ACIM Mentor

I don’t quite remember when this happened, but sometime before I dismantled the old life I was out walking one morning and I had a distressing thought or question cross my mind. My split-mind turned toward the Holy Spirit (Awareness of Truth in my mind) and received an answer. But I was startled because this time I heard the question and I answered—I was not the questioner turning to the Holy Spirit. I was the Holy Spirit answering. Suddenly I was no longer the split-mind, but the “other side” of the split, the Teacher. As significant as it was to me at the time, it of course now stands out as a telling moment. This was the first time I was conscious of the shift in my mind, although I didn’t recognize its full implications. I was confused: I figured once I shifted to identifying with the Holy Spirit the split-mind would be gone. Was I now, as the Holy Spirit, to mentor the split-mind? Anyway, I couldn’t force myself into that position and I didn’t feel a moment like that anytime soon…

Since I have become aware that what I thought of as “me” is a character in a story of Undoing (the “Atonement” in A Course in Miracles), and that in fact I am the Undoing (Holy Spirit/Awareness of Truth) expressed as that character, I have become aware that what I thought was me did nothing. I never had a will apart from the Undoing. Everything I felt, thought, and did was the story of Undoing. This has made it clear to me what the ego (personal thought system) was. First, to recap the ontology (theory of existence) that I culled from ACIM and that the Awareness of Truth (Holy Spirit) and my experiences helped me hone: Truth (God), being All, must contain the idea of Its Own opposite. But, being All, It cannot have an opposite. The moment the idea arises it is undone by Truth’s All-encompassing nature. However, as Truth is timeless, limitless, and formless, not-Truth is time-bound limited form (the universe). Time is the illusion (not-Truth) on which all other illusions re…

My first experience with grief over a life shift was when I graduated high school. I wasn’t a kid anymore. I wasn’t a student anymore. My whole community had been in school and it would be gone overnight. That was all I had known so far in my life! There was no going back. I would never be a kid again; I would never recreate a community like that again. If I was a student again it would be in a very different context. I didn’t feel the grief until graduation drew near. I didn’t know to expect it. No one talked to me about it, so I did not speak of it. I was embarrassed by emotions at that age anyway and I sensed it was a sign of weakness. (Poor kid!) None of this meant I found adulthood undesirable. But I knew it would be very different and so I felt a loss. Following closely on this I came out to myself and entered into an even longer and darker grieving period. Again, it was not that I wanted to stay in the closet, but I was also not going to have the life I’d envisione…

“Please clarify what you said at the end of your (November 8) newsletter. I think I understand ‘Higher consciousness occurs as an effect of the awareness of Truth on the mind.’ But I don't understand ‘...it is no more significant to be aware of Truth than to not be aware of Truth.’ I thought being vigilant only for God and His Kingdom meant being aware of Truth.” – BT
“Be vigilant only for God and His Kingdom” (T-6.V-C) is a lesson of the Holy Spirit in A Course in Miracles meant to teach you that you have a choice of thought system in your mind. In the mind training ACIM provides this would be a first step toward growing your awareness of Truth. But that is quite apart from the context of that article, Consiousness, Truth, and Forgiveness. In that article I discussed how Truth (God) is beyond all consciousness (awareness), even the highest consciousness of Truth. So while consciousness can be affected by Truth, consciousness never affects Truth. Truth is wholly unaffected by what h…

I realize some of my recent articles (like last week’s Consciousness, Truth, and Forgiveness) are above a lot of readers’ heads and seem like a lot of theoretical hoo-haw, but please bear with me. These come out of my new experiences and insights so they lay the groundwork for what will come up ahead. I want to explain more clearly what I wrote last week and discuss its significance. One thing that was a source of confusion for me on this path was the two ways oneness can be experienced. One is something falling away where there are two or more leaving one. This, in fact, is how I’ve understood non-duality: An illusion of reality falls away and the only Reality (Truth) is left. The other way I’ve experienced oneness is where there seems to be two or more and I find they are one. This can come as a vision and experience where I see the unity of all things or where I feel one with one or more seeming “other”—person or thing. The latter is my current experience and it is what Bernadette R…

What for me sets A Course in Miracles apart from other teachings is that it conveys that the Truth (God) is beyond our experiences of Truth. Our perception, awareness, consciousness—whatever you want to call our experience—of Truth is not Truth. It is only perception, awareness, consciousness, or an experience of Truth. The Holy Spirit, or Christ Consciousness, or what I call the Awareness of Truth, is as far as consciousness can rise, but It is never Truth. I discovered this for myself through direct Revelation of Truth. Truth is beyond all experience (perceptions, awareness, consciousness) of Truth because It is beyond all experience. It is indescribable (and shattering) because nothing on “this side” of Truth resembles Truth, not even the Awareness of Truth (Spirit). The Awareness of Truth is only an effect of Truth on consciousness. As a contemplative, Bernadette Roberts (The Path to No-Self) had no idea of this and discovered it for herself when consciousness (which sh…

My experiences in the past year and a half, which revealed that the ego (personal thought system) had fallen away a while ago and involved what I call The Break, where my consciousness shifted upward, have been humbling. They revealed to me that I was both naïve and arrogant about the spiritual path I am on. I was naïve about this mind. All the difficulty I’ve encountered is nothing inherent to the path, but rather to the limits of this mind. And I was arrogant in thinking I knew the way ahead. Oh, I knew there was a shift up ahead. It came a couple of years earlier than I sensed, but it didn’t come as a surprise. The nature of the shift came as a surprise, though. I had no idea that the mind’s shift to Spirit would be like this. What is the nature of the shift? An entire life, both an internal consciousness and the external expression of it, fell away. So far my mind has been dealing more with the shock of what happened—internally far more than externally—than it has been…

Along the way, as much as I loved to get into spiritual theory, in the end I always let experience lead the way. Theory is interesting intellectually, but it never caused an actual shift in my experience. I have been willing to let go of theory if experience taught me something different. However, more often than not my experience would not contradict, but would rather illuminate theory for me. Theory became fact when I experienced it. In the past several years I became aware of the pseudo-reality we live in as a story. This is how “the world isn’t real” began to show up in my experience. This story is the moment the idea of not-Truth arose in the Mind of Truth (God) and was undone by Truth’s all-encompassing nature unfolding as time. In time, the idea seemed to arise long ago and its undoing seems to be in some indefinite future. We live in a story of correction, or undoing, or, as A Course in Miracles calls it, Atonement. I became aware that what I felt were my thoughts…

If I can be said to have a desire, it is for what will happen. It does not make sense to want anything else! To do so would mean opposing myself, because I now know I am That from Which it all unfolds. I no longer feel I am a thread independent of the tapestry. I am the tapestry expressing as this thread. This makes it very difficult to speak to people who are not on the same path about my experience. Did I want to leave Australia? No; it wasn’t about want. Did I want to stay? Not at the moment, because I could feel leaving was the next step. Do I want to go back? Yes, but that’s because I feel I will. If that changes, I will feel complete with Australia. Acting is no longer about desire, or want, or motivation for me; it’s about feeling the movement of the unfolding through me. I willingly move as I am moved and my feelings seem to keep pace with the movement. What do you want? What would make you happy? What are your plans for the future? These are not relevant questions to me anym…

I am back in the United States after a year in Australia where I followed a Holy Relationship, which continues into a new phase. Everyone wants to know how I find it here now, back in the city (Las Vegas, Nevada) I left a year ago after dismantling the life I had been living. So I thought I would just tell you all in one fell swoop! Las Vegas is familiar, but not natural to me. It feels like a foreign land I once visited. I live with a sister across the city from where I lived before, but I have been to my old neighborhood and I even drove past my former home. It is hard for me to believe only a year has passed since I went through that huge dismantling. In fact, it is hard to believe I ever lived that life. Not only can I not find the self that lived that life, I cannot find the self that left it. And as my time in Australia wound down I could feel who I had been there falling away, too. When I experienced what I call The Break, which was when I rose in consciousness, I told my then-wi…

“Is the Course saying that the script is written and our only choice is to see everything with the ego or the Holy Spirit? Or is it saying that in every situation where we make a decision the script switches to a different script?” – BM
A Course in Miracles is saying everything that happens is already set and your choice is in how you see it. Although you feel that your desires, motivations, choices, and actions are your own, really you are a part of a whole, and that whole lives through you, showing up as your desires, motivations, choices and actions. While your will feels free, it is really part of a greater will living through you. To understand this, you must understand the nature of what you perceive as reality, or the world you live in. It is actually an instant of undoing unfolding as time. That instant is the idea of not-God (not-Truth) arising and being undone in the Mind of God (Truth). God, being All, must contain the idea of Its Own opposite. But being All, God cannot have a…

A common spiritual practice is to be mindful, which is another way of saying to be present. A common misunderstanding is that mindfulness should be limited to the body’s activities; to its breathing, feelings, and activities. Sometimes clients say things like, “I struggle to stay present, but I’m worried about my son” or “I want to be present, but I can’t stop thinking about what my sister said to me last week”, etc. They feel that they shouldn’t be thinking about anything but what the body is doing. But the mind is going to continue to think until it does not. So mindfulness must include being present to the mind’s present thoughts, even when those thoughts are about the past or the future. When you are doing tasks that do not require much thought, like cooking, washing dishes, pulling weeds, engaging in a quiet hobby, etc., you find your mind processing the day just passed, a book read or movie seen, an issue in your life, an insight, something in the past, possible outco…

On my path there were various ways in which I was “purified” of guilt, often quite consciously. But I had two noteworthy episodes that I did not recognize as purification when I went through them. The first I have written about a few times before. I began A Course in Miracles, which was the start of my spiritual path as well, in 1984. It was my life from the moment I picked it up. I was in a study group for a very brief period at the very beginning, but after that it was just me and the Holy Spirit (Awareness of Truth in my mind). Despite early experiences of direct Revelation, a Holy Relationship, and higher miracles I remained largely intellectual in my approach to my spirituality. In the late 90s I found my study and practice tapering off until one day I realized ACIM had been sitting on my end table gathering dust for quite a while. I simply had no motivation to read it. I felt no rancor toward it. I was not frustrated or angry. I was simply not interested anymore. As …

In the past couple of years, this mind has faced itself like it never had before. This is an aspect of becoming conscious to Truth. It lights up every corner of the mind, revealing what had been hidden, and what had been hiding It. This has meant seeing a lot of dark and ugly beliefs, most of which I’d seen over the years. Some I thought were gone, but seemed to review. A few surprised me. I did not have to do anything with most of them but feel them and see them and realize they were no longer really there. These were the shadows of the ego (personal thought system) that had gone. I learned, through this long, uncomfortable retrospective, exactly what the ego was and what it taught me about me (lies). While the actual beliefs went with the ego, some habits and postures instilled by it are still unraveling. One of these beliefs was revealed in a deep discomfort with myself that had been with me for the past several years, perhaps since the ego fell away in 2014. Having not…

My visitor’s visa is due to expire and I will be returning to Nevada in the United States in early October after a year in Western Australia. As most of you know, I came here to Hannah, with whom I have a Holy Relationship. It has been quite an, erm….interesting year for both of us. Difficult may be a more apt word, LOL, though of course there is also a lot of Love. It is not my place to tell Hannah’s story, but we have both faced ourselves in ways we did not expect. I came here having just dismantled a life that had come to completion and with a mind adapting to a new consciousness. The former was difficult and I hoped the latter meant things would get easier for me. Ha, ha! In some ways they got harder. But now, yes, it is much easier. The first months for me were very difficult because the echo of the ego (personal thought system) was very much upon me. I was smack in guilt and fear and grief and I was easily triggered, although I also recovered relatively quickly. At first I used …

In painting, pentimento refers to the emergence of previous paintings or drawings on the canvas beneath the present painting. It can reveal the artist’s original ideas or that the artist changed their mind. In fact, the word is Italian for “repentance”. Ha! I feel this kind of “bleed through” now as the Light of Truth shows up for me in this new kind of Vision and Awareness. Sometimes I have an epiphany and I am There, seeing with pure spiritual Vision. But most of the time I simply experience, well, pentimento, as the Light of Truth simply illuminates my present experience. When I first experienced It, I called It the Golden Light of Love, or, simply, the Golden. Later, as It seeped into my ongoing experience, I called It the Enchantment, because It was a magical feeling of being, well, enchanted with everything. Now I simply call It Love. I experience It here/now. It is everywhere/always. It is the Real World or True Perception. It is a perception of where I truly am, so forgiveness …

Although I have not watched much of Modern Family, besides enjoying the writing and the humor, I always liked the sitcom because of its realistic portrayal of family relationships. There is a lot of tension; a lot of painful history. There is a lot of disappointment, eye rolling, and sighing. But there is also always love. Painful family relationships are a common theme with my clients. There are two mistaken expectations that often emerge. One is that there is not supposed to be tension in loving relationships. My clients think something is wrong when there is conflict. The other is that as one becomes spiritually aware personal relationships become pain free. Let’s take the first mistaken expectation. There is no perfection in the world. The personal experience is a relative one so there are no absolutes. We are all unique and therefore different from each other. Conflicts are inevitable. Even if you have undone all conflict with yourself and so have no conflict with others, others w…

I have shared many times that direct Revelation of Truth is indescribable. Truth is so wholly unlike the relative experience of perception that I can no more describe It than I could describe a color to a blind person. There is nothing to which to compare It because it is All-That-is. What I do say is that Truth is Wholeness beyond any experience of wholeness at the relative level because at the relative level wholeness is always experienced in relation to lack. It corrects lack. But Truth does not occur in relation to anything else. Also, Truth is beyond experience. The highest level of awareness (consciousness; perception) that one can attain at the relative level of perception is the Awareness of Truth (Holy Spirit). The effect of this is an experience of Oneness. And, truly, this, too, cannot be adequately described, though many of us have tried! At the level of perception, where all is relative, Oneness “bleeds through” into duality as an experience of “One with” what or whomever…

Sometimes I feel that what A Course in Miracles teaches is just for this stage. Only now do I get immediate results putting into practice what I have practiced for 35 years. But, of course, I actually always got results. It was just the time between practice and accepting its results has shortened considerably. It took years! Then months, then weeks, then days. Now its hours at the longest; usually minutes, if not instantaneous forgiveness. When I first became a student of ACIM, which was the start of my spiritual path as well, I had direct Revelation and higher miracles that showed me that what ACIM teaches is true. From that time on, all I was really doing was coming to accept what I had seen, that Truth (God) is true. I made the mistake for the longest time of thinking I had to relearn this and that I had to choose Truth over and over. But Truth had come to my awareness and didn’t have to do so again. It was not in my ongoing conscious awareness, but I had seen It and c…