ACIM Mentor

             Liz here was only twenty when she became a student of A Course in Miracles so she felt that she could not have already learned ideas presented in the Course . If she came across something she already knew she felt it must mean something “higher” or “deeper” than what she had already learned. But she was mistaken. She had not yet learned that we don’t all learn things in the same order. A person at twenty could already have learned something that someone else doesn’t learn until they are fifty. The most significant example of this is the idea that what you give you receive. Liz had already realized the reason she was a nurturer was that she felt love when she was loving, not when others loved her. Really, what she felt when she engaged in actions considered nurturing was satisfaction, but this is one of those “good” feelings that we call “love”. However, when she read the idea that one will experience whatever idea or attitude they proje...

            Last week I wrote, “Ego holds itself off from what appears as though what happens is supposed to be at its direction and feels confused at best and furious at worst when things don’t go its way.” What I meant by ego holding itself off is it sees itself as autonomous rather than part of a whole—the whole being appearances in consciousness. It projects this autonomy onto the neutral person, something that, like ego, is also just appearing in consciousness. This never changes for ego. It never comes to feel it “belongs” except maybe temporarily with other egos and bodies. This is easily shattered, though, when ego realizes its expression is unique and it is different or it feels others don’t see it correctly. If you have a sense of being part of something larger, a greater whole, that is not ego but is due to truth rising toward your conscious awareness. It’s a dim sense of the wholeness of truth (pure consciousness) and/or an awareness that desp...

             A rose is an expression of a rose bush. Or, if you need a broader example, we say the weather and plants and animals on earth are expressions of that abstract idea, nature. We have no aspirations for these expressions, we don’t expect them to lead somewhere, because we understand them as expressions. They will arise and they will pass and we accept this. So, when I say that what appears in consciousness, including your life, is only an expression this is what I mean: Everything appearing in consciousness is not to bring something about but is part of a depiction of what A Course in Miracles calls the Atonement , or the correction of the perception of separation from God. To put this in the terms I use now, everything is part of a depiction of the moment the idea of not-truth arose and was simultaneously undone by truth’s all-encompassing nature. It is pre-determined, “the script is written”, because it depicts over time a moment whose o...

             After the shift in consciousness here I had the sense of making a 180-degree turn in outlook. It felt like the turn radius of something huge, like a ship that makes a long arc to turn around instead of the neat U-turn of a small car. It felt like I had been looking at things backwards and now I would see things from the correct point of view. It took a while to come to fruition. It turns out that what appears in consciousness is a predetermined expression and aspiration—trying to reach a goal—was just part of the expression, it was nothing real, because there was no one here that needed to get somewhere. The appearance that there is, is just that—an appearance. It is ego’s story, and it is just a depiction of an idea. The thing is, I can share what is seen in enlightenment, but I cannot teach it in such a way that it becomes your living experience. If you cannot see that what is appearing in consciousness is only an expression, you canno...

             In the past several articles, I’ve been drawing a picture, one that is clear to me now but was not always. As truth rises to conscious awareness it affects ego and the two become blended and it is difficult to sort them out. Especially as ego is not motivated to do so. It will use whatever comes to conscious awareness to validate itself, its reality. Of course it does, it knows nothing else. The spiritualities it finds acceptable always include some version of itself, subtle though that might be. Its idea of heaven, of the “real world” in A Course in Miracles’ terms, is some version of what it wants to be true. To help uncross the wires—sort out ego from truth—I’ve been using the distinction between enlightenment and self-realization because these goals are not the same but are often confused. And what occurs when these goals are confused is spiritual bypassing that does not address dysfunction and/or inevitable disappointment after yea...

             The absolute, being all that is, must contain the idea of its own opposite. But being all, the absolute cannot have an opposite. So, the idea of the opposite of the absolute can only ever be an idea , and one that is simultaneously undone by the onlyness of the absolute. This idea and its simultaneous undoing are represented as consciousness . Consciousness is a symbolic depiction of an idea of a truth (represented by pure consciousness ) being opposed by ideas (represented by ego and its world) that appear in it and that it undoes over time. Pure consciousness (the truth of consciousness) is whole and does not have parts. But ego, as the idea of denial of truth, makes it seem that it does have parts: Conscious awareness (what is in immediate awareness), subconscious (what is just out of conscious awareness), and unconscious (what is out of conscious awareness). Ego’s occupation of conscious awareness pushes truth into the unconscious...