Posts

Showing posts from December, 2017

Too Concerned with Consciousness

My mistake for so many years was to try to accept that I wasn’t what I was experiencing myself to be. In other words, I felt I was a self, but I tried to get myself to realize that I was Truth or Spirit or Mind or whatever you want to call It. It would have been better to allow myself to feel I was a self and to also invite Truth into my awareness. In practice, of course, this is what eventually occurred. I would, time and again, say, “This is what I experience, dammit, and I’m not going to deny it anymore.” But it would have been a lot less painful if between those moments of honesty I didn’t fall back into guilt and feel I had to try to accept what was unacceptable from the point of view that I was a self. There was no reconciling my experience as a self and my experiences of Truth. I really just had to experience each apart from the other. This is the experience of the split mind. But mind seeks to be whole. So it seeks to reconcile its parts. However, Wholeness is . It is not

Letting Truth Lead the Way

There are two approaches one can take to a spiritual teaching. In one the teaching is an end in itself. The goal of the student is to master the teaching. The emphasis of study for them is to find the “right way” to understand the material. Therefore, they often engage in arguments with other students over the correct way to interpret the material. They are often unhappy with teachers they feel are not “right” in their interpretation. In the other approach, the Awareness of Truth (Holy Spirit) is the Goal. And the teaching is seen as an instrument that the Awareness of Truth in the student’s mind uses to help them reach that Goal. So the student does not seek the “right way” to read the material, but rather asks the Awareness of Truth in their mind for the most helpful way to understand it. The student emphasizes their experiences of Truth over the material they study, which they recognize are just symbols on a page. They have no reason to argue with others over the correct inter

Ask: Can you explain this quote in ACIM about God creating distinct beings?

“I was doing my morning reading of the Course when I came upon this statement in  Text-4.7.5: 'God Who encompasses all being, nevertheless created distinct beings who have everything individually, but who want to share it to increase their joy. Nothing that is real can be increased except by sharing it.' This confuses me a bit...thinking we need to lose the individual…” – JW Yes, it is a confusing quote out of context and seems to contradict much that A Course in Miracles says about Oneness. And it certainly contradicts the experience of Oneness! Oneness means one and the same throughout. There is no distinction to be made in What is One. The conversational nature of ACIM, especially in the first few chapters, also makes it confusing because there is an implied understanding between the Voice and Helen so there is a lack of helpful elaboration for the rest of us. But that quote is understandable if you remember that in ACIM “to create” means “to extend” rather than “to b

Ask: Can you explain your different versions of "mind"?

“…I try to follow your descriptions when you refer to the mind but it seems there are so many versions of “mind” I wondered if you could find an easy way for the very simple person (me) to explain so I can understand? So for example in your last mind you mentioned--Universal mind--Universal split mind--hybrid mind, and simply mind. Is this linked to the ladder of the split which Kenneth Wapnick referred to?” - CL There is only one Mind (Truth), but we experience Mind as though It is split between Truth and not-Truth. The part of Mind where the idea of not-Truth seems to occur I refer to as the one or universal split-mind. (In A Course in Miracles this is called the “Son of God”).  It is this split-mind that projects the universe of form, including billions of versions (“sons of God”) of itself. You experience yourself as one of these projected split-minds. The split in you shows up as two thought systems, the Awareness of Truth (Holy Spirit) and the personal thought system (ego)