So if you go and read Martin Luther King and so forth you will realize that
Martin Luther King—as much good as he was bringing and extending in his life
he was aspiring to be as Christ-like as he could and
Mandela was aspiring to a higher state of awareness
and so was Gandhi. So my heroes, I realized, were all struggling and aspiring.
So I became more interested in what they were aspiring to.
So the Course in Miracles what that did was it was coming from the master himself, and he was basically saying
He said basically: David, you know you're psychotic. You've had a total break from reality,
meaning Heaven and in Nirvana, you've had an absolutely total break. You're totally psychotic. You're schizophrenic,
your mind is split. You're listening to, you're serving two masters. When I said in the Bible
It's impossible to serve two masters. You cannot serve both love and fear and
you're schizophrenic.
You're listening to multiple voices in your mind,
hearing many multiple voices every day when you walk out on the street. You're hearing all these different voices you you're schizophrenic
and you're hallucinating.
You are absolutely
hallucinating a world that doesn't have any existence whatsoever.
It's a total figment of imagination, and you're absolutely hallucinating. Now
what would you do if you had to deal with somebody who is psychotic,
schizophrenic and was hallucinating?
They need some major help.
And what I discovered was as I, the more I started to read the Course I thought: ah, this is describing my mind.
I may have heroes. I may even think I know what social justice is.
And I certainly did because how else would I be an activist with having a strong thread of social justice
moving inside my heart.
There's a part in the Course, it's actually a subsection of one of the chapters where it's titled
The Justice of Heaven.
And when you read that section in the Course The Justice of Heaven he will basically tell you that there is no
justice in the fragmented world that you perceive
and there never will be. He's not saying you can hope to reach a goal of social justice at one point.
He's saying
You are going after a ghost, you are chasing a ghost.
And that had a big impact on me. I one time watched this video called The Story of A Course in Miracles, and it had
Milton Friedman was in it, speech writer for the president of the United States,
William Whitson who was a former general,
a Pentagon general who was working as like an ambassador for the United Nations to China.
I got to watch people with one lady worked with dolphins.
What I loved about that story of A Course in Miracles
where I got to see a range of people throughout the human condition all trying to practice A Course in Miracles.
And what really got me was when I heard a politician like
William Whitson, who ended up marrying the publisher of the Course Judy Skutch,
say the most impactful line for him from A Course in Miracles, because he had spent his whole political life
trying to make the world a better place,
his whole political life fighting for social justice.
He said the most powerful line for him was when Jesus said seek not to change the world,
seek rather to change your mind about the world.
That is what I mean by we have to come to an admission that we have a perceptual problem.
If we're looking through a kaleidoscope of cracked perception, and we're trying to get activated
about certain things and certain people
Then we have to realize
we are still part of a cracked perception, of hallucination.
And the reason why we're not happy is because we're still so bought into this ego belief system.
Now another thing that helped me
Was this idea that
Everything that involves social justice
revolved
underneath, on the belief in victimization and
I started to work with the Course and I kept going through every chapter
and I go through the lessons and I go through it over and over and over and
What Jesus was saying (???) he says beware of the temptation to perceive yourself as unfairly treated.
I thought that's amazing.
He's, he's calling this is like a temptation.
So what I perceived as social injustice as
people taking advantage of other people, as people being mistreated all over the place.
He was saying that's a temptation.
And it's a temptation to look and continue to keep looking through that darkened glass instead of turning within to the Holy Spirit
for a unified perception of the world.
So the hardest thing to swallow about
A Course in Miracles seems to be this perceptual problem thing.
Because the ego has already done a strong convincing job. That's you're human, you're time and space,
you're stuck in it like a fly stuck on a fly paper,
you're stuck in it
and there's all of this injustice around you, everywhere you look.
And it doesn't matter whether it's it's your your mother giving you a frown or it's
somebody being beaten in prison.
It doesn't matter
whether it's a tone of voice when you're expecting a happy loving tone of voice and you hear a harsh
condemning tone, even just a tone of voice, it hurts.
The only justice is the justice of forgiveness,
which is what I was talking about earlier, all things work together for good. It's the highest state of mind there is.
To reach a state of perfect acceptance.
And when you see something and
your emotions well up like that's just not right, which happens
as we watch the news, as we watch movies, as we're interacting in our families and in our work environments,
but that's just not right!
What the Course is saying is like you're never upset for the reason you think!
You're never upset with what you perceive is happening. You are upset by your
interpretation of what you perceive is happening.
And then
through this workbook
he's going to show us that everything that we perceive is an interpretation and as long as we have egoic
interpretations, we're going to be upset.
So for me when I
really decided to practice the Course I
would latch on to a
series of lessons that just resonated in my heart.
And people have asked me
What did you do when you faced all kinds of temptations,
when you got upset, when you were disturbed, when you were angry, fearful,
guilty, shameful, all those things,
I would practice lessons 5, 6, 7, 8, almost like a cadence. He goes like ha, here you go!
What do you think about that, 5, 6, 7, 8? I'm never upset for the reason I think.
I'm upset because I see something that's not there.
I see only the past.
My mind is preoccupied with past thoughts.
Talk about a reorientation!
Whenever I would get upset about anything
I saw on the news, in my family, with my partner, with my cat, with my three-legged cat,
whenever I would get upset with my three-legged cat Tripod I would still
have to work it back to 5, 6, 7, 8. I'm never upset for the reason
I think. And you see how practical that is. It's almost like Jesus is saying
you're having a tough time. I understand that, but I'm going to give you some
real practical
lessons to help lift your mind out of the
judgment and the darkness that you feel