ACIM Mentor

I assumed that the awakening process was the same for everyone and that any seeming differences could be put down to those who shared their experiences using the symbols of the path they had taken. I thought the steps were the same, but the description varied according to the tradition followed. But I have discovered that the path is not the way you take; the path is the way that takes you. So your path does not just determine how you are likely to describe your experiences. It indicates the experiences that you will have. Although the content is ultimately the same, it does not unfold the same for each of us. I don’t just mean that we don’t all go through the same stages in the same order. I mean we go through very different, if eventually similar, experiences, which are determined by the path unfolding through us. For example, Bernadette Roberts ( What is Self? ) was a Christian contemplative and made it very clear that she initially went through a process that was in line with...

A few weeks ago I wrote about my “ Grand Tour of Fear ” (May 8). I shared how since my shift in consciousness I have seemed to experience fear in all its forms and degrees. It has been an intense and often rough two years, but it has not been all about fear. I wrote that I would eventually share some of the good stuff that has happened as well, so here it is. So far, the hallmark of my experience has been my feeling of immortality. Immortality was not something I gave much thought to before and I had no idea I would one day experience it. Like so much of this new experience, it has seeped slowly into my awareness so that the way to characterize it has come long after I began to have the experience. First I felt a “ghost in the world”. This was before the moment I refer to as “The Break”, which I call the shift I experienced. After The Break I would say “a new life had come”, which seemed inadequate to describe my experience. Not long after that I became aware that I am Spirit and...

Avery Wan lived in a dark room, only she didn’t know it was a dark room. It was all she knew, so she thought it was what existence was. One day Avery noticed that there was something in the room that had always been there, but that she only now saw was not the same as the as-yet-unlabeled darkness. How could she not have noticed there were two where she thought there was one? No matter. Now she knew. She labeled what she was used to “darkness” and this newly-in-her-conscious-awareness presence “light”. Because it was new to her awareness, she was drawn to look at the light. She was happy to feel she knew something more about existence. The more she looked at the light, the more distinct it became from the darkness, and the more she was baffled that she hadn’t seen this before. It’s so obvious! What’s more, she found the light to be more appealing than the darkness. She suspected that the light had helped her tolerate the darkness all along. So she lived for a while happily awar...

Sometimes I hope there is some reason for the journey through fear I have taken these past two years since I rose in consciousness. I have seen fear up close and intimately; raw, unmasked, and unmodified. But then I see that it is just as insignificant as the experience of existence (ego) that is gone for me and when it is over I will not give it any thought. This is just the way this split mind comes to an end. Everything A Course in Miracles says about the ego I have visited, experientially , not as just a concept. I have been through the fear of death and I’ve been through death. (Not of the body, obviously, which is irrelevant.) A much worse experience was fear of nonexistence. Because, as the Course points out, at least death “proves” there had been a life. Nothing terrifies the ego more than the idea that it doesn’t exist. Because it doesn’t. And I’ve seen that, too. When I reached the furthest edge of fear of nonexistence I had only one place to go if I didn’t pull ba...

When I was first a student of A Course in Miracle s I noticed a pattern: Whenever I had a positive spiritual experience, anything from a significant insight all the way up to a higher miracle, I would then have a “backlash” from the ego. This showed up as fears, attacks on me, attacks on others, obsessing angrily on a social or political issue, etc. The initial backlash seemed to be in direct proportion to the strength of the spiritual experience. But, for a long while, even one simple insight could lead to weeks of backlash. Eventually I noticed the pattern and came to accept that the backlash would happen. Simply recognizing the pattern helped mitigate it. In time I learned to not resist at all, because that seemed to lengthen and strengthen it. This shortened the duration and intensity of the backlash considerably. When I started teaching and coaching Course students I discovered I was not alone. In fact, this pendulum swing is a universal experience—and one of the more unco...

Sorry to have inundated you with emails lately, but I find I am going in a new direction and I wanted to share a new service—joining in Christ (the part of each of us that is Part of God)—and offer a discount for mentoring/life-coaching during this unusual time when we hunker down during the COVID-19 pandemic. (I’ve also lowered my fee in general. Check out my new streamlined website, www.acimmentor.com.) And here I send you the first of a new newsletter/blog, The Christ in You . When I ended the ACIM Mentor Articles a few weeks ago I felt it difficult to continue teaching in a way that was meant to be “corrective”. By this I mean, looking out at a world I thought needed adjusting. I still found it natural to teach one-on-one in a mentoring/life-coaching session with the handful of clients who still remain, but I found writing articles to be a strain except where I shared my process. My point of view shifted with my shift in consciousness, about which most of you know if you read m...

  “Christ is the link that keeps you one with God, and guarantees that separation is no more than an illusion of despair, for hope forever will abide in Him. Your mind is part of His, and His of yours.” —A Course in Miracles (W-pII.6.2) “(Christ) is the Self we share, uniting us with one another, and with God as well.” —A Course in Miracles (W-pII.6.1) I live now in the awareness that I am Christ—and so are you. I wish to use the power of my awareness to strengthen your awareness of Christ in you.   So I offer joining sessions at $1 US per minute from 10 to 30 minutes. How this works: ·          Email me to set up a time for joining. Liz@acimmentor.com or 702-742-5305. ·          You call me on the phone or Skype or Facetime or another platform over the internet. ·          If you have something on your mind you wish t...

Dear Readers and Clients: At least through April I am offering  mentoring/life-coaching at reduced rates  for those who need a break during this unusual time. My usual fee is $50 US for a half-hour and $85 US for an hour.  Whether you are a regular, returning, or new client , if you cannot meet these fees at this time you can pay what you can afford . (For those in Australia and Canada I now bill through PayPal in your currency). If you have been considering mentoring/life-coaching from the perspective of  A Course in Miracles  but have not got around to it,  now is the time to take advantage of  your enforced free time and my offer of reduced fees! Also  consider more creative ways of meeting with me, as in with a friend or two  with whom you can divide my fee for an hour. We can study and/or discuss the  Course . We will meet on Skype or Facetime or some other platform that allows for more than two to meet. I am not actively ...

            Years ago I discovered something about the ego: What it told me to fear was what it secretly desired for me.             Is there some disaster you are projecting in your life now? Maybe you are afraid you will lose someone or something, like a job. Maybe you fear for a loved one who is in trouble or sick. Maybe you have financial concerns. Maybe your life and your loved ones are settled for now, yet you still catastrophize over something , perhaps your country’s direction or the planet as a whole. Whatever it is, the ego hopes the disaster you fear will come to pass. Fear is really a wish.             And nowhere is this more clear than with the idea of death. It is the ego’s ultimate goal for you.             I have faced this lately as I have come to experience my immortal...

A Course in Miracles teaches us that through the ego we project onto the present from our individual past in the hopes of healing past hurts. We hold against those in the present injuries we perceive others caused in the past and expect them to make up for what we think those others did to us in the past. For example, you felt your mother was emotionally distant so you find yourself drawn (usually unconsciously) to emotionally distant partners in the (again, unconscious) hope that they will give you what your mother didn’t. If they do, you feel it is a “match made in heaven”. If they do not, you resent them and replay your drama with your mother over and over. Why, you wonder, can you never get your needs met? Recently I discovered that I was projecting hurt from my first holy relationship onto Hannah, with whom I am presently in a holy relationship. This erupted in a horrific way, but cleared up something that had been very confusing and difficult for me in my relationship with...

            I have gone back to “God”. I am writing a memoir about my path up through, well, when I finish it! The title—as of now—is A Memoir of Christ: A Student of A Course in Miracles Awakens . I was not planning this. One day the prologue for the book came to me, I wrote it, and suddenly there was a preface, and I’ve gone from there. You can see the thread of it in the title. It was a surprise to me. Suddenly the whole of my former life was re-framed as Christ’s journey. And my new experience of existence is given new context. A year ago I had an experience on a walk where I was my Self, the one we all share. Jesus was there and I knew I was experiencing me as I am, Christ. If you know my story, you know I point to the start of my spiritual path as a moment when I was a teenager and suddenly knew that what Jesus was everyone was. In that moment a year ago I realized this in my experience. A few days later I knew I was going to go forward i...

When the ego had fallen away but I had not recognized this, I had an ongoing experience of detachment and something else, what I came to call the “ghost in the world” experience. I wrote at the time that I felt like Bruce Willis’s character in The Sixth Sense (spoiler alert!): Walking the world as though part of it, not realizing I was dead. Except, unlike his character, I knew I was not the same, although I could not describe how. A bit over a year and half ago I realized I am Spirit. A couple of months later I felt this again and after that it came over me now and then. I realized this was a more direct experience of the ghost in the world feeling. But there was something to the experience I couldn’t quite grasp. What did it mean to be Spirit? How do you go about being Spirit? The experience faded as I went about dealing with all the other incredible stuff occurring in my mind and life.             Then something crept quie...

            I get how religions are started. I have had many world-altering, world-shattering experiences in the past couple of years. They have all been profound. Some of them, the movement I’ve felt over and/or within me has been HUGE. But these have all been my experience. They affect no one else. I find I am not what I thought I was. I have taught this all along and I’ve found it is true! I find what is true for me is true for everyone, but they can’t see it, as much as I might tell them. I find myself in a new world and everyone’s here with me, but they don’t know it.             But the shifts I’ve experienced were profound and large because of how insignificant and small were what they shattered. A thought system of puniness fell away and my mind, which had adapted itself to littleness, has all sorts of structures in place that must come down to accept its reality, which is far more than ...

I was amused to find that Bernadette Roberts ( What is Self? ) took the same approach to her path that I took to mine: Wanting the Truth, we have both been willing to dump what we thought we already knew and valued if we found it was erroneous. And we both used the same test: We would let go of ideas and experiences we valued and if they hung around we’d know they were true. I let go of the Holy Spirit often at the beginning, only to find It was still here.             Another approach I often took to test my path was to dump all concepts and look only at my own direct experiences. What do they teach me? I trust experience, not words in a book or someone else’s experience. Those only resonate when they align with my experiences. I never wanted to fit my experiences into preset concepts, but rather allow concepts to arise from my experience. Having said that, sometimes it was not until I read another’s experience that I would ...

“…What I'd like to understand more is how I can understand Forgiveness - I know it's for my benefit to forgive but it seems hard..  Sometimes I will THINK I forgive but when I get anxious,  it will come into my mind what a person "did" to me & I’ll be walking round my places grumbling & playing back the past in my head & I want to STOP THAT LOL… … if I had plenty of money I really would spread it around & help others as I do that now,  often  to my own detriment!...I give my last hundred dollars to someone who seems in need then I can't pay my rego or insurance. Do u know what that is or can u relate to doing things like that? ”—CB You are correct that continuing to be emotionally charged about another person’s actions means you have not forgiven. But remember you do not forgive others; you forgive (release) your thoughts about them. Others act and then you tell yourself a story about their actions. This story usually supports an idea you...

            It is often said by spiritual teachers that we are all here to love each other. I think this is often misheard. People hear this as an instruction, rather than as a statement of how it is. The way to hear it is, no matter how it appears right now, we all do love each other. We live in an expression of Love.             The moment the idea of the opposite of Truth arose in the mind of Truth it was undone by Truth’s all-encompassing nature. But, as Truth is Timeless, the idea of not-Truth contains time. In time it seems like the idea of not-Truth arose long ago and will be undone in some indefinite future. Time is that instant of not-Truth/the undoing of not-Truth unfolding like a story. So time is the Undoing (Atonement in A Course in Miracles ). That means everything, no matter how it looks at this moment, is the extension of Love. Everyone is fulfilling their part perfectly, no matte...

            My experiences of the past several years have brought up questions for me about conscious awareness.     A few years ago I wrote now and then about how I had come to see that what I experienced—what I was consciously aware of—really didn’t matter. Truth does not need my conscious awareness to be Truth, so how could it be significant? It seemed self-centered to be so focused on my ongoing conscious awareness when the Awareness of Truth (Holy Spirit) broke into it when necessary and operated through me regardless of what was going on in my conscious awareness.             When the Awareness of Truth became my new state of consciousness after years of denying the ego (personal thought system) had fallen away, questions about conscious awareness became a central focus for me. I was conscious of this shift while still contending, on the conscious level—rather intensely for a wh...