Sunday, January 16, 2005

MARY: Welcome! Thank you for coming. I'm really excited about this particular talk this year, because this talk is the highlight of the trip. So many things have gone on this year, and this talk is going to be a little different from the ones in the past. The reason I'm excited is that I really see it as an opportunity for me to get a lot of feedback from you. Not just for me to be talking, but to hear things from you and to be able to share together our experiences and challenges. There are lots of different ways to look at things. Each of us tends to get stuck in the way that we look at things, and sometimes we can't really figure out how to get past that or around it.

This has been an interesting and intense year for me. Mostly the theme of this year has been about balance. There are several different directions that I want to go with it and share some of my experiences, and also get feedback from you guys about similarities or differences in your experiences. The year has been very intense, but it's been very informative. I've given myself a lot of information.

It started out that I began doing something different than I have in the past ten years. In the past ten years, in association with sessions and people who do sessions, in the very beginning I learned how to do this buffering thing, because it was very difficult for me to do a session with people and to experience all of the energy from everybody. It felt to me like I was wide open. I could feel all these balls of energy coming from every single person in the room, passing right through me, and it was very difficult. Elias suggested that I do this buffering thing and I've done it ever since.

A little over a year ago I decided to stop doing that. It occurred to me that if I wasn't buffering everybody, it would probably help me with information about each of the people I interact with. People have a tendency to speak in half concepts and half sentences. Especially if something is very personal to them or they're uncomfortable or they're nervous, they speak in generalities, they don't really get to the point, and they're generally not very direct. Which is okay, but when you're interacting with people on a very personal basis, trying to understand what they're experiencing because they're trying to engage you and talk to you about it and wanting feedback, it's difficult if you don't know what they're talking about and if they don't get to the point, and that happens a lot.

I found if I dropped that buffering thing, that helped me generate more openness, and I could take in more of their energy and that filled in the gaps. Whatever they weren't saying I would pick up anyway from their energy, and I would just feed back to them what I was picking up. It seemed to be very beneficial, because they didn't have to explain themselves as much and they would say, "Yeah, that's exactly what I was trying to say and what I'm trying to explain to you!" So it seemed to be a very beneficial thing to do.

But after a while, it seemed to be not such a beneficial thing, because it seemed to be interrupting things. It started, in my perception, to go awry. The way it started to show up was that sessions started getting moved. People's sessions would get moved around. I know some people, for a while, were saying their sessions were cancelled. Nobody's session ever got cancelled, they just got moved, and that started happening more and more.

I started fighting with it because I thought it was all me. I didn't factor in this other part. I wasn't there yet. I was thinking it was all me and what the heck was I doing and why, and if I could just get myself back to normal, do things the way I've been doing them the last ten years, everything would be fine. I was frustrated with myself and a little bit angry with myself, and so consequently a lot of my clients were frustrated with me and somewhat irritated with me for a while. That went on for quite a while. For about six months I battled with that; it was the biggest piece of my personal imagery at the time. Little did I know that that was loaded with lots of information.

I think it's an interesting point, especially for people who are involved with this information, that because we've been listening to Elias talk for so long about reflecting and things like that, we have a tendency now to turn back on ourselves instead of blaming somebody else for what's going on in our own reality, and we go through these gyrations of questioning: what am I doing, what am I creating, what am I reflecting to myself, what am I trying to tell myself? Sometimes you can spin those wheels pretty hard and come up with no answers. Then you go into what are my beliefs, what are my truths, what kind of energy am I putting out? But it's all me, me, me - what is everybody else reflecting to me? Later I had some other experiences that showed me another side of the picture, or an expanded picture.

So I went to Vienna and... Well, let me just back up a tiny bit and add in another piece of that, because we all do this. When you've got something that's on going and you're dealing with it for a long period of time, you start to become numb to it. It's always there and you know it's there, but it becomes so familiar that you're not always paying attention to it. So when you bring something up that's related to it in a bigger way, you don't always go back to "I've been dealing with this all year, and this is what it's about." Most likely you're going to go in a direction of "what am I presenting to myself" and think that it's something new, because the other thing has become so part of your life and so there all the time that you kind of don't pay as much attention to it or you're paying attention to it in a different way.

That's what happened with these sessions. My perception was that I was doing something wrong, I was screwing up, I couldn't seem to get back to normal, and also that I was doing less sessions than I usually do. In my perception - and believe me, this really showed me how real perception is because this was very real to me - I believed that if somebody got moved, that left an empty slot, and since nobody is in that spot and that person is in a different spot which is taking up time that somebody else could have had, I'm doing less sessions.

I went to Vienna and I was doing quite a few sessions in Vienna, like I always do around a group-session trip. All of a sudden, all of that went away for a while because that felt normal. That felt like what I normally do - I was working, I was doing all these sessions, it was flowing and that's good. I came home and the morning after I got home, Polly got sick and she stayed really sick for three weeks. In that three weeks I went to the vet every single day, I was spending money like it was water, and I wasn't doing very many sessions because I was going to the vet every day. Polly was getting IVs, I was going to the pharmacy, and it was a nightmare.

Through the whole thing, I thought that this little dog is reflecting something to me. I can't see it, I don't know what it is, and it's making me crazy. What am I doing, what kind of energy am I putting out? That was a confusing question, because I felt fine. I felt calm, I didn't feel agitated, I didn't feel overwhelmed. I felt fine. That was confusing, because I thought if I was putting out some sort of crummy energy, I'd probably feel bad too.

But I thought that I must be putting out some sort of crummy energy because this little dog is wicked sick, and I started thinking maybe how I felt is not an indicator of what kind of energy I was putting out. That was a big one, which turned out to be right on the money. You can be feeling pretty bad and not necessarily be putting out some sort of negative or destructive energy, but you can also be feeling neutral and fine and be putting out some wicked strong intense energy, which was what I was doing.

At the end of three weeks of Polly being sick and my poor vet wracking his brain, calling Vienna and calling Prague to find out if she'd picked up a virus that was not known to us in the United States, I did a session with Anjuli and Gottlieb from Germany, and they decided to ask a question about Polly. They had been involved in some of it, because they helped to get phone numbers of veterinarians in Vienna that my vet could call. They were wondering what they were creating, too. Anjuli said she was going to ask Elias about it and asked if I had a question. I was so confused at that point I couldn't formulate a question to save my life. I was completely confused about it. So they did, and Elias gave a pretty good answer. I didn't have to listen to the whole answer, because as soon as I turned on the tape, the first thing he said was, "This is about balance." I went, "Bing! Oh no, it's this thing again!"

While Polly was sick, I kept doing something that lots of people do. I kept retracing my steps and going back to the beginning before Polly got sick and then when she got sick, trying to figure out what set the ball in motion, what got this train running, and I would know for the next time and be able to prevent it from happening again - never once in the middle of it thinking that I could stop it at any time, never realizing I was creating it every single day, and that each day when I got up I was putting out that energy again. I wasn't even feeling it, but I was overwhelmed and not thinking I was overwhelmed. I know I was underneath, because I was dealing with it for the last six months on a daily basis. Of course, it triggered as soon as I stepped back home. There I was, back in that environment again, and there it was.

It was an interesting experience to realize that this whole thing had to do with balance - it had to do with sessions, my interaction with other people around sessions, how I felt about it, and my pushing my energy with it.

One afternoon I received four different emails from new people requesting sessions... This is another thing that has become very familiar to me, which I don't think about. Since Lynda has taken over doing my scheduling, she comes downstairs every morning before she goes to work and goes over my book with me, and she makes sure we both have the same ones. She adds in any new ones and tells me about them. This is a routine and I don't think about it. Another routine that we have is whenever a new person emails me requesting a session, I don't read the email, I forward it to Lynda as soon as I see the words "request session," and she deals with it. It is such a routine that I don't even think about it.

This particular day I happened to notice that I got four emails from new people that I forwarded to her, and I looked through my book and started counting how many sessions I had that month. I realized I wasn't doing less sessions than before, although that perception was very real and I really believed it. I realized then that I was just doing them differently, but I was doing as many as I had been. Instead of doing one every day, I might not do any on a few days and then I might do three or four for several days in a row. But that's different, that's not what I used to do, and that's not what I thought was my normal. So that was an interesting revelation, that I was doing as many sessions as I had been doing before.

When I realized that, I wondered what was really going on here. I didn't quite get it yet, but I was on the tip of it. A couple of days later, one of my transcribers, Donna, was supposed to have a session and it got moved. But she did something different that started to turn things, too. The day after her session was supposed to happen, she called me and wanted to talk about what was going on. She said, "I know I am making this happen. I know it was me moving my session, but I'm not sure what I'm doing or why. I thought it might be a good thing for me to talk to you about what I'm thinking and feeling, but also to ask you what were you feeling yesterday and what were you experiencing and what you noticed about my energy. That will help me to understand what I'm doing." Which I thought was just brilliant! That would be great for both of us because then I can figure out what I'm doing, too. She can figure out what she's doing, and we can figure it out together.

Up until that moment, I hadn't really put the pieces together that things would happen in my reality when sessions got moved around but they were somehow linked with the person's energy who was going to have the session. I would pick up on their energy but I didn't know it. The only time I knew I was picking up on someone's energy was when I was interacting with them around a session, but not before a session and not in any other kind of way. I didn't realize anything was coming from anyone else; I thought it was just me. I thought that whatever was happening in my reality I'm doing it, something's reflecting to me, it has nothing to do with anyone else, it just has to do with me, and why am I doing this?

In talking to Donna, I realized because of the questions she was asking me - what did you feel, what were you experiencing - I realized that actually what I was saying to her did have to do with her energy, that she was feeling these things. When I would say I was feeling this or that, she would say that's what she was feeling, that's what she was generating. I thought that it was just me, and she said, "No, that's ME. That's what I was generating, and you must have picked that up and translated it into something." Which I do, which we all do, we just don't realize that we're mixing energy with each other.

We think it's all just us, but it's not all just us. It's not a matter of picking up someone's energy and recognizing that it's not you - if you can do that - and sending it back to them. No, that's ridiculous. You're participating with the person and their energy. You're mingling with it, and there's a reason in it. There's something in it for both of you, whether you understand what that is or not.

In talking to Donna, I understood that we are all mixing up energy and that I am picking up on other people's energy. This is why sessions get moved around a lot, and this has become the norm now. It's not a matter of getting back to the normal; this is the normal now. Other people are much more open and paying attention to themselves, and I'm much more open to them and I'm paying attention to the energy. When that happens, it's kind of a cooperation between us, although it didn't appear that way initially and a lot of people got kind of pissed off. But people are now starting to understand that it is a cooperation.

It's something that I think is significant to pay attention to, because I take that energy - like we all do - and I create something in my own life. I will make something happened. It will have some association with the other person's energy, but it's not them making it happen; it's me making it happen. I'm taking that energy and I'm doing something with it, like I'm breaking my pipes, or I have some kind of conflict, or I'm stuck behind a train that's 120 cars long. I'm doing something with it and creating something in my own reality.

If I can get to a point where I can see that I'm picking up on someone else's energy and I can identify what type of energy it is, I might not necessarily then create my own imagery to tell me what kind of energy it is. Instead of making my pipes break, if I can identify what type of energy I'm picking up on - which I did later, but I didn't initially - and I realize it's all about pressure, then I can deal with the pressure of energy the other person is feeling and not translate that into pressure in my pipes and breaking them or whatever. I can just see it, feel it, recognize it as pressure, and not necessarily break pipes with it. I'm not there yet, but I'm starting to see a lot more of it and I'm getting a little better at it.

It depends on the other person, too, and whether they are aware of what they're doing. A lot of times they're not, and so I'm not aware either. But the point was that I began to recognize that it's a cooperation; it's a mixing of energy. It's not always just me. I am creating everything in my reality and it's not the other person's fault. They're not doing it, but there's an influence there of other energies, too. After I started to relax about that and realized this is the new normal, other people started to relax and to calm down a little bit.

In the fall, I started to have this experience with a client of mine who was in a bad spot and was doing a lot of sessions and had booked quite a few appointments. One of the things she talked to Elias about - this wasn't the issue but this was the imagery of it - was that she does independent work for other people and other people don't pay her. This was the imagery she was dealing with. The interesting thing that started to happen was her checks were consistently late. This wasn't a situation of not trusting that I was going to get paid, but it was interesting because the checks were always late. There would be times when we would do two or three sessions, one a week, and I still hadn't received a check. That kept happening and it kept going on for a period of several months.

During that time, I was going in the direction of what am I doing, what am I creating, what is this person reflecting to me, what is going on, why am I doing this, what am I trying to tell myself, and I hate this! I was getting more and more irritated, and more and more focused on one person and money, which are two things that I normally don't do.

That is something I really don't focus on, so much so that I do this thing two or three times a year - I call it my cosmic banking. It's when I do sessions and sessions and sessions, and everybody's check will be late - everybody's. I'll be five, six, ten checks down, where nobody has sent their check, and then they'll all come in on one day. I've done that for so many years now that it's normal to me and I know what I'm doing when that happens. If I get four checks that are late, I know I'm in one of those modes where I'm cosmically banking. I don't know how I do it, but the reason I do it is because when all those checks come in all at one time on one day, there's going to be something unforeseen that comes up that I'm going to need money for. If the checks had come on time in dribs and drabs, I would have been spending some of that money. It's like clockwork with me; it always happens.

So that doesn't bother me and I never go in the direction of contacting people. I never think about any individual person whose check is late, I don't single out people, and I don't stress over it. I don't think about the money too much. I'll have one day where I notice that I'm cosmically banking, and I wonder what's going to come up next. For me to focus on this one person and to get so irritated and to be focusing on money as strongly as I was was out of the ordinary, and that sparked me looking in a different direction, questioning myself in a different direction. After I didn't give myself any information with questioning myself about what I was doing and what is this person reflecting to me, I stopped and thought, "Wait a minute, this is the imagery this person is dealing with exactly. If I choose - I don't know how I do it, but we all do it - if I choose specific people to interact with in whatever scenario because that's the one specific person in that moment who's going to reflect something to me in the best way possible, then other people must do this too." Why that never occurred to me I don't know! That means I might be reflecting to somebody else, and maybe somebody else specifically picked me for this type of reflection because somewhere in consciousness - not that they think about it - but somewhere they know I will be the perfect person that will react the perfect way to create that reflection, which I did. I did the exact same things: I got pissed off, I got very focused on one person, I was irritated, and I was so focused I was completely distracted from what I normally do. So, of course, other people's checks started not coming in either, because I was too focused in this one direction.

That was a fascinating thing for me to look at, because up until then the only way I ever looked at things is that everybody else in the whole world is reflecting to me. I'm not reflecting to anybody else, but everybody's always reflecting to me! All of a sudden the irritation disappeared because I knew what I was doing.

Lynda came downstairs and I was all excited about this revelation. I was telling her about it, and she said, "Great, now you can reconfigure the energy and do something different with it." But why would I do that? If I've chosen to participate with this person - which I obviously have because I'm doing it - if I've chosen to be a reflector, why would I want to stop that? It doesn't matter if she gets it or not, or if the message or the reflection is seen or not.

For a minute there I had a little twinge, where I thought this seems a little weird. I don't know if I like this or not. I don't like the idea of being someone else's puppet, where they're pulling the strings and I'm the little reflector. But that can't be right, there must be something in here I'm telling myself. I'm choosing to participate in this action with this person, and there must be some payoff. When I started to think about it, I realized what I'm doing right now is the payoff. Realizing that you're the reflector, that's the payoff, because all of a sudden you're seeing the other half of the picture. Where you were only seeing half of the picture before, now you've got the whole picture. You're a reflector, too! Wow, okay!

So that was really cool and interesting, and this person and I actually did discuss it later. We talked about the whole thing: our perceptions, our participations, what was going on with it. Right after I understood this and I felt this dissipating energy inside me and I wasn't irritated anymore because I understood what I was doing, the check came the day before the session, which was a little validation to me that I was on the right track and that something also must have happened to this person in their process, too. We did discuss this at length, and we both got insight from each other into what each of us was doing, which was pretty cool.

Then we come to the end of the year and the "list tsunamis," and all the drama that has been going on on the email chat lists on the computer. As you all know, I'm not on any of them and don't read them because I get too many emails as it is, so I don't have time! But I hear through the grapevine about what's going on, and that seemed to be the major topic of conversation for everyone for the last month.

Once again I went in the direction of what am I presenting to myself, what am I doing, why am I drawing this to myself, even though I wasn't really drawing it to myself directly. What was said was not said to me personally, individually; it was said about me. I'm kind of indirectly presenting this to myself, so it's not really a direct hit. Other people are getting direct hits, and that's unfortunate, in my perception. I started to look at that also, that there's got to be something in here that I'm showing myself with what's going on.

I realized that for quite a while I've perceived myself to be a pretty flexible person, not a very absolute person - ha ha ha! And then all of a sudden "Oh wow, I am really absolute, aren't I?!" I've got these absolute things going on like crazy, and I guess one of my truths is there's only one perception. If you are interacting with someone in the same place and the same time doing the same thing, there's one reality and the perception should be the same. You can't be in the same place with the same person and the same experience and have two different stories going on. If there are two different stories going on, that means that one person isn't telling the truth, and if that one person isn't telling the truth, they must be telling a lie or making it up.

Then I started to think about it. It was that big huge challenging piece: maybe they're not. What is lying anyway? What if there isn't any such thing as a lie? Maybe what the person is saying is what really happened in their perception. It didn't happen in mine, but maybe it did happen in theirs. Oh, there's a big one to chew on! This is going to take some work on my part to get in there with that one and make it real to myself. But another piece has come up with that situation, too, which has been very confusing to a lot of people.

I want feedback from you guys on this. I want feedback on all these different things, but this part I'd really like to go back and forth with you. Lots of people have been calling me about all this conflict that's been going on on the computer and the little whirlwind that's been happening, and are very upset and hurt and angry and are asking for advice about what's the best thing to do and what way to deal with it. If you're in a conflict with somebody or somebody's being nasty and mean and at you, what do you do? You don't want to match energy with the person, so what do you do, just ignore them? I've been talking to people a lot about this lately.

In really paying attention to what Elias says, I see no part in there where acceptance means you have to like things or that you have to be in agreement with them. You can accept things and not necessarily agree with them. Acceptance doesn't mean you have to be a doormat, either, that you have to lie down and let people walk all over you and trash you. There's got to be some other avenue to go in that honors yourself and your preferences, doesn't match energy with the other person, and doesn't acquiesce and doesn't compromise with them and doesn't create a situation where you're being a doormat.

I think a lot of people think that being quiet or unresponsive is ignoring, and it's really not. I've been watching a lot of the people who've been affected by what's going on, and they're telling me that their choice is to ignore what's going on. But they're not ignoring it. They're hurt, they're angry, they're dwelling on it constantly, and they're agitated inside of themselves. They're not ignoring it at all. They're just not responding, which creates even more frustration, because then they're churning inside themselves and they have nowhere to release it. They have no outlet for it.

I think that there are ways that you can generate a confrontation with another person and express yourself, not in an accusing way and not in a matching energy way, but definitely holding to honoring yourself and not being a doormat. This is a really hard thing for a lot of people and it's confusing to a lot of people. I don't think there's anything wrong with getting pissed off.

Let's take it out of the people realm, just for a minute. Lynda has two cats named Harold and Gilda. Harold is younger than Gilda and a little more spunky than Gilda. If Gilda's laying on the bed sleeping and Harold decides to come flying, jumping on her from across the room, and he does it three or four times, what do you think Gilda's going to do? She's probably going to turn around and smack him or bite him, and then she'll go back to sleep. He'll be cuddling up next to her five minutes later and they'll be licking each other, and that will be it. Cats don't have beliefs. So what's Gilda doing? All she's doing is making herself known. All she's doing is generating some expression with Harold saying knock it off, quit it, I don't like it. She doesn't hate him, she's not blaming him, she's not doing any of those things, but she is expressing herself and he'll get the message and quit it. Why should we have any less freedom than the cats?

Why should you be a doormat and force yourself not to respond to somebody who is being really nasty because you're so afraid you're going to be intrusive to them or you're not accepting of them? You can be accepting and still get pissed off and still not agree with another person. It doesn't mean you're going in a direction of trying to change them or being accusing or blaming. But you can express yourself and say, "Okay, I see that's the direction you're going in. It's really real to you but it's really not to me. I disagree with you. This is how I see it, and that's all there is to it."

You don't have to challenge the other person - what's the point? They're not going to change. You can't change them. You can't change their mind or their direction or whatever. But that's more of an honoring yourself but also not matching energy and tearing down the other person. Regardless of whether you like the other person or not, or like their personality or not, they're still a person, and we still do value each other even though we don't like each other.

WENDY: Elias said that yesterday, almost those exact same words. He said you may not like each other but you all value each other.

MARY: That's cool! That's actually exceptionally cool. I was wondering what direction he was going to go in yesterday. Each year I come up with an idea for a talk. I don't play this all out in my head before I do these talks. I just do it spontaneously, but I do get a general idea or theme in mind about a month ahead of time. In the beginning, I thought he was stealing my thunder. The group session is always the day before and he seems to go in a direction of a similar theme so that they complement each other.

WENDY: He was talking about the tsunami, and he was saying that we all value life and that we value each other because we're alive. We might not like each other but we value each other, but it was the same concept.

MARY: I'd kind of like to hear what your experiences are, because I know I'm not the only one participating in all this stuff.

PAUL H: I have a comment, Mare, relating to the email stuff. As some of you know, I run several email lists, and so I have a little world that I deal with. I've been doing this for over six years, and during that time I, and others who help me, have developed a set of rules or guidelines. They're not absolutes but they're pretty firm: no flames, and if you come into our list and you flame, we set boundaries. All relationships are based on boundaries. We have to interpret the rules in each case.

In this case, this person came onto New World View and did their little shtick, and I promptly deleted the email, suspended the account, and wrote the person "you violated this tenet." I didn't even go into counseling them or working with them to see the error of their ways. It was just a club upside the head with no malice, simply "this is completely unacceptable." What I get by setting that boundary and being unaccepting is a nurturing environment in the larger community that I'm dealing with, which I'm trying to create and co-create and manage, and allow other saplings and seeds to grow in there without someone coming in and making it like "this is all about me." Everybody has the right to do that once in a while.

MARY: That might not even be unaccepting. That is expressing "this is my environment, this is my space, this is my preference, this is how I've set it up, and this is my direction with it. If you don't want to go in that direction, okay, but you can't participate in my environment like that." And that's what I mean. That's not necessarily not being accepting. You realized you're not going to change that person.

PAUL H: And it wasn't my intent. These are the guidelines that you agreed to when you joined this list, this community, and you violated the spirit of them. You have the opportunity to write me back and say I've thought about this... And some people do that. As moderator of these lists, it's not easy. It's like you've got a bull's eye on your back, people trying to second guess and judge and whatever. But in the long run, when your intent as the manager of a community is to allow a nurturing environment, it's the greater good. Every once in a while you have to come down and set the rules. If that person was here and was overtly violent, I'd call the police. That's a no-brainer. Action, reaction, ripples and that sort of thing.

But I didn't contact the moderators of other lists and say, "Why haven't you banned this other person from your list?" I thought about it; I considered it. It's not my thing, it's their thing, they're experimenting, and something's playing out there. It's happened on my lists years before. I've seen enough of it.

The rules that we've evolved are based on this back-and-forth and actually wrestling with and interpreting Elias' teaching of acceptance. It's not a singular philosophy you can base your entire life on. It's one band of several others that it's wrapped around; it's commingled, and it's a very important thing. In my opinion, it deals with the Jungian shadow. We all have this shadow and we all project it on others. It has nothing to do with you in that moment; it's me projecting that on you. We've been talking about it and Elias talks about it, and I see it in all these different ways, what I call "NIRA," the noticing, identifying, recognizing, accepting thing that he has outlined over the years as a wonderful technique to deal with that shadow. Obviously, I'm working it on my own.

I felt bad suspending that person, I did. I put myself in their shoes. But when I put myself in their shoes, I thought, "I would never do that!" I would never be projecting on you in this manner, because I realize it has nothing to do with you. So I just...

MARY: It's hard to figure out what the balance is and where the lines are.

PAUL H: And tomorrow is another day; it may be different. Elias says acceptance happens in the moment. You have this neutrality, no conflict, and you're there. But something happens the next day, and poof, you're there.

MARY: What was interesting for me to think about was that I thought I could accept differences. I even thought I can accept differences like Osama bin Laden, his culture. His perception is so different and that's okay, everybody is entitled to their perception and it's just different from my own. I can go in the direction of this is my guideline and it doesn't apply to other people or whatever, but that's one thing in theory. I've never met Osama bin Laden, he's never been in my face, he's never done anything to me, he hasn't chopped up one of my children, and so it's easy to say that.

But then when you get faced with a real person who is in your face, it's like "Okay! There's some real differences there! Those are real differences, and now what do I do with it? I don't think I like those differences!"

I'm fortunate that I was not as intensely affected as a lot of other people. I watched my assistant go through hell through this whole thing and tear herself apart and really, really be hurt and upset and angry, and bash herself for being angry and trash herself for feeling like she was being judgmental and matching energy and all kinds of stuff. I have dealt with other people that have been involved in this - Ron just told me they got a big slam again this morning - and they go through so many gyrations in themselves and it's so hard.

It's all around me, people presenting all these differences to themselves and how strongly people react when someone is doing something or behaving in a way that we think is wrong or that we don't like, and getting very confused about how to deal with that. Being quiet and not responding is not dealing! Because it's not ignoring.

PAUL H: It's being in denial.

MARY: Well, I think a lot of people feel like they don't want to fuel somebody else's fire, so they choose not to respond. They think to themselves, pretty genuinely, "I'm not going to change this person anyway, so what's the point?" But the point in all of that is what they're denying is themselves and their own expression, because they're not allowing themselves to express themselves. Then they churn and churn and churn inside themselves, NOT ignoring, and making themselves a wreck over the whole thing.

In that whole action, I think what people don't realize sometimes is that even though you're not responding verbally or in writing, you are responding. If you're churning and you're not ignoring, you're spewing out that energy anyway, and the other person is going to feel it. It's going to get registered and received, anyway. They might not necessarily recognize that this is coming from so-and-so; they might not get that. But they're going to receive it and they're going to translate it. This is something that I noticed with a lot of people who aren't responding, and then they get hit again.

PAT: Or if you do respond, you get hit again! You get hit either way...

MARY: It depends on how you respond.

PAT: But I have to respond!

MARY: That's fine, but...

PAT: Later, though, I start questioning myself because other people seem so accepting. But I felt good after I said it! After responding a couple of times, I got it out of my system, and now I'm not tweaked. But I had to go through the process of defending myself and being vocal at whatever cost to get to the point where I can just say it really doesn't matter at all - it's their world, not mine.

MARY: And that's your process.

PAT: My husband has a totally different process. I found it was almost fun after a while, to see what was coming up. I would say, "You won't believe this!" (Laughter) He would look at me and say, "Pat, I really feel sorry for that person." And that was his honest feeling; of course, he wasn't the one being attacked. Coming from another angle and hearing the excitement in my voice, he was able to give me a different view, that he felt sorry for her and it was too bad. Anyway, I made it to that point, but I had to be vocal first. You know me, I'm vocal! That's the way I respond.

MARY: Just in case there's anybody in here that doesn't understand, there are several Elias email chat lists on the computer, places where people can talk to each other on-line and share ideas and concepts and experiences and things like that. There is one person who has interacted on these lists and in the perception of most people has been very nasty.

Just like I said earlier, I'm starting to question what actually constitutes a lie anymore and whether what someone is saying is actually what they believe is happening. I'm not clear on that yet, but I'm beginning to think that the things this person is saying - which are pretty ugly and openly threatening - for this person, actually in their reality, this stuff is really real and it's really going on. This happened and this happened and this happened in their experience, but it didn't happen in the other people's experience that this person is talking about - but maybe it did happen in this person's experience.

But the point is this has generated a tremendous amount of conflict and agitation and hurt and anger, and a lot of back-and-forth responsiveness and craziness, and a lot of flinging energy back and forth, and a lot of people matching energy and threatening back. It's become this big huge mushroom cloud, which has involved a lot of people all over the world.

There are some people who are going in the direction of saying they're thankful to this person because this person showed me this and this. That's one place that I won't go, because I'm not going to credit this person with whatever I show myself in this situation. I know I drew this into my reality, such as it is - like I said, not as directly as a lot of other people have - but I know that in the way that I have, it was to show me something and for me to understand something.

One example of that is that things are not as absolute as I thought they were, and maybe when I think somebody is twisting the truth, maybe they're really not. Maybe that's really happening in their world. That's kind of hard to wrap my brain around because that would be one of my absolutes! To me, it's such an absolute that it would be like if I were to walk outside right now and see this nice sunny day and somebody right next to me saw rain. I'd be like, "Okay, you're crazy! It's not raining!" That's how extreme it felt to me in this situation, realizing how absolute I am in some things.

I've been reminding myself of an experience that I had, an actual physical experience, of two very different realities happening in the same place at the same time. Of course it wasn't very threatening, but I did have an experience where Stella and I were in Paris, waiting to get picked up and taken to the airport to catch our plane. One of my clients in Paris was supposed to pick us up and take us to the airport. The lobby of the hotel we were in was probably a little bigger than this whole entire building and there was only one counter where attendants were and it was all open. There were no pillars, nothing you could hide behind, and Stella and I were the only two people in that room other than the people behind the counter. We went up to the counter three times and asked if John had come to check for us, and they said nobody had been there. We waited for an hour for him. When we got home, he called me from Paris and said, "What the heck happened? I was there for a solid hour and you never showed up! I even went up to the desk clerk and asked for you, and he said you had checked out. I went up to your room and you had checked out of your room." And I said, "Yeah, we checked out, and we were sitting in the lobby the whole time!" He was like, "That's impossible. I was in the lobby for a solid hour and nobody was there except me." We didn't see him anywhere and obviously he didn't see us anywhere, which to this day kind of freaks me out and I can't quite wrap my brain around it.

PAT: Twilight Zone kind of stuff.

MARY: It was. It really was. It was really bizarre. I mean, that was kind of easier for me to go with because there seemed to be a reason attached to it. Because actually, if we had met up with him, we would have gotten to the airport on time and boarded the plane, and we would have had to stay an extra day in Paris. The plane we were supposed to be on and missed had a bomb threat on it, and they quarantined everybody for an extra day. We weren't on that plane - we got on the next plane - and we got to leave.

For me, there was a reason why that happened, so it was more understandable. In situations like this where somebody's being nasty and they're recalling experiences they say they had with you and it's completely different from your experience, that brings up automatic things where you want to defend yourself. You want to tell them they're wrong, you want to say that's not what happened, you want to try and tell them what happened and remind them.

GEORGE: What happens in the past and the future can be changed from the present moment, and that's why memories can be changed also. My memories can change compared to somebody else's experience.

MARY: True, and there are some little variations...

GEORGE: So it's easy to start arguing. How can acceptance come in when judgments start coming in? Once you have judgment, there's no acceptance. It all depends on how you look at it.

MARY: Definitely, and that's the whole point.

GEORGE: That's when acceptance becomes "that's what was there, that's your reality; thank you very much, but I didn't experience that." Once the head butting starts, then all's lost.

MARY: Here's an example. We're all sitting in the same room and we're all perceiving similarly. We all have a different perception, but we're all perceiving similarly that we're sitting in the same room together, there's all these people here, and we're talking back and forth. If one of you comes to me tomorrow and says, "Wasn't that amazing that someone stripped right in the middle of the room!" I'd be looking at the person like they're totally nuts, and I'd be like, "When did that happen? Was I out of the room when that happened?" And they would say, "You were right there - don't you remember? This is what happened. So and so got up and started yelling and stood on a chair and stripped off all their clothes, and that was just amazing!" And everybody in this room now would be thinking, "That's a little weird, and no, I didn't perceive that happening."

Not that that didn't happen in that person's reality, but it's difficult when there are such similarities in perception with so many people and there's one person who's creating something completely and entirely different. Our automatic go-there is that there's something wrong with that and it's not real. But maybe it is real and they're just deviating, and the rest of us are all participating with a similar perception because we have similar expressed beliefs. Maybe we have similar truths and this person has different ones. But for some reason, it seems to make it more difficult to grasp that kind of thing when you're reinforced by so many other people with similar perceptions. We naturally gravitate to that.

GEORGE: My point was, to avoid conflict you could say, "Oh, there was a naked person and you saw it? Excellent." There's acceptance, no conflict, and move on instead of spending half the day trying to convince them that nobody was naked. So everybody's happy.

MARY: Right, and ideally that would be great.

GEORGE: It's so simple. I think it's simple.

MARY: It is simple. I just don't think that a lot of people automatically do that.

PAT: It's not so simple when it turns into that stripper was YOU! (Laughter)

MARY: That's a good point.

GEORGE: If you're comfortable with yourself and you know who you are, you truly don't care. When ego comes into play, that's where the problems start.

MARY: Yes, and defensiveness, but the point is that for most people that defensiveness is an automatic response.

GEORGE: Someone can say, "George was humping a dog somewhere," and how can I prove to somebody else that that's not real? I know what happened in my reality.

FEMALE: For me it's been very easy and even entertaining to observe the lists until I saw my name mentioned. It wasn't me but only my name, but even to see it, then the twinge was there. It went away because I realized it wasn't me, but it had been so easy theoretically to... And the motivation, when you were talking about the ignoring being mostly more of a positive thing, to me - I don't get on the lists, I read them but I don't write anything - but I keep wondering why don't people ignore her. Why do they keep feeding her what she wants? If I were participating, my motivation in ignoring would have been more to tweak her than to make it more pleasant. She wants a response and they keep giving her a response. Stop!

PAUL H: That's what they do, and it's called trolling. I'm speaking as a moderator on a list, and it took several years for this to precipitate in the cyber communities. Trolls come into these communities because they get a pay-off. They're like vampires - they suck you dry. As long as there's this...

FEMALE: (Inaudible) ...accepting that you can have your preference. Like Elias was saying yesterday, it's the little preference like you like to have everything dusted and then someone dumps dirt on your table. It can start with a little thing, that you can have the right to have that preference for yourself. Sometimes you can't see it until an extreme comes in. So for me, she's offered huge extremes that I wasn't even able to notice that there was a preference in one direction or another.

PAT: This has helped me a lot recently in understanding my daughter. I can read those posts and understand a lot of the thinking mechanisms my daughter has used, and it has opened me up more for my daughter to understand that maybe she's not whack-o, maybe her reality is truly different than the way I'm seeing it.

MARY: Oh yes! I will say the same thing for myself, because I started to realize that about my youngest daughter. Maybe this is really the way that...

PAT: So maybe this is a positive thing.

MARY: Yes, I definitely think so, but I don't credit her with it!

GEORGE: Mary, another thing I'd like to point out. When you talk about someone having a different experience, you were talking about Paris a moment ago. A lot of our minds probably were in Paris at that moment, but someone else's mind might have been somewhere else. When we leave, they'll say, "What do you mean, Paris? Did she talk about Paris?" So that's another thing, where it's like your mind can do that to you. I could have come here yesterday to the session and leave and say, "What did Elias talk about?" So it's all these things where we can't judge by just looking at it physically.

MARY: I understand what you're saying, George. Theoretically, you're right and it's not really different...

GEORGE: I don't mean right or wrong; this is what I'm thinking.

MARY: I agree with you. I understand, but the thing is that in this situation what occurred is that this person is taking real experiences, real interactions with some other people - I'll use myself as an example - taking a real experience where I invited this person to my home and took this person to dinner and interacted with this person, and then, in my perception, this person took the scenario of the whole evening and twisted it into something entirely different, and is using bits and pieces of what happened...

GEORGE: So it's the National Enquirer.

MARY: Exactly. And took the whole thing and twisted it into such a pretzel until it comes out looking like something entirely different. So for me even to consider that maybe that is what really happened in this person's reality, which is SO different than what happened in my reality... The person is being very attacking and threatening and accusing, when in my reality I welcomed this person into my home, I allowed this person to stay there and took them to dinner and was trying to be hospitable and even supportive, because in my perception at the time this person seemed to be very vulnerable and struggling with different situations. I was feeling compassionate about that and was trying to be somewhat distracting and playful and joking around and trying to have some fun. It got turned into something big, nasty, ugly and accusing, and then throwing threats of what the person is going to do to me. I'm not really concerned about that, because I understand there's really nothing that can be done and I know inside of myself that that just didn't happen.

But that doesn't mean that initially you're not taken aback and a little bit stunned, thinking, "That never happened! I didn't do that! Wait a minute!" I'm somewhat in the place that you're talking about. It's really not bothering me that much now. I will admit that initially it did tweak me and I did twinge, but I can go in the direction of thinking this is what this person's reality is and they created that and maybe it's really real.

JO: But maybe it isn't. Maybe she's just pathological in some way and disturbed and a liar, and she's twisting the information. Just because someone takes that point of view doesn't mean that they aren't lying.

MARY: That's true. I don't know!

JO: There's something I read someplace called "idiot compassion," like it's okay to have compassion for people but you can take it too far and you can be a doormat. It's like let's not use this "you create your reality" thing to justify and excuse bad and hurtful behavior that people are doing to each other.

MARY: I agree. I think it's confusing to me and a lot of other people. I did respond one time and not personally to this person. I responded in general and I wasn't feeling...

JO: I didn't know what was going on then and I thought it was a great email. It was very balanced and you were setting your boundaries, but it was still very light. You could tell you put a lot of effort in it. It was very well composed. I thought whatever is going on, this is a really nice response. It's not pointing a finger at anybody, it's not being accusing, and it's very accepting, I would say, of the situation of laying down boundaries.

MARY: I had just come off an entire week flooded with phone calls from people that had been slammed in this situation, calling me about how to deal with this. I thought maybe this would be some sort of a little bit of a help for these people to understand that you don't have to lie down and play dead. You don't have to go at somebody and you don't have to be accusing or blaming somebody, but you can state yourself and your preferences and who you are and express yourself and not be a doormat. At the end of that one post that I did, I said, "That's it, that's all I have to say, I'm done now." And I meant it. I spammed this person and this person hasn't been able to get through, which I understand now has sparked a lot of pissed off-ness because there's no way to get through. I'm a little bit sorry that other people have to deal with it...

PAT: We're all getting our own pay-off.

MARY: I'm feeling okay with what I did. I didn't express myself in a malicious way - I wasn't feeling that way at all.

JO: And for the record, Mary, you didn't spam her, you put her on your spam list. (Laughter)

MARY: I did, I put her on my list. Is there a difference? Does that mean you send people spam? Oh! (Laughter)

PAUL H: You're not a spammer.

MARY: No, no, no, no! I didn't do that!

JO: You have other ways to recruit people into the cult besides spam! (Much laughter)

PAUL H: I also want to say that this conscious creation philosophy, ideology, people are trying to embrace it and explore it, and it is a wide-open target for trolling. What happens is because it's a very complex cognitive mind set - it's very sophisticated, it's very highly evolved, it's pluralistic, it's relativistic, there's no absolute good or bad - you kind of get lost in that, and when you get into a really extreme form of that in your own space and time, someone can come in like this and you get so caught up in this that you put them on a level playing field.

As Joanne was saying, maybe they are lying; maybe they have a repressed, neurotic something or other that's vomiting this thing out. It happens. We've all been through it. We know these things. This person is going through a difficult time and you feel compassion, but then you get to the place where there's idiot compassion.

I'm just sharing my journey through the last three years and coming to terms and making a judgment. It is a judgment and it is not accepting and I recognize that; I identify that, but there's a time and place for it. In my reality, there are boundaries, and when a troll comes into a community and is really obnoxious, you simply suspend him. They're not welcome here.

MARY: They're going to find somewhere else to go.

PAUL H: Right. There was a cartoon in the New Yorker magazine with the caption "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." There was this dog typing away. (Laughter) It's a real different kind of game. It's like you can assume identities, alter egos can come out on the keyboard, and yet this dynamic here in-person is way different. Our defenses are up; we're much more well behaved generally. You can come over and smack me!

MARY: Definitely! Which is an interesting point, because that piece has come up, too, which we were talking about this morning. This person has written things about this group of Seth people in New York that meets every other week, that everybody likes her there and is friends with her there. Well yeah, because that's an in-person situation. When I was in-person with this person, the presentment was fine, too. It's easy to hide behind the computer and spew out all kinds of stuff. It's not so easy to do that in-person face to face.

PAT: But do they really like her?

MARY: I don't know! I don't know what to believe anymore. Even if they do, it wouldn't actually surprise me because when I met her in person she was pleasant. She seemed to have a nice interaction and a good sense of humor. Completely different than what goes on on the computer! It's like night and day. I think the reason is because you can hide behind the computer.

JO: You can almost be a terrorist. You can be anonymous, and there are very few rules unless you set them. Aliases...

PAT: And you go to a group that is working on acceptance and what better group to attack! (Laughter) What are they going to do to you? It's like you've just proven your own theory wrong, and she used that.

WILL: I'd like to add two cents to this. I don't know anything about this situation, so I'm going to take what I've been hearing and take it to a different place, to where I can make sense of it. In my experience, wherever human beings gather, wherever you have people, you have some level of polarization, different view points very, very strongly, and then you have some level of craziness, people that really aren't all there, people that aren't able to participate in the same way. I think that it is important for a community to set boundaries, but the crazy people are still there present in our human community. They have to have somewhere to go; they don't just disappear. On-line is one thing, but in-person is a whole different thing. We live as beings, as bodies, and so the on-line thing is a much different reality. I think that's one of our big challenges.

Elias brought that up yesterday, how we generate opposition. The polarization in our world and our communities is a huge thing. We have in our human community very sensible people who would attack this group here, would see this group as an unbelievable threat, and if they knew we existed, they would go after us because we threaten them. But they wouldn't be crazy, crazy in the sense you're describing, seeing a whole different reality. They would see and interpret reality differently than we do.

One of the things that's always impressed me about Seth and Elias is the way that they treat each individual. I've seen Elias respond to a person who I thought was kind of crazy in the way that they present themselves, and Elias really treated them equally. And also in the "Seth Material," Jane Roberts dealt with some really crazy people. They talk about it in the book. Elias and Seth are modeling a form of acceptance and interacting with that type of energy and craziness without making it worse and in a way that's pretty accepting.

In my own personal experience, in communities I've been a part of myself, communities give up too quickly on people or judge too quickly, and that judgment becomes an obstacle. I don't know anything about the email situation, but I think it's a huge challenge, and the material is calling for us to really look at ourselves, how we are generating this. There's no right or wrong to any of this.

MARY: I completely agree and I understand. I think the point of being able to discuss it is to be able to express what we each see, what we experience, and not to be judging ourselves or each other or saying what's a better or worse way. I think all of us are trying to implement Elias' example of being that straight little sapling, of being that embodiment of acceptance, but it's a wicked unfamiliar thing. We're not used to it. We don't naturally do it, and we all get twinged.

It's good to share with each other that it's okay to get twinged. It's good to think about what you're getting twinged about, and it's good to go in the direction of trying to evaluate all of this, because we all want to express that kind of acceptance. I personally don't know if I will ever make it there, because I don't think I have ever experienced anything as accepting as Elias. You're right, it doesn't matter what it is. You could be an axe-murderer cannibal and he would be accepting of you.

WILL: He's not threatened by it.

MARY: Exactly, and we are and that's real.

FEMALE: All our human emotions are real. You were hurt, you were frustrated, and you feel for everybody else.

MARY: Exactly, and those are real things that we really have to deal with, and they come up for everybody.

WILL: I wonder if there's a place for ignoring. Again, in a community, if the community is pretty solid and together, a crazy person comes into that community, the community cannot ignore but allow a certain behavior that might not be unacceptable to that community.

Again, in a human face-to-face community, not an on-line community, I've seen people - and Sabrina might see this with the teens - you see people change. The community has the power. The community is the larger group. Like in a teen group home, if you pay attention to every little bad behavior, that kid will be sent out. But in a loving space, eventually people get with the program - unless it's neurological or there are other kinds of things. People are able to do that. Not that I can do that, but I've seen other people do that. It's pretty amazing sometimes, the transformation that can take place in that individual. Sometimes there's no place in society for lots of people.

MARY: I understand. My point with that is not that ignoring something isn't purposeful sometimes; I think it is, if you are really doing that. But in some situations, people equate nonresponsiveness with ignoring, and they're really not ignoring. That was my point. Even in this situation, if you are looking at a behavior of somebody else that you don't agree with or like, if you really are ignoring it, it will probably discontinue or the person will find somebody else to do it with - if you are really doing it, if you are genuinely ignoring them.

But if you're not, if you're just not responding and not ignoring them, and you're churning yourself up inside and consuming yourself with what's going on, that's not ignoring it. It's kind of deluding yourself into thinking that you're ignoring it and that you're not contributing any energy to it by not responding, and that's not true. You are still contributing energy. Just because you're not talking to the person doesn't mean that you're not still throwing out that energy of conflict.

FEMALE: I think there were posts from certain people within this room that exemplified true genuine acceptance in certain posts and you could see it in the deflation of that person in that moment. That never stayed, but in that moment you could see that there was an impact when they received genuine acceptance of something that they had put out there versus seeing some people who were putting out words of acceptance but were coming across as condescending or the "poor you" thing or "if you knew better you wouldn't be doing it this way." That came back with a lot more fire.

MARY: Like I said, I have not personally been directly in the situation, but I have a lot of compassion for the people that are actually in the situation. I don't have spies - I don't need them! I have the biggest grapevine network around. People are constantly talking to me and telling me about this.

Yesterday before the session, we talked about Axel and his girlfriend Khadija. This is just such a horrendously hard time for him and my heart pours out to him. He called Cathy at 1:00 last night and they talked for an hour and a half because he was such a wreck. It was the most unbelievable experience to get up this morning and in one moment I've got Cathy talking to me about Axel and how he's so upset and going through this horrendous experience, and the next moment Ron comes in and says, "She's on Axel!" I was like, "What? Has she got not one shred of compassion in her entire being? This man is distraught and she's going to attack him now when he's feeling so vulnerable?" I had one thing on one hand and another thing on the other hand, with one person on one side who's devastated and so lost, and this shark that's coming after the floundering fish and attacks. To me, it's unconscionable. I can't even fathom the motivation.

Like with what you were saying, Jo, in the past we had a situation with another person and I and a lot of other people could genuinely go in a direction of somehow inside of ourselves excusing her behavior to an extent by saying to ourselves, "This person is genuinely crazy. She doesn't know what she's doing; she doesn't understand what she's doing." Therefore, we excuse her and forgive her behavior by saying she's not responsible for what she's doing because she doesn't understand what she's doing.

This person now might be a little neurotic but she isn't crazy. She knows exactly what she's doing and is doing it intentionally. There's no way to excuse it and there seems to be no way to reconcile it within ourselves. I had nowhere else to go except in a direction of saying to myself maybe this is real for her. Maybe this is just really real for her. Maybe that's just my way of being able to deal with it because it's so far out of my reality. It's SO different that I can't reconcile with it in any possible other way. To me it's the most unconscionable thing I could present to myself. How can you be a human shark and do this kind of thing? I can even justify the Nazis better!

PAUL H: I can reconcile it. I've been going through this in my own experience. Look up on the Internet the words "narcissism, narcissist." I know Elias doesn't use psychological belief systems, but this type of behavior, a narcissist - what did Narcissus do? He stared at his reflection until he starved to death and died. It's all about him. And here you have Elias in parallel saying focus on self. Narcissists feed on this; it's like a magnet to them. It's all about them and pay attention to them.

I've had two personalities on my list, and Mare, I'm tripping, because you're describing something I've gone through in the last year and a half that led to me to refine these tenets. They're very general; they're not very specific. There are twelve. Basically you're suspended, and you're not allowed here anymore. I'm not going to come after you, I'm not going to send the FBI or my spies to find you, because I don't care. These people won't go away and you're setting a boundary.

I had someone on a list who was from another country, living in Canada, and he was just off the wall. He had issued death threats to President Bush! He wanted to kill the president. It's the same behavior. But if someone was accepting and compassionate, he was bright. These people are bright - high intelligence, articulate, interpersonal skills - but you don't exist to them. You're just fuel for them.

So instead of good and evil, I think of pathological behavior - crazy. But these people aren't crazy, they're not seeing... But how can people behave this way? This is just one conventional psychological way to describe it, and for me to reconcile this behavior. This is real, and it has to be dealt with. I'm not going to come and kill you or say you can't be a narcissist, but you can't be a narcissist in my house or on my email lists.

MARY: It was pretty crazy for me, because this was not just how do you deal with this person. It's really difficult to wrap your brain around things that are not in your experience. It really emphasized to me what Elias says about concepts are concepts but they don't get generated into reality until you have experience with them. This is something that is so far out of my experience that I understand that this is one of those examples. If this is a concept to me, I don't really get it. I don't understand it because I don't have this experience. I can't comprehend what the motivation is, what the pay-off is, what any of it is.

JO: It really helped me in dealing with my interactions with people when, a little bit after 9-11, I read a couple of papers about what Seth and Elias said and all, about how killing someone is a violation and all that. I began to believe that maybe some violations are worse than other ones. They're really very gray in that area.

I think it was when the terrorists took over the theater in Moscow. They were holding all those people hostage and they had bombs strapped on them. I pictured myself in that situation and I realized that if I had a gun and a clear shot at one of those terrorists and I could save several hundred people, I would do it. When I finally accepted in myself that resolve, that I would take somebody out if I needed to - not that it would be a wonderful thing; I think it would be a very painful thing to kill someone and that's why it's a violation - but when I realized that I felt similar...

MARY: That you're capable of it.

JO: ...and maybe that would be the choice to make in that moment, I felt a lot better about everything. It's like I would go that far with a terrorist if I needed to.

PAUL H: She hasn't killed anybody, so it's still a concept!

JO: So, for some reason I got a little more resolve about not putting up with jerks and people who aren't kind to others.

MARY: I understand what you're talking about and I have somewhat of a similar experience, maybe a little bit more so or more extreme, but I had a revelation about that, about what I'm capable of. When my youngest daughter Elizabeth was about six months old, someone broke into our house through her bedroom window. The person who did it was involved in this kidnapping ring, and the police came and fingerprinted everything - it was a big deal. But the man that grabbed her, I heard a crash in her bedroom...

(Tape runs out)

?2005 Mary Ennis, All Rights Reserved

Copyright 2005 Mary Ennis, All Rights Reserved.