ACIM Mentor

I’ve always preferred to be in love than to fall in love. Oh, sure, falling in love is exciting. But it’s also terrifying. (There’s a fine line between exciting and terrifying). It takes time and exposure to a person to know if you can trust them. And in the beginning your feelings for this stranger far outstrip your knowledge of them. If you feel early on that you can trust them it is an illusion based on your trust for someone of whom they unconsciously remind you. In other words, when you fall in love you risk getting hurt. And this makes it stressful. It is the same when one first becomes aware of Truth. Can this wonderful experience be trusted? Of course it is stressful when you begin a spiritual path. Oh, sure, it’s exciting at the beginning, too. You are so hungry for the experience. You are so hungry for books and teachers and anything that will bring the experience to mind. But don’t underestimate your distrust. This is why when you step away from those moments and boo...

Occasionally I hear from students or readers their discouragement that they have not experienced direct Revelation or "higher” miracles. Sometimes they think that without those experiences they will never attain peace. But it was not those experiences that helped me to build trust in Truth. What was helpful in building trust was the simple practice of being open, or willing, for Truth to come into my awareness in whatever form I needed. The simple, everyday miracles that were the result of this practice led to my trusting Truth and finding peace. A Revelation, as A Course in Miracles uses the term, refers to a direct experience of Truth. It is beyond perception and is Knowledge Itself. In this experience there is no world; the world is not even a thought There. A Revelation reveals the end goal of a spiritual path. If a revelatory state was sustained the world would be over for you. So it is rare to find a spiritual seeker who has experienced Revelation and even for those of...

Often students will ask me if I think a certain spiritual teacher is awake. I tell them that I don’t even know what that means. A self cannot be “awake”. THE Awareness of Truth (Holy Spirit, Christ Consciousness), Which is all that could be called “awake”, is in every mind. Seemingly-individual split-minds are aware of the Awareness of Truth to varying degrees but I would not call any of them “awake”. As I wrote last week, a split-mind never attains the Awareness of Truth. It falls away and the Awareness of Truth is what is left. But only the one experiencing this would know that this has occurred. And they would feel no need to bring it up unless they were asked. A split-mind can never see past itself. It only ever sees its projections onto others. Sometimes those projections mirror itself; sometimes they are what the split-mind hopes to see. Clients will share with me their disappointment in someone they thought was “awake” but then who did something human that they have determi...

This may be one of those things no one can understand until they experience it, but I’ll try. I used to focus on “awakening”. I wrote about it a lot. (Sometimes I called it “enlightenment”). The concept behind this word is attaining a state of awareness that the Truth is true and that illusion is not true. I call this state the Awareness of Truth (also, Holy Spirit or Christ Consciousness). But my experience has led me to see that attaining this state never happens. Oh, yes, the Awareness of Truth is real and can be a mind’s experience. But It is never attained. This split-mind is always aware of Truth to some degree now. That the Truth is true has become a quiet knowing that suffuses its experience. This split-mind is also still aware of an ego (personal thought system) and its world but they are less and less significant to it. But would this split-mind say it has “awakened”? It would feel inaccurate to say so. What would have awakened? This split-mind is aware of the Aware...