ACIM Mentor

Though it makes the ego in me squirm when I admit this to myself, the truth is that none of the considerable (though not complete) Peace I experience, nor any of my awareness of God, nor my knowledge of A Course in Miracles is due to anything that I have done. The Holy Spirit has really done it all. In my last article I mentioned the arrogance of me thinking that I know what I need to learn. Unfortunately, this has characterized much of my spiritual path. I would work and work on myself in a certain direction only to find the Holy Spirit causing a shift in me that had nothing to do with what I was working on! In other words, I am where I am not because of anything I have done, but in spite of what I have done. All the Holy Spirit has really needed all along is my little willingness, just as the Course says. Truly, I need do nothing. So I’ve learned to do nothing but to be open to God so that the Holy Spirit can do the rest. I do not need to judge what I am asked to do, or not asked ...

A couple of weeks ago I watched a movie that left me contemplating loss. The movie had a happily-ever-after ending but I got to thinking about how the characters’ relationships would change over the years, how nothing stays the same, people leave, people die, etc. I was getting depressed so, in my arrogant belief that I know what I need to be learning, I started thinking about loss in a way to get myself to stop valuing the world. I was trying to use the temporary nature of everything in the world to loosen even further any hold that I still give it over me. Then I thought that if I’m going to think about this I should do so with the Holy Spirit. So I turned to the Holy Spirit in my mind and the Holy Spirit brought me up short by saying, “I don’t want you to give up the world because it’s painful; I want you to give it up because it’s not true.” Wow. Once again I’m slapped upside the head with the awareness of how easy it is to fall into the ego-trap of making the world real to me. The...

"Beware of the temptation to perceive yourself unfairly treated." (T-26.X.4) Years ago, after taking a total break from A Course in Miracles for a couple of years, I returned to studying it and joined a local study group to get back into the groove. At that point I had almost totally forgotten the core teachings of the Course . One day at the study group a gentleman who was involved in a lawsuit (I cannot remember if he was suing or being sued) started talking about “justice”. He felt that the Course somehow supported his cause because he was certain he was “just”. This didn’t feel quite accurate to me, but I had gotten so far away from the Course that I wasn’t sure what was meant by “justice” in the Course. And since then I sometimes run into students who feel that something is their just due, or that they have been unfairly deprived by another, and they will say, “I know God wants me to have what is rightfully mine” or “Why would God deprive me of this?” In essence you...

Once upon a time when separation from God was more real to me than God I had to have a story for the separation. I had a narrative for the separation, and I have even offered it in my articles. But as I practice the Holy Instant more and more, and I spend my time living present to the Presence of the Holy Spirit, I find that all stories for the separation simply crumble as I try to grasp them. I literally become disoriented because there is no story for the separation because the separation isn’t real. Any story about it is totally made up, and I can see that now. Sometimes students ask me about how the separation works: Is reincarnation real, what happens when they die, is the story of Jesus real, how will the Great Awakening unfold, what is their part in it, etc. And over the years students have shared various stories with me that they brought with them to their study of A Course in Miracles , and that they feel the Course justifies. The Course itself offers a narrative for the sep...

A Course in Miracles makes it very clear that Truth and illusion cannot be reconciled. If there is any illusion in Truth, then Truth isn’t Truth. And if you bring illusion to Truth illusion disappears because unreality is dissolved by Reality. For many years I tried to bring the two together. Every now and then I’d sit myself down and try to come up with some sort of philosophy to live by that was based on my experiences of Oneness in direct revelations with God, and in the Holy relationship. I struggled to come up with a way to live, the appropriate attitudes to strike, and the politics to adopt in light of my experiences. But there was no relationship between my experience of the world and my experiences of Oneness, and I couldn’t make them come together at all. I’d always reach a point of relief when I saw the contrast between the two experiences clearly, but I didn’t really want to understand that, either. So I’d wander off, only to come back again and again to try to ...