ACIM Mentor

I’ve noticed that there are three types of motivations for being on a path of spiritual awakening, and that the motivation determines how easy the path is for the student. You may have more than one motivation, and over time your motivation may change. In fact, the third motivation below is the one you have to have to let go of ego and the world, and to fully remember that only God is Real. The first motivation is the avoidance of pain. This is a negative motivation because you are not pulled toward something that attracts you, but you are pushed by something you wish to avoid. This is the least successful of the motivations because the ego interprets a path of spiritual awakening as one of sacrifice. So if you are already in pain it seems at first as though you are simply choosing another form of pain. You can get through this if you understand that you are not being asked to sacrifice but to give up all pain . But it’s much easier when you have a positive goal as well. ...

There comes a time when students start to get what A Course in Miracles is saying and they start to mourn the loss of the things in the world that they love: Blue skies, sunsets, ice cream, children’s laughter, puppies, sex, shopping, attaining goals, good books, long walks, etc. But these are distractions from what you really fear that you will lose. The things that you love in the world are really nothing to you. Not just in the spiritual sense, either. To the ego their only value is in how your attachment to them can mask what you really do not want to lose: Separation from God. Separation from God is the ego’s only goal, and everything it uses is the means to this end. So your attachments in the world only represent your real attachment to an individual self that is separate from God. Some students embark on a path of trying to loose themselves from specific attachments. But until you let go of ego you will always be attached to something in the world. This is the form that separa...

And now he must attain a state that may remain impossible to reach for a long, long time. He must learn to lay all judgment aside, and ask only what he really wants in every circumstance. Were not each step in this direction so heavily reinforced, it would be hard indeed! (M-4.I.A.8) The quote above is from the “period of unsettling”, the 5th stage of the Development of Trust outlined in the Manual for Teachers of A Course in Miracles . I used to wonder what was meant by “heavily reinforced” and what was so hard about this stage. I always felt like whatever I was going through at the moment was hard enough! What was this going to look like? Now I know. Last fall I shared with you my latest revelation and some of the lessons that I learned as I came back from it (see Unsettled , and There Is No “I” in God ). I also said that I would keep you updated on what I have experienced and learned. It always takes a while for me to process the lessons. In fact, what really happens is that I live...

As students learn that all that they see is in their mind, they tell me that they become confused about how to see others. A Course in Miracles tells you that others are part of you, but it also seems to talk about others as, well, others. This is because the Holy Spirit recognizes that you experience others as something outside of you, so it needs to use these relationships to return your mind to Oneness. I wrote before about how the miracle unites your mind. Extending love to others is a miracle that begins the process of bringing your mind back to Oneness. Your mind seems to be split between a mind in you and a world outside of you. So if you imagine your mind as a cloth that is split in two, extending love from your mind to a body that seems outside your mind is like extending a stitch from one cloth to the other to sew them back together. Instead of seeing a body and projecting an ego onto it, you choose instead to extend Christ from within you to encompass ...