ACIM Mentor

The title of this article is a question that I hear often from students of A Course in Miracles. Obviously, it implies that they are still tormented by the personal self, so it is still very real to them. You have two thought systems in your mind: Your Real Thought System, called Christ, or Holy Spirit; and the personal mind, which is an erroneous concept of yourself. You cannot fix or change the personal mind; you can only let it go, so that all that remains in your mind is your Real Thought System. Remember, you do not have to seek for Love; you only need to remove your obstacles to Love, and you will find that Love is here. By degrees, you will learn to not listen to the personal mind, but you will still hear it as long as the personal mind is in your mind. You will stop hearing the personal mind altogether only when you have wholly let it go. For myself, the process has been like this: I began by listening to the personal mind almost exclusively. This took the fo...

One of the things that I’ve come to understand is that, despite its efforts to attack God, the personal mind is actually benign. It is only trying to survive; everything that it does is for its own self-preservation, so how can I blame it? It’s like an animal that kills to eat for survival, not to be merely malicious. The personal mind wants to perpetuate itself, and isn’t that just like God extending only God? This realization has come as I’ve been able to detach from the personal mind more and more and merely observe it. It’s also come as I am willing to take responsibility for my perception of separation from God, instead of blaming the personal mind as though it is something separate from me. I made it (not personally, but as the one split mind; the ‘dreamer-of-the-dream’); it does not make me. And, if I listen to and follow it, that’s my choice. Nothing is happening against my will. Years ago, when I said to the Holy Spirit ‘God is All-powerful, so how could even the i...

Occasionally, I hear from students who fear that they will be asked by the Holy Spirit to make some great sacrifice. I, too, used to wait to be crucified. Despite what A Course in Miracles says about no sacrifice being required, I couldn’t shake the expectation that at some point the Holy Spirit was going to ask something greatly torturous of me. I didn’t know what form that would take – physical, mental, emotional, or some combination of these – but the belief that sacrifice is required to spiritually awaken was deeply imbedded in my mind. I finally had to fully confront it when I went through the ‘period of relinquishment’, because this was the stage where I found myself having an incredible willingness to step back and let the Holy Spirit lead the way. My expectation of suffering was an obstacle I had to overcome, then. This belief took me some time to work out. It was really a matter of trusting the Holy Spirit day-by-day, and finding that, in fact, I was never asked to...

A Course in Miracles teaches that the personal mind insists on your complete independence, not just from God, but from others as well. It is threatened by any kind of joining, even with other personal selves, because there’s always the threat that you will break through your perception of separation and become aware that you are not limited to a personal self. But you long for Oneness, or Love, because your True Nature is Oneness in God, not a limited personal self. So the personal mind has had to concoct its own version of ‘love’, which allows you temporary moments of connectedness, but which overall reinforces your sense of separation and guilt. A couple of ways that longing for True Love shows up is in one’s desire to ‘belong’, even if only to one other or a small family; or to be a ‘part of something bigger’, in organizations like churches, the military, corporations, etc. This ‘belonging’, though, is a poor substitute for the Oneness of God, Which is Limitless and Eternal, so it...