I think it's helpful, again, not to think about how many steps do I still have to take
just deal with where you are, because the ego's trap is always to have
you worry about the future. You know, this is such a huge process.
And, the ladder is so immense I'll never get there, which makes the whole ego thought system real.
And you could let go of the ego thought system in an instant.
So your focus should only be on what you're feeling and experiencing right now.
Everything else is just a trap.
Q: Separation and specialness can also take place on a non-physical level, too,
right, because you hear of people who channel spirits and different entitites
and relatives. So they're like separated, but they're without form?
Oh yeah, sure, separation and specialness don't occur in the body at all
they only occur in the mind, and when the body dies, nothing has happened.
And remember, as I began today, the body is like a lifeless piece of wood,
so it doesn't die. So the mind that was fully active while the body
seemed to be alive, is just as active when the body seems to die.
I remember my wife Gloria used to say often at workshops that
people have this insane idea that just because they're channeling a voice
from the other side, quote unquote, that that voice is wise.
And you'ld listen to it. You know it could be just as filled with ego
as the voices that we hear here. You know being disembodied is not a spiritual state.
All right? Because we are never in the body, anyway.
We just think we are. So whether you are embodied or disembodied,
is really the same, because we always remain in the mind.
And so whether you are on this side or the other side, quote unquote,
You could either be with the ego or the Holy Sprit.
And being here in a body is irrelevant to that. It's a choice you make in your mind.
Q: So, when a person dies and they still have a mind are they experiencing time?
The question was when you die and you're in your mind
do you still experience time? Certainly not in the way we do here.
Basically, the body and the world are the home of time and space.
What you find in the mind instead of space is separation;
And instead of time, linear time, you have sin, guilt and fear.
So, in a sense, that would be the equivalence.
So, a person who experiences him or herself in a body and then dies
and still has an unhealed mind, then those thoughts are still present,
whether they are expressed in the form of time and space
or they're expressed in thought, or they experience it in thought, again it's really the same thing.
Q: And where are, are they still . . . K: Where are they?
Q: Yeah, where are they? K: We keep them hidden under here, too.
We keep everything under the stage.
They're nowhere in the sense that it's not spacial.
One of the difficulties in trying to conceive of a mind is that you can't.
We know where our brain is, but a mind is outside of time and space.
So, words like where have no reference.
Q: Are they watching your loved ones?
Where they are is no different from where they were before they died.
We're all in the mind watching split off parts of ourselves that we call other people.
So the idea is, is like my loved one still watching over me or involved with me,
sure, but no differently from the way it was here.
Q: Except that they could come into the bedroom or . . .
But they always come into the bedroom, because nobody's in the bedroom.
See you can't have it both ways. What makes this difficult is that these questions,
which are very natural questions to ask, and psychics give all kinds of answers,
have nothing to do with what this Course is talking about
because everything only occurs in the mind because there's nothing else.
I mean nothing is happening here. There is no room here. There are no separate people here
in chairs. There's an illusion of that.
Just like when you dream at night, and you could have a dream tonight of being in this room,
with all these people, but when you wake in the morning, you know you were not in this room,
at least, not at night. And you would realize all of this was just a dream,
it was just a set of symbols. Well, this whole world is just a dream and a set of symbols.
So people don't go anywhere when they die.
They don't go anywhere when they're born.
They all are in the same place, which is the mind, which again,
is non-spatial and non-temporal. So there's no way of even describing
what it's like. People do, but you have to realize that it's filtered through
their own understanding just as I was explaining earlier when people hear
the Holy Spirit and they hear words, and they think they're hearing words,
all they're really doing is connecting to that right-minded presence of love
and then their mind translates that abstract presence of love into words
or symbols they can understand.
So when psychics who believe that the world is real,
whether they believe in another world or not, then they're going to translate
their experiences into symbols and forms they could understand and other people could understand.
Which doesn't mean it's not helpful, it just means it's not reality.
It's the exact same thing people did with Jesus.
People experienced him and translated their experience into form
and they wrote stories about him. The stories had nothing to do with his reality.
The Course says words are but symbols of symbols. They're twice removed from reality.
So the reality of Jesus, which is this thought of love,
became a symbol of a messianic figure, or a great teacher, and then there were words.
And then, of course, we made a theology based on the words.
But it had nothing to do with the reality. But it gets mediated
through what we think is the truth, which as the Course says, the line I quoted earlier,
the condition in which we think we are in, which is that of being in a body,
living in a separated world. The problem is people don't understand symbols.
Everything is a symbol. Words are symbols. Concepts are symbols.
Theology is a symbol. Pathology is a symbol. Symbols are not real.
So when people have experiences of an afterlife or voices from beyond,
and whatever, it doesn't mean the core of the experience is not real.
or not helpful, but the interpretation of it is very idiosyncratic.
And it's always mediated through a body and specific entities and forms,
so people tell stories about what it's like on the other side.
There is no other side.
So when you really begin to understand what the Course is saying
it will change absolutely everything you believe.
Does that make sense? It's not very comforting.
You know the line that says you can not even think of God without a body
or in some form you think you recognize, is a very important line
because that explains why this Course is all about the body.
God is a body. He's talked about as a person. He has body parts.
The Holy Spirit is talked about as a person. Why? Because we can't think about God
without a body because we think of ourselves as a body.
It makes no sense to say that we're a mind.
We have no referent for that. So the Course is written in a way
which meets us where we are and as we follow it along and do what it says
it will lead us beyond itself, beyond the Course, and beyond the body,
and beyond the world and then we would be awakened.
So that when psychics have experiences or mystics have experiences it's not
that the content is wrong, but the words that they use and the concepts that they use
the constructs that they use are symbolic, symbolic of something that
they couldn't explain any other way. Or they couldn't even experience it any other way.
And it is always mediated through the condition in which they think they are in,
which is a body living in a world. And since it is a world of duality
and a world of opposites it makes sense then because that's our thought system,
which is not real, but it's our thought system. Then it makes sense
to think about opposites. There's life and then there's an afterlife.
There's life in the body and there's life in the mind or the spirit or the soul or whatever.
And so we're comfortable with the idea of opposites: life and death, mind and body,
but this is a non-dualistic system in which there is no opposite, there is no mind and body.
The body is a projection of the mind and has never left its source,
which means there is no body outside of the mind.
So the idea that we are all one is meant very literally in the Course.
So, of course, you are still connected with a loved one who has died,
but you are connected when the loved one was here.
And, you were connected before you were born. You're always connected.
What the Course tries to help us to do is to generalize that connection
to all people so we're connected with everyone.