And one of the things you said during your dialogue just caused me a question that I
thought to be true... you said something to the effect of, “Spirit doesn't inhabit the body."
You know, Spirit is not in flesh.
And I thought wow, what I've always believed to be true is that I am spirit having a physical
experience and that spirit is animating this body in some way.
So I guess I'd just like a little bit more clarification around that statement.
Ya, we could take the metaphor of when they talk about Pinocchio in the sense that Pinocchio
was always wanting to be a real boy – to not be a puppet or a marionette but to have
a real life experience and that kind of shows how this animation – even in the world of
cartoons and animation, Walt Disney took a bunch of images and he just flicked them together
with such great speed that to the eye the eye perceived the continuity of not a static
image but a motion picture.
Cartoon characters are literally just a bunch of images on a time line that are strung together
in such rapid succession that there's no breaking point.
It looks like a continuous movement.
And so when we say the body seems to be animated and the plants and the animals and so on and
so forth, like the Spirit is behind all of that.
We have to realize that ego took the power of the mind, was invested in it and it was
the big bang.
And it did all the animation.
It did the animation of the big bang, and then with evolution and creatures seeming
to grow in form on planet earth and so forth, all of the animation and even all of the energy
behind the animation is part of the ego's world.
Now within that metaphor it's like well where's the Spirit?
How does Spirit even then relate to us, to the body, to the world?
And if we continue with the metaphor of Pinocchio, it would be to flip it around and get to a
point of saying, “OK, I'm tired of being a real little boy or a real little girl.
I'm tired of being the man, the woman that, or I've never been fully satisfied, always
been seeking and searching for more, or trying to become better.
And to say I'm ready to get back on the strings and I want you to pull the strings” - I
think that was one of Wayne Dyer's books, “Pulling Your Own Strings.”
Except this is more saying to the Spirit, You be the one to guide and direct the strings.
And that's what A Course In Miracles is saying, it's saying that the only purpose...
I remember when I first read that, Jesus says that the only purpose that the body has, the
body is solely a means of communication.
That's it.
It just has one purpose.
And then in another point of the Course, He actually says, “The only purpose of the
body is to let the voice for God speak through it.”
That's even more specific than just calling it a communication device.
And I don't know about you but if I look back into the parable of David and the history,
I used this body for many many many different things.
We can talk about not only to walk or to swim or to run or have sex with or to eat with
or to ski with or to play tennis with or to play golf with or... if you really made a
list, if you just sat down and look at your life and you said, What have I used this body for?
Every one of us could make a long list, really quite a long list.
And of course those things would have involved pride, striving, working, playing, as well
as seeking for things and avoiding things.
We would use it for all those motives.
And those are all ego motives.
Even playing, we know here is a value to playing because we know how fun it feels.
But, but when you get caught up in the game and you lose track of yourself in the pretending
– a lot of times when children are playing, they're just pretending.
When you lose yourself in the pretending then that even is part of the ego's trick as well.
So when I first got into this I thought, Wow, is that is all the Holy Spirit wants then
is to have the voice for God speak through me.
That was a problem initially because I was very shy and I thought, Hmm, ya maybe somebody
else other than this one, because that doesn't sound really appealing.
And then the other thought my ego had was, You know, that actually sounds downright boring.
Variety is the spice of life and, the ego says, it's good to have a lot of money because
it gives you more options, you can buy more things and do more things.
Well if you 're a body you seem to have a lot of options, that seems to have a bit of
pizzaz.
A bit of spice.
It's stimulating to be able to do lots and lots and lots of different things.
And then when you get into, “OK, the body has one purpose: let the voice for God speak
through it”, you see the ego's not at all thrilled by that one purpose.
I've even done talks where I've been talking for a full day and someone will raise their
hand at the end of the day and say, “You know, what you're talking about sounds very
boring – extremely boring, and I don't think that's for me.”
It's just too boring, it's too monotonous and everything for me.
And everything and from the ego's perspective you have to understand that even the Course
In Miracles to the ego would seem pretty boring.
I mean He's really just talking about the same thing and He's zooming around like He's
a little, like He's Tinker Bell with little wings going zooming around the very same thing.
He keeps going around and around and around.
He comes around to you and He goes, right in front of you, “Did you get it?”
Duh, no, and he goes around again, did you get it?
It's very circular, it's very symphonic.
People have read the Course and they say, “Come on, He's just saying the same thing,
He's just saying it in lots and lots of different ways and that's just kind of like the Spirit
going, “Did you get it yet?
Did you get it?
I'll try this one.
I'll try it this way.”
It's like, I want you to get this and I'm going to hang with you, so I'm just going
to keep lightly spinning around and we'll try to get it.”
So that's how the journey goes.
And when you really have a desire to have the experience then I will tell you that the
Course In Miracles will get simpler and simpler and simpler.
It won't seem like this big book.
It won't seem like a task or some kind of deep long heavy burden.
A lot of people feel that way, like we just had that retreat up there in Maitland and
I remember you were saying, “Oh man, I'm just seeing, I'm just at the very beginning
of this thing and it can feel almost like a heaviness, like there is so far to go with
it.
But the more our desire starts to stir up, the more the love and the peace starts to
really ignite inside our hearts then all of a sudden our readiness to really have the
eyes to see and ears to hear just gets, we get much more ready.
We are really ready to really have an experience, have a real experience of what this is really
talking about.
So to me that's been my life's calling is first of all was to have the experience and
have it in a sustained way so that it was a constant experience.
And then the joy is to let the Spirit come through in many many seemingly different ways
– using all kinds of different learning aids, and all kinds of different symbols.
That's why I've actually enjoyed the travel – not when I was a kid – I was one of
those kids, “Are we there yet?”
I hated to travel when I was young, but it actually becomes inspired because of the purpose
behind it.
That's what enlivens, that's what makes the travel a joyful adventure.
And it's the same with writing.
It's like I swore that I would never write a book.
I mean, I figured with the Course, we've got the Course, there's just no need for a book.
So actually the books that are over there, I didn't write them.
I spoke them and somebody transcribed it and put it into a book.
I didn't sit down with a pen and go....
It was just given.
And it's the same with singing.
I do a lot more singing now than ever.
I like to go on singing tours.
I never thought I would go on a singing tour but I enjoy singing.
You enjoy, it's just the inspiration comes through you and it gives you this sense of
energy and vitality and aliveness and a childlike sense of wonder and joy and glee because it's
so present.
It's not stuck on that time line - which is where the monotony and the repetition and
all the heaviness comes in when we think we have to repeat something over
and over and over.
Ya it's beautiful because that is a tendency once you, even a defense mechanism like projection.
Once you start to consciously see that, “Oh, I've been blaming, I've been projecting”
and you start to pull it back, really what you're doing when you pull back the projections
is you're pulling them back into the mind.
It's the mind that was trying to project them out onto the screen of the world and you're
really pulling them back and seeing that, No the cause is in my mind, it's not an external
cause.
But the tendency, when you start to pull the projections back from all the characters on
the screen, and all the different circumstances is Oops, you get it back this far and blame
the personality self.
Because that personality self is associated with the mind.
Sometimes when people say “my thoughts”, they'll point to the scull as if the thoughts
are up in the brain.
But the thoughts aren't in the brain, the thoughts are in the mind.
The brain itself and the body is just a projection, so if you start to withdraw the projections
from the other bodies, the tendency still is what we could call self criticism, self
condemnation.
And that's pretty common with Course In Miracles students and teachers is to say, “OK, I'm
getting much more laid back and low keyed and accepting and tolerant of my brothers
and sisters.
But the tendency to be hard on yourself as a personal self is the same thing.
And that's why when someone kind of holds it in and really doesn't reach back to the
full sense of forgiveness then a lot of times what we call cancer, heart attacks, those
kind of things – that's still the ego still projecting the guilt onto the self that it's
still identified with.
And that means you just have to go one more step back to get back to your mind, away from
this idea of the body.
At one point Jesus says, “A body is outside you but it seems to surround you.”
Hmm.
That's kind of, nobody ever told us that.
“Mom, I hurt my knee.”
“The body is outside you but it seems to surround you.”
Mary Baker Eddy for a mother, wow that's,,, when you start to see in your own mind that
you do have to apply those metaphysics and that means in the end you have to take this
off the hook too.
This can't be a source of blame.
And it's just another symbol.
But the reason it's just projected with so much blame is because the ego mind has identified
with it.
It thinks that now has a home in the body.
But it's not true.