ACIM Mentor

         “I am understanding that when ego falls away the self-concept or ‘host’ no longer values or feels connection to what seemingly gave it joy before. (?) For those of us not yet at that phase of the journey, could you give us a glimpse of what you do feel? Do you feel the Joy of the Divine? Simple inner peace? As hard as it is to be here in this transitory space at least there are the things (quite a lot of them) that I love. The sense I get from your newsletter is that those dissolve . But what are they replaced with? Some hope, please?” – BB   Wholeness is here instead. I do not know if that gives you hope or not, because it is ego that hopes, and enlightenment does not come to ego. What we call enlightenment occurs because ego is no longer here. So, for ego, enlightenment is a terrible occurrence.   “Enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or being happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away o...

           In the past few months, I’ve written about how ego felt like an entity or being that was here. I’ve shared how I’ve discovered that ego and Liz were not the same thing. I wrote a few weeks ago about ego as like something that was “inserted” here, something that was foreign and not a part of the fabric of what is. Here is an example that maybe conveys these experiences. Liz loves dogs. This has not changed. Sometimes it comes up when she sees dogs or hears about them, but that is all now. She has no desire to have a dog again, and she no longer has the mechanism—what I call ego —for attachment to a dog or attachment to loving dogs. In fact, without ego, there is no attachment to anything or anyone. Without ego, there is nothing to regret the absence of attachment. When ego was here, Liz’s love of dogs was a key feature of a sense of identity here, but without ego, Liz’s love of dogs is merely a neutral trait of Liz. Without ego, there is no lo...

          In my last few articles, I’ve tried to convey how close truth (love, liberation, wholeness) is, and how, without ego to bloat it into something special, it is wonderfully ordinary. I often tell my clients and readers not to look for a “burning bush” moment, that when you experience truth, it is often subtle and unrecognized. They have often experienced truth but not given it the correct label. These experiences aren’t dramatic but slip in among the myriad experiences of ego and are lost in that cacophony. Truth shows up as the “still, quiet voice”—not necessarily an actual voice , of course, but an inobtrusive experience that stands out in contrast with the rest. It is the quiet child on the playground, the one who doesn’t demand your attention, but who gets it for that reason. But then it is lost again in all the noise, often forgotten. Another way to put this is that truth is different from the usual ongoing experience of ego, but it is also famil...

            Six years ago, as I was getting into bed one night, I became aware that I was going to “receive a download”. I had not had an experience like that before. I didn’t know what it meant, I thought perhaps a new book would come to me. The next day, as I was out walking, suddenly only pure consciousness was here. Jesus was present as well, which I understood to be symbolic, a verification that what I was experiencing was what is called Christ . A few days later, on another walk, I became aware that I was to go forward teaching, “What Jesus was, I am. What I am, you are, too.” Ego was still so present at first there was a freak out. I put an end to the melodrama quickly, but ego was still disturbed by this idea, for obvious reasons. However, ego still had lofty ideas of what this meant and it was still playing itself out. For years I’d been using the term “Truth” for, well, truth. But now I found returning symbols I had not used in years, God , Ch...

             In Buddhism, when Buddha is quoted, it is not the man Siddhartha who is quoted. It is understood that Buddha is a universal consciousness that has been revealed through many teachers through the ages. This stands in stark contrast to how Christians feel that the same truth—pure consciousness—which they call Christ , revealed by the man Jesus, belongs only to that man. All the world’s religions began with someone experiencing pure consciousness. They expressed it in their own way and then ego took over with guilt and fear and bloat so their simple experience, if it can be found at all, is buried in each religion’s mysticism, which is sought only by a few. If you experienced pure consciousness in some form, in a moment, an episode, or maybe now in an ongoing way, you experienced the same truth that Siddhartha and Jesus and all the “master teachers” before and after experienced. Truth came to conscious awareness in you as in them. And as...

          Six years ago, when this consciousness shifted, I began to see ego as something inserted here in this consciousness, something foreign. I couldn’t quite grasp the bigger picture then and it eventually faded as other things came forward to be seen, experienced, processed. A few months ago, I became strongly aware of ego as an entity or being that lived here, asserting its reality through the person of Liz. I saw more clearly than I had yet that this consciousness and ego were not the same thing. Neither are ego and the person of Liz the same thing. Over the past year, I saw what fell away at the shift, which I call The Break , was what ego is before it takes any shape, the denial of truth ; the denial of pure consciousness. Through denial, ego seems to carve out a being from beingness, an experience of existence at odds with pure existence. Ego’s denial of truth also included denial of its denial, because after all, if you admit you are in denial, you...