Talk by David in New Zealand--from YouTube

This was transcribed from one of David's talks recorded on You Tube. Put on your seat belt and enjoy!

Ken

"One of the ego's biggest tricks it does not want you to know about, because if you know about this trick and you raise it into awareness then you no longer fall for it.
That is a fast way to wake up to divine love - not falling for tricks.
This trick is a game or a scheme. Now if this world were only pain and suffering and hurt and tragedy, wouldn't it be easy to drop?
Yes it would.
If everything burned, you could drop it like a hot potato and boom, its back to the Kingdom of Heaven and Nirvana.
But the ego disguises itself, and as everyone knows in this world, there are a lot of things that seem to be very attractive. It's like fool's gold, and that's what makes it very sneaky.
That's the trick. If you could see it, you would drop it in an instant. But the ego uses the duality of pain and pleasure. In fact, in this world they seem to be very, very different.
In this world there are whole philosophies built around the idea that we should maximize the pleasure and minimize the pain. And the ego is never going to tell you one thing: They are the same. They are identical. Pleasure and Pain are identical.

Now on the surface when you first start to look at this, Jesus talks about this in ACIM, its’ a big trick. It takes a lot of faith to say, okay, I'm listening, how are you going to explain this one to me.
It sounds pretty profound but it doesn't feel that way.
Everyone who has experienced the pleasures and the pains will say, 'I think I can tell the difference between pleasure and pain.'
He says, “No you can't.”
You are in such a state of mind in this world that you are so confused that you can't even tell the difference between pain and joy.
That's pretty confused. In fact, he says that pleasure is part of a flip side, the trick from the ego, that is actually called the attraction to guilt.
In other words the ego can make the guilt so attractive that you keep going for it. You keep grabbing for it, over and over. In linear time you keep falling for the trick. You keep getting stuck in its game, and that's what the ego wants you to do. It wants you to get stuck in its universe.

So, I use the example of Marilyn Monroe (gorgeous in terms of body, sex appeal, fame, money, famous husbands, . . she even had the President of the U.S. lusting after her -- John F. Kennedy).
Now from the world's perspective she had everything. But she was depressed, suicidal. Years later Elton John would write a song about her (Candle In The Wind) about how sad and lonely this woman actually was. This is a very good example of the ego's teachings in the mind. You will come to a place that you will think, kinda like Pinocchio, going to Pleasure Island, 'I don't have to go to school, I don't have to be responsible for anything, I can have fun all day with all the other boys on Pleasure Island.' And what happens?
It turns into a really horrific experience. This is a little parable for the whole human race.

Now on the surface of things we could look at this metaphysically and say, 'how is this working?' How did the ego devise this sneaky trick to keep us all feeling guilty and stuck on planet earth or in time and space and keep us forgetting what our eternal reality is. That the world was made as a distraction.

Remember I said that in separation there were these two thought systems, fear and love. I
t was an intolerable conflict to try to believe in both, to try to hold both fear and love in the mind. So the world, the cosmos, was an attempt to throw the guilt, the conflict out into time and space to relieve the tension. So instead of feeling this terrible feeling of 'oh my God, I’ve done a terrible thing I’ve separated from God, I’ve ripped my mind away from God' which is a horrific idea, the ego made up time and space as a way to dilute it (so it's not so horrific as one terrible instant). 'Let's spread it out over a millennium.

“Little tiny bits of pains and pleasures over millions and millions of years.'

Almost like (for example) if someone took a tiny drop of poison they were going to give you (we are talking really potent poison) and they said 'I'm going to give you a drop of this poison, and you must drink of this poison, that is the only condition.
Now you can decide how you want to take it, but you've got to take it.' You could say, 'okay, put the drop....in the ocean over there, and i'll take a drink of the ocean.' You see how it would kind of dilute it a little bit?
That is what the ego tried to do, it tried to make up a world of time and space so it could dilute the guilt of believing that the separation from God was possible so you would be stuck in this little human body and seemingly dealing with this for lifetimes, and meanwhile the ego never tells you the secret - that pain and pleasure are the same illusion.

In fact Jesus says why they are the same: they both reinforce the reality of the body as your identity, because they are dualistic.

Now Joy, or Love, or Peace: these are natural States of Mind that don't have anything to do with the pains or pleasures of this world.

That is your natural inheritance that has been covered over by all of this dualism. So I have to say that in my life when people think about going on the spiritual journey, one of the things that scares people the most (you've heard about the lives of the mystics and saints, saint john of the cross and the dark night of the soul and starving and fasting and penance and all this stuff) is that it doesn't sound very attractive.
It's much easier to just have a life that seems to have a mixture of things. But what I am saying is that when you go into working miracles, which is what A Course In Miracles is about, it gets you in touch with your Purpose, which is the joy.
And that has to take over to the point that you are not going to fall into the tricks of pain/pleasure, pain/pleasure, which is purely seeking for a satisfaction, which is,... what can we say about pain and pleasure? One thing we can say is that they are temporary, they come in little bits and pieces and there is no lasting satisfaction (i.e., when you have a particular food, or a particular sexual encounter, or you see a particular experience in the climate or the world or whatever).
It's very transitory, and then the ego says, 'okay, now you've got to go back for it again ...go again and again and again.'
And all of us know that it just doesn't satisfy you. You end up feeling like there's got to be more. Like the old Peggy Lee song ("Is That All There Is?").
Everybody in this world sings that tune at some point."

David Hoffmeister in New Zealand
from http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AwakeningInChrist/