A Course in Miracles Teacher Talks About God, The Bible, Ego, ACIM and Advaita Vedanta

David Hoffmeister—A Course in Miracles Teacher: The Bible told us, "Hold no graven images before the Lord, thy God." It wasn't talking about totem poles or golden calves, like we thought. It was actually talking about anything in time and space that you hold more valuable than God or your true Self. Anything that you hold more valuable than God or our true Self will block you from the awareness of love. 

Spirit is not a religion or a theology. Spirit and love is a state of mind. You can't know that presence as long as you value anything else besides that presence. That's why with all the commandments; the two that Jesus emphasized was, "Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and soul and mind." And, "Love thy neighbor as thy self." Not as a separate entity or a separate being. So, when the song we listened to earlier said, "You
literally are your brother. You literally are your sister," it's pointing to all the great traditions that say that God is one and God is love. Instead of using a spirituality that emphasizes only meditation or seclusion, for example going off in a cave or going to a forest, it's saying, No, you can actually do this as an open eyed meditation of being shown that what you think of as somebody other than you is not actually other than you at all. 

That's why giving and receiving is the same. Any A Course in Miracles teacher really applying ACIM will know that All that I give is given to myself. There literally are not two. That's what Advaita Vedanta means- not two. This is
literally a teaching of "not two." The most glorious experience is when you relax into that state. If there is not two, then all must be well. It must be that you can just relax in that state of forgiveness and remembrance of
who you are.

The key element for the ego is the belief in sacrifice and what Jesus teaches us through a Course in Miracles is that while you believe in sacrifice love is unknown. He describes sacrifice very simply in the Teachers of Teachers section - which is for A Course in Miracles teachers and students - as the belief in giving up of what you want. So, he's going to work with the sacrifice idea because, it's so heavily believed in. The giving up of what you want is very simple. You have been called by God into the most holy function there could ever be; forgiveness. And that is your calling. Your calling really isn't a calling in form. It may seem to take a form for a little while. But it's really a calling into divine presence and remembrance. You have been called by God. Jesus says, "Would you now sacrifice the call,if sacrifice is the giving up of what you want?" You have linear time on one hand and you have the call to remember God on the other hand. Really, that's the only thing you have to come to a reckoning with. Am I going to sacrifice the call to experience Spirit or am I going to sacrifice linear time? David Hoffmeister, A Course in Miracles teacher.
https://www.youtube.com/user/DavidHoffmeister

Nondual Teachers and Sickness

The following is an excerpt from a transcribed talk for nondual teachers by David Hoffmeister.

One time I had symptoms where I started feeling this nauseousness and this sick kind of feeling when I was doing all my mind training. As a one of the nondual teachers, I was watching my thoughts, and the thoughts were oh it feels like I am getting sick, feels like I am catching the flu, oh my Dad just had the flu, oh so did my Grandmother, I probably caught the flu from them.  I was just watching all my thoughts and then I put a plate of food in the microwave to heat it up, put it in there and it was heating and then I started thinking oh no, the nauseous feeling started coming and I was thinking oh no, now I am not going to get to eat the plate of food, just watching my thoughts with everything. I at least had taught myself to watch my mind by that point, just watch the thoughts, like watching all the thoughts. Then the diarrhea feeling hit really hard, with the flu symptoms and then the nauseousness and then the diarrhea and I went running down the hallway to run to the toilet and everything and I got in, put my pants down, still watching my thoughts and as I sat there I went what is my lesson, what is my Course lesson for the day?  It was lesson 136. Sickness is a defense against the truth.  Interesting timing for that lesson.  No coincidences here. So then you know how Jesus says in the Course, he says let related thoughts come to your mind from the lesson.  

So I am sitting on the toilet with my nauseous feeling and my diarrhea feeling and everything. Now I have got my lesson for the day. Yay, I am good, a helpful thought.  I missed all the flu thoughts, and catching germs and the feelings.  And here comes, here we go, Jesus on the white horse to the rescue and here he comes. So I thought okay, sickness is a defense against the truth, now this is what we are talking about, be practical. So then I started to let related thoughts come and one of them was sickness is a decision. I thought well that is interesting. Kind of counteracts catching the flu bug. Sickness is a decision of mind.  And then I let another thought start to trickle in and another one is coming in and it is like you choose sickness, you choose sickness, you choose the symptom when you are afraid of love.  Just what we have been talking about today.  Ah ha. See how right minded that is when Christ comes to the rescue, it is always there for us nondual teachers, we just have to let the thoughts in.  And then you are afraid of love and therefore you think that this will help mitigate, you think that you can kind of punish yourself instead of being punished by God. What kind of a crazy view of God, you see how twisted it is; it is as if God would punish anyone. But we have believed it you know, look at our religions, drill it in. So ah ha, I am choosing a small self, I am choosing the flu, I am choosing nausea, I am choosing diarrhea instead of the condemnation and judgment of God. Ahhh so I think I have chosen smaller, safer. Oh that is a sneaky trick that would not escape nondual teachers.

To learn more about the teachings, nondual teachers, and David Hoffmeister, please visit his website at http://www.nondualteacher.info

Non dual Teachers Wisdom on Alignment with Purpose

Enjoy the following excerpt from a transcribed talk given by one of the clearest non dual teachers David Hoffmeister, who speaks about alignment with purpose.

Yes, I feel that that is exactly what we are coming to.  Many non dual teachers agree that it is an awareness that through detachment, through non-judgment, or obviously being aligned with our divine purpose, that that is the highest helpfulness that you could have.  You are literally being fully a part of a re-translation of the whole perception of the world.  And is that helpful?  It is the most helpful. 

The other attempts that you were describing were very noble attempts, very altruistic attempts.  And underneath the altruistic attempts was a desire to make a contribution, to provide some helpfulness.  And the prayer at the beginning of the Course...says I am here only to be truly helpful.  I am here to represent Him who sent me.  That truly helpful, putting those two words together… we could say that as you rise up in consciousness and you start to clear away the dualistic thinking and you get much more in line with this beautiful purpose that is forgiveness, I will call it… that the more in line you are with forgiveness, that you become truly helpful. 

And sometimes people will say, “Well, does that just mean that you sit there in the lotus position and the world goes on and you are just sitting there meditating?”  No actually what I have found is that as I have come into alignment with this purpose, the body of David still seems quite active, talking, going around to thirty-one countries, going to third world countries where I do get the chance to interact with children and families and all walks of life.  I will occasionally meet people who are involved in politics or science or you name it.  It is like a huge broad swath of those that I come into contact with, some celebrities.

 It is just a huge, wide range and there is always that helpfulness component.  To give you an example, going down to Argentina and going out with my friend to go to many gatherings like this, taking along a little sack of coins, and she brought a little sack of little angels to go along, because while I was down there the economy had collapsed.  People were going through starvation and children, were coming up to do juggling acts, wanting to wash the windshield of the car, anything to bring home something to support their mothers and their families and everything.  So the Spirit had us get a sack of coins, and my friend brought along these little angels. We would stop at the red light and they would do their little performance, and we would have these wonderful Holy encounters, one after the next, with these children.  And their eyes would light up and sparkle.  It was very active.  We were not just off and sitting and meditating.  We were right there, just letting the love, you might say, just infuse us.  The body is like a marionette that is completely neutral, as many non dual teachers agree.  It has no causative effect, but that marionette can be moved, you might say, or I call it being done through.

To learn more about non dual teacher David Hoffmeister, please visit https://nondualityonline.com/

Opening the Heart to Jesus with a Course in Miracles

The following is an excerpt from a talk with David Hoffmeister, A Course in Miracles teacher, on the topic of heart opening to Jesus.

When you have the feeling that you are being touched by the truth, obviously you feel your heart opening up and in A Course in Miracles it is saying you do not need to believe in Jesus to benefit from this. It can be helpful for many people, very helpful inroads and of course there are many devoted Christians that I have met all over the world, lots of them in South America, they were just so passionate and everything but even among them, they have gone through so much intensity in this world, wars, starvation, disease, and death. They have gone through these things like hierarchies that were just set up to follow — these hierarchies to Jesus, like you are walking up a ladder. There is so much corruption and so many things done in the name of Jesus that do not seem very loving at all.

So I find it in Europe in particular a lot of times people say I do not feel any kind of connection, it is a turn-off instead of a turn-on and it is quite common over here. For me, I was raised in Christianity but it was something that took I think it was much later in my life, when I was in university that I started to have this awakening experience with A Course in Miracles and I started to open up and have a connection with Jesus for the first time. It was not the historical Jesus it was with the Jesus in my heart. That is that good feeling when we say we have a relationship with Jesus. Maybe in your experience you are opening up to the truth, it resonates in your heart, that when you bring in the word Jesus or the Holy Spirit it is like an alien has landed or something,  like Oh, hi who are you? Or a kind of thing like that, but the most important thing is your heart opening up. I find that there are so many people who have had Jesus on a pedestal, and even a lot of Christians and Catholics have told me they are quite afraid of Jesus.

It is interesting, the flip side, you are not feeling anything in particular.  They are feeling fear, they can relate to Mary, they can relate to angels, feeling like someone is watching over me. So at least you are more in a neutral position, not in the fear mode, to have to overcome all that. So when you asked that question I just had Jesus inside me. You know the song Jesus is just alright with me, Jesus is just alright oh yeah?  That's how playful Jesus is with me, He has a little Jesus song going in there, feel like rocking and grooving in there, He is so playful, friendly, so funny, so humorous and for many they have to peel away a lot of conditioning around Jesus being something else.

To learn more about the teachings of A Course in Miracles and David Hoffmeister, please visit his website at www.davidhoffmeister.com

Why Non Dual Teachers Always Seem Happy

The following was transcribed from a talk given by David Hoffmeister, one of the great non dual teachers of the modern age.

For me that was the thing of surrendering just to say I'll go wherever you want me to go, I'll do whatever you want me to do, I will step back, you lead the way, you show me. I'm not going to try to freeze down an identity into anything that is static. I want to continually go through an evolution of consciousness where I am so unattached and so open to whatever comes my way, that in the end I reach a state where I see that I cannot judge anything. That I never could judge anything. That I never did know my best interest. This humble state of just pure openness. Open-mindedness.

There is a lot of ideas that get left along the way. Even the idea of positive energy and negative energy. You could start to see that there is so much duality in everything that we have believed in. We have to truly, like one of the greatest non dual teacher, Buddha said, empty the mind of everything that we think we think and we think we know and come into that state of pure emptiness and innocence.

Recently I was listening to the Chinese translator of A Course in Miracles and she said - I mean, in the beginning they didn't get it into mainland China, they got it over to Taiwan and she did a lot of her work in Taiwan. She said first it kind of caught fire as kind of this catchy new age teaching and philosophy and it was starting to become popular that way. And then occasionally some Buddhists would trickle in and start picking up the book and working with it a bit. And she noticed over the years, that the ones that came in from a new age perspective, they were like a flash in the pan. They quickly let it go and it was the Buddhists that were the long term ACIM students. The other ones all faded away and I thought how beautiful. This ancient tradition of non dualism, with so many non dual teacher emphasizing the emptying of the mind, this deep rich spiritual tradition there, they came into it very slowly like, What's this? and then they started working with it and then they hung with it. 

I think that is the way that this kind of alchemy, this transformation goes. We have to have a lot of steadfastness, a lot of persistence, a lot of devotion to truly hang with it and then pop! It seems like we reach a crescendo. We reach a threshold or something and it is just like, Wham! It is just, Boink! Ah ha! Eureka! The simplicity of it just dawns. The glee, the joy, the happiness. That’s why a lot of non dual teachers seem so happy, because they had a lot of devotion and hung in there.