ACIM Mentor

The ego uses physical illness and pain to make the body real to you. That is its primary goal for illness and pain. This shows up as using them for many reasons: To get attention, to punish you, to avoid situations, to make others guilty, etc. But of course no matter how physical symptoms show up their origin is in your mind. Ultimately all healing is the result of you accepting healing in your mind, either directly in your mind, or through “agents” like medicines, doctors, and treatments that seem outside of you and that remove the symptoms in a way that your mind can accept. Using external agents is what A Course in Miracles calls “magical thinking”, but it is necessary until you can accept healing directly. “The miracle is useless if you learn but that the body can be healed, for this is not the lesson it was sent to teach. The lesson is the mind was sick that thought the body could be sick; projecting out its guilt caused nothing, and had no effects.” (T-28.II.11) Oft...

There is a lot of discussion in A Course in Miracles around the Holy relationship in which it says that you can “trust your brother”. What it really means is that you can trust the Holy Spirit within you to guide you in the relationship. It must be understood that much of the Course specifically addresses Helen Schucman’s experience, and this is most apparent in its discussion of the Holy relationship. Helen was in a unique position with Bill Thetford in that they had a specific task to do together. They learned about the practice of the Holy relationship as they scribed the Course together. But most students do not have the privilege of having a Holy relationship with another who is also a student of the Course , and who is willing to go through the experience with them. The experience of the Holy relationship is not like anything in this world. It is an experience of Oneness with another that completely wipes out of your mind any separation between you and another. ...

In A Course in Miracles you are told that you are always teaching, and that you are always teaching only yourself. What you are teaching yourself is what you believe that you are. Come from ego and you teach yourself that you are ego. Come from Spirit and you teach yourself that you are Spirit - you are being what the Course calls a “teacher of God”. This is occurring within you every moment. You never really learn from others; you learn from the teacher within you that you choose at any given moment. Read a book, or listen to someone speak, and you will read and hear what you have chosen to learn about yourself. The world thinks of teaching as something you do for others. You may accept that what you teach you learn, but if you are a teacher you are supposed to see yourself helping others in some way. But the Course shows us that there are no “others” to help. Everything is your mind. You do not live in a world, but in your thoughts about a world. You are always only rela...

We are so used to the ego’s religions with their “shoulds” and “shouldn’ts” that almost every student goes through a phase where they read prohibitions and admonishments into A Course in Miracles . But the Course does not tell you a thing about how you should live in the world. What it does is compare the ego’s thought system with the Holy Spirit’s thought system to help you to sort out when you are coming from ego and when you are coming from the Holy Spirit. It is helping you to sort out illusion from Truth because they have become confused in your mind. The mistake that many new students make is thinking that they are supposed to make the ego more like the Holy Spirit. This is where they think they read how they “should” or “shouldn’t” be. Students will say, “I know I shouldn’t judge.” But what the Course says is that judgment is the way that the ego thinks, and that it really doesn’t have the capacity to truly judge because it doesn’t know what the Truth is. Only...

This view of payment may well seem impractical and in the eyes of the world it would be so. Yet not one worldly thought is really practical. How much is gained by striving for illusion? How much is lost by throwing God away? (P-3.7) The quote above from the supplement to A Course in Miracles on psychotherapy refers to money, but really you can use the ideas in it for any aspect of life in the world once you decide to follow only the Holy Spirit. People tell me all the time how I should do things, especially with my mentoring practice or my writing. If they are students of the Course then I remind them that I follow the Holy Spirit. If they are not then I tell them I’m not interested, or I smile and thank them for their suggestions. This used to bother me and I wondered why until I figured out that others were simply reflecting what the ego was telling me. I have the intelligence and discipline to do anything with my life that I want to do and the ego wants me to do anything...