ACIM Mentor

  What are you doing with your spiritual practice but seeking to have another, better experience? You want your consciousness transformed. Specifically, you want peace in your conscious awareness —that of which you are immediately aware. You want a different world, really. And that means recognizing that your world is not the material world the body’s eyes report to you—and of which they are a part. Your consciousness—your mind—is your “world.” When spiritual teachers point out that Truth is within you, they do not mean in your person’s body, but in your consciousness—which isn’t even really “your” consciousness but is simply an individuated expression of consciousness. There are three parts to your consciousness:   Conscious awareness : That of which you are immediately aware. For example, what the body’s eyes see now and the thoughts and feelings in your mind now. Your conscious awareness is limited, so it cannot contain all of what is in your individuated consciousn...

           The Course was dictated to two who had a sense of Spirit working in their lives. After all, they were taking down the Course itself! The Universal Christ Mind sought to develop and grow their awareness of Spirit through the lessons in the Workbook as well as simply in discussion with them, privately and through the Course . And for those who find the Course and already have an awareness of Spirit, even if only dimly, the Course functions in the same way. Through the practice suggested, they develop their trust in Spirit. But for many who come to the Course , the discernment of Spirit within has not yet occurred. For them, practice is the means of opening to the awareness and experience of Spirit. Those who do not understand this often feel frustrated and even angry with the Course for suggesting that they should be having experiences that they do not yet have. They feel that they fall short when they read the instructions and descriptions ...

             Your spiritual path is an expression, but you probably experience it as for something—you want a different experience. You want peace. And a new experience comes not from ideas, but from practice that invites and extends the new experience. There are a lot of ideas in A Course in Miracles that are startling, maybe frightening, and often seem impossible when you first learn them. How can the world you see not be real? How could you ever come to understand that you are not a body? How can you see the real world when ego’s world is right before your eyes? The alchemy of practice is that it transforms ideas into experience. For example, I did not come to understand that I am mind by going around saying, “I am not a body” or even “I am mind.” The awareness that I am mind seeped in over time as I watched my mind, as I watched how my thoughts and judgments made the world I saw. I realized one day that I had shifted and now understood I am a ...

     “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” 1 Corinthians 13:12 KJV   What I did not know to expect when enlightenment occurs is the years-long overlap of Spirit and ego in consciousness while ego slowly falls away. This means there is a long stage in which the mind having the experience does not fully understand what is occurring. This early stage of enlightenment is much like the much earlier stage of spiritual awareness that I call dawning , when one first becomes aware of the real world in consciousness or Reality (God) beyond consciousness through a mystical experience or experiences. You see amazing things, but not clearly. The difference is, after the dawning experience, your experience of existence goes on as usual, as ego is still the center of your consciousness, although you feel changed. And enlightenment means a very different experience of existence, as it is...

             As I’ve shared before, in my earlier Oneness experiences, I would feel I was one with whatever I was looking at or thinking about—person, place or thing. But as time went on and these experiences were less shocking, they lasted longer, and I experienced them more clearly. I discovered that I am not One with whatever I see or is on my mind, but Oneness is here… and there is something appearing before the body’s eyes or in the mind’s memory. This experience of Oneness is Spirit’s Wholeness , reflecting the Onlyness of God (Reality) beyond consciousness. It reveals that consciousness and the myriad forms appearing in consciousness are illusions that have no effect on Reality (God) at all.   “…There is no world! This is the central thought the course attempts to teach…Some see it suddenly on point of death, and rise to teach it. Others find it in experience that is not of this world, which shows them that the world does not exist b...