[member of audience]: I feel I have a desire in my heart
for the future and
not haven't made any plans, but
there's
the desire of
doing what you guys do,
of being able to just be with people and talk about the
Course all the time. That is my question.
[David answers]: Yeah,
there's beautiful, it's beautiful how the Course is written with these different stepping stones and metaphors.
And there's one part in the Course where he's talking about this
change of mind
that will
make the future unlike the past, and that's more the metaphor that you're talking about,
where you feel like wow, if I
join with this purpose
and I feel relaxed and confident in this new purpose
that my future will seem to be very unlike my past, which is much more closed down and isolated. And
that's like a helpful use of that metaphor, then
as you go through, we'll say, a phase of doing that a lot,
and you come to see, wow this is a whole different world, and I feel completely different about myself.
You'll, you dip into deeper and deeper states of mind that I call mysticism,
where
it's all very practical, like what you're feeling is very practical and then as you dip into deeper deeper states of mind,
you begin to discover the sameness of the world and you start to
question even the beliefs around linear time.
That the future could be different than the past and then that's a whole different,
like, if you were on the ocean you're going down the trench at that point of questioning
time in of itself, linear time as being part of the problem. And
Jesus does have those metaphors in the Course too, that the past is gone the future is but imagined,
these concerns are but defenses against present change of focus. That's an entirely different quote than the first idea
I shared with you, because as you drop much much deeper,
you start to realize that, that even thoughts of the future when you get down into the deep trenches of the mind,
still will be a distraction away from the moment and from the gateway to eternity.
But the Course is so practical, just like when we learn to ride a bike. You know, we
we have to go out there, and we have to pedal and we have to pedal the bike
and maybe we have training wheels, little wheels hooked onto it, and then after a while
we can take the wheels off we can learn how to ride the bike.
It doesn't mean that we will forever be riding the bike. We probably will advance, oh I'm gonna go for a scooter now,
I'm gonna get a Yamaha,
Harley-Davidson, I'm going for motorcycling. [audience laughs] You know, we may go quite far with the bike and eventually the who knows what,
but eventually, that
can fall away too, you know where the trinkets of the world, you know, the deeper you go into your mind and you reach these higher
mystical states, then the trinkets of the world lose their their value.
But it's very practical; it's very very step-by-step, and
that's very much why would we work with people, it's very individualized. We have people that come to
to be with us
or come to just meet us at retreats or even maybe a one day gathering or a two hour talk, and it may be
very significant,
but it just reaches the mind in a way that is practical. And I love that about the Spirit, you know,
people one time I had, I had a student who work with me very deeply and, uh
she would say,
"Please point out to me anything that you notice in my mind that could help me on a spiritual journey.
Point anything out to me that you see." It was a big invitation.
Her husband was a Jewish man,
Orthodox Jew, very much into his career, very much into entertainment, sports, and so on so forth
So when I would go to their house, I would talk to her;
we would zoom into very subtle things in the mind that she was working on, different issues and
then he would say, "Oh come on in David, come and have something to eat!"
And I'd go join him and, "Watch the basketball game with me." Okay, I go sit in the couch with him,
I could easily just float around and be just as at home with him,
feel just the same love, and rejoice with him in the same way, and
this continued on for some time until we had some other students over and they said,
"Why do you treat her so much differently than him?". And I said, "Well the form may look very different,
but I'm just reaching and extending in what the invitation is."
You know, he's inviting me to share the joy of the moment with some food and the basketball game, and she's saying, "Oh
I want much more
for my time with you" and so it depends on the invitation.
So, the Spirit works that way with all of us, it's just based on our invitation and our capacity
to comprehend, the Spirit will work with us in a very individualized way.