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Catching Up with David Hoffmeister...
... is easier said than done. This popular speaker on the ACIM circuit spends nearly eleven months of the year on the road leading workshops worldwide. I managed to find him recently in Sausalito, California, to chat about “the happy dream” that ACIM promises as a reward for all those who manage to get in the habit of forgiveness. The remarks below are excerpted from my upcoming book Living with Miracles, coming out from Tarcher/Penguin next year.
David discovered the Course at a humanistic psychology conference in 1986, after ten years as a “professional student” at the University of Cincinnati where he majored in urban planning and general studies before beginning to gravitate to a study of the mind, philosophy, and spirituality. But nothing focused his attention like the Course, which he almost immediately felt to be his calling. “When I discovered the Course, it was like a tsunami of love washing over me,” David reports. “It was a mystical experience just to open the book.”
Soon David was studying ACIM for up to eight hours a day, a regimen he continued mostly alone for two years before beginning group work with a similar intensity, going to five study meetings weekly. At a large group that had no facilitator, people began to direct their questions to David as he felt “the Holy Spirit just coursing through me, and answers would come pouring out.” In the early 1990s he began touring Course study centers around the United States, gradually finding himself to be more and more inspired to teach and facilitate various kinds of events related to experiencing Course principles.
To his own surprise, David undertook his journey of Course teaching without much planning. “My ego freaked a little bit in the beginning,” he admits, “because I was going on the road with no money in the bank, no organization behind me, and no practical support. I was afraid of ending up like a bag lady. But things turned out just the opposite. Once I was on the road people offered me places to stay, and enough food and gas to keep going. And it’s been that way ever since; things just seem to work out in the way that Jesus suggests in the Course: ‘When you perform a miracle, I will arrange both time and space to adjust to it.’”
Thus, for David, one aspect of the Course-inspired happy dream is that “life gets easier at the practical level. Things just seem to click into place without a sense of effort or control. This is the complete opposite of the ideas I was raised with, that you’ve always got to work hard to get ahead, and even then things will go wrong so that you have to learn to make lemonade when you get lemons, and so on. It’s not just that I’m more relaxed about difficult challenges, but that everything get easier when I let go of planning what I should do.”
David has also experienced three revelatory encounters with a “blazing light” in which “the three dimensions we normally experience collapsed around me. Three times in my lifetime, the world has literally disappeared before me. I had read before about such mystical experiences, but it was only experiencing them firsthand that completely changed my perspective on reality. Afterward the world seemed like a flimsy veil, not nearly so substantial as it had looked before. And there was a sense of lightness, not an unsteady giddiness, but a light and stable joy that’s always present underneath my emotions of the moment. That joy helps me see my emotions much more clearly, as interpretations or reactions to what I’m seeing, rather than the objective truth of the situation at hand.
“What all this has confirmed for me,” David explains, “is that there’s not actually an objective world outside our consciousness, but only a reflection of what’s going on in our mind. The more you can let your consciousness be cleared, the more you will see a happy world regardless of what seems to be going on. I can now turn on the TV and see all the usual news, but I don’t have negative judgments of it anymore. That’s what has been washed away in my consciousness.”
David concludes that “There’s a correlation between the happy dream and the absence of expectations. Even mild expectations or subtle agendas of control, wanting a certain outcome to any degree, will block the happy dream from awareness. A sense of ongoing wonderment and innocence is what I’ve experienced. You finally yield to the simple idea of peace of mind now as the only goal worth having. This is very alien to our usual way of thinking, because we’re used to setting a lot of goals that are all related to the future. But the happy dream has nothing to do with the future. It’s feeling peace now as a way of being, rather than something to be achieved someday after a lot of effort to arrange the right circumstances in order to feel peaceful.
“I once heard this kind of peace described as ‘being happy for no earthly reason,’” David muses. “That sums it up pretty well for me.”
(Catch up with David online at the Foundation for the Awakening Mind.)
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