 Yeah, you're not so much committing to the darkness. You're really committing to the light. And the unconscious mind is just filled with so much darkness that it just has to be exposed. What Jesus says in the Course is you have to go through the darkness to the light. So to see a dark tunnel, or a tunnel that sometimes you wonder, is there a light at the end of the tunnel? And even with the two people that were instrumental in bringing the Course into the world, so to speak, Helen Shockman and Bill Fetcher, they were in a working relationship, but it was very testy. In fact, they worked in a Colombian Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City and it was a testy environment and it was a testy relationship and it stayed that way for some time until Bill moved to California. So it was one of those kind of hanging in there kind of experiences. And I mean, I think that part of the sense, there has to be a sense of attraction. There has to be some kind of a sense of a shared purpose for these kind of sustained relationships. Even if you're going through the darkness to the light, there has to be a great deal that you share. The two people are not even conscious of how important it is that they be together and hang in there and work through things. It's kind of like these assignments come and it can be very intense, but if one or the other just pops out of the assignment, the lesson will be repeated. If you have that Carly Simon song, if you're willing to play the game, it will be coming around again. So it's going to come around, it's going to come around anyway. It's just that sometimes there's a part in the teacher's manual where Jesus talks about lifelong partners, lifelong relationships, and he says the teaching-learning balance is actually perfect. And if the two decide the perfect lesson is laid before them and can be learned, very, very hopeful, very optimistic, very mysterious, only place in A Course in Miracles he talks about perfect teaching-learning balance. Can you give me more on that perfect teaching-learning balance? But it's just, we could say that spiritually the two have been drawn together and because of this teaching-learning balance, there's going to be lots and lots and lots of opportunities to really get the lesson. There's not like a sense of in-balance where one is more ready than the other. Both are really ready and it's worth hanging in when that happens. Are you also saying then that if you concomit to a relationship that your ego is in the way? No, it's like I was saying just before that, that the Spirit is going to have to use assignments to build a sense of commitment towards the correction or the escape hatch. But those assignments can come in many ways. So for many people, they don't feel intuitively guided or drawn into a relationship. They have plenty of relationships in their daily life but not what the world would call a romantic relationship or whatever. But there's plenty of mirroring, plenty of opportunities going on. But they may be involved in other things like yoga or so many things. Even getting a degree in university or learning skills and whatever. There's so many different assignments that the Spirit can use to work on that sense of commitment. Even a diet is a commitment. And all of those can be actually used by the Spirit as part of a mind training to start to align the mind with the Spirit. So it's not saying that it's necessary that you have a committed or significant other relationship. But the Spirit can use that as well as many other assignments. There's definitely two different purposes. One is towards unification and forgiveness and the learnings of oneness. And then the ego purposes. It has many judgments, it has many preferences. People talk about even the dating game. Comparing and contrasting like we're going grocery shopping with the dating services and so on and so forth. And the Spirit can use those things. In other words, the Spirit uses what the ego made. The ego made in fear and hate. But even those preference patterns that are egoic can be used by the Spirit in its progression towards waking up. So yeah, there's certain things that when people come together there's definitely for people to come together in a relationship. There's attractions going on there. And that can be used by the Spirit because it's going to be evolving more into things that we know relationships. Once you get bored and frustrated, you ask for another way. Yeah, you ask for another way. You really want a sense of connection. You want a sense of trust, honesty, openness. A sense of reverence that's there. The things that people really, the values that reflect eternity, those are the things that the relationship is destined ultimately to grow into. And the ego is kind of like, it's so impetuous, it's so impulsive, it wants immediate gratification on its own terms. I describe the ego's purposes for relationships as kind of like Dixie cups. There's little cups in bathrooms and little paper cups. Just take a little drink and throw it away. Take another little sip and throw it away. There's no sense of depth, continuity of really hanging in there in a commitment to face the shadow. As the shadow comes up and release the shadow, it's more just motivated by the shadow for immediate gratification and then it's on to the next sip. So you can start to get a sense that, for example, the ego uses the body for pride, for pleasure and for attack. And the spirit only uses the body for one purpose and that is it's a communication device. And it's a communication device to help the mind regain the awareness that true communication is really, I call it vertical, it's really with the creator, with your intuition, with the spirit. But because the mind has fallen asleep and it believes in separation, it believes in words and so on and so forth, then the spirit has to use what the ego made to train the mind to come back to what I call communion. That's the point of spirit-inspired communication is to actually come back beyond the interpersonal communication, back to that communion with the one. And it's like the more that you practice this, the more that you don't hold anything back and let the spirit just pour through you and express through you and express through you, you start to have this experience like you're talking to yourself, like you're just teaching yourself with everything, like there's nobody else in the universe but you. Like that's what the matrix is about, you know, you are the one. Literally, you know, it's one mind but that one mind has been forgotten and it seems to have fragmented off into bits and pieces that only know the little self, the personality self. So, yeah, it's beautiful how you just keep at it and you keep at it and keep at it and then it just kind of, it channelizes everything into one experience and that's the whole purpose of life is to have that connected experience. This experience, would you say then that because everything is a mirror, then the holy relationship is really with oneself then, isn't it? It's not really with the mirror, it's just the distractions. But they're the learning message, right? Yeah, ultimately the course came and it is written on the level where it can be most helpful, which is written for the ego. The spirit doesn't need a book, you know, it just is. The ego is a symbol of consciousness, fragmented consciousness and that fragmented consciousness needs to be unified through training. And we've all grown up hearing about raising consciousness and raising the vibrations and so on and so forth. So, in that sense, the spirit is working with the ego, is training the ego little by little by little to a leaping off point where you can transcend the ego entirely. Basically, the world and the people in the world will reflect the judgments, the opinions, the attack thoughts and so on and so forth. And then as you start to release those attack thoughts and those grievances and judgments, it's like the world starts to light up. I mean, you just start to get more and more and more witnesses, loving, loving reflections. In my own life, I went from being very shy and kind of a loner and I was lucky by two or three friends. And now I go around the world, I just have so many deep intimate friends that those are just reflections. And then it just takes you more and more to a point to what your first question was about where you start to realize that really it's about opening to this experience of being the one or the one mind. And we could say the whole not only transcends the sum of the parts, but the whole is real and the parts are not. So that's really an answer to your question that the whole relationship is described in the book as if there's two partners working towards this experience of holiness and holy relationship. But actually you have an experience of just being all-encompassing. Like there's a line in the Course of Miracles where Jesus says, mind reaches to itself, it does not go out. Within itself is everything, you within it, and it within you. It's just like, wow, the whole sense is just very all-encompassing. And that's the goal of opening to the mystical experience and true holiness is really, we could say, an experience of singularity, of pure oneness.