Why Non Dual Teachers Always Seem Happy

The following was transcribed from a talk given by David Hoffmeister, one of the great non dual teachers of the modern age.

For me that was the thing of surrendering just to say I'll go wherever you want me to go, I'll do whatever you want me to do, I will step back, you lead the way, you show me. I'm not going to try to freeze down an identity into anything that is static. I want to continually go through an evolution of consciousness where I am so unattached and so open to whatever comes my way, that in the end I reach a state where I see that I cannot judge anything. That I never could judge anything. That I never did know my best interest. This humble state of just pure openness. Open-mindedness.

There is a lot of ideas that get left along the way. Even the idea of positive energy and negative energy. You could start to see that there is so much duality in everything that we have believed in. We have to truly, like one of the greatest non dual teacher, Buddha said, empty the mind of everything that we think we think and we think we know and come into that state of pure emptiness and innocence.

Recently I was listening to the Chinese translator of A Course in Miracles and she said - I mean, in the beginning they didn't get it into mainland China, they got it over to Taiwan and she did a lot of her work in Taiwan. She said first it kind of caught fire as kind of this catchy new age teaching and philosophy and it was starting to become popular that way. And then occasionally some Buddhists would trickle in and start picking up the book and working with it a bit. And she noticed over the years, that the ones that came in from a new age perspective, they were like a flash in the pan. They quickly let it go and it was the Buddhists that were the long term ACIM students. The other ones all faded away and I thought how beautiful. This ancient tradition of non dualism, with so many non dual teacher emphasizing the emptying of the mind, this deep rich spiritual tradition there, they came into it very slowly like, What's this? and then they started working with it and then they hung with it. 

I think that is the way that this kind of alchemy, this transformation goes. We have to have a lot of steadfastness, a lot of persistence, a lot of devotion to truly hang with it and then pop! It seems like we reach a crescendo. We reach a threshold or something and it is just like, Wham! It is just, Boink! Ah ha! Eureka! The simplicity of it just dawns. The glee, the joy, the happiness. That’s why a lot of non dual teachers seem so happy, because they had a lot of devotion and hung in there.