I’d like to cite a quotation from a spiritual document called A Course in Miracles. And for those of you who don’t know, A Course in Miracles is a three-books-in-one spiritual text that was given by Jesus to a woman in New York City named Helen Schucman.

And she heard the voice of Jesus for like seven years and she wrote down what He said in her shorthand notebook and then she would read it to this guy named Bill Thetford who would type it out.

 

And that became A Course in Miracles. And very early in the scribing of the Course back in 1965 Bill had to get up and give a talk at Princeton University to a group of psychologists.

 

And Bill, as it turns out, was a lot like me. He was very introverted, as many mystical people are. Mystical people are very used to going within themselves. They’re not really “out there.”

 

Extroverts love to speak in public. Like Oprah, she’s “out there.” They love it. But a lot of mystical people, like Bill and also myself, we’re not the kind of people you would ordinarily expect to get up and speak in front of a crowd of people. In fact, those of you who have read my first book, The Disappearance of the Universe, may recall that my teachers in the book asked me, they said,

 

“You don’t like to get up and speak in front of a crowd, do you?”

 

And my reaction was:

“I’d rather stick broken pieces of glass up my butt.”

 

And that’s kind of like the way that I felt about it. And certain things had happened along the line to sort of change my mind about that.

 

But getting back to 1965, in Bill’s case he had to get up and give this series of talks and he gave this saying from A Course in Miracles that was ultimately meant for all of us. But at the time it was meant for Bill to help him get up and give this talk. And I like to use it as my way of letting the Holy Spirit kind of like be in charge of what I say and kind of like take over. So I’m gonna recite that right now and just let the Holy Spirit take over from there.

 

I am here only to be truly helpful. I’m here to represent Him who sent me. I do not have to worry about what to say or what to do, because He who sent me will direct me.

I am content to be wherever He wishes, knowing He goes there with me. I will be healed as I let Him teach me to heal.

 

And that’s it. And that’s kinda cool, because I’m like off the hook and I don’t have to worry about what to say and what to do and the Holy Spirit now is responsible for whatever gets said.

 

So one thing I’m gonna do certainly, is give you an overview of my first book, which is called The Disappearance of the Universe. And the reason that it’s called The Disappearance of the Universe is because when you wake up from a dream the dream disappears.

 

When you were in bed last night and you were having a dream, you wake up from the dream and where is the dream? Well, it’s not there. And the reason that that’s possible is because it was never really there in the first place. It just seemed that way.

If I can use an analogy, let’s say we have a four-year-old daughter. And she’s in bed at night, and she’s dreaming. And you just kind of like peek in on her to see how she’s doing. And you notice that she’s tossing and turning and she’s having this kind of like unpleasant dream. You can tell that it’s not very comfortable for her. She’s reacting to events in the dream and it’s not a pleasant dream.

 

Now what do you do? You don’t go over there and shake the hell out of her, because that would scare her even more. And for her, the dream has become her reality. She’s reacting to events in the dream as though they are real. And where she really is, which is in the bed, that’s oblivious to her. She’s not really aware of that any more.

Her whole attention is focused now on the dream. And that has become her reality, and where she really is has been lost to her.

 

So what you do is, rather than go over and kind of like rudely interrupt her, maybe you’ll whisper to her. Maybe you’ll say things to her like:

“Hey. It’s only a dream. You don’t have to worry. What you’re seeing is not true. Yes, it may seem real, but it’s not. They’re just pictures in your mind. And if you can hear my voice right now, then you’re already starting to wake up.”

 

Because the truth can be heard in the dream. The truth is not in the dream. The truth is not in the dream at all. But it can be heard in the dream and it can slowly and gently awaken you.

 

And so, you whisper to your four-year-old daughter and she starts to hear you. And it changes her attitude and her state of being and her state of mind and she slowly starts to awaken. And it becomes a more pleasant dream for her before she awakens. And so, when she wakes up, she’s not afraid.

 

She’s ready to wake up to kind of like, where she really always was, but she didn’t know it. And then, when she wakes up in the bed, she realizes that that’s where she always was all along. But it was simply out of her awareness.

 

And the same kinds of things that we would whisper to a four-year-old in bed at night, this having a bad dream, are exactly the same kinds of things that the Holy Spirit is whispering to us right now, in this dream. Because when you wake up, it’s really just a different form of dreaming. It’s a function of what A Course in Miracles (which we’ll get into) it’s a function of what the Course would call levels. So this level seems more real.

But it’s really just another form of dreaming. In fact, A Course in Miracles says that all of your time is spent in dreaming.

 

So we had a dream last night, and that seemed real. And then we wake up and we find out that we were in our bed, and that seems real, But it’s really just a dream. And then we dream that we live in this life and all the adventures that are in it. And then some day we dream that we die and then we have all of these interval periods in between life times where all of these other kinds of adventures happen. And then, eventually we’re born seemingly in another body, and that’s just a dream too.

And in this dream the Holy Spirit is whispering to us,

 

“Hey. It’s only a dream. You don’t have to worry. What you’re seeing is not true. And if you can hear my voice right now, you’re already starting to wake up.”

 

Because the truth can be heard in the dream. The truth is not in the dream but the truth can be heard in the dream, and it can slowly and gently awaken you.

And as you start to wake up, your attitude changes and you become less fearful of the dream. Because the Holy Spirit is saying that all of the problems that you have and all the things you think are such a big deal, and all the questions that you have, they’re really just kind of silly. Because they’re a product of the same thought system that produced the dream in the first place.

 

And as you wake up you see that it’s just all kind of silly. And then, when you finally awaken, you realize that you never left home. Except this home is Heaven. This home is one with your Source, where you really were. So just like the bed was out of the awareness of the four-year-old, Heaven, which is where we really are, is out of our awareness. And it’s something that we awaken to.

 

A Course in Miracles says,

“You are at home in God, dreaming of exile but perfectly capable of awakening to reality.”

 

And it’s the experience of that, that I want to talk about. Because experience is really the only thing that will make us happy. Theology won’t do it. I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with theology or intellectual concepts. They’re important as a background so that we can understand what we need to understand in order to be able to apply things in our every day life.

 

So you can say that they’re really three phases that people go through in their spiritual life, and most people stay stuck for a long, long time in the first stage, which is really the gathering of information. And that’s where you find intellectual concepts and theology. And they’re important but they will not satisfy any of us. They will not make any of us happy.

 

Eventually what you have to do is you have to get up onto the next phase of your spiritual life, which is application. And that’s really the most important phase, because what you do, is you take everything you’ve learned, everything that you know, and now you actually apply it, to every situation that comes up in your every day life. Whatever’s there, in front of your face, on any given day.

 

And what that does, eventually, if you do it (and that’s kind of like a rule, you have to do it), what that eventually leads to is experience. And experience is what will really make us happy.

 

A Course in Miracles says,

“Words are but symbols of symbols.”

 

They’re twice removed from reality. And when you think about it, how is a symbol ever gonna make us feel whole and complete? How is a symbol ever gonna make us happy?

It can’t because it’s just a symbol. What will make us happy is not a symbol of reality but an experience of reality. It’s that experience of where we really are, that we never really left home, and that we’re still there right now.

 

That experience of being one with our Source, of being one with God or whatever you want to call It; that experience is the great mystical experience that all the great mystics of history have reported. And once you experience that, that is the answer to all of our questions and it’s the only answer that will ever really satisfy us.

 

As we said, words can’t do it. But the experience of where we really are so blows away anything that this world has to offer, that after that, everything here is kind of like chicken crap compared to what’s available. Because once you experience it, you know that that’s the truth and that has to be where we really belong and what we really are.

So the goal of a good spiritual discipline like A Course in Miracles is to lead to that experience.

 

At one point in the Course, Jesus, who is the teacher in the Course, makes a pretty amazing statement. He’s talking about all these questions that we have and all these dilemmas that we have, and at one point He says,

 

So it’s really that experience that A Course in Miracles is directed toward, and that experience that my teachers in the book, The Disappearance of the Universe, were directing me toward. And I’ll tell you more about my teachers because I’m not the teacher in the book. I’m just a student. And I’m very clear that there’s nothing special about me and I feel very lucky to be able to pass these teachings along. And I’m not any better or different or more special than anybody else, and I’m having a great time being able to pass along what was given to me.

 

But I just wanted to finish up with the dream analogy by pointing out that when you awaken from a dream, the dream disappears. And when you awaken from a dream of time and space, there is no more time and space. So that means there are no other people that you have to hang around for a million years, waiting for to wake up, because they’re already there.

 

Because when you awaken, you’re awakening from something that is partial and something that is divided to something that is whole and full and complete. In fact, the word “holy” comes from the word “whole”. And by definition, if it is whole then it is one and in that oneness nothing can be left out. Nothing can be missing. Nothing can be lacking.

 

In fact A Course in Miracles says that a sense of separation from God is the only lack you really need correct. And all these other problems and lacks that we have in our lives are actually substitutes for the one real problem. And we’ll explain it as we go along on why that’s the case and how it happened and how it appeared that we got here, on planet Earth, living this life that we think that we’re living, thinking that we’re bodies.

 

And we’ll explain how that experience actually came about and then we’ll explain how we can have a different experience, an experience of awakening to what we really are, and where we really belong.

 

But that’s certainly not the entire teaching. In fact the idea that the world is an illusion, by itself, will not really do you a lot of good. That’s just one piece of the puzzle. It’s an important part of the puzzle but it’s not the whole thing. And if you leave it there, if we just teach that the world is an illusion, that by itself will not bring any happiness or peace to anybody.

 

We’ll see as we go along, that there is a certain kind of forgiveness which is not the same as the way the world usually thinks about forgiveness. This is the kind of forgiveness that was actually practiced by great masters like Buddha and Jesus, and it involves total non-judgment. But there’s even more than that. There’s kind of like a particular way of looking at things and looking at people that comprises this kind of forgiveness. And that kind of forgiveness actually leads to the end of reincarnation.

And I think that all of us sense it at some point in our lives, that maybe something here is missing; there’s something amiss here. And that’s because there is something missing here. And what is missing here is spirit. But spirit is not the old-fashioned kind of spirit. It’s not the way we normally think about it. In fact, most of the things we’re going to be talking about today are not the old-fashioned way.

 

We’re going to talk about forgiveness, but it’s not the old-fashioned kind of forgiveness. We’re gonna talk about healing and we’re gonna talk about spirit, but it’s not the old-fashioned definition of spirit. This is a whole new ballgame.

 

What we’re going to be talking about is not your parent’s spirituality. This is something that is not based on the old way of thinking. It’s not based on Newtonian physics where you have a subject and an object that are separate from each other, and they’re both empirically real and exist apart from each other. What we’re going to be talking about today would be more in line with the new physics, with Quantum physics, which would teach that there’s not really any such thing as separation. That that’s just an illusion. That everything is one, everything is connected, and you can’t really separate one thing out from everything else.

 

I’ll give you a quick example. I’ll give you an example of the old-fashioned kind of forgiveness.

All right. The old-fashioned kind of forgiveness, being based on separation and Newtonian physics would say,

 

”Well, OK. You really did it and you’re guilty and it’s your fault. And it’s not my fault, but I’m gonna forgive you because, well, you know, I’m better than you. And You know, I’ve got Jesus and you don’t. But I’m kinda like spiritually sophisticated so I’m gonna, you know, forgive you I’m gonna let you off the hook. You’re still going to hell. But I’m gonna forgive you. And then maybe some day, if you agree with me about everything, and you think the same way as I do about everything, and maybe if you if you subscribe to my religion, which is the only one right religion, then maybe you can go to Heaven too, but I doubt it.”

 

That’s kind of like the old-fashioned kind of forgiveness because it makes separates real and it makes subjects and objects real. And we’ll see as we go along that it also makes sin real, bodies real, ideas like guilt and fear. It holds those kinds of things in place and actually perpetuates them.

 

The new kind of forgiveness is not like that. The new kind of forgiveness recognizes that there is no separation between anything and so, you’ll find, astonishingly, that when you forgive somebody else, with this new kind of forgiveness, that the one who is really being forgiven is you. And the one who is really gonna benefit is you.

And that’s kinda cool, because in a way it actually encourages you to do it because as you go along you realize that you’re the one who’s getting the benefits from it.

But we need a little bit more of a discussion to really explain why that’s the case. So I’d like to begin by telling you a little bit more about myself.

 

I was born in Salem, Massachusetts. (Don’t read anything into that, by the way.) There were no witches in Salem three hundred years ago. They all moved there in the 1970’s, and it’s a really good tourist thing now.

 

But three hundred years ago, what happened in Salem, as my teachers pointed out in the book, they said that, that was a classic example of the projection of unconscious guilt. And we’re actually going to see as we go along, why that’s the case.

 

But in a nutshell somebody else has to be found who is the problem. Somebody else has to be found who is the blame for the situation. And that’s what projection really is. It’s not my fault; it’s your fault. You’re the guilty party, and if we look throughout the world we can see it at work all the time. We can see it at work in individual relationships. We can see it at work in international relationships. It’s always somebody else who is the problem. It‘s always somebody else’s fault.

 

You know, so the terrorists know that we are the cause of their problems. and that we deserve to die. And we know that the terrorists are the cause of our problems. And the democrats know that the republicans are the cause of the problem. And the republicans know that the democrats are the cause of the problem. And the democrats don’t know that if they don’t forgive the republicans in this lifetime, they’re gonna be republicans.

So it’s like, you know, you have this whole shifting of the blame going on from the moment that we’re born to moment that we die. And there’s a reason for that. There’s a very important reason why people feel compelled to have that kind of projection of blame and guilt in their lives.

 

But to get back to my story; I was born in Salem and my mother was a virgin. (She just wasn’t very good at it.) And I was born with scoliosis. I was born two months premature, which was unusual, you know, for someone like that to live because I was less than three pounds. And back in those days, babies who were that small they didn’t live very often so they just kind of like stuck me in an incubator and turned me in the corner and said, you know, “good luck kid.”

 

And I had this scoliosis and I didn’t find out about that severe curvature of the spine until I was thirty-one years old. We didn’t have much money. We were poor and didn’t have health insurance and back in those days people who didn’t have any money or didn’t have health insurance, they didn’t get very good health care.

 

And it’s nice to see that things don’t change.

 

Eventually when I was thirty-one years old, I found out that I had this scoliosis and it explained a lot to me because I remembered that it just made a lot of things make sense. Like, when I was a teenager I would sit there and I didn’t feel like doing anything. I’d just sit there in front of the TV watching it and I’d just be kind of blah. And I was depressed, not that anybody cared back in those days, I mean, you know, they’d say,

“What do you mean, depressed? What are you talking about? Get a job.”

 

But now a days everybody’s depressed. And everybody’s on medication. It’s very much a part of our culture, because back then nobody cared about depression.

I would see all of my friends going out, and they’d be getting jobs and they’d be having a good time and they’d be getting girls. You know, I’d be sitting there, doing nothing, missing out on everything, just kinda like blah. And my parents were very worried about me, and they made me feel different, and made me feel like I didn’t fit in. And that’s right up the ego’s alley. (We’ll be explaining what the ego is as we go along too.)

 

But the ego wants us to feel different. It wants us to feel guilty. It wants us to feel bad. It wants us to feel left out in some way, and I did. I certainly did. And fortunately for me I was very lucky because when I was a teenager this musical group came over from England. They we called The Beatles. And I remember going into a music store when I was a teen- ager and somebody put on a record.

 

I know that they don’t have records anymore, but they let you put on records back in those days and listen to some of the music. And somebody put on a record by the Beatles and I heard this guitar work by George Harrison. (He was my first false idol.) And I heard this guitar work and it sent shivers up and down my spine. And when I heard that, I knew what I wanted to do. I knew what I was gonna be. I knew I was gonna be a guitar player.

 

And actually, I did become a guitar player. And I became a pretty good guitar player. I wasn’t great, because to be great at anything you have to have a lot of drive and ambition and energy and put a lot into it. And I didn’t have that, but I did have some good musical talent and I was able to make myself sound good, and eventually I became a successful professional guitar player.

 

But when it came time to graduate from high school I had kind of like a dilemma because I didn’t want to go into college. I hated school. I couldn’t understand how they could make such fascinating subjects boring. But they did, and I didn’t really wanna go to college. And at the same time, there was this thing going on called the War in Viet Nam, and I really didn’t want to go to Viet Nam.

 

I understand that this situation today is very bad in the international arena, but back then there were like 100 men getting killed every week in Viet Nam. That doesn’t even count the ten times that many who were getting wounded and maimed. (It’s like they forget about them.)

 

So I wasn’t into that and at the same time, I didn’t have any big political convictions, at that time. I just wanted to play my guitar. And fortunately for me, this guy became president of the United States. His name was Richard Nixon and I hated him. But he did for me one of the biggest favors that anybody’s ever done. He switched over to this thing called the “Draft Lottery System.”

 

Now, people now a days, they don’t have to worry about that, Although, you never know, they could always bring it back if they wanted to. But the way the draft lottery system works is they draw your birthday, like it’s the lottery. And they have a drawing for your year. And if your birthday comes up in the first 122 dates drawn or so, say in that top one third, then you’re getting drafted. But if it comes up in like in the middle one third, say from 122 to 244, it’s kinda iffy. You can’t be sure. But if you come up in the bottom one third, like from 244 to 366 then you have like no chance of getting drafted.

 

So I’m praying…the old-fashioned way, (and we’re gonna practice the new-fashioned way in a while) but I’m praying the old-fashioned way.

I’m praying,

 

“Please God, please have my number come up near 300 or so, so I don’t have to worry about getting drafted.”

 

So they had the lottery drawing for my year and they drew my birthday, which is March the 6^th. They drew it and my number came up 296. And because of that I was free. I didn’t have to worry any more about being drafted and I didn’t have to go to college and get a deferment, you know, which would have kept me out of the draft, and I didn’t have to worry about any of that.

 

I was free to just play my guitar and have a good time and live happily ever after. Right? Well, that’s not the way that things work in this world. In fact if you solve a problem in this world, then what happens is, you get another problem. That’s the way it’s set up. From the moment that we’re born ‘till the moment that we die we will be faced with an endless series of problems.

 

And the reason for that is, so that our mind will be distracted “out there” onto the screen. And we will keep our attention focused out there, in the world. And the reason for this is, so that we won’t look where the real answer is, which is within and within the mind.

 

So, we’re kind of like set up to have our attention focused out there and we think the answers are out there. It’s like they used to say on the X Files:

“The truth is out there.” Except the problem is, the truth is not out there. What’s out there is just a smoke screen.

 

An analogy I like to use, because you know, those of you who have read my book, you know that I like to go to the movies. In fact that’s my hobby. I love to go to the movies. And when I go to the movies, I want to forget that it’s not real. So I go into the movie, and I forget that it’s not real and my attention is diverted to the screen.

 

And I start to react to the screen and I start to get into it. I actually talk to the screen or something, because I get into the story so much that I forget that there’s not really anything important going on, on the screen. That where the movie is really coming from is hidden and there’s this projector in the back of the theater and I’m not supposed to think about that.

 

I’m supposed to forget about that. And what I’m seeing is coming from this projector but it’s hidden from me.

And if I really want to change what’s on the screen, if I really want to have an impact instead of, you know, messing around with the screen, which is just an effect, what I really have to do is go back to the cause.

 

And the cause is this projector, but the projector is hidden. But if I could change what was in the projector then that would change everything else.

Because now I’d be going to where a real impact could be made, which is in the projector instead of just fooling around with the screen. Which, even if I could change what was on the screen it would just be temporary. It would just be a temporary fix at most and it wouldn’t have any lasting impact.

 

But if I could go back and get inside the projector and change what’s there, I could have a lasting impact on what’s on the screen. And that’s the difference between fooling around with the effect, which is what all of us do, almost all of our lives, and most people never really get into the projector, and be able to have this kind of lasting change which is a permanent change because now you’re going back to the cause. And one of the themes that we’re gonna have in our talk here is that it’s very important to deal with the cause instead of the effect.

 

In fact, A Course In Miracles says that this is a course in cause and not effect. And it’s very important to be able to get back to where there’s real power, which is in the cause instead of the effect.

 

And another one of the things which we’ve already mentioned is that it’s very important to seek spiritual experience rather than staying stuck in intellectual concepts. And the way to get to experience is through the application of what you know.

 

And on that note I might add, that it’s very important, because of that, to find a good spiritual discipline that you can stick with for a while. And it doesn’t really matter what it is. It could be Buddhism, it could be of lot of things, it could be A Course In Miracles. But Buddhism and A Course In Miracles are really good spiritual training systems. And what they do is that they train the mind to think along a different line.

 

And that’s absolutely vital because right now the mind judges automatically. It’s like a machine. People don’t realize how mechanical their thinking is and how automatic their judgment is. The mind is very much like a survival machine run by the ego. And what A Course In Miracles wants to do is actually take the mind, retrain it, all the way from the point to where it judges automatically to a condition to where it will forgive automatically.

 

And that’s not just a little change. That’s a very big change.

But in order to accomplish something like that, you have to train the mind and have some kind of a spiritual system that you can actually stay with for a long time. That’s why A Course In Miracles says that,

“An untrained mind can accomplish nothing.”

 

So it’s very important of it to have something that can train the mind to that level of accomplishment so that you can actually change the way that you look at everything in the world.

 

So, for my next problem in my life what I cooked up was that I started to drink. And then I started to drink some more. And then I started to smoke a lot of grass. And that pretty much covers the 1970’s.

 

And I knew that that wasn’t a good thing. I knew that I wasn’t being a “good boy”. That that wasn’t working for me. I really didn’t know what to do about it. I was not religious. I’ve never been religious. What I did, eventually though, in the late 1970’s, as a way of finding some way to deal with this drinking thing, was that I decided that I was gonna become a “Born Again Christian”.

 

And actually, I did become a “Born Again Christian”. And it wore off after a little while. Then I tried it again. I was actually born again a couple of times in the late 1970’s. The good thing about that was that I read the Bible. And that was really very interesting, that experience of reading the Bible. But there were problems with it.

 

You know, I found things in the Bible that I could agree with. Like it would say things like, “God is love.” You know, that made sense to me. At one point the Bible says that “God is perfect love” and that made perfect sense to me.

 

The only problem is that you look someplace else in the Bible and He’s like a killer. He’s getting even with people and He’s got all this stuff going on. All this wrathful vengeful stuff and I couldn’t reconcile that. It didn’t make any sense to me. How could God be perfect love on one day and be like a killer the next day? So it like almost depended on what kind of mood He was in.

 

And so I couldn’t really stick with that. I couldn’t stay with organized religion. It just didn’t make sense to me. But I did notice that when I read the words of Jesus in the Bible, stuff like The Sermon on the Mount, and all the stuff about love and forgiveness, that that rang true for me. And it’s more than that that, as I said, it wasn’t a religious thing. It was a personal thing. It was like I felt like I knew Him. And, you know, I felt like there was some kind of connection.

 

I didn’t know what it was but I felt like He was my friend and that I could count on Him and that I could talk to Him and that He would like help me. And I never really understood why until it was explained to me much later. But I always felt like He was my friend and that I could depend on Him and I could talk to Him. And even though I didn’t stay with organized religion, I never gave up on that relationship that I felt with Jesus. I always stayed with that and the magnitude of it would be revealed to me as I went along in my spiritual life.

 

And fortunately for me, (because I went back to drinking), fortunately for me what happened was this thing came over from California to the Boston area. It was called the EST Training. And I did this thing called The EST Training, and it turned out to be a very powerful experience in my life. And there were a lot of similar ideas in EST that you would find in A Course In Miracles. Because it’s very much about taking responsibility for your life.

 

There’s this famous workbook lesson in A Course In Miracles that says,

 

“I am not a victim of the world I see.”

 

And that’s an idea that you would find also in EST. And EST does not exist any more but it was a very powerful experience for me at that time. And that was also when I had what I would describe as my first “mystical” type experience. I remember that they put me up on the stage in front of the audience and you’re supposed to look out at the audience. And when I looked out at the audience, all these people, it was like they were moving in slow motion. It was like they looked different. They were moving kind of like in a herky-jerky manner. And the experience that I had that’s associated with that, (because when you have these kinds of experiences you also have an intuition as to that they mean) and when I saw that, it was like I was the one who was doing that.

 

It was like now, time and space were not something that was being done to me, it was something that was being done by me. It was like it was coming from me instead of at me. It was like I was the cause of it now, instead of being at the effect. And that experience didn’t last too long, but it was the first of what turned out to be an endless series of mystical experiences, usually very visual, in my life and they would continue to this very day, all these years.

 

I remember in the 1980’s when I would go to bed at night and close my eyes, it would be almost like watching a movie. I would see like whole scenes presented to me, in color, sometimes even with sound. And it was like I was watching events that occurred in previous lifetimes that I’d had and sometimes I would even be able to connect the person that I was seeing in this movie with people who exist today in my everyday life. You know, I wasn’t asleep. All I had to do is close my eyes. And also in the morning when I was awake, I could kinda lay there in bed with my eyes still closed and see these movies. And I would have all kinds of visual experiences that got stronger and stronger as they went along.

 

And I found that after I did the EST training and took responsibility for my life, that something shifted in my unconscious mind. I didn’t really understand it at the time, but I do know that almost all the mind is hidden from us. It’s like what we see with the body’s eyes. We look out with the body’s eyes and we see the tiny tip of the iceberg. It’s a very small part of the mind. And almost all the mind is like the rest of the iceberg and it’s hidden underneath the surface, and we can’t see it, and we’re not aware of it, and that’s really what runs us.

 

And we don’t know it, and we’re not in touch with it, but that’s where the real decisions are made that have a real impact. And when I did the EST Training, I made some kind of, some kind of a decision at that level, the level of the unconscious mind, which is where the cause is, which is where you can have the real impact. And after that I became almost the opposite of myself. I went from somebody who drank a lot to somebody who didn’t drink at all. I went from a musician who hardly ever worked to being a musician who worked all the time.

 

I started a band with this friend of mine who also did the EST training and before you knew it, within a couple of years, we were working like six nights a week, twice a day on weekends. And I didn’t have too many experiences in the 1970’s. In the 1980’s I made up for it. I lived like almost two decades in one. And I was doing all kinds of things. I was riding in hot air balloons, and I was walking on hot coals, and I was jumping out of airplanes, you know, with a parachute.

 

I was doing all these things, and I met a girl named Karen and got married. She was my type,…female, You know, we had this relationship. Eventually it turned out that we became each other’s best forgiveness lesson and that happens in many relationships. And there’s a good reason for it. And it’s all set up ahead of time. And everything that happens here is something we agreed would happen before we ever appeared to arrive here.

 

And the real question is, “How are we going to look at it?”

What are you going to do with it? Because it’s gonna happen anyway. But how you look at it will completely change your experience of it and that’s where real freedom lies. Not so much in trying to fix what happens or what’s going to happen.