ACIM Mentor

           When the person here, Liz, was seventeen, she came out to herself as a lesbian. She’d had romantic and sexual feelings for girls and women all her life, but she’d developed a heterosexual persona to keep the truth from herself and others until she could handle it. Coming out was an identity crisis, a very difficult psychological and emotional process of personal identity shift from the personally false to the personally true. So, when a couple of years later, she learned that God was within and that her True Identity was in God, that it was already here, and that ego was a false identity that had to fall away, she felt she had an advantage. She felt coming out was a template to follow. But it turned out that the coming out experience was a parallel , not a template for enlightenment. Because where in the coming out experience the “I” of ego stood between a false heterosexual persona and an authentic homosexual orientation and seemed to have ...

              A s Spirit has taken center in consciousness here and ego continues to fall away, consciousness, ego, and Spirit have been sorted out. The “I” of ego (yes, this is redundant) seemed concrete, and was in fact projected onto a concrete form, the person called Liz. But Liz’s body, personality, and attributes are only neutral expressions of consciousness, so she and ego are not the same. Although that strong sense of identity belonged only to ego, the “I” stated by consciousness here has never belonged to only ego. Sometimes the term has been used by Spirit. Ego strongly asserts an “I” and seeks constantly for its validation. But Spirit merely observes and sometimes teaches, which is as close as It gets to asserting Itself. The term “I” is used by both ego and Spirit, and can vacillate quickly between them, so it can seem there is only one “I”. For example, a question may arise in consciousness from ego and is answered by Spirit. Often, ...

             For a while it has seemed that the concepts of a dream and awakening were great analogues for consciousness and the experiences that reveal the Onlyness of God, and that consciousness is a false reality. But now they seem like concepts shaped by ego.   Because what would be the dreamer of the dream that then awakens? Certainly, God is not lost to Itself in a dream! Consciousness represents a false idea (the opposite of God) that was simultaneously undone by God’s All-encompassing nature. So, to God consciousness is an impossible idea. Only the idea of time within that idea makes it seem like the idea of not-God arose long ago and will be undone in some indefinite future. Consciousness registers either ego projecting ego or Spirit extending Spirit. It does not have agency. So, while consciousness here was dominated by ego, even buried under it as ego conflated itself with it, consciousness did not dream ego and then awaken to S...

            One of the first things I recognized in my early years as a student of A Course in Miracles was the pattern of touching Spirit in some way—answer, insight, true peace—and then swinging hard back into ego. Decades later when I began to teach, I found this was universal, not just to students of the Course , but on any spiritual path. I eventually called it ego backlash . But my original term for it was ego rebound . What I now see about consciousness shows me this was a more accurate label. It has been over five years since The Break , when I shifted from ego- to Spirit-consciousness. I had indications of the coming shift for many years before. I had new experiences of Spirit and ego sensed its coming “death.” But after the shift, even though I knew I was in a wholly new paradigm, the split mind seemed to continue. The personal identity was certainly missing. But something was screaming about the shift, lamenting what had happened, usurping and...