A Course in Miracles and the Movies

Enjoy the following excerpt taken from a transcribed talk by A Course in Miracles teacher David Hoffmeister.

It’s very much like when you go to a movie theatre, you are going to watch a movie. It's already been shot. It’s in the can. It’s being projected. You can't change what is happening in the movie. Well, they actually are coming out with movies now where you can, but for this metaphor, we are talking about the last decade of films, black and white. etc. You can't change it.

People do talk to the screen. Like, Don't go down that hallway. Don't go in there! Don't go in there. Don't. Get away from him. You know it’s a bunch of images on a screen but they are talking to them as if they were real people. That's the mesmerism of this whole world; forget that you are dreaming, watching a movie and become so identified with the characters, you really believe that they are real characters that can hear you.

Jesus talks of that in A Course in Miracles. "You talk to those who are not there,” he says in his A Course in Miracles Workbook, “and those who are not there seem to answer you," even in the most simple things. Hi, how are you doing? Umm, not bad. Aha! Ego’s sitting back there going, Ah, I gotcha again! You think you are having a real conversation with somebody there and you're just asleep and dreaming, watching a movie and forgotten completely that you made the movie up and you are not even a character in that movie. Just like when you are watching a movie in the theatre, you don't expect the characters or the movie to change.

I went to see The Time Traveler's Wife and instead of just talking about the movie and your reactions and responses, you say, I just decided to play the movie out differently. In my version of the movie The Time Traveler’s Wife, they get married and they go to the planet Zorbo and they live forever. But that's not my version of the move. I decided to do it a lot differently. I had him disappear at the end ... da,da. We are talking about it as if it’s a movie and it’s been shot and the movie is the movie. You can't change the movie. But again, how different this is from everyday experience when you are trying to fix and change the movie. Or under the guise of making a happy dream or a better dream, you work very hard to try to change the dream, to have a better life.

To learn more about the teachings of A Course in Miracles and David Hoffmeister, please visit his website at https://acim.me/