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.

At A Course in Miracles Devotional Center we are living the principles of A Course in Miracles

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At A Course in Miracles Devotional Center we are living the principles of A Course in Miracles

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At A Course in Miracles Devotional Center we are living the principles of A Course in Miracles, the metaphysics, the guidelines, and the practical application. Being together in ACIM Spiritual Community is a living experience of sharing in one purpose in order to experience awakening in mind and the presence of Love.

“This course does not aim at teaching the meaning of love,
for that is beyond what can be taught.
It does aim, however, at removing the blocks to the awareness of love’s presence,
which is your natural inheritance.” ACIM

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Inspired by the teachings of A Course in Miracles, we are dedicated to inner peace and awakening. We desire to know God, to experience His love, His peace, and His will for us consistently, and we know that joining together in our shared purpose is the most joyful way to invite Him into our awareness.

Our approach is based on David Hoffmeister’s teaching of the practical application of A Course in Miracles, focusing on the Guidance of the Spirit within. This single-pointed  approach is one where absolutely everything in daily life is used for one Purpose; to come to the experience of forgiveness and true freedom.

A Course in Miracles Teacher, David Hoffmeister Shares about the body and Communication.

A Course in Miracles Teacher, David Hoffmeister Shares about the body and Communication.

David, A Course in Miracles teacher:Also, we can just get some contrast of using the body for something other than communication. For example, the Olympics: The Olympics are based on competition, and you
will notice that bodies seem to get hurt in the Olympics. Think about boxing and wrestling, these are forms of attack and defense. One time when I was in Venezuela, I went on a sports radio show and the man who
read the scores was also an A Course in Miracles student. He would sit with me in the booth and he would read off all of the scores, and then he would say, "Okay David, you who are an A Course in Miraclesteacher, can you tell us what is happening when players get injured, when they collide or when they have ligament problems." I said, "Well that is coming from guilt in the mind for believing in competition." Let's apply this to business for example, there is something called a Type A personality, full of stress. Type A, work all of the time, never take a break, push, push, push, they can have high stress, heart attacks, high
blood pressure. Another motive could be fame, different actors and actresses being in motion pictures,
or models, using the body to be famous, and to draw attention to the body identity. Fame is not a good motive for the body, it is not a good motive to use the body, or to try to be wealthy, that is a common thing that people use the body for, to work hard with the body to accumulate a lot of possessions and lots of money. They have discovered too, that a lot of people that are stressed out are wealthy people who are afraid of losing their money. Another example would be thrill seeking, using extreme sports, or pushing the body to extreme conditions just to get more stimulation. All of these examples are the ego misusing the body
for its own purposes. And then there is the very obvious one, it is called war. Using the body to kill other bodies, this is not the Spirit.

Then we have stories of all kinds of war injuries that can last for many years, decades. Even the psychological ones like, post-traumatic stress. Where people keep re-living horrific memories of war scenes. I see some of you are taking notes, we can make two categories, ego's use of body, and Spirit's use of body. Holy Sprits use: communication device, and Jesus puts the other into 3 categories:
pride, pleasure, and attack. These are the 3 main uses that the ego has for the body, and these 3 keep the mind asleep and dreaming. The communication purpose will take you first into lucid dreaming, you start
to have more Deja-vu experiences, “mm, I have seen this before." Or, a sense of, "Oh, I am aware that I am
dreaming," which is a very powerful experience. I think we really covered the healing.

I once had a request given to me from a thirteen- year old girl. She had
not even begun high school and she was already ready to retire, and it
does come down to practicalities. I told this girl, I said, "Well you
have very many highly artistic skills, and if you want to paint for a
living, you actually could do that." Her skills were so high.

Her mother was A Course in Miracles teacher and student, and so was her grandmother, and I said, "You could tell them of your idea,"

but I said, "You cannot tell this to your father, he will think you are
completely crazy. And so you will have to make a decision because that
would be a very radical thing to do at thirteen- years old." I did meet
her 5 years later when she was eighteen, and she was preparing to go to
university, and have a boyfriend, and then I did hear about her another 4
years later, she had graduated from university. Even though she had
considered retiring at thirteen, it was too extreme, it was too radical.
So in relation to this question that is
being asked it would be good to talk to the daughter about the
consequences of such a decision, because the Holy Spirit is always
helping us unlearn the world, but it's most important that we give our
skills over to the Holy Spirit.
So if the daughter wants to just stop school, and has no idea of her
purpose, there could be some very harsh consequences to that decision.
But if she is very clear spiritually that she is letting go of the
pursuits of this world, and we do have a lot of indigo children and
crystal children on the planet right now. I think they do have a feeling
that they are here to demonstrate a completely new way of living. In
rare cases they do drop out of school, and it actually becomes a
blessing, a teaching device. If you remember the story of Siddhartha,
his father had all kinds of future expectations for him to be king. But
when Siddhartha left the palace he said, "No, I have to go for spiritual
enlightenment." That is pretty much the same with all saints and
mystics, they seem like the black sheep of the family, they never fit
into this world well, and they would be unhappy if they tried to play
along with the world. Okay, we handled all of the questions. Thanks to
all of those who wrote in.