help, I need to make a sincere prayer, God hears the prayer of the heart, God answers the prayer of the heart and then everything starts to shift accordingly. So while we've got about the last 15 minutes before our first break, 15, 17 minutes, why don't we open it up to the topic of your choosing, anything that you'd like to use as an inroad to this awakening? What are living things? What are living things? What are sentient beings? What has life? Well, I go back to working with the course for many years and one time I was listening to a lot of Ken Watnick recordings and everything, one time I was doing the dishes and somebody in the audience on the tape said, I ask Ken, what does the course of miracles have to say about life on other planets? I always love this question, what does the course of miracles have to say about life on other planets? You better go to your rancher book for that one. But actually, Ken's reply while the course says there's no life on this planet. You've got to love it, you know? I mean, you've got to start with some really good metaphysics to go for this healing and make up from this screen. The course says there's no life on this planet. Well, if there's no life on this planet then why are we making such a big distinction between organic and inorganic? I mean, we're here at the fold, so that's going to be the first question that's asked in the fold. We're right in the fold today and we can say that life and eternity are synonymous. So there is no life but eternal life. There is no such thing when we say biological life, when we say organic life, when we put everything that we've taught and learned about life from the amoeba, from a single-celled organism and on up. What does this do to the whole field of biology? It's wiped. What does this do? I mean, you could go through what does this do to most spiritualities? Wiped. They're wiped. What does it do to all of our research when we're looking for solutions to cancer or to various viruses? What does it do? It basically says all of that has to be wiped when we start to think that life is eternal life. It does remind me of the Bible at one point where that man came to him and said I'd love to follow you. What must I do to reach the Kingdom of Heaven? One of them, Jesus says sell all that you have and come and follow me. One comes and says, my father just died. I've got to go to the next town to bury my father and then I can come and follow you. One of his responses is let the dead bury the dead. Why is that not harsh? It's because that was eternal life that was I am present speaking. Let the dead bury the dead. Don't be fooling around with images and burial rituals when eternal life is speaking to you now and it's saying follow me now. Make haste, follow me immediately. Don't give me this weak plan of WEEK and WEAK. Don't give me this weak plan plan B, I'll come back and catch you next week. Some of you saw the peaceful warrior movie where Socrates is going to meet with Dan Milman at the beginning and meet me at the bridge and Dan shows up late for his meeting with his teacher and so when he shows up all he shows up with excuses and Socrates just pushes him into the river. That's what the truth thinks about time. That's what the truth thinks about delay in plan B. I couldn't make it, I was late for this. Boom into the river. Some of us have had that experience when we tried to bargain with Jesus. I'll get around to you. Don't worry, I've got you in mind that all this relates to this definition of life. When eternal life calls it's like, make haste. When eternal life calls respond with the yes. When you are called as a teacher of God or to serve the Almighty or to serve the Lord or to serve eternal life or whatever what you want to do right away is when all your thoughts come up about why you can't do it you want to hand those over to the Holy Spirit because those definitions of life and those definitions of the world are holding the mind back from spring into eternity. So for me that's what's happened in this journey is I've had to question my beliefs of life because I've gone through vegetarian phases, I've gone through phases of eating, I've gone through very different practices of working towards non-violence towards animals and so on I was quite an activist at one point and then I did come to the course and I got struck by the teaching seek not to change the world seek rather to change your mind about the world that was again Jesus saying don't be so concerned with the form be concerned with your perception and clearing your mind there was even a time when I was over here in Europe recently where we were invited to Arhus, Denmark and we did a gathering and then we said is there anybody that wants to host us for a little bit longer just let us know and we were invited to a loft in the industrial district and we went there and we held this gathering but right across from the loft was a slaughterhouse so every time myself and all the participants would go out to eat or come back instead of looking across at a barn or some plants or something here which is all on organic farm we basically had to look at these lines and stalls of people probably ten minutes we would look at this and then I would just go and sometimes I would be guided to go over and I would put my hands on the railing and I would look right into the stalls where these the cattle were lined up and I would look right into the eyes of the animals that were lined up to go right in for slaughter and I would eye gaze with them and I would look and their eyes some of them seemed to be obviously frightened and some of them were telepathically communicating with me and they were saying to me what is happening they were very confused very disoriented and going into these metal lines and they were confused and I knew as the son of God that I was there for one reason which was to extend the kingdom of heaven all I did was through this eye gazing was extend this unconditional love like it's okay everything will be fine everything will work out perfect because everything we experience is just a decision in mind eternal love transcends every perception of this world so I would take some time before I would go off to give the talk would be to go and just extend love by looking in their eyes and reminding them of what was beyond this world that's what Jesus was doing that's why he say be a good cheer I have overcome the world he was coming from divine love that was eternal life that's where the love is that's what the life is that's why when they brought the woman who the men had caught her in the act of adultery which was a violation of the Moses and of the Ten Commandments Jesus could look at her and look at all of them do a little writing in the dirt and just look into her eyes and say your sins have been forgiven go your way and send them more not one bit of condemnation they thought they would trap Jesus into going against the laws of Moses he was coming from eternal life your sins have been forgiven the correction has been made the errors of time and space no longer have dominion over anyone and he was sure about it he was sure about the heavenly love and life he was sure about eternal life before Abraham was I am isn't that wonderful what else could we want but have our life be a demonstration of your sins are forgiven imagine when anyone does anything to us and they are just looking to be loved and we can have that presence of eternal life in us come through us as us and say you are innocent you are innocent this is the greatest message that could be delivered that's our message that's why we are here we are called to extend that message of perfect innocence and that's really what I was doing in that situation was it was one to extend that love and that light and that innocence be the calming presence that knows that true life has no beginning and no end it was never born and never dies so and we've got a little bit of time I think we'll take a pause Francis has a little bit of break also Francis has we've shipped some books over from Ireland so a lot of times people say I would love to have some of your books and materials but it's the postage from America so much but we've actually had some shipped over from Ireland they're all here and so it's a good time to get them instead of waiting to get them online and have the postage so yeah if you are interested you're welcome to make a donation in that box and get the book you want I don't just say that there's nothing wrong with here but if anything needs to come to great just because of the way here there's another loop just on the right hand side of the building they can't be over there if you can't see if you can't see if you can't see if you can't between them and come and you can come and you can go yourself thank you Mr Chris mentioned a a a a a a a a a