ACIM Mentor

There’s a story that A Course in Miracles offers to give context to spiritual awakening in the perception that you are in a world: As you awaken, you model awakening for others, and everyone awakening is the Great Awakening. I used to live in this story, and you can find it in many of my articles, and in my biography on my website. But a couple of years ago things began to change for me: The “story” started to leave me disoriented, and, when I tried to clarify it, it would seem to disintegrate before my eyes. It really began to be seriously undone in me when I translated the Text into plain language. If you’ve read the translation, then you will notice that the story isn’t in there. I couldn’t maintain it and be faithful to the message that I was reading in the Text through my experiences of the Holy Instant. Everything that I perceive is in my mind, so I couldn’t turn around and write that there are “others” who I am supposed to lead. Modeling, then, became meaningless for me, but ch...

When you identify with a personal self, you believe that separation from God is real. You believe that you are guilty for attacking God, and snatching some of God for yourself. You expect that God will punish you for this, so you fear God. The only way out of guilt/fear-of-God is to realize that the personal self is not you; you are Eternally One with God. Then you can let go of the personal self, and the guilt and fear-of-God that are inherent in your belief that it is real. Lesson plans like A Course in Miracles teach you how to do this. Often students blame their feelings of guilt, shame, and fear-of-God on their upbringing. Sometimes it’s a religion they blame, sometimes it’s their parents, sometimes it’s both. But guilt and fear-of-God do not originate in the world; they originate in your mind, just as the world does. In fact, the purpose of the world is to “prove” that you are sinful, guilty, and deserving of punishment. So you don’t need the world to teach you guilt and fea...

There is a tendency among people who are new to a spiritual path to confuse God with anything that is deemed “supernatural” in the world. A Course in Miracles addresses psychic powers, explaining that, in themselves, psychic powers do not have a spiritual value, except that they reveal to you that your mind is not limited to an isolated personal mind. Other than that, unless they are directed by the Holy Spirit, they have no value in your spiritual awakening. The same can be said for coincidences and synchronicity. Coincidences and synchronicity are occurring when you notice patterns in your life. For example, you’ve been thinking about a certain topic, and all of a sudden every where you look there are books on that topic. There is no special meaning in this. All it shows is that you are in touch with the one mind that is the dreamer-of-the- dream of separation from God. Some people live in this awareness all the time, some people have moments when they notice patterns, and others fi...

When my brother, who is not a student of A Course in Miracles , heard that I was leaving my house-cleaning business to be a mentor for students of the Course a couple of years ago, he made some comment about my “love for people”. I clarified with him that I do not love people. He laughed because he thought this was odd. Then why am I doing what I am doing? This is a common misunderstanding. I have never, and still do not, “love people”. Certainly, I have loved individual people, but I am not a “lover of humanity” as a whole. This is not only a personal statement, but a spiritual one as well. In my mind, to “love humanity” means “to love the projections of the personal mind”, and only the personal mind does this. When I come from God, I love God, not “people”. I was horribly co-dependent when I first became a student of the Course . I thought it was my job to “fix” or “rescue” others. This was very draining, and a drag on all of my relationships. I didn’t understand the Course ver...

The other day I was watching True Blood and a vampire, who was about to commit suicide, asked the protagonist how she thought God would punish him. She told him that God does not punish; God forgives. And I thought, there again my experience of God has taught me something so very different from what the world teaches. God neither punishes, nor forgives; God cannot conceive of anything to punish or forgive. I’m the one who has to forgive my illusion of separation from God. This made me so aware again of how all of the story - the drama, the conflict, the guilt, the fear – exists only in my own mind. I cannot really convey the experience of a direct Revelation of God, but in God the world doesn’t exist at all, not even as a concept. So, there’s God going along Eternally and Infinitely Itself, and I’m over here having this little struggle with myself. And this, of course, is very offensive to the personal mind: I made all of this and God hasn’t even noticed?! I’m feeling all o...