Want to go onto some other things in terms of level confusion? Want to give some other
examples? Two good ones I think in terms of that are the whole idea of anger and the whole
idea of sickness. The Course teaches as you know that sickness is a defense against the
truth. It teaches us that sickness is not of the body, that it's of the mind. And that
pain is not of the body but it's of the mind. In fact, let me lump sickness and anger together
because it's really the same principle. The Course also teaches that anger is never justified,
that we're never upset for the reasons we think, that I'm never angry at you. I'm always
angry at myself. And the way that this gets translated many times is the Course says that
anger is never justified, that sickness is a defense against the truth and therefore
I'm not angry; and therefore, though I'm sneezing 10 times an hour, I'm not sick. Because the
Course says I'm not a body and I'm not supposed to be sick; therefore, I'm not sick. This
obviously doesn't work very well. It leads to a lot of denial. And as the Course teaches
us and any good psychologist would teach, when you deny something, it just comes right
back up in the form of projection, however, in a form that you don't always recognize.
The very fact that we're born into this world in a body is telling us that we're guilty.
Because as the Course teaches, the body is the embodiment of the ego and the core of
the ego system is guilt, which means by virtue of the fact that we're in this world in a
body means that we're guilty. The Course also teaches us that everything that's in our mind
must be projected. That's a fundamental principle of the mind. Well, if there's guilt in my
mind and it must be projected, there are only two places I can project it. Either I project
it onto your body, which means I get angry at you, or I project it onto my body, which
means I get sick. There's no other possibility. So it's inevitable we will get angry and get
sick. And so the level 2 understanding of that when we get angry and when we get sick
is to realize it's a learning opportunity for us so that we now have a chance, now that
we've projected our guilt onto something external, we now have another chance to look at it differently
and thereby let it go. Were it not for the special relationships we have, the Holy Spirit
would not have any opportunity of healing us. So again, I think that's probably the
most prominent form of level confusion is taking a level 1 statement, which is that
anger is never justified, that sickness is illusory and then saying I'm here in the world
that we believe we're in, that therefore I'm not sick and I'm not angry. And that's another
tricky thing that will lead us to about asking the Holy Spirit for help. And that's probably
I think one of the things as we travel around that there's some real major problems with.
And I'm very glad...it's somewhere in the manual I think...it says very few can hear
God's Voice directly. I think we should remember that. It's very difficult to go from a conditioned
mind over millennia and all of a sudden sit down and do the workbook lesson that "God's
Voice speaks to me all through the day" and you're going to hear it in five seconds. It
just doesn't work. All right, what the Course, I think and the workbook is trying to make
us do is to realize that there is a Presence called the Holy Spirit within our mind, and
we can always go for help. That doesn't mean that it doesn't take practice and a lot of
hard practice in monitoring your own mind and a real process of discernment. The easiest
thing...and the Course warns us about that...is for the ego to sound like the Holy Spirit.
And then we're off and running, think we're listening to God's Voice and we're doing exactly
what the ego wants us to do. And it's not easy to discern, just like a concert pianist
has to practice eight hours a day for many years before he opens at Carnegie Hall in
New York, we also have to practice. And you can be sure if you have an investment that's
even unconscious or very subtly conscious in any outcome, you probably won't be hearing
the Holy Spirit's voice because you'll probably be telling the Holy Spirit to say what you
want to hear. And so you have to be very careful with all this because I've heard the most
bizarre stories, people getting themselves raped and saying that's the Holy Spirit that
set that lesson of forgiveness up for me. And the Holy Spirit doesn't set up any lessons
in this world for us because there is no world. Now he'd be making the same error we made
in the beginning and reinforcing the original error. So we have to be very careful. He doesn't
get us parking spaces. He doesn't get us checks in the mail. He doesn't get us love partners.
He doesn't do any of that. And it's a confusion that stems a lot from people that are working
with the Course and new age systems. He doesn't use abundance and prosperity or any of those
things. And if we have all of these preconceptions in our mind...remember our mind is very powerful...we
made up a whole world and everything in it...so we can make up anything we want and have it
come true. I mean if you want abundance, you can use your mind to get abundance. But that's
not what the Course is talking about. It's not talking about material abundance, checks
in the mail or dividends from your stocks. It's talking about the abundance of the Kingdom
which is love. Giving love and receiving love. And you can't give love unless you have it
and unless you let the Holy Spirit have that love come through you. So that's a very...I
would urge everyone because it's a real trap that you can all fall into. I've fallen into
it and I know everyone else that has ever worked with the Course at one time or another
has fallen into it. If you have the slightest investment in outcome, the slightest investment
in how you want the script to go, it's very easy then to play a little mind trip and then
say...have this voice tell you this is the Holy Spirit and this is what he's telling
you to do and not only you but your next-door neighbor, giving him a message. And then you
get right into the ego trap and all you do is reinforce your guilt because you're, again,
denying truth. And denying truth will always reinforce our guilt. So the thing that I practice
all the time in my mind is just learning and asking the Holy Spirit to teach me how to
forgive, because that's the great need that I have, and the Course says that's the great
need of the world. And that's what I concentrate on - my daily lessons that come practically
every second of every minute of the day. You have a wonderful meditation in the morning,
you leave the room and bingo, everything goes wrong. That's when you ask the Holy Spirit
for help. And you don't have to hear a voice. You might get an idea that comes to your head,
you might get a hunch, you might get an intuition and you might get zilch, zero, nothing. It
is very simple to take some of those ideas such as "God's Voice speaks to me all throughout
the day." There's one lesson that says we should be still and ask God our Father what
we should do and He will tell us. And to then conclude from that, that it's the simplest
thing in the world to hear the Holy Spirit. And then you come to other conclusions. One
is that you're hearing the Holy Spirit's Voice when it's really your ego's. Or then you don't
hear anything and then you feel that you're a failure. And then you hear all these other
people telling you what wonderful things the Holy Spirit is telling them to do and you
think my God, what's wrong with me. And the very guilt that it's the purpose of the Course
to undo simply gets reinforced. Well, there is nothing in the Course that tells you how
you should study this Course...in fact, at one point, it specifically says there's no
right order of doing it...you let the Holy Spirit guide you...it is nonetheless true
that you will...and I've mentioned this before...you will not understand what the Course's theory
without reading the text, which it says right in the very first lines of the workbook in
the introduction. Basically you cannot be a student of this Course without at some point
having done the workbook and studying the text. And studying the text doesn't just mean
reading it through once or twice or five times. I think it obviously is a lifetime's work.
(I think you left out the manual). Well, the manual...nobody has trouble with the manual.
I always leave out the manual. The manual is lovely, too. Did you hear that, Jesus?
The manual is lovely, too. His feelings get hurt very, very much. He has this attachment
to the things he writes, you know. He's working it through, though.