 to understand that your past learning will never make you secure, but your faith and trust in the Holy Spirit will sustain you in every situation, while you believe the situations, and every circumstance, and that's what the whole thing's about. You have to be convinced. So even if you have fear arising, and even if there's a panic, or you feel your world is falling apart, all that is really is an opportunity to be convinced by the Spirit. Nothing's really going wrong. Nothing ever is going wrong. It's all just opportunities for this convincing. And from what was shared this morning, what Francis was sharing about the fear that can arise, and what Kirsten was sharing too about the meaninglessness, that, you know, in this world we have, you know, these Freddy Krueger movies, and all this stuff about Friday the 13th. It's all this horror stuff around Friday the 13th. Well, Jesus has his own 13th. It's lesson number 13. He drops his atomic bomb out of 365 lessons. He drops his atomic bomb on the ego in lesson number 13. Jesus is 13th. The ego makes up its own scary 13th Friday the 13th. Jesus is like, alright, I'll drop the bomb on you on the 13th. You'll remember that one. You'll remember that lesson. A meaningless world and gender's fear. If you know it's the first lesson in the workbook where Jesus decides to make a direct cause and effect relationship between fear and what's causing the fear, it's the first lesson in the workbook where he boom, he lays it out. He gives you a direct cause-effect relationship with fear. He says it's not a violent world. It's not a chaotic world that engenders fear. It's not what you perceive on the surface of consciousness, you know, a world of scarcity or lack. None of that engenders fear. It's actually a meaningless world that engenders fear. There's nothing that the ego is more afraid of than meaninglessness. Nothing is more frightening to it than meaninglessness. If you want to really scoot the ego out of its hiding place like it's a little spider in the well and you want to shine a light down there, a big light, and a little spider moves around to try to get away from the light, it's afraid of meaninglessness and that's because when the slate is cleaned, when you start to let go of the meanings of the world, you'll see that the Spirit will come rushing in to give a new meaning to the world. That's what the retranslation is. The Holy Spirit will give a brand new meaning to the whole world. It's a beautiful meaning. It's the real world. It's the happy dream. It's the correction. And the ego doesn't want that to happen so whenever there's a sense of meaninglessness, the ego tries to thrust and throw meaning where there is none. It's trying to tell you, be afraid, watch out. All of its fear tactics come when you start to let go of thinking there's a meaning in the world. So that's what I heard today in some of the groups after that movie last night that there was meaninglessness coming out. Intense meaninglessness. That's actually, you're getting closer to the release point because the ego really gets stirred up by meaninglessness. Now let's just follow the lesson 13 now. Jesus is Friday the 13th for the ego. It's a meaningless world and gender sphere and if you read down in the lesson, he drops the atomic bomb always down in the lesson where he makes his first cause-effect connection and the ego doesn't like it and it doesn't want to hear it and it's like a major bomb. A meaningless world and gender sphere because I think I'm in competition with God. Oh, oh, why have those words never been written on the planet before? Oh, oh, ego's like a little spider. It's been caught. That's where the fear is coming in. That's where the rage comes up. That's where the all the shame and the pain and the guilt come in. A meaningless world and gender sphere because I think I'm in competition with God. And Jesus even says, you know, you may not believe this. Maybe you may be uncomfortable with this. If he even follows it up like, listen, if you're stirred up by what I just dropped, it's to be expected. I've just dropped a big one and I've just laid out the first direct cause-effect relationship in this workbook. The reason you're fearful is because you believe you're in competition with God. He's taking what he did in the text talking about the authority problem and he's saying, oh no, it's not about authority figures. Parents, judges, police officers, military officers, generals, those aren't it. Those aren't the authority figures you're afraid of. It's a question in your own mind of holding onto this authorship thing where the ego wants to be right about inventing itself and inventing the world. And God created you as spirit and God creates only in spirit. And so when you try to invent, apart from the way God creates, you believe you are in competition with God. So when we watch a deep movie like that and a very deep sense of meaningless comes up and you watch your mind go like this. Whoa! You get all stirred up from that movie. It's because the meaninglessness is getting stirred up and it's because all the distractions for a moment stop and all this chasing idols stop and you just come down to this point and you face the utter. I'll be Christian Bernie for a moment. Utter! Utter! Fear of meaninglessness. Then you're close. You're getting close to healing. You're actually right on the verge of healing. If you can do like when Kirsten said, just let it move through. Don't try to defend against it. Don't try to distract away. Don't try to move away from it or anything like this. Let it move through. Stay there with the Holy Spirit. Let those clouds move because then the Holy Spirit can give you a new meaning for the entire cosmos. But not until you are willing to let this old thing pass away, pass through, move through you. This is where atonement to seem scary because the ego is saying, you're going to be struck dead, God's going to punish you. It's used all this crazy threats to say, don't stand there. Some of you have heard this from other teachers. Gangaji, is anybody heard about Gangaji? Gangaji, G-A-N-G-A-G-I. Can't spell A-J-I. Gangaji, one of her favorite teaching is stop. Gangaji's that stop moment that she's talking about is the moment I'm talking about. When that fear, that sense of meaninglessness comes up and the ego wants to rush in with distractions, rush in with justifications, rush in with intellectual ideas, rush in with something, anything. Busy yourself. Like Mary and Martha's story in the Bible where Jesus is teaching and Martha is so anxious about him teaching, he spends all the time cooking in kitchen while Jesus is teaching because it's too exciting. And Mary sits there at his feet listening. She's in the stop. She's at the Gangaji stop. Yeah, another reason that the ego used another defense mechanism, the ego used to stop the energy from flowing through and be released is to conclude of what I am afraid of. I am afraid of losing this, I'm afraid of losing that, I'm afraid of being alone, I'm afraid. It's like using this so that you will start to solve and start to engage your mind in a specific situation or in a specific direction instead of just be there and be open and allow the new meaning to come in. The fact is as what we're talking about today is whatever you are afraid of is not something you can understand. It's something so pushed away from your awareness. You are afraid of losing the meaning of this world. You're not really afraid of losing anything in this world. You're not really afraid of any of the human condition that we talk about, being alone, being not taken care of. It's not the real reason that you're afraid of. But every time when this intensity comes up, really there is a temptation to just conclude. This is my emotion, this is the reason, this is where I'm at. Then how do I find a solution? And you can see that there's just no solution that can be found there. The only thing we can do is please remove the conclusions just to be able to say, I don't know what I'm afraid of. I don't even know what this is. Sometimes it's agitation, there could be some super sensitivity coming up around certain things. But just knowing that when this kind of shift happens, it happens at a very, very deep unconscious level. So it flushes up a lot of things that doesn't even make sense to the logical mind. It doesn't make sense why you suddenly get agitated around certain things and this emotion bubbling up. And just the allowance to allow it to just be whatever it is and allow the Holy Spirit to tell me what they are instead of using the past story and the past experience to say, this is what I'm feeling and I need to fix it right now. That's how the ego won't stop, stop the opening to continue. It's very, very profound. You just pause for a moment and take that in. It's kind of a version of lesson number five. I've never upset for the reason I think that that applies as well. When you come to that sense of deep fear, you're trying to come up with a reason for it and find a solution, like a worldly solution to it. Including a direction for the spiritual journey from this point. Okay, well if the world's meaning was being, okay, perhaps my spiritual journey can look like this and it's still trying to grab hold of an idea or even a spiritual idea and move forward with it. But it's just daring to stay so present with what is coming up in awareness now because only the Spirit can guide the mind through this awakening. It's like the very mind that's experiencing this is being completely undone. So how can that mind know what's helpful or what it's going to look like has to come from the Spirit, it has to be revealed. And I think the question can rise, what is the solution then? If that cause-effect relationship has been so pushed out of awareness that a meaningless world of gender's fear, because I think I'm in competition with God, I think that is so horrifying and that's pushed so far out of awareness and what's the solution? True empathy is the solution. Jesus does a lot of teachings in the Course on true empathy and that's what I was saying earlier when my friend was saying, you know, the deeper you go in unveiling and exposing the ego it could seem like a nose dive, like a plane going down in a nose dive but don't go into a tailspin with it. The ego wants you to crash. You know, for me, true empathy pulls you up and out like an acrobatic flyer snoopy in the red baron pulls you out of it, pulls you up and out of it. And what is true empathy but your own certainty of what is real and true? I mean certainty. I mean real certainty.