ACIM Mentor

            Last week’s article was about finding that heaven is not an extra-ordinary state but is the everyday ordinary consciousness you are used to. I get asked if now that I see this, do I experience heaven all the time? No, I do not, because ego is still falling away. But I sense heaven here, and have moments and episodes of it. In fact, lately I’ve been dealing with bouts of over-the-top fear when certain things “go wrong” or appear that they may. What changed after The Break, or shift in consciousness, was the covers were pulled from ego, from fear. What I once would’ve felt as a niggle of irritation or discomfort because of something practical I had to deal with I now know was the fear I feel fully now. Fear used to be (mostly) denied or masked or distracted from. I suspect some of Liz’s physical issues are due to years of the fullness of fear being repressed. Fear had to go somewhere, it had to be expressed in some way, and that ended up in the ...

               “Heaven is here. There is nowhere else. Heaven is now. There is no other time.” (M-24.6:4-7)   Lately, there have been articles written here that speak of the ordinariness of truth—pure consciousness—and how it is always here. You may hear or read this in other places, too. Certainly, the everpresence of truth was something that Liz here had often heard and came to experience. But applying the word ordinary to truth was something she came across only relatively recently. So, what was expected was that when ego fell away and truth was fully revealed, it would be remarkable. She expected that the veil of ego covered something different from her usual experience so when it was gone, something different would be exposed. This expectation was largely due to overblown mystical experiences, which Liz thought revealed what A Course in Miracles calls the real world and were indeed out of the ordinary and remarkable. But those tu...

Last week I wrote about truth, or pure consciousness , rising to conscious awareness. I mentioned how the Christian labels (God, Christ, Holy Spirit) used in A Course in Miracles , though never used here (this conscious awareness) in the traditional Christian way ( Christ never meant Jesus , for example) have fallen away as special words are found unnecessary for something so delightfully ordinary and simply present. There has been a long journey here with the word “consciousness”, accepted, rejected, and accepted again, this time because it has been found to be distinctly apt. The word consciousness in the context of spiritual experience and aspiration seemed to have developed in Eastern religious philosophy rather than in the West. While Liz here recognized the truth of nonduality teachings, she was never moved to pursue them. There was an attempt here sometimes to translate what was said about consciousness in those teachings into the Christian symbols of God, Christ, and Holy ...

             When the shift in consciousness (The Break) happened here in 2018, anything that could be called “I” or “me” (ego) fell away. The Holy Spirit as constant companion was gone as well, because there was no longer anything here to connect with the Holy Spirit. However, it was not totally lost. What once was called the Holy Spirit no longer felt beside but surrounding . It had become the context—the space, the field, the “world”—in which everything was occurring. This was one of many experiences at the time that was baffling, largely because it did not fit expectations. But experiences that I could not understand for a few years are now coming together. (The experience of that time can be found in a memoir ). The presence of ego in consciousness seems to block part of consciousness from itself, what we experience as conscious awareness —what is immediately in our awareness. This blocking seems to make an unconscious. So, truth , which is pur...

             Last week, I wrote that acceptance is a universally taught aspect of inner peace across psychology, religions, and spiritualities. You will often hear it as, “Accept what is .” But which “what is”? What is appearing before you and unfolding in your life? Or the what is that is truth , which is the space in which what appears appears and what unfolds unfolds? It depends, of course, on the context of what is being discussed and it can be useful to clarify with the speaker. Because while accepting truth leads to acceptance of what appears and unfolds, it does not work the other way around. No matter how much you accept what appears and unfolds, it will not lead you to an awareness of truth. It is still helpful, however. When you are aware of truth and you see that what is appearing is nothing more than an appearance—an illusion —it naturally follows that you accept it. There is no motivation to work to change an illusion. To say, “Well, ...

            When students read in A Course in Miracles that the entire experience of the person and its world is an illusion, it leads to two common questions: “How can I possibly see my reality as an illusion?” and “Am I to deal with the whole experience as an illusion or only deal with the illusions within the experience?” That the personal experience is an illusion is an awareness that may come to you through mystical experiences or a slow dawning, but it is not something that you can make occur, so there is no point in trying. Practically speaking, you can deal only with the illusions that occur within the experience.   And this is what a teaching like the Course is for. It is a “better way” to be in the personal experience. The person and its experiences have no meaning. Without ego, the person is just a human animal living out its life. The person would have thoughts and feelings and take actions and they would all just pass by if ego was n...