 Okay, hi everybody. Hi, lovely to see you all again. Thanks for joining us. I'm Peter. I'm going to be a hosting today. And yeah, I can just let you know about the day for those who are new. So we're going to start the session with David. He's going to give a wonderful commentary. And then afterwards there'll be time for a Q&A session. And just before then we'll have a 10 minute break. And yeah, and then later on in the day at 4pm MST, we're going to have a worship session. And that will be held in the same room we're in now. So hope you can join us through the day. So I'm going to pass it over to David now. Hi, hi everyone. Welcome. Ah, yes, we're going to have a wonderful day today. A deep dive, deep dive into the mind. I sometimes think of this world, the ego projected the world of times and space to be like a cover or a cloak to fool the mind into a different alternate identity and a completely, you might say, a giant destructive device. But it's kind of, the world was made out of hatred to keep you mindless. And anyone who is really going to go all the way with with Christ all the way to the awakening has to pretty quickly realize that that mind training is required, discipline is required. And anybody who's ever attempted to reach God knows that this is a very deep disciplined journey of spiritual mind training. And of course, anyone who is fortunate enough to have read about the mystics and saints. Then they do realize that the mystics and saints for many centuries have written about the darkness that they encountered when they attempted to go deep in their mind to find God. You know, that all the teachers throughout history have basically said, go inside. The truth is within you. The kingdom of heaven is within you. Nirvana is within you. And yet the journey toward that seems to be the journey through the darkness to the light. Yesterday I was having a meeting, a lunch meeting with a group of friends and toward the end of it. Yeah, my friend Deborah brought up that she said, I still experience a lot of shame in my life. I still experience shame in all aspects of my life. Even when I have happy moments, I feel this shame that I'm too happy. And so there's a permeating shame that goes through everything even into the glimpses of happiness. It's like a dark shadow that is lurking. It was very touching how she was just very transparent toward the end of our meeting just talking about the shame that she still experiences and somehow still feeling like sometimes she feels like she's just going to explode like it's going to erupt. So in praying to Jesus this week, I really prayed on the themes that you all voted on. And the theme that came in first place was I am worthy of perfect love and happiness. I am worthy of perfect love and happiness. And I think deep down we know that God is the creator of perfect love and happiness. So for us experientially as we wake up, the key word in that first theme is worthy. And I would say that that there seems to be with the ego belief a deep seated feeling of shame and unworthiness that is underneath the perceptual world. If you could scrape away all of the surface images, it's like if you had a Sunday and you scraped off all the whipped cream and all the fudge and even the cherry just trying to get down to the ice cream. It's very much what Jesus is telling us is if you started to go beneath the images of this projected world, you would find a ring of fear. And that ring of fear is total shame. It's actually a ring of shame and fear and guilt. It's extremely dark. And this is why when people go for God, they have to drop through that. And when you do drop through it, it feels so disorienting and so crazy and so just out of control that you sometimes get a feeling like you're losing your mind. It feels like that. But actually you're coming closer to your mind and the power of your mind. You're actually reclaiming your mind. You're saying enough of this mindless these mindless images. I'm not I'm I'm tired of futzing around moving the images around every day. You know, like I'm making progress when I have to I have to face what's in my mind. I have to take responsibility for my state of mind. So the movie today will help us all do that we're going we're going down to in the lagoon today. I put on your scuba diving and your fins and you might have to clean your mask off a few times because it's so dark. Sometimes you're going to have to brush the brush the the the darkness away. The second of our themes today is using all quote doings for going inward. That's delightful that that has 50 votes. But imagine how much progress you would wake you would make on waking up and forgiving if you started to just look around yourself and look at all of the things you think you need to do during a day. And then you started to just put them all into one category. There are all four going inward. That's right. My children are just from my mind to go inward. That's right. My parents, my body, the bodies I perceive my apartment or my condominium or my house. Oh, that's just for going inward. It has no other purpose than going inward. You know, you can see you would start to zoom inward very quickly. If you took the focus and the attention off of future goals and thinking, well, my body will serve me in the future. My house will serve me in the future. My job, my career will serve me in the future. And Jesus is kind of like saying, how many times do I have to tell you there is no future? You've got an imaginary world going here where you have an imaginary future that actually doesn't even exist. It's like, talk about a hallucination. And then you put your mind energy thinking about what you're going to do for the future. And I mean, I know Jesus has had some good laughs with me because I had a five-year university degree in planning. Imagine that, getting your degree in planning and then having Jesus go, okay, come on now, let's get over this stuff. You can't keep putting your effort in that because you're not going to find who you are if you keep going for future goals and future outcomes. The third theme we have is just relax and let love tell you of itself. The relax part is so important because anxiety and neurosis and stress are all just aspects of fear and guilt and shame. If you think like a low grade of anxiety that just follows you through the day where you just feel this kind of vibration of anxiety, if you would follow that anxiety down deeper into your mind, you would go right to the ring of fear. You would see that there's shame under worry, there's shame under anxiety, there's shame under pressure, any kind of pressure you feel. And basically, shame is death. In workbook lessons 163, 167, Jesus, he's teaching us that any feeling that you have that is not extreme happiness is death. And he's teaching us in lesson 133, I will not value the valueless, that if something will last forever, he says it has value. And in the same lesson, workbook lesson 133, he says if it will not last forever, it has no value whatsoever. And that's his criteria for what's valuable and valueless. So now we know why he taught in the Gospel of Thomas, you know, be passers-by. Of course he wants us to pass by the images and go for the light. Of course he does. He doesn't want us to linger and to try to manipulate the images or reconfigure the images because they're all part of a projection. And his goal is to take us into the vision of Christ, which is non-perceptual. So we're not even here to try to actively improve perception because human beings don't know how to improve perception. They're part of the perception. And the Holy Spirit is the light in the mind that can transform perception. So really, that's why we have to pray to the Holy Spirit. We need help. The persons aren't going to be able to find a way out of time and space. But the prayer of the heart given over to the Holy Spirit is the way to activate the guidance. The next one is called relinquishing future outcomes to receive what is desired now. Oh, wow. That's amazing. Just imagine if you relinquished all future outcomes to receive what is desired now. And you didn't associate future outcomes with the love that you want to experience now. You actually associated the light with the love that you want to experience now. And the images of past and future, you see, that's the veil. That's the veil. That's the block. And that's what we're here to let go of. And then the last one is the glory of God is all I wish to see. Isn't that sound wonderful? The glory of God is all I wish to see. That is so beautiful. So as we start to look at the first one, I am worthy of perfect love and happiness. That is our, that's what we want Jesus to show us today. But you may have noticed that in all spiritual traditions that there is a teaching that you don't approach truth directly. You first have to remove everything that's not the truth. That's why Jesus teaches us in the beginning of A Course in Miracles. In the introduction, he says to learn this course requires willingness or not in the introduction, but he does say in the introduction that basically you have to remove the obstacles to the awareness of love's presence. Later on, he will say to learn this course requires willingness to question every value that you hold, and not one can be kept hidden and obscure or it will obscure your learning. If you hide anything, then that will turn into a block. So what we find is on this journey today is this movie is going to help us go down and just go inside our mind and see if we still have any pockets of shame that are left. This movie is like if you called a plumber and you had a clogged toilet or clogged sink drain, this movie is a roto-router. It's an older movie in terms of some of the movies we show, not older really, but 1994. And back in the 1990s, we were having retreats, some retreats, and we would show this movie at the beginning of the retreat to crack everyone open. So we would call these mind watchers or flusher. If you have a block, you all know if you have a block in the kitchen sink, you need something that's going to open the drain. So we would pray to Jesus, please, we can't get the drain open, the drain of our mind. He'd say, I'll give you a roto-router, I'll give you a flusher. And then we'd be like, thank you. Oh, now it's much better. Now we can start to make some progress. So I thought I would start off today before I give a little context for the movie and set the movie up. I thought I would just read from lesson 93 in Jesus' workbook. And the lesson is, light and joy and peace abide in me. Ah, light and joy and peace abide in me. And here's what he has to say in this beginning of the lesson. You think that you are the home of evil, darkness and sin. You think if anyone could see the truth about you, he would be repelled, recoiling from you as if from a poisonous snake. You think if what is true about you were revealed to you, you would be struck with horror so intense that you would rush to death by your own hand living on after seeing this being impossible. These are beliefs so firmly fixed that it is difficult to help you see that they are based on nothing. That you have made mistakes is obvious. That you have sought salvation in strange ways, have been deceived, deceiving and afraid of foolish fantasies and savage dreams, and have bowed down to idols made of dust. All this is true by what you now believe. So that's a shame paragraph. And Jesus is saying, if you don't think you're shameful, if you're not in touch with your shame, that's all right. It's all just beliefs. It's all just fantasies and idols. But actually you cannot go down deep enough to the light to experience what God created until you go through this. And so this is why movies like this are so helpful. If we're praying for perfect love and we're praying for perfect light, then basically what we need to do is we need to expose and release the shame. When I was in China one time, I was asked to do a talk on shame. And basically a whole video came out of that, but it basically started off with healing and undoing the shame. And that's actually what this movie is about today. The title of our movie today is When a Man Loves a Woman. And some of you know the song. Has anybody ever heard Michael Bolton's version of When a Man Loves a Woman? You know, have you heard that one? It's a very famous song. And Jesus is going to use that and use everything we watch today to help us dismantle and dissolve all of our beliefs about what relationships are for. If we step back and even look at the title When a Man Loves a Woman, that's a very, very, very common experience on planet Earth. And I would say common in terms of the attempt. And we have, we make an attempt at a relationship and we make attempts at marriage and we make attempts at love in the form. And what Jesus tells us in the course is that first of all, God is a God of spirit and God creates in spirit. And then in the Beyond All Idols section, Jesus says God knows not form. So when we speak of relationships or when a man loves a woman, for example, we are in the realm of bodies. And it's important to remember at the beginning that God didn't create these bodies. These bodies are projections of the ego. And if the ego is a death wish, then the body is a projection of a death wish. Now the Holy Spirit can reinterpret the body as well as every other image in this world. And that's why we're so grateful we have the Holy Spirit because we need a lot of reinterpretation. But the body was made to build like a wall around the Christ. He says in the Course that the body is a wall that was built around the Son of God. So even in history, when people call Jesus the Son of God, it's important to remember that the man, the body, is not the Son of God. But the Christ Light that is the creation of God is what the Christ is. Christ is not Jesus' last name. People think his surname is Christ, but no, Christ is our name. It's our name. It's actually our name. And Jesus was a man who reflected our Christ Light, reflected our being, our actual being as the Christ. But it's important to remember that the most a body can ever be is a reflection of the mind. And when the mind becomes pure and the mind becomes unified, it becomes the mind of Christ. And then when that light and that divine mind is reflected in a body, you have a reflection. But a reflection is not the actuality. The Christ is a light that's prior to time. Some of you remember last Saturday, I took us prior to the Big Bang, to the Big Light, prior to the Big Bang. There's where the Christ is. The Christ is prior to time. And Jesus was a body that seemed to be in the loaf of bread I was showing you, the loaf of bread of time space. So he was reflecting that light that's beyond, it's before time. So when you start to realize that the body is a fence that was built around the Son of God, then you start to realize that actually you need prayer. You're not going to reach God with this body. You're not going to take the body with you. I know some people want to have an immortal body, but I'm sorry, those words don't belong together. You don't have to worry about having an immortal body because immortality is spirit and the body is a fence that was built around the Son of God. Now, when we start looking at interpersonal relationships, which we will look at today, and this is going to be more in the context of a man and a woman, a husband and a wife, and we're going to have little children involved, and we're going to have grandparents involved. So today we're going to say to the Holy Spirit, please take this concept of family, nuclear family, husband and wife, mother and father, two little girls, Jess and Casey, a man and a woman, Michael and Alice. We're even having grandparents coming in here. So this is your nuclear family, and of course it does not resemble reality in any way, shape or form because God is reality and God is spirit. So we're asking the Holy Spirit to help us use the symbols that seem to be in a traditional family and then lift them so high and purify those concepts so much that we start to forget what they mean. And we start to resonate and radiate with the light of truth that is beyond all the concepts that's just pure love and light. So there's a part in the Course when Jesus talks about ego dynamics and he actually says there is no such thing as ego dynamics. If you're a psychologist or a therapist, that's very humbling. If you've ever been a psychotherapist and he says, no, there is no such thing as ego dynamics because what is nothing cannot have dynamics. You see, there are no dynamics to nothingness. And so what he's going to say is what seems to be the acting out of darkness and shame and guilt is really the acting out of nothing because God didn't create darkness or shame or guilt. He's going to teach us you believe in it, but it doesn't exist. He's going to teach us you have no problems. You were created as a being of light and you remain as you were created by God and you literally have no problems. But to a mind that believes in idols, there seems to be many, many problems, not just a few. There's a complex tangled web of interpersonal problems, financial problems, environmental problems. Maybe it's problems with your neighbors or problems with traffic if you live in a city. It's just layers and layers and layers of of illusory problems to keep you from knowing who you are. And that's the ego. It has made a very complex world of space time to keep you from knowing who you are. And this can only be healed by exposing and releasing the shame. So this is definitely a movie for exposing and releasing the shame. This is a movie. Sometimes when people watch it, it triggers memories from their childhood. It triggers memories from sometimes from past lives or from from their family life when they when they were part of a family, maybe earlier on, much more part of a family. This will trigger layers of guilt and shame that have been buried and pushed out of awareness. And that's why Jesus says, actually he says, I'm calling you out of the world because he's saying, I'm calling you from the realm of the horizontal back into the vertical. I'm calling you from the belief in linear time back into the mind, which sees that there is nothing but mind. Every situation you face is for mind training. There is no other purpose. And some of us have actually believed that we could have different vocations. We're concerned about our vocations. We're concerned about our careers. And Jesus makes it real clear healing the mind is the only vocation. There's only one vocation. So you don't even have to be tricked to think that you can have many because there always is only one vocation and that's healing the mind. And then he points out to us that forgiveness is how you heal the mind. So that means our soul curriculum is completely on forgiveness. We may seem to have picked up other learning, you know, how to bake a cake or a pie, how to build a house or how to clean a house, how to drive, how to speak. We may have learned languages. We may have some of you are now in the process of unlearning languages. Your marinas enjoy her translation because she's unlearning all languages. She's going beyond languages. So she's still doing it now, but there's no guarantee anything continues because we're unlearning everything that we learned in this world. And we're coming back into the light, coming back into the stillness, the peace. So in this movie, we have Alice, Alice Green and Michael Green. So what we're going to have is the Holy Spirit is going to use the green family today. Now, oftentimes green is a synonym for kind of new, like when the leaves on the trees are green, we say, oh, it's spring. It's green leaves. These are not mature leaves. These are newbies or somebody says, oh, you're new here, you're green. When you're green, you are not mature. If somebody calls you green, that is not a synonym for mature. You're beginning and the green family is green. They are green. They're green because there's a lot of shame under the green family. There's a lot of shame under all the families actually. So we're just going to see the green family acted out for us. They're going to act out our shame, not our real shame, but they're going to act out the belief in shame and show us that this is what is believed in. Just like in the law of laws of chaos and the course, you know, Jesus goes through the laws of chaos, and he says you may insist that you do not believe these laws of chaos. But I assure you, if the ground seems solid under your feet, brother, you do believe them. And he's saying, you may say, oh, all is light and love, all is God, all is one. But if you believe you're still walking on solid ground, then he's saying there's still some shame that we have to expose. Because if you were free of the shame, you wouldn't be here very long. You wouldn't perceive this world. You would disappear very quickly without shame. Oftentimes, people ask me about reincarnation and they say, wow, after all that I've gone through in this lifetime, I would hope. I would hope if I was ever given the opportunity to come back, I would say no. And I said, well, it's all about the shame. If you clear your mind of shame, I mean, if you totally rotor it, if you totally just completely allow the Holy Spirit to wipe your mind of shame, oh, you will have no attraction to this world. Reincarnation won't be a problem at all. You'll say, ah, no thanks. I'm the light. I actually have no need for time. No, thank you. But if you have shame and most shame is unconscious, then you will be drawn back to the realm of time and space, drawn back to bodies, drawn back to some more drama because shame and drama go together. There's no drama without unconscious belief in shame. So today's movie is going to show us a family and it's going to show us things coming into play in the interactions of the family. And one of them is alcoholism. It's important to know, though, that the world is just a projection, so alcoholism itself is not the addiction. It's the shameful belief in the mind that is the addiction. The only addiction there is is an identity addiction to be addicted to being an ego or to being a person, being a small self that God did not create. That is the only addiction there is. There's just one. And that generates shame. And that shame is out of awareness and what we call drinking and drugs or the things that the world calls addictions. Those are symptoms. Those are symptoms of holding on to a shameful identity and the ego is a shameful identity because God didn't create it. So we don't have to worry about trying to free ourselves from the symptoms. We have to try to, with the Holy Spirit's help and Jesus' help, free our mind from the shameful misidentity of believing that we're flesh creatures. God did not create the body. God did not create the body. And to identify with the body will generate shame because if you identify with yourself as a creation of light, there's innocence. There's joy. There's light. And if you identify yourself with the body, then there is shame and guilt. And it's so dark that it can't even be kept in awareness. It has to be pushed out of awareness. And then the symptoms of alcohol addiction, drug addiction, so on and so forth. Those are the projected symptoms of the belief. And the mind is causative. So if you don't pluck the error from your mind in the mind, then you simply can do a lot of plucking in the world. And you may stop with one addiction, but anybody who's been through addictions, the symptoms, knows that when you go from one and you try to pull away from it, you usually shift to another addiction. In this movie, Alice will shift from lots of alcohol, like a quart of alcohol a day, a lot of times vodka, because it doesn't have the smell and the breath as much. But as soon as she starts to try to shift away from the alcoholism, she becomes a smoker. And anybody who's been through 12 steps and knows that that's how the ego moves the symptoms around. So there's this sense that something is terrible underneath. And then at first you can't stop drinking, and then when you stop drinking, you can't stop smoking. And then some people who quit drinking and smoking, they can't stop spending. Elton John will tell you about that. He said, I've let go of all the drugs, I've let go of all the vices and everything, but I still am a shopaholic. It's tough when you're a rock star because you have so much money, you don't know what to do. But you see how the ego will get you anywhere. Even spending, the ego will say, oh, you don't smoke anymore, you don't drink anymore, you don't do drugs. Just go spend and spend and spend. It doesn't care how you try to play the guilt and the shame out. It doesn't really care. It just wants you to keep the guilt and the shame. It doesn't care how you play it out. So that's why we're all called to be miracle workers because the miracle is the way out. We're all called into our divine function. We're called to answer the call of God. And as we answer that call, seemingly in many different forms, even though the content is the same, as we answer the call to God, we get happier and happier and happier. And the addictions and the shame don't have a chance when we get so happy that we start to remember who we are. That is where the shame is undone completely. Or a better way of saying as you see the impossibility of it. It would be good to reach a state where you had so much joy and laughter that you would laugh at the very idea of shame. Wouldn't that be fun? You don't need a stand-up comedian or a comedy movie. Just somebody goes, shame. You can laugh at the shame because you know it's not real. And that's what the goal of forgiveness is, is to be able to have gentle laughter with the Holy Spirit at everything of this world. There are no dark shadows when the light has come. So also I wanted to mention that the ego is a very complex belief because God didn't create it. Everything with God is simple. The light is simple. Love is simple. Truth is simple. And joy is simple. But when you believe in the ego, then the projection is quite complex. And many of us have come through some situations with our, we'll say even with the biological families where we felt there was pressures that we could feel when we were going through our childhood. And these pressures can stay with you for many, many years. Financial pressures. If you have a sibling, most of you have some memories where you had some difficult times with the sibling. And in this movie, we have two little girls. Jess is the older child, still a young child, and then her younger sister, Casey. And you notice when you watch this movie that there seems to be some pretty strong tensions there between the girls, between Casey and Jess. There's tensions between the children and the parents. There's tensions between the husband and the wife. It's a tense situation. We may call this just a regular average family, but anything that's regular and average in this world involves a lot of intensity. And Jesus is trying to call us back deeper into our mind to slowly outgrow these learned roles. We, as an ego, we selected these roles and all the specifics of these roles before we even seem to come to the projection or enter into the screen of the world. But these are all beliefs and thoughts in the mind, and they have to be cleared away in order for there to be a lasting peace and harmony. So allow yourself to just sit back. We're going to open up with that beautiful song when a man loves a woman. You can feel all the passions swirling in there and you can feel the romance. Let it all come. Let the romance come, the passion come, and all the fantasies rise. Let it all just come up and then let Jesus stay with us through this movie because there's going to be some temptations to interpret something. And Jesus doesn't want us to interpret anything here without the Holy Spirit. So just stay with the Holy Spirit. If you feel the shame coming up in your awareness, call upon the Holy Spirit to show you it differently, to show you a different meaning to what you're watching. And then that will be part of the great cleansing, the great healing that we do today. I'll be with you through the movie. I'll pop in from time to time and then afterwards we'll take a brief break and then we'll all come back together for expressions, questions, answers. Anybody still wants to let their shame volcano erupt today? That's fine with me. We'll welcome the eruption. If that's what comes, we'll let it come because it needs to come and go. So thank you very much. Enjoy the movie and I think you will find it'll be a very healing day.