It's so, there's such a high charge of judgment or negativity or just this feeling of wrongness that there was somebody who was wronged or it's just plain wrong and then the mind just kind of goes into this state where it just feels like that forgiveness would be like glossing over something, like over something that was really a crime or really a real offense. So in the workbook of A Course in Miracles Jesus says, your one remaining difficulty is that you believe that you must forgive what is true and real, that you must forgive the true. And when you first read it it's like, what was he talking about you know? And yet he works it into, well actually the truth is true and only the truth is true. It almost sounds like you're back in kindergarten and he's giving you this ABC stuff. What's this? The truth is true and only the truth is true. So he breaks it down. He says, the first part of the statement, the truth is true is real and you have to accept the second part of the statement for the first part to be true. You can't have exceptions and for the truth to be true. The truth is true and only the truth is true. So with difficulties with forgiveness in particular situations like there's a grievance over a particular situation it's like the mind has just adopted a stance where it's saying, oh no, this really happened. There was a real mistreatment that occurred, a real abuse or whatever, a real crime and so on and so forth. And the mind gets just locked into this fixed position where it's like saying, no I will not budge on this particular situation. It could have been different, it could have been better or there needs to be, someone's got to have to make amends. I'm not going to take the first step. They're going to have to, they're going to have to call me, contact me, they're going to have to forgive me before I forgive or it could be any one of those kind of things but it's just the basic lesson where the mind still has made a hierarchy of illusions and therefore denied that they're all equally the same illusion and then it's in this hierarchy it's made some as very negative illusions or unforgivable illusions or whatever, some that it's kind of indifferent about and some that it's like, oh yeah, I can I can let those go and the teachings are that there's no order of difficulty in miracles and there's no hierarchy of illusions that they're all the same and that's why with Jesus it didn't matter whether somebody you know seemed to be blind or deaf or have you know leprosy or they seem to be dead like with Lazarus kind of severe form of sickness, oh he's dead, he's unavailable, he's been in the grave for three days and he's got his grave clothes on and he smells for the high heavens, he's deader than in death, no order of difficulty in miracles, Lazarus come forth you know it's like that's a pretty extreme teaching example actually but that was showing again that it's like with the power of God nothing's impossible you know or if God is with us who can be against us is kind of the way that it was said in the Bible so so those are more extreme cases but but yet like you're saying Sue you come back to okay what do I have what's on my plate to practice with you know I'll tell you a story about the people that brought the course, Helen Shuckman and Bill Thetford, one of the original four is a friend of mine, Judy Scotch and she told me about the day that Bill Thetford made his transition or seemed to leave this earth, he was one of the first two course and miracle students on the planet, Helen and him, they went along taking down the notes and you know doing this shorthand and getting taking down the course and Jesus kind of at some point after they'd done a number of chapters Jesus you have to study the notes oh study the notes oh yeah it's like you ask for a better way you ask for another way study the notes so Bill did he he actually became quite a demonstration is over the years after he retired from his profession and really worked with the course but uh Judy was telling me Judy Scotch was saying that she had invited Jerry Gimpulski and and Bill to come up for lunch and Bill was down in Southern California La Jolla or San Diego so they were supposed to be up there like around noon for lunch and she prepared the meal she was all ready for him and everything and noon time came they weren't there she was very angry one o'clock came two o'clock three o'clock four o'clock she was furious she had prepared this meal and they were probably just having a bunch of holy encounters having a ball together coming up the coast of California but by the time they finally got there and whatever it was she said late afternoon she was so angry she said she heard heard one of them coming up and it was Jerry Gimpulski he came in you know first and she's like where have you been do you see a table over there you know I've prepared lunch and you you guys are more than late you know and didn't call and this and she said and where's Bill and Jerry said well he's coming up the steps behind me but he is so happy and high that it's I don't know if you'll he'll he can hardly keep his feet on the ground he's like Fred Astaire you know with Ginger Rogers just dancing around and so she was like ah so when he came in the door she kind of had her hands ready like this like just in strangle mode like really to get him she was really angry at it and but he was like all over the room because he was so happy he was just telling about his miracles and dancing around the room she was like following around she's but you can't stay angry that somebody is just in pure joy and how do you stay angry at somebody's just joy so then Bill finally after they had their meal and everything you know Bill said well I have forgiven my last relationship and she's like you know like I know you I know you intimately she knew all of his grievances they talked about them all all of them maybe I don't know how many just bunches of them and so he insisted that he had forgiven his last relationships and she saw I'm gonna go down one by one and see every single one because she knew them all what about this one no no it's that he would tell the story about this one and it ticked off all of his relationships and she knew that there was like the ace in the hole there was one that it was a woman that he had loved when he was much younger that was unrequited love that she never seemed to love him back and he was always heartbroken about her and that was kind of like the thorn the one situation that was always down there for him so when she got through all the rest she went ah but what about her and you know I brought her up and he said well you know I called her up you called her yes and I invited her we went out we shared a weekend you met with her yes and well we just laughed and it was oh I could see it was all my own faulty perception of her she was flabbergasted that he had forgiven his last relationship she was just struck and then the next morning they were supposed to go to some kind of conference together and it was a beautiful sunny day and he just said he was gonna walk he wanted to walk instead and she said don't be ridiculous you know it's a good pretty good distance and you can ride with me in my car and he insisted and he went off walking in the sunshine and they found that he had laid his body aside right next to the sidewalk on the grass on the on the route that was his transition the body gently laid aside like taking off a sweater or something you know which is a very powerful story you know even for students of the course of miracles that that you know he just basically put it into practice and he had to face that situation where he was making the exception and then finally just go no I can't be that this has the power to hold me back from my goal and so you know it's like you just open to it and then through circumstances or there's always a way that's that's something happens it gives you that opportunity to kind of see the lesson you know to to really feel the love and the joy and the connectedness that was just covered over by the grievance because the grievance was just another ego perception that was just waiting to be released you know there was no there was no salinity to it it was not really what it seemed it just seemed to be solid but it was just another grain of sand there was something in the news about a month ago a month and a half ago you probably heard about it in the case in Austria where a father had imprisoned his daughter yes and they had so she had seven children because and that's hard to forgive I mean I can say I can glibly say oh I forgive that but doing it in here is I think it's beyond me and I don't see how Jesus could forgive that forgive that even yeah I remember when I was at Germany they were talking about that that case and they said oh they put it on the news it's like it's everywhere this man's face and you know and this and this and this and it seemed to stir up a lot of things for a lot of people there was a time where Jesus was talking with Helen and basically I think Helen had a huge resistance to forgiving something and basically it seemed like a mountain like she came up to this solid almost like a mountain of granite that was in front of her and looking to go up over the mountain just seemed impossible and even to walk around the mountain it just seemed like a huge mountain and Jesus basically said come and take my hand and we'll go through the mountain you know almost like just pierced through it it seems very solid but yet it's just as flimsy as all the other illusions it will it will fade away we can pass right through it if we're joined together it's kind of the symbol of being joined and and I definitely have had that I've had three revelatory experiences in my life where I was doing eye gazing and the figure of ground the three-dimensionality collapsed and then this like where the figure would be the outline this blazing light started to pour through and then the whole world just completely disappeared into that light it was like three very very direct experiences of how flimsy this this little film is it's like a movie it's very very thin and yet it just seems when your mind is in kind of really deep into into the belief it just feels like it's solid and and the characters seem very real in it another time I had a friend who was like in in Florida who he was married and they were married couple and their daughter I think she was adopted or she was the daughter of his wife that he had married but still his daughter had been murdered and that they had caught the man and they he went through a trial was put into prison and my friend Jap he he basically he had had a Corsair Miracle Center that he founded in her is his daughter's name Lauren Quinn Center and he'd he'd hosted attitude new healing sessions Corsair Miracle sessions for years in this center that was named after his daughter had been murdered and then at some point he was guided to go to the prison where the man was and face the man and then the Spirit said to him now I want you to I want Jap I want you to write a book and I want you to ask this man to do the illustrations because the man was very artistic to put the illustrations in the book about forgiveness the man that murdered his daughter and and he did he he ended up inviting the man the man drew the illustrations and it was such a symbol of healing and forgiveness you know in his life so I actually did a gathering once or twice I think down there in the Lauren Quinn Center actually in the center named after the daughter but that was years ago that was probably in the maybe on 1992 quite a number of years ago so I went back probably 20 or maybe about 10 over 10 years later the center was gone I went to visit Jap and with all the healing Corsair Miracles for giving the man who murdered his daughter all this and that that had happened I met him and his wife had met another man a younger man and had moved off to Greece and when I walked in this time on him he was he was like I can't believe it all these years I've worked for the Corsair Miracles I feel angry I feel resentful I feel jealous you know I feel hurt I feel victimized you know and after all the healing that I've gone through it's almost like I've gone nowhere David I just the rage is there it was like somebody had stabbed him in the heart with a with a dagger and was emotionally he'd been married to her for 32 years and they'd gone through all that together and then she married she went off to to Greece with this younger man it was like somebody was turning the dagger in his heart so he looked at me and I said I said oh Jap I said he said what what do you have to tell me I said well first of all people are not people first of all I told him that I said she still loves you after everything you've been through to think that somebody can just walk out of your life they don't love you that's that's not the truth at all she still loves you and second of all people are not people people just represent our thoughts and so I said so all your wife was doing was representing your thoughts nothing more than that so I said tell me some more well he was about 10 years older than her he was starting to wrinkle and she was getting facelifts and you know a nip attack here I said ah she was just acting out your fear of aging that's all it was and and then going off to be with the younger and I said all it was perfect you see I was all I could he was just like oh my god give me that dagger you know let's get let's get busy here we got we got some joy to find so it's like so she was just acting it out people are just thoughts they really aren't real people they just reflect thoughts in our consciousness so your fear of aging and your fear of death she acted out and and then I said and what happened to her and he said what I said she moved to Greece like she like she left you aware I said that's a sign you know a beautiful sign your fear of aging and your fear of death moved away you know he was like looking at me like oh my god like just giving him a little reinterpretation here I got that dagger out and then I said it's like you know what is it that you feel so sad about he says well it's like I'm lonely I thought we would just be growing old and white together like on golden pond you know movie and we would just be in the rocking chairs watching the sunset over the lake just together and everything and this just shattered my picture of of my retired life with my soulmate and everything and I said yeah I said but I said you know he said and I'm lonely in this house it has all these memories and this and this I said yeah I don't know that you need such a big house all by yourself and he was getting all concerned about having to go back to work and how he would manage financially I said yeah I think you maybe you just need to lighten up so he said yeah I think maybe I could sell the house so I went off for a walk and I met two people on a walk that were like looking for a house and I came back I mean I moved quick with the boys get the knife out and let's move forward in a hurry let's get get the wound healed and so he was like whoa and I said yeah they're interested in the house you might want to talk to him and then he said he had this had happened a little while ago so he had this woman that he was kind of interested in I said well we should have a big gathering here at your house while you've still got your house and so having done this healing center he knew all these people but he hadn't been in touch with any of them so me and his new friend he called his girlfriend and they called all these different people we had this big gathering in this big house happiness joy beaming faces photographs his his son came you know all his family members came it just we just lit that place up you know like a big celebration and everything I said here how's that handle your loneliness he's like whoa like how few miracles there like we had the whole place and then he was like hmm well but I don't know what I'm going to do with my time and I said well what what kind of things have you always wanted to do but you never really gave yourself the opportunity to do and he said well I I I do like to write and he said I have written some fiction stories short stories and so he showed me one of them and it was a total miraculous story about a it was about a casino and there was this character it was like the Holy Spirit character there was helping them all get out of their addictions to money and greed and everything and helping them it was it was like a parable he writes these fiction stories that are really like parables for awakening but he never published them which I got the book or got one of them put it on the web for him and you know he just he loved to do that and he had a great skill for that but he just had never given himself permission to do it I said oh you have great ability for this you should do more of this so I was there a few more days he started to get more interested in this girlfriend and she came he was there at the party and everything since then he's married her so you know his fulfillment he just continued on in life he didn't like get really sad and just go into the grave with how his soulmate left him and this and that and at the very end I said he was I think from Mississippi a southern part of the United States and he had a southern draw and I looked at him one day and I said what is it if you could do anything with your life what is it that you would do and he looked at me he's probably I guess at the time in the 70s with his face starting to wrinkle up and he just said in his slow southern Mississippi draw go fishing go fishing he wanted to go fishing and I went that's your meditation he just wanted to put the the boots on and the rubber things you know him and a group of buddies just go out there and they just stand in the stream let the stream roll by just out there losing track of time and space that's his meditation he didn't have to be in yoga postures and work on his breathing and all this stuff that was his meditation to go fishing and so I said you should do that you really should but that was just an example again about how for him he he had gone through so much forgiveness but he was beating himself up because of this hatred and this anger and jealousy and envy that came up with this situation but again it was like no no no no no no let's let's not go there you know you've come too far I'm joining with you now to look at at the blessing of this even though it doesn't seem like a blessing and right now it will end from this higher perspective you know you'll be able to see it and what joy it is for me to be able to go with to meet with people who I have people sometimes they call me and they're crying when they call me and they're laughing 10 minutes later it's just it's totally miraculous we've had some of those conversations even so you know the power of the miracle when you can have such a turnaround from what seems to be such a dark state where everything feels like the world is closing in on you to just popping through like you pierce through the clouds and you're back in the sunshine again and and the more we teach it the more we let the miracle just extend through us then of course we become very convinced that if everything is love and a call for love and we learn to recognize the calls for love instead of perceiving them as a tax we actually see them as calls for love we let the love pour through us as an answer to the call for love and then you can't extend something that you don't already have I mean that's how the Holy Spirit convinces us that we are love is by extending love through us over and over it washes away the ego it washes away every kind of limitation that we have every unworthy thought that we've ever had about ourselves just gets washed away over and over you know we keep teaching what we would learn just to keep gently just let it happen or have a break so if there's any more questions you'd like to hear it over we started the thing that we the vision board and it's funny when you're saying about cracking the opening and seeing the light because it was actually a conversation that we had we'd started to do these visuals just aboard and at the beginning we just said we'd pick images that made us feel good and you know it was interesting because a few of us did it together in a kind of a fun arrangement at the house and we said we'd all put our own ideas together and the interesting thing was one of the people had four things on their board or maybe five and they were very specific exactly detailed and then some of us had loads and loads and loads and loads and loads of little images and there were all kinds of different things that were from scenery to things that we saw as beauty or joyous or laughter or people jumping for joy or big smiles and there was a couple of fun ones all right and a bit of fashion in there as well and we were actually having this bit of a debate afterwards to say because it was so many different interpretations I have to say my own was very busy lots and lots of different images and we were questioning ourselves as to would it have been the right decision now there is not obviously no right or wrong but would it have served us better to have had five images that were very very clear or was it actually better to have loads of different things that just made you feel good and talking about the cracking over the head we sat down afterward we did it and the following day he says you know actually because you spent all this time and merged in all these fun things that you absolutely loved it felt like something had cracked open and the light had come in so we were having this debate anyway amongst us so you can see the light on it but we were delighted to take sides and go back and tell how wrong they were yeah the cracking open because it's like it's kind of how it goes where where you go for goals and aims in this world and and there seems to be some fulfillment it's definitely part of a training of the mind seemingly to just practice clearing and opening to feelings of joy and happiness but the forms the specific forms whether there seems to be many or even a few but the forms are always the bringers of the answer to prayer that in the sense of using symbols that are still meaningful to the perceiver so that's why some people see you know angels or the mother Mary appear in in India it might be you know an elephant or a goat or something like this it's something completely different but so the prayer is like the the specific forms are the bringers in form to the emotional experience that the mind is asking for and so that's important once you begin to see that you see that that's always whatever you seem to experience in this world is always answering the prayer of the heart or you know how it's that God God knows the prayer of your heart before a word is spoken before you even utter the words and say I want this or please help me with this or that and this is good because you can clear on cause and effect that you start to see that the images and the objects whether there's a few of them or a lot of them are are part of this tapestry of images and symbols that the Spirit is using to lead you to guide you to that innermost spot in your heart which is just pure joy and happiness and contentment it's like step by step using the symbols to take you in deeper beyond the symbols so in that context you can understand everything much more clearly that whenever we pray for specifics which like in the the movie the secret and the vision boards and so forth when people had a lot of symbols of getting exactly the house they had envisioned or exactly the partners so forth but whenever you do this imaginary thing where you're trying to imagine they imagine something that you want it's still looking at the script and saying out of all of these possibilities I want to focus in on or narrow down on this particular object or outcome or event that I really want to draw into my awareness whereas the deeper you go spiritually you start to realize that that the script is written and that the idea of trying to pick out a specific thing that you want is like picking something out of the past and drawing it out and focusing on it saying I want to have this again in the future which actually maintains the wheel of imaginary time and Krishna Murthy was probably one of the great beings of our of the recent century who who talked about that whenever you desire something specifically you like you're anticipating it and you're wanting it to come forward into your awareness in the future and that's how the time the movement of time unfolds is wanting the past to be repeated in some way that is desirable thinking of course you know what's best and what is most desirable so that's how the perpetuation of time goes on and eventually you start like with my friend Les you know you start getting more and more to the sense of okay I want the state of mind that's what's my I'm going to use the power of my mind for I want a state of peace or joy or freedom or happiness or however you think enough the more when we began the process which was selecting the images versus placing the images actually onto the board there was a huge shift because you started off with loads and loads of things that were maybe more about material items and actually when it came to putting the things on the board there were more about feelings experiences you know like you might have an image of a person on a mountain you know with the clouds and the expansiveness and that would attract you more than you know when I actually came down to it we started with loads of photographs of things and they're the things that ended up getting shifted there was a couple of things but it was much more about the actual experience and the freedom and the sensation of joy and the sharing and the that type of thing was more poignant when it came to actually making a decision about placing this it was quite an interesting process in itself between where it began and where it finished and now it's just a pretty thing to look at you know now it's just something that actually you get a bit of joy of looking at and if you're in a moment of disturbance with yourself or out of alignment with yourself when you look at it in one of the images that I had that's central which is interesting because when we placed them we did it quite quickly because the kids were coming in and there was pictures everywhere and glue and glitter and we're thinking the kids are going to have a field day and it was quite quick but I noticed that the hand there's a beautiful hand which looks like a spiritual image that's in the center of the board and the actual layout of it is quite miraculous when you look at it as a whole because it never was never originally in my head that that was it was going to be a process of choice but it ended up being something completely different but now it's just something when you're having those moments you look at it you think that really gives me a lovely feeling it makes me feel good and it doesn't give me because there's not all this material stuff it doesn't give me any of that jarring of oh I haven't achieved this or there's none of that experience look at it it's more about oh it feels good to look at this it has a a nice calming effect yeah like a reminder of the experience and a reminder of what I'm chasing you know not what I'm choosing so that if there's something that's out of balance it's like hey this is what I'm choosing this makes me feel good this is where I'm going to continue to you know follow in that but it was a fun and interesting experience and everyone and doing it together as a group made it a lot of laughs you know it was a lot of fun yeah yeah it's beautiful beautiful example and it does seem that people open up and progress I know I just recently heard that they for decades they've been surveying Americans on what's what their top priority is and it's always been one answer money money money money and this year they said for the first time something took the number one spot away from money the first time in decades free time free time just the sound of it you know freedom to use time in a helpful way you know it's like a movement away from this kind of obsession with material things and getting and so forth so you know it's those are all just symbols of like spiritual evolution where oh yeah we've tried we've tried it with a lot of the toys and everything and now you know we're getting we're getting zooming in to to what's really meaningful what's really truly valuable what we want to you know hold on to and our awareness I think Jesus said with all that getting get understanding yeah if you understand yeah yeah peace and understanding Jesus says peace and understanding go together and cannot be found apart so so it's not the understanding of the world in terms of how things work or analytical understanding but but that wisdom you know that wisdom that's that's in our hearts it's all knowing this knows all the answers and has always known them that's where we find the peace it's like you you really do start to just let go yield away all those associations of what you think you know what anything means and I've had so many of those experiences it seems more and more surreal or feel very lighthearted but but you just don't value and hold on to those old meanings anymore you just your mind's making way for the new like Jesus says you know you can't put you know new wine into old wineskins you can't keep using these old paradigms and judgments and categories that have been around for centuries if we're going to really experience consistent joy so the the old just seems to fall away even with relationships I mean I think you know we've always thought of relationships in terms of bodies frequency of contact people will say yes but how much quality time do we spend together you know those have been kind of our barometers but now it's like the mankind and the whole human race is ready for an evolution into what Jesus calls holy relationship which is all based on giving and extending and it's not based on getting or owning or possessing it's not it's not like a co-dependency it's dependency on God for everything where you fall in love with God and then therefore you fall in love with with everyone based on that and it's a very different way of of looking and perceiving it's like like there's a there's a family therapist in the United States named John Bradshaw and he he did he drew it out one time as a mathematical equation which was on the blackboard one half plus one half equals one that's kind of the old paradigm you know find your other half find your soulmate find the one that will complete you will give you that one that wholeness and John Bradshaw said well the only problem is it's not a plus sign in the equation it's a multiplication sign one half times one half equals one fourth you feel you feel worse than ever in that kind of paradigm you feel like you're lacking now you feel dependent shaky unworthy you know you don't have stability so he he said it is a multiplication sign but then he he erased it and he put in one times one equals one you've got to come from a state of wholeness you've got to come from a state of knowing that you're loved and connected that you have all this love to give and share then you meet a partner who reflects that and you both come from a place of giving and sharing not give and take or you know trying to balance things out you know as if we both have to work hard and we both have to make the best of this and this and that to more of just coming from a place of wholeness and seeing that wholeness reflected around you so I think you know of all places that's really where the paradigm shift from the ego's use of setting this world up on specialness and trying to find fulfillment and special love Jesus spends nine chapters in the book talking about special hate relationships and special love relationships and there's no topic that gets more words or more attention than that of relationships so it's like in traditional spirituality it was like emphasizing meditation and service perhaps now Jesus is saying okay we can bring relationships into the realm of spirituality but you need careful training because the ego wants to use the relationships for its purposes to keep you sleeping to keep you guilty you know to keep you feeling like you you gave and you gave and you gave and never got anything back there must have been something faulty going on in your mind because giving and receiving are the same so if you feel like you gave and gave and didn't receive what you were giving it's not the partner's fault it's the perception it's it's what's going on in your mind that has you still looking to receive something and if you look at the prayers of Saint Francis and Mother Teresa and so forth there's always an emphasis on the giving and the extending you know make me an instrument of your peace you know I want to love rather than to be loved you know instead of looking to be loved looking for a partner or for people to adore you and love you and this and that to get into the the giving aspect of just for the joy of it just giving giving giving like the flower gives its fragrance you know it doesn't tell the wind where to blow the fragrance blow it to that cow but not to that goat or you know it doesn't it doesn't tell the wind how to use the gift it just gives the gift and lets the wind carry you know to wherever and I think that's just in human relationships that's just a very new kind of concept because it's like oh no I will direct the fragrance to where it's to go and you know and there's a lot of expectations that come in with that and people can feel quite locked in in that way so sometimes a goat gets frightened you know it's like why are we why are these things coming to earth yeah yeah that's what I've seen in in that you know when I've tried to demonstrate in my life that kind of love and give me the freaked out nature sometimes people accept things and they're they're quite delighted and then they're just wondering what's the catch yeah yeah you know yeah and maybe sometimes with me maybe there is a catch maybe I am trying to get something but a lot of the times I wasn't but they still were wondering yeah and that time showed them that there wasn't but yeah it was interesting again yeah it's quite a it's quite an art in the sense of Gary Fromm wrote a book years ago the art of loving it's like because the spirit knows what's best in every situation we're back to that inner listening and being tuned into the spirit because until unless you're tuned in then yeah sometimes the most you can offer someone is like a smile I mean that's an absolute maximum if you go beyond a smile you go over to have them they're like rigid like there's too much fear and that's why it's so important to become more and more intuitive because the spirit knows what is best in every situation when the ego tries to get in there and and oh I know what's best here then it's you get mixed results oh yeah very funny yeah we've got a sort of philosophy like in Freemason which is based on something that Charles Lamb had said do good do good by stealth and be found out by accident and a lot of people actually find that quite difficult to cope with give example I mean I know my thing is I like to sort of leave a coach on people's desks and not tell them I don't know anything like that but a friend of mine said no I've got them the same way and I was like why how does that make that act any better for you because you've received gratitude back if you don't if you don't for the right reasons you don't need gratitude all right that's exactly the same thing I think yeah yeah it's very much like the bible about don't let the left hand know what the right hand's doing I mean it's it's the same principle or I think in twelfth step programs they they emphasize anonymous and anonymity because the ego just wants to jump on to this idea of giving oh yeah and then giving for for recognition for attention you know it will just bring in a whole bunch of other motives or the giving in fact I I participated years ago in a in a project called uh it was like a crisp the holiday project or whatever which was the slogan was you are the gift so even though we would go to nursing homes and in the hospitals and so on and so forth to sit and talk with people or to bring them cookies or take animals in for them to to pet or whatever it was like the slogan was always remember you are the gift who you are your state of mind that you share is the gift it's not in whatever you're doing don't get caught up in the task and I kept hearing that from the Holy Spirit all along it would be like David it's the the message is important not the messenger and uh so when I first was starting to do this and and the miracles were pouring through me a friend of mine wanted me to speak at a big national course of miracles conference in the United States and the director man setting the whole thing up said could you send a resume and some people around me were like laughing they were going resume you don't even have a resume and he said could you send a photo they said you use all your photos for healing you don't even have any photos hanging around uh and when I did put something together just to send off to him uh to answer his his request it got lost in the mail yeah it was like uh and and the spirit said I reminded me again they said the spirit said you will not have a spiritual career uh that was what I was told again I would not sell anything and I will not have a spiritual career almost like you've done that before do you want to wake up or are you going to go back to this thing again so even the game of writing books and doing publicity and you know flying around and blah blah doing talk shows and this and this and this it's very sneaky you can it can turn into a profession again and before you know it you've got you've got something to do an image to maintain uh something that's got to be protected uh something that's expected of you or that you expect others you know I've heard people say well I can't come there unless I've there's 50 people there or I can't come without sufficient numbers and this and that that's that's when you're getting into a spiritual career you know the egos just hopped right on the old spiritual journey and said great let's turn it into a career and you know and and for me one time I was asked to write an article for a magazine called on course which was had a wide distribution of Course in Miracles magazine and the man my friend John Mundy who was the editor said write a write an article please and then send in a photograph again and my friend said you don't have photographs you use them all in your healing process of bringing up all your intensity and and then you just threw them all away once once they actually didn't have a charge on any of the photographs it's like no purpose for them anymore and I said I know somebody snapped a picture of me and my friend Beverly when we were hopping in a car in front of before one of our trips so I sent that photo in and it just came out as figure ground black and white in the magazine you couldn't see the facial expressions you know exactly there was nothing there you couldn't see eyes or nose or anything and again the spirit is like the message the message the article was fine it was just bigger ground you know and I was you know this was early on when I was just working with the course so it was like the spirit was like giving me very strong messages like do not go down these destructive roads truth is simple and you want this experience of it and truth doesn't involve numbers it's not about reaching a threshold of so many people in the world believing something a certain way he said no no truth is here and now treats the truth as an experience that you can open up and have right now you don't have to wait until you cross a threshold or something in the future oh yeah yeah that's the punch line alive and my dad we don't have to think like that anymore it wasn't matter but the answer to me well from the ego's perspective I mean the little child was like the two no no not that bit her and him and I was like sit back into the same but he died instead he went you know if he'd gone and not for guilty that she died I just didn't see a lot like that it's fantastic well that's true there isn't no longer than that except for Solaris yeah Salah the fire was loving yeah humans no the plan was giving the opportunity for the humans but I didn't know that they resolved and think for themselves it didn't feel that way well I mentioned that at the very beginning about him he's chopping chopping chopping and he cuts his finger yeah it was huge so it that scene did come around again where he's chopping chopping chopping he he seems to cut his finger but there's no no blood which was kind of just a little symbol but if it ended there then that would have been fine but why did she came in and like no you genuinely didn't get except for Hollywood you see changing something to make it well she had to deliver her lines that's my point though he was forgiven in the healing yeah but is it because oh people might get that let's have a walk at the end of the stage seriously because I studied I don't need that what's that about I've done that I chop off ends of films too and it reaches the crescendo this is where the juicers came in and said they will get that are we filming the ending they do partially reviews where they bring it shows people when people were tapping up watching this film would change the ending all the time but everything is forgiven that was just so she could deliver her line everything is forgiven in other words it's all it's all forgiven and then we don't have to think like that anymore in other words this still is one trailer or question am I dead am I alive you know but but birth and death are inventions of the ego yeah the ego made up the the realm of time and space it made up the bodies it invented birth it invented death and I was sharing a breakfast the course says the ego will pursue you beyond the grave you can't just die it's like those freddy kruger movies you know that keep coming back and threatening and threatening you know you can't it's never going to stop until you see that silly that that love is all that there is and there could never be an ego that could tell you to be something that you're not you know you can never take it seriously that that there's anything other than love so I that's what I thought was nice about you know we don't have to think like that anymore but but in order to not think like that you just have to give up everything you think you know about everything in the world you know nothing birth and death and bodies and growth and even our concepts of spirituality you know reincarnation that's got to go eventually and then I tell people the course has got to go you've you've got to get to a point where you go look at the course and you go okay out with that too because the truths can't be explained or described it's just it's an experience that's beyond the words and the words are just set almost like a like one of those trampolines that you can just go boing and jump on and then go springing springing beyond them to the to the point where you don't need the words anymore and it does say that in lesson 189 forget this world forget this course and come with open arms unto your God you know it's just a beautiful invitation to go beyond the the symbols and beyond the words and even when we talk about it it's like a holy scripture you know it's like well let's remember he says words are but symbols of symbols twice removed from reality oh that's a good clue about how putting words in their place no matter how poetic and how beautiful they are they're symbols of symbols twice removed from reality so they're they're concrete symbols that represent thoughts which are still symbols which are still twice removed you know it's it's once removed from reality because reality is abstract it doesn't have any form there's no specifics in reality it's just pure love so that's why we're we're using the specifics but we also keep in mind I look forward to the day when I can just say okay thank you book you've served me very well now I can can just shine my light and be the truth not you know have to quote it or anything like that you see yesterday when I said about your own reality you had a different words but I something about your own illusion project your own illusion yeah that's great because then you can enjoy all the stuff with the secret and and you know the Abraham material and on and on there's so much stuff but with but it's kind of more of a catchphrase now it's almost like the next step in human evolution is you create your own reality and then beyond that is oh I projected my own illusion and thank God that there's something greater than the illusion it's waiting for me it's actually instead of me seeking love it's nice to think of it as love is seeking me wow love is seeking me and I know that what it seeks is what it finds loves on a sea commission and it's going to find you and there's nothing you can do you can play hide and seek if you want in time and space but but love is too powerful it's it's it's the only reality there is and it will find you and in the end it's almost like isn't that fun even when you're dating you know when you're being pursued isn't it fun to be copped okay you can have me then imagine that that's what's going on the love is seeking you and finally you go all right you got me I'm yours you know that was a Kenny Loggins song he Kenny Loggins did a song called forever and the very end of the song is always thought I'd be I'd be yours and then the song just goes higher and higher and ends with this glorious crescendo but forever in my life always thought I'd be I'd be yours which is really a song to God kind of saying in the end I'm yours you created me I'm yours and I could never be anything other than yours and it's like that true loyalty in this world you know there's so much about interpersonal loyalty you know our fidelity loyalty trust but those are all just practice grounds for really being loyal to God and how would you be loyal to God but except being happy that God created you happy then the best way to be loyal is to be happy and it's so simple to think oh my God that's what God's will for me is perfect happiness not created me to be happy and when I'm happy I'm honoring God by saying thank you for creating me happy and so it's just that the ego is so frightened of that love that it makes up its own versions of happiness like happiness games but when you follow the games you're never happy I mean they're they're called happiness games but but they don't really make you happy once you have achieved the goal of the happiness game in the world or you think you've got there there's always something back there going maybe I could be more happy which means that it can't be true happiness because you could never be more happy than than you were created that would be impossible so it's just like we try fame and fortune and money and possessions we try interpersonal relationships and children and and even setting up healing centers and and somebody asked me one time well if you're so awake and happy and joyful enlightened how how many enlightened students do you have like I want to quantify enlightenment like five ten fifteen you know what's your quota what have you produced you know how many happy teachers have you produced if you're so happy and I said well it's just it's all one mind it's not really quantifiable in terms of that you know and it goes past all this stuff for centuries about disciples and devotees it's just a state of mind persons don't get enlightened you may think about Buddha or Krishna or Jesus or this and this but but but if you take person personality persona you follow it back to the Latin persona is mask how can you have an enlightened mask I mean that makes no sense to me Buddha was enlightened Jesus was enlightened even you'd have to go beyond the traditional teachings that would say that there's human beings that reached the stage of enlightenment when it's actually the mask never reaches the state of enlightenment and people have been talking now for centuries about the second coming of Christ when is Jesus going to come back they were all excited in the first century it's close he said the kingdom of heaven is in hand first century no second century no third century it's in hand it's in hand no four six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve st. Francis it's the kingdom of heaven it's close 13 14 15 16 you know it's when you forgive the world and you wake up and you see that you are the Christ that's the second coming of Christ it's not that some man is going to come back with long hair and blue eyes and walk on water or walk on the clouds and say come up here with me I will rescue you from the world like some people believe you know they just kind of lift people up in the rapture they'll be sowing or knitting or out in the fields all of a sudden their bodies will just start to go up thank you how many centuries does it take 495 well I'm happy and we but you know it's not going to be like the body is just raising up into the sky it's like you've got to forgive the world do your inner work and accept yourself as the living Christ and then that's the second coming of Christ there really is no first or second but in those terms wouldn't that be of course the second coming of Christ is when when you realize it for yourself that you're the one that's the story of the matrix you are the one you know Neo you rearrange the Neo letters you get one which is what Morpheus his teacher was telling him you're the one and that's what Jesus is telling us in the course you are the living Christ and you've just forgotten it you fall asleep and you're wearing a mask and you're playing small when you're shoot you're vast beyond comparison your magnitude absolute magnitude created as magnitude as God created you so practically speaking I mean we were having an interesting discussion at the breakfast table because I was sharing a parable about I mean if you really want to go into the deepest realm you do have to get into this thing called hypotheticals all of history is hypothetical and all of the future is hypothetical and really we were talking yesterday that the present moment is the only time that there is but to human beings that just sounds very like wishful thinking like sentimentally that sounds good like wow I would love to have my state of mind know that the present moment is all that there is because practically speaking you would have no more problems if you knew that you live only in the present moment time couldn't touch you you know the ego could try to zap you with past guilt and it would be like having a shield where all these arrows come and you've got this armor on you got your present moment armor on all these arrows from the past come fire you clink clink clink clink they can't penetrate the armor then ego tries to fire future worries and concerns clink clink clink clink your armor is too strong because you're so in the present moment that the arrows from the past and the future can't penetrate the armor that's what akritali is talking about with the power of now you know if you really live in the now you are invulnerable invulnerable how's that for a word that describes yourself most people don't use that word even some throughout history might have stopped hitler might have thought he was invulnerable but it proved otherwise napoleon was marching up here through belgium where belgium is in waterloo nope sorry you're not going to rule the world you know the little man in the horse nope stop as far as you go you know in this world no there is no invulnerability in this world there's no person that's invulnerable and even the idea of power when we talk about power like like a president or a dictator or you know you think of eva perone or vita you think of presidents and kings and like rulers Caesar and you can go through history and everything I think we could look at something like well well is political power a really power of course not god didn't create political power there's nothing powerful about politics what about military power nuclear weapons now they're working on star wars shooting missiles out of the sky and and all kinds of high technology they invented some kind of a an invisible ray that they could fire that as human beings feel pain with now but it doesn't permanently harm them it just makes them yeah like it's like a gun that they fire to kind of break up rebellions or yeah you should use with potential rebellions or things like that it's like they keep coming up with new weapons inventing more and more weapons and but military power is an oxymoron too I mean people have always joked that military intelligence is an oxymoron you know that's always been the running joke that that's a contradiction in terms military intelligence but military power


It's a really exciting time to be a neuroethicist because the whole world is getting interested in these topics. I'm Tos Cochran. I'm the Director of Neuroethics at the Center for Bioethics at Harvard Medical School. I'm also an Assistant Professor of Neurology and I work at Brigham and Women's Hospital where I specialize in adult neuromuscular medicine. Neuroethics is a term that's relatively new in the world and it hasn't been fully defined yet. For me it basically describes the intersection of neurology and neuroscience and ethics. So the care of patients who have neurological diseases and can't make decisions for themselves, patients who've had bad brain injuries and may or may not want to continue living in that state. New neuroimaging techniques that can detect consciousness, brain-computer interfaces that may allow some patients who are paralyzed to control a computer or control a prosthesis. Things like artificial intelligence, when computers really become intelligent, will we owe them things like we owe other intelligent beings? Do we have a moral responsibility towards computers that can think? We're going to need to make decisions about how to care for each other when we develop these conditions and we've got these great new technologies that interface with our brains and our minds and raise questions about who we are and who we want to be and I think that's a topic that everybody can get interested in.


something as simple as how much water should I drink every day seems like a very very easy thing not to mess up but I see a lot of these articles in the internet that say you should be drinking this much water or these Instagram are saying everyone should be drinking a gallon of water a day now I have not yet seen an explanation outside of Chinese medicine for why certain people feel thirstier than others I'm not thinking about exercise or exertion or digging ditches out in a tropical climate I'm talking about why some people are fundamentally thirstier than others and I thought this would be a great talking point for this video because there's a very specific reason that many of us see clinically that I don't know that many people are aware of hey guys Dr. Alex Hein author of the health book master the day on Amazon doctor of Chinese medicine now before we jump into this video two very important links the first link is for my free weekly video newsletter it's right below you'll get a free download as well which is for daily rituals that can potentially help you add years to life with traditional Chinese medicine and the second is if you'd like to become a patient of mine locally or online via telemedicine the contact info for my private practice is right below this video so let's go back to this idea of damp versus dry constitutions or even constitution so a person's constitution is what in the old days was the term for basically your genetic predispositions right it's when someone says oh my grandma always had stomach problems and I always have stomach problems or you know when asthma runs in a family line or allergies or eczema and skin conditions it's these kind of things that people say this just runs in my family this is your constitution right your genetic makeup a predisposition that you did not choose based on diet or lifestyle now constitution is an extremely important part of treating a person for chronic health problems because it is the constitution that is the primary thing that dictates what problems a person will be predisposed to when they break down so the person who has always eaten healthy their whole life but has digestive problems it's constitution most likely and not necessarily something environmental in my opinion and experience and when you treat the constitution with formulas or with acupuncture they can go back to eating those things that were allergies or problematic in my experience so this idea of constitution is exceptionally important to understand because people will manifest predictable problems when they break down if you understand their constitution this idea of constitution is very important when it comes to thirst something as simple and seemingly non-diagnostic but I want to point out a few different criteria related to constitution that are helpful to know the first is someone's body temperature right a person's body temperature can change obviously based on their body weight their physical exercise their circulatory capacity cardiovascular health the weather obviously etc but generally speaking you will see family lines of for example thin women predisposed to anemia or to thyroid conditions you will see that run in families and you will see the opposite run in families true where we're a bunch of big boys that are big boned weigh a lot we're big we're red in the face run super hot sweaty warm etc now some of the other factors are appetite and thirst right good appetite or excessive appetite sometimes in Chinese medicine is called stomach heat very very low or not existent appetite is often called stomach cold very important and very different and those often occur with certain constitutions in general two other final factors are complexion and body type people with a rosy red complexion are often more on the warm side of the spectrum and people with a pale power to them ashen kind of like how I am are obviously more on the pale and usually the cold side of the spectrum and then body type is one final way to assess constitution again these are all very generalized aspects okay I would not make a diagnosis of one-to-one on any of these but generally you see these to be true clinically so these are very important to know because these are one of the main factors that predispose people to feeling thirsty or not thirsty and let's talk about why that is in Chinese medicine specifically so when we talk about someone who experiences thirst or no thirst these are very useful clinically at least for an herbalist and it's a very specific reason I want to give you the example of someone that I see quite a lot in my private practice which is the damp cold tendency constitution this person is usually pale faced is usually prone to mucus or phlegm in the throat always clearing the throat after eating sometimes they're just phlemy post nasal drip allergies brain fog this low-grade kind of pressure in their head prone to bloating prone to issues with their bowels these are what Chinese medicine consider dampness these are people who have issues with their mucus membranes often with their sinuses as well or chronic sinusitis it's a very common constitutional pattern for these people the mucosa are chronically too wet from a Chinese medicine perspective and so they are very phlemy types you know the mucus in the throat sometimes they are very fat swollen or scalloped tongues on the sides these are signs of what we consider the spleen failing to transport because really the pathological factor of the spleen in Chinese medicine is dampness so excessive moisture now the reason why these people are very often not thirsty is because you guessed it they are already too damp but the dampness is really centered in the digestive system so they may have lots of phlegm or mucus in their throat they may have a runny nose all the time they may have tons of bloating tons of gas they may have urinary dysfunction frequency the body is already inundated with water that it cannot physiologically process well and so when you give a formula that works on those on the mucosa these people will then begin to experience either a healthier appetite or a more regular thirst and that is because again there is already what we consider dampness or moisture that is there physiological moisture but it's not being used properly so the reason they are not thirsty and the reason why they should not drink a gallon of water a day is because it will worsen those problems this idea of everyone should just drink a ton of water doesn't make much sense at all this is kind of like very generic I don't know fitness trainer advice everyone should do this everyone should do that the reason why people are not thirsty is a very specific reason and the body does not want more water because more water will make it feel worse now on the other side of the spectrum you have a big ol southern boy he's big big boned built like a truck sweaty red face runs hot he's just drinking water ravenously thirsty all the time and that may be a product of his constitutional type or it may be factors related to lifestyle but in general what I see is with the damp type these people are often putting down a lot of excessive water or a lot of excessive fluids and liquids that they don't really need because the body is already pretty inundated so that was kind of interesting how many people I see recommending drinking all this water but clinically the formulas that I'm using or in a class of formulas in Chinese medicine we call for people with impaired water metabolism so it's very interesting when I see people recommending that I'm thinking no look for the love of God do the exact opposite don't don't not drink water but drink just drink water when you feel thirsty and I think this is something that is underrated and again goes back to trusting the information your body is trying to tell you unless it is giving you really bad information like you're craving sugar as a diabetic trust some of the signals that it is trying to give you random video but I thought it was pretty cool pretty interesting when I heard that myself as a practitioner and I see it every day in my clinic and I am one of those damp wet types that is not that thirsty all right you guys before you go again check out the two links below this video one is for a free download for daily rituals that can potentially help you add years to your life with Chinese medicine the second link is if you want to become a patient of mine locally or online via telemedicine the link to my private practice in clinic is right below this video all right check out these two related videos and I'll catch you guys soon


Dr. Sherman wrote a new article for the SCP wiki. This is the non-spoiler announcement video. SCP-5542 titled cake by the ocean is literally about a beach made of cake. The reason why is a mystery. Go check it out on the wiki and then if you're a member of the wiki, vote and leave your comments in the discussion. But if you're not, leave me a comment here and let me know what you think and if you solve the mystery. Hi, Dr. Sherman. Good afternoon 425 and how might we be feeling today? I'm great and he's been helping me a lot. Excellent. Do you have a big worry? Oh? What sort of big worry would that be? Easter's coming up soon, and I know the site is really hidden. So is the Easter Bunny gonna be able to find her way here or is she just gonna get lost? And then my Easter basket will be empty. Oh Nothing to fear. We have a perfectly adequate Easter basket fulfillment system.  That gives me so much hope. Thank you. Well, hope is the outbite of the masses. Am I right? When he comes here to her and keep her here as an anomaly, are you? You told me not to lie to her. Mato with my new knife. Why has God abandoned us? Your request to test the knife for the D-Class has been denied.  You nuggies. Oh, okay. Deploy the nugget. Thank the long boy. Come on back to base. Huh? Oh. 049 is trying to be annoying until I let it have more test subjects.  So when you ask for the monthly equivalent of Site 42's operating costs for aquatic tactical gear, this is what you meant. You're being reassigned to SCP-3000 and you'll be wearing that. Dr. Sherman from Site 42, um, I don't know how I got you. SCP Emergency Hotline. Place off Euclid Avenue, where the SCPs will munch on you. You had better run, don't try to fight. They've got poison teeth and they wanna, you know.  Yeah, they wanna. But seriously, you'll be messed up. Hey doc, they're stealing your Jello child. What should I do? Perhaps go get them? God, this universe is so much better than my old one. I mean, here we've achieved world peace. The anomalous is well known and well documented. 096's domestication training is going great. What do you mean they don't have Dr. Pepper? Hey Daniel, this tic-tac connoisseur says you're poorly animated. What'd you think about that? I only said VR per... Relax, Dr. Sherman. Huh? Oh, yeah, come on in. I'm just researching new hobbies, you know. Gotta blow off some steam. It never ends. Get me Mobile Task Force Delta 7, the spring chickens. We've got a floater at the trampoline park. Not that kind. In my line of work, it's very easy to get desensitized to child abduction. Supernatural creatures love them. They're small, easy to capture. I deal with Dr. Bright all day.  Watch closely as I turn this unsuspecting child I found on the beach into a D-Clap. Note to self, remind Dr. Bright that we are running a research facility, not a daycare. Yes, we've set up a containment site at the location, but Researcher Mayday is having a lot of trouble keeping the peace. Like, right now, when the Daniel entity is at the toilet on fire for some reason. And Flat Dog is weirdly jacked now. Uh, yeah, there it is, you see? Begin SCP-093 test. The D-Class has entered the mirror. Let us know what you find, and keep an eye out for the unclean.  What the? Nugget, get control of that demon. Where is he going? Alright, Wardic, what the? Milk demon, I put that light switch in so you can turn the lights on and off. Not so you could throw light switch raves. Five Nights at Freddy's is not an SCP, but if it were, how would they- Why are they in my office? They're not supposed to be real! Why aren't things like Slenderman, Siren Head, Five Nights at Freddy's, all manner of internet creature? Why are they not SCPs? It's a matter of definition. To be an SCP, you have to have two defining qualities. Quality one is that you have to be anomalous. You have to be not normal, you have to have a power.  Something that is not baseline normal. Quality two is much more specific. You have to be catalogued in the SCP database. In the universe, this is because, like science with animals in real life, we haven't discovered them all. They can't be catalogued as SCPs if we haven't found them. The Global Cult Coalition has their own database with different catalogues. Out of the universe, this is actually a lot simpler. Things that are not original to the SCP Wiki to be SCPs. Simply put, we don't want to be sued. So they're anomalies, not SCPs. As many of you misunderstood the point of yesterday's video, allow me to state it plainly. Just because it's anomalous doesn't mean it's an SCP. Unless it's listed on scpwiki.com, it is not an SCP. My new favorite phrase in this community? It's anomalous, but not an SCP. Five Nights at Freddy's. It's anomalous, but not an SCP. Siren Head. It's anomalous, but not an SCP. That SCP-6789 document that's making the rounds? A forgery. You've been bamboozled. There is now an SCP called Siren Head, but it's about a boat and it's named Siren Head because the author was making a joke. Thank you in advance for helping us combat misinformation and not get the SCP Wiki sued. This tweet is from the Wiki's official account. Read it. I've been informed that the single chicken nugget was only a temporary solution. Oh, God. Alright, D5542, I'm going to need you to go procure some more nuggets. Don't worry, we'll expense it. Oh, dear goddess of the nuggies. Delta 12, give me a report. What did you find? Command, the molding on this tub seems to be filled with human teeth. Well, that's disgusting. Oh, hold on. This is downright not marriage. Hopefully command gives us the okay to get out of here. Roger that. Alright, the higher ups are saying you need to get into the tub. Into it? Are you garam kidding me?  You won't be penalized for this insubordination. Good, we're getting out. Has you really been far, even as decided to use even-go-want-to-look-more-like? Call<PHONE_NUMBER> inside the details for go further and even more decided to use. You can really be far as decided twice as much to use and go wish for it. When you decide far even wants to use and go want then get really far even as decided to use and look more like and go after. It's just common sense. Apply today. Did I have a stroke? Dr. Mayday said you was to speak to me. What? Highly against regulations, Daniel. I look at SCPs every day. So when I say this one upsets me, I hope you're ready to go for a ride. SCP-198 is an anomalous beverage vessel with three abilities. Ability one is a conchape shift. Maybe it's a coffee mug, maybe it's a thermos, maybe it's a styrofoam cup. Ability two is teleportation. It wants to be used so it will teleport to places where other beverage containers are so you'll pick it up. Ability three is that if you grab SCP-198 it will sear itself to your flesh so it cannot be removed from your hand. SCP-198 begins filling with one or a random assortment of bodily fluids including but not limited to pus, bile, urine, feces. Data expunged. The holder of the mug begins rapidly dehydrating only able to gain fluids from the mug. We allow them to self-terminate at that point. SCP staff containment breach challenge. Blind to it this video and do not look ahead because you don't get a heads up when disaster is going to strike.  You only get one take, no edits, no effects, no pauses. If you cheat, you have to live with that dishonor. Pass or fail, you have to post your video. Ready? Let's go. Don't blink, it's SCP-173. You're alone in the room, it's 30 seconds until someone can get to the room to save you. Maybe you're good at staring when you can prepare but this is a surprise drill so if you fail now you know what it would be like in real life.   After this recording ends, review your tape to see how you did and post with the hashtag I survived 173 or 173 got me. Hey there, Site 42 fam. It's come to my attention that not a lot of people know that we have a Site 42 SCP merch store. We've commissioned art from multiple artists to make SCP-related merch and we've got stickers for the Site 42 channel and so if you want some SCP merch as well as helping support the Site 42 channel tspring.com slash stores slash Site 42. Thank you in advance and cheers.


Hello, everyone, and welcome to the 5 p.m. to 5 30 p.m. session of the 2017 Open Simulator Community Conference. As a reminder to our in-world and web audience, you can view the full conference schedule at conference.opensimulator.org, and tweet your questions or comments, too, at OpenSimCC with the hashtag OSCC17. This session, we are happy to introduce a wonderful session called Creating a Place for Learning Spanish Language Learning at Escape. Our speakers today are James Abraham and Marta Eugenia Lino. Let me introduce them. James T. Abraham, PhD, has been working in virtual world since 2006. As El Professor in OpenSim, he created Mi Casa Esucasa, an immersive interactive Mexican village with realistic buildings and over 25 learning activities. For the last several years, he has been using OpenSimulator to create an even bigger immersive experience at Spanish language learning at Escape. Marta Eugenia Lino is a Spanish teacher and owner of the educational project Spanish with Eugenia, teaching in Mexico and the Metaverse. Eugenia shares her knowledge and love of her native country, Mexico, with her students in the virtual world. She also serves as academic director and creates rich cultural exhibits for Escape. Welcome all, and let's begin the session. James. Hello everyone. Thank you for joining Eugenia and I tonight. We just wanted to have a chance to share our work with you that we've been doing actually that we started in Second Life and now we've moved over to OpenSim. And Eugenia still is teaching in Second Life, but I've made the full transition over to OpenSim. And we created originally a space called Mi Casa Esucasa as I was Callisto Encinal. And we decided I lost my funding from my university, so we had to go find another way to create our space. And the idea was to create an immersive study abroad experience for students. I teach at a community college, so my students typically don't have the chance to study abroad. They're working a lot and can't get away. So my idea was to create a space where they could come in for a couple hours a week and have a fully immersive experience and kind of replicate that study abroad experience. So imagine if you had people playing roles within the space. And I told my students to go in and go to the bank and take out $20 and then go to the bakery and buy a couple loaves of bread and then go to the Plaza and talk to the bum that's there and give them a loaf of bread and share some time. Imagine the rich experiences that they could have. I think I'm preaching to the choir here when I say that virtual worlds could provide that for our students, and that was our goal. It's kind of morphed. It's, as you probably know, difficult to find people all the time to staff something like that. So we've done some experimenting with NPCs that we'll talk about in a little bit. But our goal was to create this space. Eugenia Moore for role playing. She does a little more advanced classes. So she uses the space primarily for role playing and meeting with her students. I teach lower level Spanish. So 101. So I wanted to really create a textbook like experience within the 3D world. So I've actually converted all my content to open educational resources. So all the book learning is online and available for free. And then I meet my students in world and there are different types of learning activities there for them. And there's student to student interactions. There's student professor interactions. There's solo interactions and the unique variety of experiences. I think really shows the depth of what virtual worlds are capable of. I have not run across one thing that I have not been able to do that I do in class that I haven't been able to do in the virtual world. The only thing would be to touch a student, which is probably frowned upon anyway. So it's a good thing. Any kind of experience that you want to create is absolutely possible within the virtual world. I haven't found anything that has not been possible. So we've created several different environments replicating a Mexican town, but it really could be any kind of Spanish speaking country town. It's pretty generic across the board. And within those different locations, we've created learning activities. And so within these learning activities, they cover the scope of Spanish 101. So basically present tense verbs, gustar, a lot of vocabulary. So imagine if you go into a house instead of typically now in a college textbook, you'll just get a vocabulary list at the end of the chapter in the book. And that's pretty staying at pretty one dimensional. Imagine if you could go into a house and just start clicking on objects and seeing the word and hearing a voice, audio file, modeling the pronunciation, creating a really rich. Just look at where you're sitting now and imagine if you were a language learner and you wanted to know how to say things and you could just touch them and it would tell you what it was and it would talk to you. You could interact with it. That's what kind of experience we can create in virtual worlds and we've created at escape. So embedded with all the different are the typical things that you would find in a Mexican town, all the different locations, clothing shops, sporting goods, markets, theaters, plaza, all those different type of things. And really what we want to do today is just kind of wet your appetite to come and visit us. It's really hard to explain in 20 minutes what all we have. We really want to just give you a postcard to make you want to come and visit and kick the tires and come around and walk the streets of escape to see what it's like. Let's go into the next slide. So our learning activities embedded within all the spaces are these green balls. I wanted to make it so it's not necessarily jumping out at you that there's things to touch. It looks like a pretty natural environment, but there's these green balls situated around that if you click on, it'll pop up a menu for you. And the first stage was the acquisition stage. So that would be the acquire, the aprender where you're going to learn. So I make no cards explaining grammar points or send you to videos to find out, get a little background information to learn. So when you're done learning, then you can go to the practical stage. The practical is where you get a chance to practice producing. First of all, and actually within the practical, there's two levels. There's the recognition phase. So at first you'll just be recognizing the vocabulary or the grammar structures. And then in the second phase, you actually have to produce it. So it'll ask you a question you have to put in the word for that vocabulary item, or it'll be a grammar question. You have to answer the question by actually typing it out. And the students earn XP points for this. So as they're doing practice, because they're being rewarded for all their work and eventually down the road as we build this out, we'll have a reward system where they can purchase clothing or other trinkets to satisfy that need to get work done and produce and acquire things so that rewarding. And then finally, probably what the instructors are interested in is the exam and phase. So they would then take a test on again two phases, recognition and then production. And this is actually stored in a database and you have to get 100% on this exam and to get credit for it. So it goes into a database and there's a web interface and also in world interface where you can find out what you've completed and what's available in each space.  For instance, in the PLASA, there's a sign that says PLASA.  So that would be for a student to go in and work on on their own. And then instructor could meet them, walk them through. This is often what I spend time doing with students is helping them walk through it. They're not so familiar with virtual world. So sometimes they just need to have their hand held as they click on things and they're not used to seeing all the things in the screen. So that's really has become my role is just facilitating the learning in the 3D world. So that's kind of an overview of our learning activities. Then what we've also done is created a level of learning aids. So we have our own HUD, which is the production for the vocabulary audio.  And when I was working in Second Life, when I originally created this idea concept, there was a lot of crosstalk. There were students all in there and it was playing on the public channel. So our HUD allows it to just play within that HUD. So each student could have an individual experience and you don't have any crosstalk. So that you could have 10 students and they're all clicking on objects and they're all not hearing each other's clicking and stuff that they're clicking on. And we also have teleporting so you can teleport. You can put a question mark and it'll tell you all the places that you can teleport. So it makes it easy to get around the space and we have a dictionary and then we have web screen. So if you pop on the power button, it'll pop open a little web screen so you can go to URLs to see what's going on.  It's kind of another level. All those learning activities to give you feedback. So when you get an answer correct, you get a ta-da, or a trumpet blast. And when you get a wrong answer, you get a wah-wah-wah or a whammy kind of sound to give the students a little bit of interaction as they're going through. Besides visual clues to colors will change red if it's wrong, green if it's correct. So they're seeing, they're getting a lot of feedback, a lot of information about how they're doing on their learning. I experiment, I'm not going to talk too much about this personal assistant. I really wanted to have like a NPC that walked around with you. That was kind of like a helper bot and I'm still working on that to get that all created. But I think that has a lot of potential too. So you would walk around in this instead of getting feedback from the parrot there, you'd get a feedback from NPCs. But talking about NPCs, we've created two different types. First of all, we have static NPCs that are just mesh items that I've pulled in. And they're easy to script and they give a sense of presence. One of the big complaints about virtual worlds is that they're empty. If you walk into Escape, you'll see they're not moving around per se, but they're there. So it looks like there's people there. And within these, then I've embedded activities. So this is the simple greetings in the plaza. If you click on these people, they'll ask you a question about like, Como estas? Como te llamas? What is your name? How are you doing? And then you have to answer a question. And then if you get it right, you go into a database and you don't have to answer that one again. So the idea of students has acquired that knowledge. They don't have to practice that again necessarily. And then we have our moving NPCs. So these are the fully scripted NPCs that come in OpenSim. And it's been such a great joy for me to come into OpenSim with these NPCs rather than in Second Life because they're really easy to script, especially if you use some of the models that have been provided. Fred did a great job providing his NPCs. So you can just tweak the code a little bit and get what you want. But this is a picture from our restaurant. So we have a fully integrated restaurant interaction where the waitress comes out and tells you to sit. And then you go through the whole food order, beverage order.  And then she asks if you want to leave a tip or not. So it's kind of fun. It would be really cool. And I tell people when I show them this, could you imagine this with voice recognition? So the machine would grade you on your scale, how well you were interacting with that. And then go on to the next question all through voice. Right now it's all through menu, but it really has a lot of potential. I think if we could ever get voice into virtual worlds. But I'm working on one that's a pharmacy. So imagine going into a pharmacy. And this is the way to get around having to have actors come in. So you can have a pretty interactive scripted model with these NPCs. For basic students, that's good. They want to work off a script and they want to have a limited set of interactions. And that's what we want. For more advanced students, you might want to have the instructor play the waitress. So then you could have a more free form interaction. And at this point, I'll turn it over to Eugenia, who's going to talk about our wonderful cultural activities. Yeah, thank you. Thank you, James. If you let me sit, please, could you move your avatar? Can you just look over the screen? I mean, yes, please change the slide. Did you change? Yes, you did. Your avatar on the place to speak. Well, it's OK. Well, hi, Eugenia. Oh, thank you very much. I am here. OK. Well, how do I use Escape, our theme? I use, of course, all the activities Professor James have created, has created. But in my experience, where my students get more the knowledge, they can get the language practicing, playing. I mean, with immersion. In real life, as we do in real life, we organize activities. We have classes, of course. We have parties. We sing. We dance. We make some field trips, et cetera. And I discover when I start teaching here in virtual worlds in second life, I work, of course, in second life. And in the world, another virtual world also. I discover I can create. I can get that immersion in virtual worlds. So I start teaching in second life. How I get the immersion? Well, in second life, well, it's virtual worlds. We have avatars. And in that, I can use that tools to teach and to get my students learn the language. So I, well, I start organizing activities like parties or cultural activities. Well, specifically cultural activities. As you can see on the slide, we have Professor James and me. We organize, for example, we celebrate the Mexican independence. I am Mexican, by the way. And we create cultural activities. We celebrate. We perform the celebration of Mexican independence. We organize exhibition about Day of the Dead because it's a very important celebration in Mexico. We have in escape. Well, we have a lot of the all activities Professor James have created, but we also have the Casa de la Cultura Cultural House. In that cultural house, we put some exhibition about Day of the Dead, the Christmas time in Mexico, how we celebrate. Well, especially in Mexico. Because it's the cultural know and but also we put exhibition about Mexican Revolution, Mexican independence, the International Women's Day. Well, a lot of activities during the year we have a lot of activities we can do like we do in real life. So that is the reason for me for, well, specifically for me, it's very, very important to the virtual world. I use Second Life. I use BG World. And now I am exploring another world like it's a French, the French grid. So well, more, more virtual world. And I don't know, of course, the how to make some scripts. But it's not necessary. I know that all the things creators have created in the virtual world helped me. Helped me a lot. The places to build something, the animation, gestures. When we dance, when we use streams, of course, we sing songs in Spanish. And at the same time, I use the activities on escape, the grammar activities. I also, well, I use a lot the role play. We visit the airport, we visit the bank. We go to the restaurant and also we practice the dialogue at the restaurant. And well, all of that, we get that immersion in virtual world to help a student to get the language. And that is very important. And that is the reason I use Escape. Okay, well, that is my participation, the way I work with virtual world in escape specifically. Well, we can do a lot of things, a lot of things at Escape. Okay, so, please go ahead. Okay, is that it? We're running out of time, so do you have more to wrap it up? Nope, I think I'm good. Okay, great. Well, thank you, James and Marta, for a wonderful presentation. Thank you. As a reminder to our audience, you can see what's coming up on the conference schedule at conference.opensimulator.org. Following this session, the next session will begin at 5.30 p.m. in this keynote region and is entitled mixed reality holo presence or holo presence, whichever you prefer, for avatars. Also, we encourage you to visit the OSCC 17 poster Expo in the OSCC Expo 3 region to find accompanying information on presentations and explore the hypergrid tour resources in OSCC Expo 2 region, along with sponsor and crown funder booths located throughout all of the OSCC Expo regions. Thank you again to our speakers and to our audience.


Hi, and how are you all today? I'm Priyanka and I'll be helping you with the following question which says rationalize the denominator of the following. These are the four parts of the question which are given to us and in each part we need to rationalize the denominator. So let us start with our solution of the first part. The expression is given to us as 1 by root 7. As we know that root 7 when it's multiplied by root 7 we get 7 which is a rational number. So in order to rationalize the denominator we will multiply both the numerator and the denominator by root 7 and we'll write it multiply numerator and denominator by root 7. So proceeding on we have root 7 divided by 7 and this becomes the answer of our first part. Proceeding on with the solution of second part the expression given to us is 1 divided by root 7 minus root 6. Now in order to rationalize we need to multiply the numerator and the denominator we have denoted it by N and D by the conjugate of the denominator. Right, so its conjugate will be root 7 plus root 6. So on doing so we have 1 divided by root 7 minus root 6 getting multiplied by root 7 plus root 6 in the denominator as well as the numerator. So we have root 7 plus root 6 divided by using the identity that is E minus B A plus E is equal to A square minus B square which is applicable in the denominator. We can write A square as root 7 the whole square minus root 6 the whole square. Let us simplify it little further on doing so we have root 7 plus root 6 divided by 7 minus 6 that gives us root 7 plus root 6 by 1. So the answer to the second part is root 7 plus root 6. So this completes the answer to the second part. Proceeding on with the third part the expression is 1 divided by root 5 plus root 2. Here also we will multiply the numerator and the denominator by the conjugate of the denominator that is root 5 minus root 2. And on doing so we have 1 divided by root 5 plus root 2 getting multiplied by root 5 minus root 2 to both the sides. Further root 5 minus root 2 and in the denominator we can again apply the identity that is E plus B A minus B is equal to A square minus B square. So we have root 5 the whole square minus root 2 the whole square. On simplifying it little further we have root 5 minus root 2 divided by 5 minus 2 which gives us root 5 minus root 2 by 3. So this becomes the answer to the third part. Proceeding on with the last and final part here also the expression which is given to us is 1 divided by root 7 minus 2 multiplying the numerator and the denominator by the conjugate of the denominator that is root 7 plus 2 we have 1 divided by root 7 minus 2 getting multiplied by root 7 plus 2. Further simplifying it we have root 7 plus 2 divided by root 7 the whole square minus 2 the whole square because we have again applied our knowledge of the identity that is E minus B A plus B is equal to A square minus B square. Now here our A is root 7 and B is 2. So we have root 7 plus 2 divided by 7 minus 4 which gives us root 7 plus 2 divided by 3 and this becomes the answer to the last and final part which was given us. So I hope you enjoyed this session and learned how to rationalize the denominator well. Bye.


So one of the things that's been really interesting for me lately is I've had a lot of leaders from company who aren't necessarily trained in analytics asking, how do I manage analytics problems? How do I get them started? And after being asked about this a number of times, we decided to write a book called Mining Your Own Business. And that is really trying to help executives and managers of analytic projects understand really what's behind analytics. And my premise in the book is that the gap that we experience between the promise of analytics transforming a company and results that fall below that expectation are really a failure of leadership and leadership understanding really what analytics is. This morning we had a great presentation by BMW and one of the things they talked about was the evolution of the car over a hundred years. You know, I think a hundred years ago they would have never imagined the I-8. But sometimes in analytics projects we want the whole Death Star from the very beginning. We want to try to define the end point when really what we need to do is just get started to find something initially and then as we go along we can evolve that into what we need for our business as we understand our business better because the thing is our businesses are changing around us, our consumers are changing around us as well. So we need to be flexible and adaptable to that. So that's one of the points I'd like to make. The second point I'd like to make is a lot of times managers because they have two executives, they let their intuition get ahead of the perception and the perception is what we might see in the data. Intuition is our experience behind that. There's a funny story we were working with a telco company trying to help them understand their churn. They were getting a lot of churn in their model and they believed it was because they hadn't offered the iPhone. Everybody needs to offer the iPhone. So we built a churn model for them and we deployed it into their call center and sure enough their churn came down as we expected it would based on the model. And everything was great. They were actually paid the model back within the first couple of months, the cost of actually implementing that model. But then they were able to offer the iPhone about a year later and as soon as they offered the iPhone for some unknown reason they quit using the churn model. And what happened? Churn came back. There was a belief at the executive level that the iPhone was the cause of their original churn. But if you think about it, we modeled that without having any knowledge of the iPhone and were able to reduce their churn. And so when they realized that the iPhone wasn't really the root cause of their churn, there were other reasons people were churning. They reinstituted the churn model and that brought back their churn down and helped the business. And so it's sometimes these things that we believe that aren't actually born out by the data that we have to let the data sort of influence our intuition instead of the other way around. And John Elder talked about that a little bit this morning. But finally, the first and foremost problem that we see is that people start out in the wrong way. We tend to want to see things getting done. And we believe getting things done is actually looking at the data and starting to build a model. But many times what we find is the executives or the managers haven't defined the business opportunity well enough yet. And if we don't define the business opportunity well enough, then the model we're building at the end of the day may not actually meet that business opportunity, may not actually cover what we thought it should cover because we hadn't taken the time to do that. And we hadn't taken the time to figure out if we implement this model, any time you implement a model, it's going to impact some business decision in the business. And to do that, that's going to affect some process in the business. So the idea of change management, how do we actually build this into a deployable thing that people use every day and make decisions on? Sometimes that thought isn't there either. People just get excited. They hear something like deep learning and they say, I got to have some deep learning without really truly understanding what deep learning is or how it might impact their business. And those key questions that you need to answer upfront can make all the difference in the success of the model and how it transforms your business.