What is forgiveness? Forgiveness is about overlooking the seeming problem entirely. The Holy Spirit doesn’t want us to try to figure out what the problem is, He wants us to release this belief in separation and overlook the problem entirely to the light of the Atonement. That is what the Holy Spirit’s function is, to overlook the error and see only the correction.
Separation
How Did the Separation Happen?
How did the separation happen? This is a very common question for students of A Course in Miracles, but it is also a question that has no answer. To ask the question implies the questioner’s belief in the separation from God. The ego is the one asking the question. An experience will come to end all doubting, to end all questions. An experience that separation from God is impossible, and has actually never happened.
What Is the Ego Belief System?
This world was made to reinforce guilt; its only useful purpose is forgiveness. We want to remove the obstacles to the awareness of Love’s presence. The popular acronym for ego is “edging God out.” More exactly, the ego is a death wish, it is the belief that there is no God, it is the belief that Love is impossible, and it is the belief in separation. Some people ask, “What is the point of the ego?” The only answer is the ego doesn’t have a point. In fact, being an illusion is being unreal. Reality is the point. The ego is a denial of Reality.
Desire of Your Heart
Why hold on to a little autonomous role, even that of being a spiritual person? Nothing repetitive, no spiritual ritual, will take you to the holy instant. Only the desire of your heart will take you home. You can have a spontaneous Awakening just from following your intuition. What Jesus is saying in A Course in Miracles can be paraphrased as, “You can see this world without any help. But you need help to see another world. You need help to have spiritual vision. You need a lot of help to come back to remember who you are as the Christ. Yet you can see this world without help.”
The Lie of “The Wages of Sin Is Death”
In traditional Christianity the cost of man’s eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is death. You did something wrong to God and must pay a ransom. Jesus, the innocent one, was crucified and the ransom was paid. Belief in the ego costs you the awareness of God. The wages of error (missing the truth) is the illusion of suffering.
Let Thine Eye Be Single
How do you change something that is not real? How do you live in a world that was made as an attack on God? What is the purpose of my life? As long as you believe in the ego, you’ll seem to have needs. When you’re coming from a place of lack, you don’t make the jump from needing things to needing nothing. The Holy Spirit uses the seeming needs to lift us higher until we realize we don’t have any needs. Enlightenment is an emptying out of all self-concepts and is a state of being. We now give all our seeming talents and needs to the Holy Spirit for the ultimate re-translation.
An Uncompromising Path to God (Part 1)
David Hoffmeister has been teaching the principals found in ACIM for many years. He has been uncompromising in his practice of what the Course teaches. Because of his uncompromising approach, he is now a living demonstration of the Awakened Mind. As “A Course in Miracles” states: “You will learn this Course completely or not at all.” This series of videos recorded at the Kalani retreat center in Hawaii helps one to understand some of the steps required to awaken to the clear and beautiful state that the Course describes as the Christ Mind. Enjoy!
How Did the Separation Occur?
There is no true answer to the question, “How did the separation happen?” A short while into the scribing of A Course in Miracles, Helen and Bill asked Jesus, “Wait a minute! How could the separation have happened in the first place!?” Jesus’ answer was, “You can tell by your emotions that you believe it happened!” In this humorous and insightful video, David expounds on this answer from Jesus by explaining how the Course was written for the mind that believes in the separation and therefore must meet the mind where it believes it is. All the things of this world which hold no value are magnified by the ego as a distraction. It is an upside-down and backwards world we live in.
The Belief in Separation
The belief in separation is actually the belief in impossibility. The ego created the world. God did not create the world. You can’t connect a God of Love to a distorted perceptual world where there seem to be so many problems. We have a belief in the concept of duality. This is an error. This very error has to be exposed. We have to look at this error together and expose its falsity. This whole world was made as a giant hiding place. Duality is in the mind, not in the world. When the mind decided to take the idea seriously (forgot to laugh) the whole cosmos was created as a giant fig leaf to cover up the belief in shame and guilt. You have to look within and see and expose the shame for the nothingness it is instead of trying to project it into time and space. The problem is not time and space, it is in your mind that made up the belief. We need to release the error and realize that it has no consequence. The instant the error seemed to arise the Answer was given.
Undoing Education
On the question of education, the deepest truest goal is consistent peace of mind. For decades, education has been seen as the answer to all the world’s problems. It hasn’t worked. Jesus says that you have over-learned an impossible lesson. You have taught yourself that you are separate from God and you perpetuate this. If you were a teacher and you gave a child an impossible learning goal, that would be cruel. A goal that could never be accomplished. It would ensure learning failure. The ego is an impossible learning goal. It is a goal of separation. If you continue with this you will never have peace of mind. And so we need to unlearn the thought systems of the world and anything that would perpetuate the separation. David gives an example of his grandmother who was diagnosed with dementia and seemingly remembered almost nothing but was very happy.