Guidance Transcends Judgment
David Hoffmeister August, 2008 video summary
Jul 31st, 2009
The answer to awakening is to develop a closer and closer relationship with the Holy Spirit. This world is like a labyrinth and you have to make many turns every day, but you are not really sure which is the right turn to take to get out. The more tuned in to the Holy Spirit you become, the more specific His Guidance will be: Go here, do this, call this person. This way you don’t have to try to figure out what is the best thing to do now based on your education and history. You can put all that aside and the Holy Spirit will use the symbols of the world to guide you. When you become very willing you are easily guided and may even be lifted up to a higher perspective to a mystical experience like “rapture.” You see that you are no longer stuck in the labyrinth; you are above the battleground where peace is found. If you feel identified with a dream figure in the world, with the world’s images, then you will not have consistent peace of mind. You will find yourself reacting and responding to certain people and situations. Situations are little constructs that the ego made up to chop time and space into little increments. Situational thinking is part of the problem.
When you align with the Holy Spirit your mind starts to feel much more abstract. Your situational thoughts will begin to dissolve and evaporate because you start to experience that you are indeed everywhere. You are not defined in a human body with a small band of human experiences. Your mind was created by God and it is vast and expansive. If you work with the Course long enough certain passages start to come out like “When I am healed I am not healed alone. [When you accept the gift of healing] legions upon legions will receive the gift.” W-137 You are the savior of the world. Not a person with a messiah complex addressing a crowd on a street corner. But that presence, that state of mind, the Holy Spirit “You are the way, the truth and the life.” T-7.III.1:9 There are many names for that presence of Love. You begin to open to this state of expansiveness, like the Observer in quantum physics, where you feel peace and detachment like you’re watching everything and at the same time one with everything. You’re watching it from a unified perspective, not a human perspective.
Jesus Answers Poet
William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
Jul 27th, 2009
I noticed correlations to some of Yeats' poems in Chapter 25.
Tags: Ego
Giving Forgiveness
Clarifying giving and receiving
Jul 24th, 2009
"A major learning goal this course has set is to reverse your view of giving, so you can receive. Accept God's peace and joy, and you will learn a different way of looking at a gift. God's gifts will never lessen when they are given away. They but increase thereby. The "gifts" the world can give are but a bid for a more valuable return; a loan with interest to be paid in full; a temporary lending, meant to be a pledge of debt to be repaid with more than was received by him who took the gift. This strange distortion of what giving means pervades all levels of the world you see. It strips all meaning from the gifts you give, and leaves you nothing in the ones you take." W-105
The Course talks a lot about "giving." I was confused about what the Course meant by "to give is to receive," "to have, give all to all" and "all that I give I give to myself." I think the key is in Lesson 297.
Tags: Forgiveness Giving
Professor Gates Arrested at Home
No one can fail who seeks to reach the truth
Jul 23rd, 2009
“For several minutes watch your mind and see, although your eyes are closed, the senseless world you think is real.” W-131.11:5
A dispute arose between black Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and the white police officer who arrested him at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
“Review the thoughts as well which are compatible with such a world, and which you think are true.” W-131.11:5
My perception of a news story tells me that two people, each perceiving the same event in the world of form, interpreted its meaning differently. Each had a different version of the truth.
Can there be multiple versions of the truth? Can a world that contains multiple sources of causation be real? No.
“What is seen outside must lie beyond forgiveness, for it seems to be forever sinful. Where is hope while sin is seen as outside? What remedy can guilt expect?” C-4.6:4-6
What is the alternative?
“This is the shift that true perception brings: What was projected out is seen within, and there forgiveness lets it disappear. For there the altar to the Son is set, and there his Father is remembered. Here are all illusions brought to truth and laid upon the altar. Seen within your mind, guilt and forgiveness for an instant lie together, side by side, upon one altar. There at last are sickness and its single remedy joined in one healing brightness. God has come to claim His Own. Forgiveness is complete.” C-4.6
“And now God's knowledge, changeless, certain, pure and wholly understandable, enters its kingdom. Gone is perception, false and true alike. And gone are bodies in the blazing light upon the altar to the Son of God. Here the face of Christ has shone away time's final instant, and now is the last perception of the world without a purpose and without a cause. For where God's memory has come at last there is no journey, no belief in sin, no walls, no bodies, and the grim appeal of guilt and death is there snuffed out forever.” C-4.7
Tags: Ego Forgiveness
Movie Guide Supplement
Movie Watcher's Guide to Enlightenment
Jul 22nd, 2009
The Movie Watcher's Guide to Enlightenment, by the Messengers of Peace of Awakening Mind is a wonderful learning aid for understanding spiritual metaphysics and forgiveness through films.
To help me remember the characters and events in these movies I have put together an updated "Movie Supplement" which I have uploaded.
Tags: Awakening
What Is Forgiveness?
Part II of the Workbook
Jul 22nd, 2009
“Forgiveness recognizes what you thought your brother did to you has not occurred.” W-pII.1.1
The thoughts I think I think are recycled past thoughts. They are part of a script that was written for my life as a person. These thoughts and this life are a hallucination, an evil dream. They keep me isolated in a self-made insane asylum.
Tags: Forgiveness
Stepping Stones to Awakening
From David Fishman and Linda Card
Jul 21st, 2009
Stepping Stones which ACIM provides for Awakening to Our True Identity
1. My Only Purpose is to AWAKEN from the dream of forgetfulness.
2. I am Cause. I am not a victim of the world. I invented the world I see.
3. Nothing in this world will satisfy the Eternal Son of God and nothing can hurt the SON unless He chooses to "believe it can."
4 "I do not know what anything is for."
5. Do I want to be right or Happy? Choose one, you can't have both.
6. It's ALL in the mind. If You Spot It You Got It, NO exceptions. It takes one to know one.
7. "The alertness of the ego to the errors of other egos is not the kind of vigilance the Holy Spirit would have you maintain. When you correct a Brother, you are telling him that he is wrong.”
8. "Only my condemnation injures me. Only my own forgiveness sets me free."
9. "What could you not accept, if you but knew that everything that happens, all events, past, present and to come, are gently planned by One Whose only purpose is your good?”
10. "It takes great learning to understand that all things, events, encounters and circumstances are helpful.”
11. "Forgiveness is the key to Happiness"
12. The Law of Love, The Law of Mind, The Law of God. What We Give, We Give To Our Self. Love Knows Only Itself & Gives to Itself by Extending without limit. ONLY the LOVE IS REAL!
For the full text and references click on the One MInd Foundation. Also be sure to check out ACIM Gather if you are not already familiar with this online Course teaching program.
Tags: Awakening Ego Forgiveness
Best Book for Understanding the Course
Book Review
Jul 20th, 2009
TITLE: Awakening Through A Course in Miracles
AUTHOR: David Hoffmeister
I studied the Course for 18 years and thought I understood it. But reading Awakening Through a Course in Miracles took me to a much deeper level. What is so different about this book is that the author, David Hoffmeister, has been there and done that. Since his awakening almost two decades ago, David has clarified the message of the Course for individuals and groups across the United States and in over 20 foreign countries. He consistently speaks with the wisdom and unconditional love of the Christ Mind.
Tags: Awakening Ego Forgiveness News
Changing My Purpose
Forgiving and Awakening
Jul 18th, 2009
I was just reading Chapter 29 of the Course and it helped me see that I must indeed have set the purpose of separation and made secret vows with my brother. Only my setting of that overall purpose and making separation vows (and then "forgetting" that I had done so) would explain why I consistently misperceive my brother:
"When you are angry, is it not because someone has failed to fill the function you allotted him? And does not this become the "reason" your attack is justified?… No one can fail but your idea of him… Perceptions are determined by their purpose, in that they seem to be what they are for."
The Decision for Guiltlessness
Selections from Chapter 14
Jul 16th, 2009
You who are steadfastly devoted to misery must first recognize that you are miserable and not happy. The Holy Spirit says, with steadfast quietness: The truth is true. Nothing else matters, nothing else is real, and everything beside it is not there. Let Me make the one distinction for you that you cannot make, but need to learn. Your faith in nothing is deceiving you.
Whenever you choose to make decisions for yourself you are thinking destructively, and the decision will be wrong. Seek not to appraise the worth of God's Son whom He created holy, for to do so is to evaluate his Father and judge against Him. And you will feel guilty for this imagined crime, which no one in this world or Heaven could possibly commit. The Holy Spirit teaches only that the "sin" of self-replacement on the throne of God is not a source of guilt. What cannot happen can have no effects to fear. Be quiet in your faith in Him Who loves you, and would lead you out of insanity. Never forget the Love of God.
Tags: Guilt
A Clearer Understanding of Jesus
From the Book of Urantia
Jul 15th, 2009
I grew up mocking Jesus as a pious loser. So recently I was pleased to read in the Book of Urantia, Part IV, The Life and Teachings of Jesus, that “Self-conscious piety had no place in his philosophy.”
He was a man, certainly more intelligent and more friendly than most, who “by faith achieved the knowing and the doing of the will of God.” I highly recommend reading Part IV, which explains why Jesus did what he did and how Christianity misunderstood him. It is available online at http://www.urantia.org/papers/paper122.html I have also uploaded my own ten-page summary of Part IV.
Tags: Jesus
What I Am After
A concise list
Jul 06th, 2009
Goal: to prepare my mind to awaken to peace in the Oneness of God
Means: to remove the obstacles to my awareness of Love’s presence through
Tags: Awakening Ego Forgiveness Guilt
Obstacles to Peace
Worth a close look
Jul 05th, 2009
In the unholy instant I thought I separated from God; I fearfully made the ego to maintain the separation and keep God out, and I adopted the ego as my self-concept. I use the illusion of linear time to call forth that unreal instant. Dreaming a world of time and space demonstrates my belief that the separation from God is current. I value the past because I can hold it against everyone. I see only representations of my insane thoughts, replacing reality with illusions that I blame for my upsets. I make people enemies to justify my anger. I am only aware of my private thoughts. This prevents the present from dawning on my mind. I am using the past against God and against peace. The following obstacles exist because I find something in the world to be attractive and valuable. I would like to expose my faulty decisions so that I can see they really offer nothing I want.
1) The desire to get rid of peace because I find guilt more attractive.
Tags: Body Ego Forgiveness Guilt
