ACIM Mentor

Last week I wrote about the void left when the ego (personal thought system) fell away. What I mean by “void” is that the structure around which my mind organized itself is gone. I grab for familiar handholds and find them missing. This leaves me with the sensation of free-falling through space. Sometimes, however, I experience this as liberation. Obviously, since I can observe this and write about it, it indicates my whole mind is not a void. The ego only merely occupied a place in it after all. It really was only a thought system—an arrangement of ideas for looking at myself and my world as a person. What disguised the void for a while, rather unsuccessfully, is the echo of the ego remaining in my mind. It is unsuccessful as a disguise because it, rather than the Awareness of Truth (Holy Spirit), is now the “other” in my mind. It feels as though it is floating in my mind, rather than that it is my mind. It yells into the void, trying to fill it with what used to be there. But i

            It’s not a comfortable thing, the ego (personal thought system) falling away. I have been uncomfortable for over four years. That’s when it happened, but I didn’t recognize it. All I knew was that something had happened, I was no longer relating to the world as I had been, I was increasingly uncomfortable, and I expected one day I’d understand. And then one day last year I did. But all that’s happened since is that the discomfort has come into sharper focus as I discovered the explanation for it. And, oh, yeah, and all sorts of new discomforts occurred as I dismantled an entire life and moved to a new life in Australia. Which has had its own discomforts.             But the outer changes and its attendant discomforts, which pass pretty quickly as I adjust, are insignificant compared to what’s going on within. I live within; that’s my “world”. And that is often, not in struggle, because I refuse to engage, but in turmoil. Because all my mind knows to do is to hurl all

            Something that shifted in the past few years after the ego (personal thought system) fell away, leaving its diminishing echo behind, is I started to honor, not the ego itself, but the mind behind it. My mind.             Honoring my mind showed up as allowing the ego to have its responses without judging myself for them. I didn’t realize at the time that honoring was what I was doing. I had undone guilt (see my book, Releasing Guilt for Inner Peace ), so I no longer felt a need to judge myself for the ego’s judgments. I no longer feared the ego, because I no longer felt guilty about it. I simply found that if I pushed away egoic responses they lingered and if I allowed them, they dissipated. I had no idea that this was how to respect my own mind! But of course it was. The ego was a part of my mind, even if false. Letting it have its say was how I respected, not the ego, but the will behind it. And that was me. I think of my identification with ego as the “little wil

What I find myself pondering since I learned that what I call Higher Awareness can be attained as a goal and not just as an effect of an awareness of Truth is where what A Course in Miracles defines as “forgiveness” comes into play. Is there a difference between Higher Awareness attained as an end in itself and Higher Awareness attained as the effect of forgiveness?             The easiest way for me to discuss this is to compare the two teachings that informed my spiritual path: ACIM and The Infinite Way . I was certainly aware of an incongruity between them as Joel Goldsmith (who wrote TIW and several articles and books related to it) never discussed Truth and illusion, so he never discussed forgiveness as ACIM defines it. But I also never gave this much thought as I used the teachings in different ways and ACIM always took precedence. What occurred recently for me is the exact nature of the incongruity became clear.             First, let me define what I mean by “Higher Awar