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
A Course In Miracles Awakening Mind Community and Retreat space for
participants to practice living in Purpose and experiencing the Peace of God
& ACIM.
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.
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.
Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has resigned after a unanimous and historic ruling by the country's Supreme Court, whichdisqualifiedhim from holding public office.
Afp / AFP / Getty Images
This verdict was a result of a deep investigation of thePanama Papers case, in which the Sharif and his family were accused of corruption and not being able to substantiate their massive wealth with the appropriate documents.
"He is no more eligible to be an honest member of the parliament, and he ceases to be holding the office of prime minister," Judge Ejaz Afzal Khan, head of the implementation bench,said in the courtabout Sharif.
The highly-anticipated verdict marks Sharif's third incomplete term. No prime minister in Pakistan hasever completed a full five-year termsince the country's inception 70 years ago.
The Sharif family was found living beyond their means and asked by the court to submit a paper trail of their spending, including their real estate property in London. Their lawyers failed to provide convincing documentation, and were also accused of submittingforged documents.
Another member of the Sharif family implicated in the case is Maryam Safdar Nawaz Sharif, the prime minister's daughter, who has been very vocal in the family's defense.
Others include her husband Captain Muhammad Safdar, and the prime minister's sons Hassan and Hussain Nawaz.
Pakistan's Finance Minister Ishaq Dar was also disqualified shortly after the verdict on Sharif.
Aamir Qureshi / AFP / Getty Images
Dar had submitted documents supporting the Sharifs to the court, to prove they had obtained their assets fairly.
Ex-cricketer and the leader of the opposition party Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf Imran Khan was responsible for bringing Sharif and his family's links to offshore accounts and companies to the court's attention.
Aamir Qureshi / AFP / Getty Images
The allegations were originally made in April last year by Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca.
Sharif was among several leaders around the world identified by the law firm of involvement in corrupt off-shore activities.
The most popular fake news post about the German chancellor leads to a Catholic version of YouTube that's apparently run by people in Moscow using servers in Moldova. Yes,seriously.
There have been hundreds of articles and videos published about the Angela Merkel, but no German-language post has attracted more shares, comments, and reactions on Facebook in the last five years than a video from Gloria.tv headlined, "Angela Merkel: Germans have to accept foreigners' violence."
Facebook
With about 273,000 Facebook reactions, comments, and shares, it's by far the most successful German post about Merkel on Facebook. It's also false.
In fact, a BuzzFeed News analysis found that 7 of the 10 top-performing German posts about Angela Merkel on Facebook the last five years are false.
Karsten Schmehl / BuzzFeed
Using BuzzSumo, BuzzFeed News identified the articles about Angela Merkel published in the the last five years that generated the highest total number of shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook. Of the top 10, seven were false or a hoax, and the remaining three were either true or based on an opinion. All 10 were slanted against Merkel.
The analysis found that false stories and fake news about Merkel spread widely on Facebook, especially when linked with the topic of refugees. These stories come from far right websites and other non-traditional media, and outperform traditional media coverage of the chancellor. One reason this content spreads so widely is that it's shared by a variety right-wing Facebook pages and groups.
This finding is similar to aprevious BuzzFeed News analysisof German and English-language content about Merkel that looked at the top-performing content in 2016.
Although Ezra Levant of The Rebel is highly critical of Merkel in the video, he does not label her “insane” — the German version simply added that to the headline.
The list of top-performing content also includes supposedly satirical articles that fooled people. One claimed that "Angela Merkel was run over in a traffic accident," and was published by a "website for funny pictures," debeste.de. That site is registered to an address in Poland.
German website Eine-Zeitung.net also published the article "Merkel wants to give all refugees the right to vote as soon as possible", which earned the second-most engagements on Facebook. But, aside from the words"In Satira Veritas"("Truth In Satire") in the logo, there is no indication the post is satirical. Many readers thought the satirical articles were real and scolded Merkel and the lying press in the comments.
The top post about Merkel, from Gloria.tv, is a 7-second video clip in which the chancellor only says one sentence.
Since its publication in January 2015, the clip has generated 639,400 clicks, according to a traffic counter on the page. The video title says, "Angela Merkel: Germans have to accept foreigners' violence."
But does Angela Merkel actually promote acceptance of foreigners' violence like it says in the headline? No. The sentence in the video is taken out of context and the headline turns her real statement into the opposite of what it meant.
"The thing here is to ensure security on the ground and to eradicate the causes of violence in the society at the same time. This applies to all parts of the society,but we have to accept that the number of crimes is particularly high among young immigrants.Therefore, the theme of integration is connected with the issue of violence prevention in all parts of our society."
Merkel doesn't mean that Germans have to accept the fact that there's more violence among young immigrants. Instead, she says that the high number of crimes needs to be recognized and not ignored. By being shortened and headlined as, "Germans must accept the violence of foreigners," the meaning was warped.
Gloria.tv's slogan is, "the more Catholic the better." It's a platform similar to YouTube where users can upload videos.
In 2013, news siteDie Zeitcalled Gloria.tv aggressive and right-wing afterit showed German liberal priests, who supported the morning-after pill, with swastikas. The website itself was founded by Roman Catholic priest Reto Nay from Switzerland. However, since 2014 his name is no longer associated with the website. It's not clear who runs it now, but the Gloria.tv servers areregisteredin Moldova, and have a contact address in Moscow.
This is the building where the contact for the website is supposed to be based. There is no email address or telephone number. BuzzFeed News mailed a letter containing questions for Gloria.tv to its address in Moscow, but has not received a response.
Google Maps
BuzzFeed News contacted the user account, Tina 13, that uploaded the viral video on Gloria.tv. The person who replied denied they are the creator of the video.
BuzzFeed
A few minutes after our exchange, Tina 13 deleted the video from their, but it can still be foundhere.
It's unlikely that Gloria.tv user "Tina 13" is the person who made the original shortened Merkel video.The YouTube version of the videodates back to 2014. However, the YouTube version only has about 50,000 Facebook interactions, which is much fewer than the Gloria.tv one.
How BuzzFeed collected the data:
BuzzFeed used the content analysis tool BuzzSumo. This tool allows you to search by keywords, URLs, and time periods and to sort the results according to the number of interactions in social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube.
BuzzFeed News searched in BuzzSumo for all articles in German which have the keywords "Angela Merkel", "Merkel", "Chancellor of Germany" or "Chancellor" in the title. It is therefore possible that either us or BuzzSumo missed articles about Angela Merkel. If that's the case, we would appreciate any feedback on what we missed.
BuzzSumo only allows for the last five years to be searched. We collected our data between July 17th, 2017 and July 25th, 2017.
At this point, it is important to emphasize once again that Facebook interactions do not translate automatically into website traffic. This analysis focused on the most successful individual articles about Angela Merkel. This does not mean that alternative media generate more overall traffic than the websites of traditional German media.
