ACIM Mentor

It’s hard to grasp that the world is an illusion. The word “illusion” means something that’s not there but that you see anyway. In the midst of the illusion it’s impossible to accept that it’s an illusion. And there’s this expectation that if you ever did get that it’s an illusion it would be like vapor before your eyes. Now, this may happen. I’ve had experiences where the physical world for a moment seemed transparent, but this experience is not sustained. If it were, I would have learned all that I need and the world would be gone from my mind! The everyday experience of the world as an illusion, though, is that the world's significance pales in comparison to the Peace of God that you experience within. I wrote before about how what you value is what is real to you (see Reality and Value ). The world fades into the background as it becomes less valuable to you. Sometimes students ask me if there will ever come a time when they will cease to see the horrors of the world or somebod...

It cannot be said too often that everything is thought, everything is in your mind, because to understand the miracle and how it works you have to understand this. To the ego, material, concrete form is real and thought is meaningless. Of course, this is upside down. Mind is what is real and it is formless and abstract. So one of the first things you have to do is grasp that you see this backwards, that mind and thought are what are real and material, concrete form is what is not real. There are two levels of perception. The first level is the thoughts that make the world for you and this layer is neutral. Look around the room you are in now. Everything is a thought – round, blue, rough, chair, refrigerator, rug, etc. even though you aren’t conscious of yourself “thinking” it. What you are seeing with the body’s eyes – remember the body itself is unreal – is the screen made by the split mind so the separation could be projected onto it. This level of perception is neutral because it ha...

As with everything else, A Course in Miracles uses the idea of “faith” in a way that is different from the way that the world usually uses it. It still means trust, and trusting Something that the body’s eyes cannot see, but faith as the Course uses means acknowledging that only God is Real. One day I was having a conversation with my life-partner, Courtney, about prayer. She comes from a traditional Christian background and sometimes I have questions because I don’t understand Christianity. I told her about overhearing two women talking and one told her friend that her daughter had had a medical procedure and she had come through it okay. Her friend said, “God is good. Our prayers were answered. ” I asked Courtney if this woman would’ve thought God was bad if the first woman’s daughter had not come through okay. Of course not. The woman would’ve accepted that as God’s Will. Okay, so what’s the point of these petitioning prayers if God is going to do Its will in any case? Courtney ex...

Back in the summer of 2005 I went to see my therapist to help me sort out what was my grief over my father’s recent death and what was just regular mid-life stuff. She’s not a student of A Course in Miracles but she is a great therapist and I don’t go to her for spiritual stuff but for practical stuff – like what I was going through then. I saw her for a few weeks and at one point I found my mind flooded with story ideas. Once upon a time I wrote (terrible) fiction and I have always been filled with story ideas. But this was so overwhelming I had to make notes on some of the stories just to get my mind to shut up. I shared this with my therapist and she got this far-away look in her eye that I recognize as someone listening to the Holy Spirit and then she asked me, “What are you not doing that you need to be doing?” At first I thought she was saying I was supposed to write novels, which I had no desire to do anymore. But then a few days later I realized she asked that question without...

You are not an ego, a personal self; you are One with God. When in A Course in Miracles it says that you chose to be separate from God and you feel guilty for this and you fear God will punish you it does not mean that you personally made this choice. When the Course says that you are responsible for making the world it does not mean that you personally made the world. It means you the mind-that-has-decided-to-split from God made this choice and that all of the egos that seem to have been made by these choices are born into guilt and fear. If you identify with a personal self you will feel guilty and fear God. You can only escape guilt and fear by putting aside the ego in all its forms. All that is left then is God. In sorting out Truth from illusion you have to realize that the personal self is the illusion. The questions students ask: “What happens when I die?” “Is reincarnation real?” “Did I plan this life?” All of these are questions about the personal self and are not really q...

I wrote a couple of week ago about realizing in a moment of extreme fear that I didn’t have to suffer and about how I sought relief in Truth: Only God is Real . The thing is, I have become less and less willing to tolerate much smaller fears. I don’t have to suffer at all, I realize at moments. But then ego pushes back with a frightened, “Yes, you do. Without fear you would be dead. Fear is life.” I can remember a time in my life when I was very young when fear seemed unnatural and alien whenever I experienced it. I somehow knew it wasn’t “right” or “natural”. But at some point when I was a pre-teen fear started to creep into my everyday life until eventually I just “adjusted” to it. Fear was just a part of life, I concluded, and it just had to be accepted. Anything from minor insecurities, vulnerabilities, uncertainties to extreme phobia – fear was always present in some form. Fear was life. Looking at this with the Holy Spirit the other day I was able to lift up the fear and peer und...

Sometimes students contact me to ask why they made something terrible happen in their life. They interpret A Course in Miracles to say that they chose this “bad” thing to happen. “Why did I make my child sick with this terrible disease?” “Why did I “create” this hurricane that destroyed my house?” “My husband was only thirty and I didn’t want my husband to die but the Course says I make everything happen in my life.” What the Course teaches is that the world is chaos. It is unfair and cruel and it has no rhyme or reason. It will never make sense. It is a place of separation from God. It is hell. Nasty things happen in this world. Children are born sick. Natural disasters occur. People die. There is a lot that is out of your control. You do not “invite” everything that happens to you - you are living in a perception of separation from God and as long as you live in this perception it will manifest all around you. What the Course teaches is that these situations do not have a meaning...

For years I’d here Christians say “God is in His Heaven” as comforting words and I’d think, “Big whoopdie-doo. What’s that to me? Here I am in the world suffering, what do I care that God is in Heaven?” Even after being a student of A Course in Miracles for years I’d still think this because I was looking at it from the traditional Christian perspective that there was a relationship between the world and God. But after I finally accepted what A Course in Miracles says – that I am One with God and that there is no connection between the world and God – I understood the relief this idea could bring: God is in Heaven and nothing can change that; and I am in God. A couple of weeks ago we had to put down our beloved dog, Murphy, on his 16th birthday. My partner and I like to be there when the vet euthanizes our pets and we had been through the experience 3 years before. But I had totally forgotten how I had had trouble with the process of watching the chemicals go through the IV to “kill m...

Sometimes a student will say something like this: “I work with this guy Joe and I don’t want to be judgmental, but Joe comes to work late every day and our supervisor does nothing about it.” It is not a judgment to say that Joe comes to work late every day and your supervisor does nothing about it if in fact Joe comes to work late every day and your supervisor does nothing about it. You are simply observing a fact. It can also be a fact that Jane lies, that Tony is selfish, that Marie gossips, that Bob has never been on time for anything in his life, that 90% of the time Alice is going to cancel on you, etc. Observing facts is not judging. Judging is when you decide these behaviors are “bad” and hold a grievance against those who have these behaviors rather than simply acknowledging these behaviors and making a determination of how much you want to be around them. Ego is inherently insecure and frightened and so it is selfish and inconsistent and chaotic. Once you accept this fact you ...

In God there is only God. This is the meaning of Oneness. Oneness is the Law of Mind, which means it is Mind’s true state of being. The experience of Oneness with God is limitless love, peace and joy which cannot be conveyed in words. But what I am going to attempt here is an intellectual description of Oneness . This will maybe clarify some of the confusion students seem to have around the idea of Oneness, “extending God”, “what you give you receive” and the equality of having and being in God. Whiteness is the visual representative of God here. Imagine whiteness being everywhere – extending up, down, all around. There is only whiteness – so whiteness is one . There are no parts in whiteness because it is all one extending infinitely in every direction, but if you did separate it into parts each part would be exactly the same as every other part and could be said to be extending whiteness. Because there is only whiteness in whiteness all it can give is whiteness and all it can re...

“The name of Jesus is the name of one who was a man but saw the face of Christ in all his brother and remember God. So he became identified with Christ, a man no longer, but at one with God.” (C-5.2) This quote from A Course in Miracles used to piss me off. I wanted to attain Christ Consciousness, too, but I just wanted to be Christ, I didn’t want to have to see Christ everywhere. This was so contrary to the way that I understood things worked! If I was Christ, why would I see Christ everywhere? It didn’t make sense. Wasn’t I supposed to find God within? Why did I have to change what I was seeing in the world? I couldn’t make the connection between myself and what I was seeing in the world. And yet this was the central teaching of the Course ! Everything is Mind; we only see our own minds, we are always teaching ourselves what we are by what we choose to perceive. I was so resistant I made the simplest thing – a miracle – so difficult. Let me give you an example of how easy a mirac...

Almost every new student of A Course in Miracles has moments of disorientation trying to believe that the physical world isn’t real because in separation from God the physical is what is real and mind is nothing. This is what the Course calls “upside-down thinking” because it is the exact opposite of what is true. The physical world seems solid and unshakable, but to what? A mind that identifies with a physical body and that underrates its own power. It’s hard to believe that the physical world is not real when the body is real to you and what you can see, touch, taste, hear and smell is how you measure reality in your identification with a body. Do you see how circular the reasoning is here? The physical tells you that what you can measure physically is real. Is this any surprise? But of course, it’s not the body that tells you what is real. It’s the mind that chooses to use the body to tell it that the physical world is reality. The mind is what is real. The physical is nothing. It...

There’s a tricky passage in A Course in Miracles that confuses some students: If you inspire joy and others react to you with joy, even though you are not experiencing joy yourself there must be something in you that is capable of producing it. If it is in you and can produce joy, and if you see that it does produce joy in others, you must be dissociating it in yourself. (T-9.VI.1) What confuses some students is the parts about others reacting to you validating that joy is in you. How can this be? Doesn’t one’s reaction come from their self? Isn’t it up to them whether they see the Holy Spirit in you or not? Yes, how someone sees you is their choice, not yours. For an extreme example, think of Jesus’ life. All He did was extend God’s Love but that’s not what everyone saw. Some saw Him through their own guilt and fear, so much so that they crucified him! The Course teaches consistently that your experience comes from your own mind. It is true that when your attitude becomes more lov...

My last blog about extending God’s Love has brought up some questions about the mind and healing the mind. Everything is mind. In the world, it seems as though you are a body with a mind of your own. The mind is supposed to exist in the brain. All of this diminishes the importance of the mind because the ego does not want you to know that everything is mind. If you accept this then you can change your mind about the ego. So, the world teaches that your mind is housed in a brain in a body in a world. But actually, the brain, the body and the world all exist in your mind. The separation is not just your belief that your mind is separate from God’s Mind, but also that you are separate from the world and everything the body sees. The first step in healing is accepting that God is within your mind. But that’s only a beginning to undoing the separation. You also have to take back the part of your mind that you have projected onto the world. You cannot return to the Oneness of God’s Mind with...

What does A Course in Miracles mean by “extending”? Notice that this word is contrasted to “projecting”. It is the Law of Mind that mind always sees itself. The ego uses projection to deny this by making it seem as though what you are thinking is caused by something outside of you. For example, “Joe makes me angry” projects blame for the fearful thoughts you are having onto Joe. “Extending” is the true way the Law of Mind works. Your thoughts do not leave your mind. Think of extending your hand for someone to shake. Your arm does not leave your body and by extending your arm you are stretching yourself outward. When you extend God’s Love, you first feel it within, and then you stretch it out -- extend it -- in your awareness by looking at It instead of at the ego’s projections on the world. God extends only God and in God you only extend God. This is another way of saying “God is One.” God’s Extension (you) is God’s “Creation” and your Extension of God is your “Creation”. Again, God i...

One of the areas where students of A Course in Miracles get particularly strapped up is with the Course’s references to relationships. Jesus was speaking to all of us through Helen, but He was also speaking quite specifically to Helen and Bill. For Helen, all those references to “brother” meant Bill specifically and the lessons must be generalized for the rest of us. Helen and Bill were in the unique position of being at the exact same place spiritually and they were both willing to consciously recognize this and to learn from it. These holy relationships are rare, as the Course tells us (M-3.5) and most students do not seem to have the opportunity to experience the holy relationship the way Helen and Bill did. But even if you do have the opportunity to experience the holy relationship with someone who is spiritually ready to experience it when you are, it takes great, conscious willingness to go ride out the threatened ego’s terror. One or both of you may break it off because of th...

My last blog ( You Don’t Need to Save the World ) seems to have confused some students. What am I doing as a spiritual teacher if my goal is not to save the world? Didn’t this blog contradict my own life? Haven’t I written blogs that talk about the part we all play in the Great Awakening? First of all, I don’t look at the world as needing to be fixed or saved. I look at it as – well, nothing. The world is a problem for me when I get caught up in it or get attached to it. Then the problem is not in the world, but in me. My goal is to let go of the world (forgive). I also do not look at students as needing to be fixed or saved. I offer you my experience and you can take it or leave it. That’s not really any of my business. The students I mentor are in charge of our relationship. They can use what I have to offer any way they want to. It’s not about me. It’s not personal. I’m not interested in being some great guru with all the answers. The Answer is within you and if reading what I write...

Many students come to A Course in Miracles from social or religious traditions that have taught them that they are supposed to make a difference in the world, make it a better place, save the world one person at a time. Often they don’t let go of their attachment to the idea of saving the world and they see the Course as a means to attaining their goal. Some even believe that the goal of the Course is to bring heaven to earth, to return us to “Eden”. But anything to do with the world is about separation from God. Let’s take a thorough look at the idea of a perfect world. First of all, what would the perfect world be? Would we all be Democrats or Republican, Greens, or non-partisan? Christians, Muslims, Buddhists? Would monogamy prevail or would there be a return to universal polygamy? What kind of family would be the perfect family? It’s clear to see that we would not be able to agree on what a perfect world would be. But let’s put aside our obvious differences and get idealistic he...

The human race is not going to change because you’ve embarked on a spiritual path. Nor is your perception of the human race going to change. What changes is your attachment to the human race and to the world. And then your perceptions change. Maybe. Here is a totally made up scenario, but it’s very typical of what I often hear from students: Mary is married to George and they have three children. George has always been pretty much about George. When he’s not working, he’s watching TV or playing computer games or hanging out with his friends. George has no real interest in his home and only nominal interest in his children. He’s particularly interested in his children when they share an interest with him, like a computer game or a TV show. Mary lived with George and knew what he was like before they had children, but she thought that having children would change him. It has not. Mary has a different set of values. Though she works too, she puts her marriage and her children and the care...

In the study group I led a few years ago I mentioned how for many years I used A Course in Miracles to abuse myself even though I knew its message was wholly loving. I was reading it through the lens of guilt that I brought with me as a new student. One woman in particular could not understand what I was saying. I don’t know if this is because she didn’t do this at all or if she did it so thoroughly she didn’t want to hear what I was saying! But I come across this with students all the time. Just as the Holy Spirit uses what you have made to teach you to awaken, the ego uses the Course to teach you that you are guilty. Here are some common examples of the ego using the ideas in the Course to attack: You are wrong to enjoy anything with the body. You should not enjoy sex or eating or a massage or working out, etc. You are wrong to be concerned with the health and well-being of your body. You are wrong to use outside healers or remedies to heal the body. You are a failure if you do no...