ACIM Mentor

A few years ago, my wife, Courtney, was going through a bad spell. She was speculating about what would happen to her if I awakened. I thought about how to answer this for a moment, then I suddenly understood what would happen, and I told her that I would take her with me. I was really answering the question for myself, and, interestingly, she didn’t ask me what I meant. This was a relief, because what I have come to understand about God and the world from my experiences in the Holy Instant is so far from what she believes that I knew I would have a hard time explaining it to her! What I meant was that Courtney is an idea in my mind, so of course she will go with me when I put aside the world. I don’t mean that literally ‘Courtney’ – the body/personal self – will go with me, but that the mind behind the idea of ‘Courtney’ will go with me, because it’s my mind. There is only one mind, and ‘Courtney’ and ‘Liz’ are just figures in its dream. This started to undo the ‘two reali...

It’s ironic, but true, that you must have a somewhat healthy personal mind to be able to let it go. Think about it: If all that you know of yourself is a personal self, then your feeling worthy of God’s Love must initially come to you in that identification. The personal mind is inherently unstable and insecure and can never be truly ‘healthy’, but if it is all that you know, then, at first, it is only through the personal self that you can learn about yourself. When your self-esteem in your identification with a personal self rises to a point where you can let the Holy Spirit into your awareness and begin to trust It, then you are ready to begin to let go of the personal self. Remember, you are Christ, but you have been identifying with a personal self. You cannot be without an identity; if you are one, then you are not the other. Everyone hears the Holy Spirit, but you have to learn to single It out of the personal mind’s cacophony of voices in your mind. You are not going to do ...

It is essential for the preservation of the personal self that you believe that specialness is Heaven, not hell. – MACIM-16.5.4 When I was first a student of A Course in Miracles , I both loved and hated its message. It made me feel loved by God, but I was pissed off that what God loves is not the personal “me”. I wanted God to love my specialness, my uniqueness. I wanted who I was and what I did in the world to matter to God. How self-centered was God, loving the Part of me that is Part of God, but not the rest of me? Oh, it was so wonderfully liberating that it didn’t matter what I did in the world! And yet, it was so terribly crushing that what I wanted to be in the world didn’t matter one iota to God. God couldn’t even conceive of it. Liberation has won out. This feeling of freedom is what kept drawing me to God again and again, until finally I accepted that I wanted it more than anything that the world had to offer. But I hear the same pouting upset from students when they...

Sometimes students will tell me that they really don’t want to do something, but they are going to do it anyway, because they think that they need to forgive it or to use it as an opportunity to extend Love. This is a classic example of how the personal mind distorts what is taught in A Course in Miracles . Life in the world grants you enough obligations to practice forgiveness without you having to force yourself to accept situations just so that you can forgive them. You also don’t have to go out of your way to find situations to forgive or in which to extend Love. If you do either of these, you are actually making these situations special, so you cannot forgive them. You are making them real to you, and you can only forgive illusions. And it is not up to you to decide for yourself what you should forgive and where to extend Love; that’s the Holy Spirit’s job. The Holy Spirit is never going to force you into a situation, because It recognizes that all situations are all equally unrea...