ACIM Mentor

A few weeks ago I was discussing with a student the stages we go through as students of A Course in Miracles in our relationship with the Holy Spirit. Initially, we simply invite the Holy Spirit into certain situations. We are still in the driver’s seat at this point but we are willing to ask the Holy Spirit for direction when we get lost or in trouble. In time, we realize that we don’t want to wait for a crisis and we call on the Holy Spirit for guidance more and more when decisions have to be made. Then our trust develops to such a point that we realize that we don’t even want to drive anymore and we move over and let the Holy Spirit take the wheel. Our trust is not perfect yet, so at first we sometimes try to take back the wheel but we always give it up before too long because we’ve learned that Peace comes from letting the Holy Spirit lead the way. Finally, we just sit back and enjoy the ride. All of this happens naturally because you cannot force trust. I then mentioned that I’d ...

When I was very young I read about Buddhism and the concept that all pain is caused by having personal desires and that true spiritual awakening came with letting go of personal desires. I instantly understood this and felt joyous liberation! Then terror at the thought of giving up individuality came storming in. I decided it would be impossible to not identify with a personal self. But it was too late. That experience of True Freedom has beckoned me back ever since. No matter the resistance of the personal mind, the call of Limitlessness has been stronger in me. In fact, the experience of joyous liberation from limitations is the sign I seek in my studying of spiritual teachings and in my experiences with the Holy Spirit. I know when I have hit upon the Truth when I feel set free. The other day I was preparing to take a shower when I looked at the body in the mirror and thought, “Not bad for forty-five.” This moment of identification with the body was a reflex and the thought was some...

I get a lot of questions from students of A Course in Miracles about the concept that you manifest or attract everything in your life in the world. Some of the teachers who advocate methods of manifesting or attracting what the personal mind wants are familiar with the Course and feel that the Course validates what they teach. I’ve written about some of this before but, since I get so many questions about this, I’m going to sum it all up here. A Course in Miracles states, explicitly, that everything that happens to you, you have asked for on some level. This is referring to the content of what happens to you, and, sure, you choose the form on some level, too, but the form does not determine your experience; your experience is a choice of your mind. This is simply a fact; at no point does the Course then suggest to you ways of making what the personal mind wants show up. Its emphasis is always on your internal experience, in which you have two choices: Love or fear. This is a choic...

For a long time I have tried to reconcile Truth and illusion, often not seeing that that was what I was doing. I would have a Holy Instant in which I would fully realize with all my being that “there is only God” and then, when I returned to an awareness of the world, I’d wonder what I just experienced meant for my life in the world. In light of this experience how should I live my life? What should I do with my life? What attitudes should I have? What criteria should I use to make decisions in the world? Of course I was instantly undoing with these questions what I had just learned in the Holy Instant because by asking them I was making the world real to myself again! There is no world! This is the central thought the course attempts to teach. (W-132) I’ve done this over and over and over again until it happened a couple of weeks ago and I finally accepted that I can never bring together what can never be brought together. There are no answers to these questions because it cannot be ...

Students ask me what I think about “compassion” as a spiritual value and I always have to tell them that I don’t like the word. It’s wimpy and flaccid to me because it has so long been overused to stroke egos that its positive connotations have been all but wiped out for me. But it is a word that is used quite a lot in connection with spirituality so I have been contemplating what “compassion” means. In both my dictionary and in common usage the word means “sympathy” or “pity. “Sympathy” and “pity” are greatly valued in the world (this alone should make you suspicious). They are attitudes of separation because they are founded in the belief that personal stories are real. They are supposed to be about joining with another but they actually reinforce separation in your mind. When you look on a personal story that you have projected on another and you “feel for” them you are teaching yourself that the story that you have for them is real and that you are not the source of it. Moreover, s...

The end of the world is not its destruction but its translation into Heaven for you. This reinterpretation of the world leads to your corrected perception, which transfers easily to God. (MACIM-11.8.1) Did you know that “apocalypse” means to uncover or disclose? It refers to a prophecy, but the Apocalypse of the Bible is the last book of the New Testament and it’s about the destructive end of the world. So to the ego the connotation of the word “apocalypse” is fearfully negative because its guilt makes it assume that the end of the world would be a destructive event. Read history or any work of fiction from any era and you will find that everyone thinks that they are living in the worst times ever and that a punishing, destructive end of the world is imminent. Youngsters are shallow and lack respect; families are falling apart; society as a whole is a cesspit of selfishness and greed; wars, famines, natural disasters. The ego never changes! It always operates the same and no matter wh...

Students often ask if my relationship with my life-partner, Courtney, is a Holy relationship because she is not a student of A Course in Miracles . Yes it is but it is a different experience than I had in the Holy relationship that experienced when I was first a student of A Course in Miracles (see The Holy Relationship ). In that first relationship, which I call a mystical Holy relationship, I experienced another as the perfect reflection of my Holy Self. My Identity extended to include her, teaching me that the personal self that I thought I was, was not me. Eventually E moved on but I continued to experience Oneness just by thinking about her. Since I was still able to experience Oneness while she was physically thousands of miles away I learned that E was not the source of the Holy relationship; the Source of my experience must be with me all the time. The Holy relationship, I realized, is really with the Holy Spirit within me extended outward to encompass what my mind perceives. ...

The other day a student told me that she met a man who she thought did not like A Course in Miracles because he said he didn’t believe that anyone could be totally free of ego since he had never met anyone who was. I pointed out to her that that only meant he was not totally free of the ego because only ego sees ego. Thoughts do not leave the mind of the thinker; what you perceive is your own mind. If you are coming from ego you see ego; if you are coming from Christ you see Christ. If you are waiting for others to manifest Christ you will wait forever because you will be looking out from ego and therefore you will see ego. Only ego wants you to think that what you experience comes from others so that you can blame them for what you are choosing to not see. In your Christ Mind you know that you look only on yourself. The name of Jesus is the name of one who was a man but saw the face of Christ in all his brothers and remembered God. So he became identified with Christ, a ma...

Lately I’ve been speaking with students who feel they are doing something wrong because when they invite the Holy Spirit into a situation it often seems that the situation gets worse. Shouldn’t it be all happy-happy peaceful when you turn something over to the Holy Spirit? Yes and no. “Yes” it will eventually be peaceful but “no” initially there are usually some things within you and in your outer life that need to be brought in line with your goal of Peace. If your external circumstances need to change then often you will experience a period of external turmoil that can be very uncomfortable. And if it’s your mind that needs to change then you might find yourself confused, disoriented, afraid, unhappy, and disturbed. Sometimes, of course, both your inner experience and your outer world need to change and then it’s extremely uncomfortable. For example, you’ve accepted a path to God and you have invited the Holy Spirit into your life. Every one of us who is a student of A Course in Mira...

Last week I wrote an article ( Equal Access to God ) that resulted in intriguing feedback. By far most of it was positive and those responses concerned the overall message of the article – each individual awakening is essential to the Great Awakening so no one is special. Those few comments and emails from confused or offended readers that I received all concerned the initial paragraph where I wrote about book signing. Wasn’t I making a big deal about something insignificant and wasn’t I singling out book-signing to judge against when nothing in the world means anything? These reactions are a good lesson in how the ego always speaks first and how it emphasizes form over content. Of course the overall message of the article had nothing to do with book signing and wasn’t judging against it. The article simply used seeking signatures from teachers of A Course in Miracles as an example of a subtle form of idol-making. Those who were confused and offended by the ego’s interpretation of the...

The other day someone said something to me along the lines, “When the translation is published and you are signing books…” I told them that I will not be signing any books. The ideas in the translation do not come from me and it would be inappropriate for me to take credit for them. But even if I had written a book that was original to me I would not be signing copies of it. Who am I that my signature has some special value? What would my signature in a book give to another that they don’t have? This is not false modesty or even true modesty. I’m nothing special and I don’t say this out of low ego-self esteem but out of recognition of the Truth, Which is beyond estimation. Why would I want to teach myself anything else? God is everywhere and we all have equal access to God because we are all One with God. The ego likes to make some teachers in the world “special” and to exalt them as a way to put distance between you and the teacher. It will make you think that you are doing something ...

One of the things about A Course in Miracles that distinguishes it from other paths to God is that it does not require you to jump through any hoops to reach God. You can join with God in the Holy Instant anywhere at any time, no matter what seems to be occurring around you or within you. In this Holy Instant your sense of separation from God is over. You are Home. There is no place else to go; there is nothing else to do. Even other paths that teach you that God is within you often teach elaborate plans for you to reach God. They say that you must attain this or learn that. Often their hoops take the form of requiring you to have many lifetimes to evolve to God. But time is only the illusion that the ego uses to keep you apart from God. It’s a “buffer” that the ego develops to keep itself going in your mind because you won’t stop and just be with God now if you believe that it’s going to be many lifetimes before you can be with God. The Holy Instant is so simple! Just like ...

A Course in Miracles teaches you that to learn that you have God’s Love within you, you must extend it in your awareness. It also points out that you accept God’s Love through your willingness to extend It. But elsewhere it says that you are the center out from which God’s Love extends in your awareness. You must touch God’s Love within you to be able to extend It. So this question arises from students of the Course : “Which comes first – knowing God’s Love is within you and extending It or extending God’s Love to become aware of God’s Love within you?” Actually, it works both ways. Love extends naturally from you when you tap into It, no matter how slightly. It overflows from the center of your Being to color your perception without you even trying. From a small awareness of God’s Love comes your full awareness of God’s Love. And when you are not feeling God’s Love (peace, happiness) within you, you can do it quickly by making the choice to extend God’s Love. In place of the awaren...

Every now and then someone asks me if I am enlightened or if I have totally let go of ego. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha! To me it is funny that anyone could even think to ask this of me. I always point out that if I had completely let go of ego I’d have nothing left to learn so I wouldn’t need the world anymore. An enlightened person does not stay long. Sometimes students tell me of others they have heard of who are enlightened or who are called “master teachers” and are said to have no ego. I’m not sure if these enlightened and ego-less people say these things about themselves or if those around them are labeling them. A truly enlightened person would not feel a need to describe themselves that way and only ego is concerned with ego at all. Perhaps it all comes down to how “enlightened” and “ego” are defined. In A Course in Miracles “ego” refers to your individual personal identity but to many it just means “pride”. You will put pride aside long before you totally give up all atta...

As a student of A Course in Miracles you learn that there is only One Mind and that it always sees only Itself so ultimately all you have to forgive is yourself. Even in the world of separation this Law of Mind that mind always extends Itself cannot be undone. But instead of extending itself the ego projects itself away and blames others and the world for what it is experiencing. Projection is really the Mind’s Law of Extension plus denial. When you are first a student you begin by recognizing how your individual mind projects. For example, you are bothered by seeing someone behaving unfairly and when you look into your own mind you see how you are behaving unfairly in the same or another situation. But this recognizing how an individual ego projects is only the beginning of learning how the mind works. It is not forgiveness to say “my ego is just like yours”. Recognizing that all the forms that ego takes are the same is not what is meant by Oneness! Merely taking back your projection...

Students often express confusion when I tell them that the goal of a true spiritual path is not to improve the ego (become a better person) but to let it go. Likewise, they wonder why, since the world is in our mind, we shouldn’t try to fix it. If not in the traditional ways (charity, politics, etc.) they want to know why using our mind to try and change the world is “magical thinking” and an obstacle to Peace. If you have a splinter in your thumb do you want to heal the splinter or your thumb? What would you accomplish by fixing the splinter? You would not heal your thumb and your thumb would continue to feel worse and worse. From the perspective of your thumb you would not be accomplishing anything by working on fixing the splinter. The splinter is an alien thing in your thumb and its presence not only hurts your thumb but prevents it from healing. To heal your thumb you have to remove the splinter first. And so it is with the ego and its world, which are alien things in ...

Students are always interested in the processes I go through with the Holy Spirit so there have been some questions as to why I am not publishing my translation of the Text of A Course in Miracles in the traditional manner. So here I share the process through which I have been: First, I have to say that I have never really looked at the book as “mine”. It was inspired by the Holy Spirit and it was a collaborative experience for me with the Holy Spirit. So from the beginning I took a “hands off” approach to the translation’s ultimate destiny and left it all to the Holy Spirit. As I was writing it I had a traditional bound book in mind but I did think of selling the book online at my website in Word and PDF format. The latter did not feel right so I looked into publishers. My research showed that most publishers today will only accept manuscripts through agents but one writer of a Course -related book told me about her publisher, who I contacted when I was about halfway through with the...

The other day I was thinking about a friend’s troubles. I was analyzing her situation, in particular the motivations of a very dark, frightened person at the heart of the mess she is in. I realized that I was getting pleasure from this analysis and I recognized that what I was feeling was relief. I was relieved that I’m not living in such darkness anymore. This niggled at me in a way that tells me I am coming from ego. Upon examination I realized that it wasn’t that I think I am “better than” because I have let go of so many of the illusions of ego but that I was pretending that there are “degrees” of ego identification. My identification is really no different just because it’s not as deep and dark as it was. Letting go of ego is a process but as long as I identify with ego I identify with ego. It won’t be gone until it’s all gone. I keep finding these little traps of ego, these myriad forms of judgment that are the whole way ego thinks: evaluating, comparing, weighing, measuring, dis...

For a long time if I was cranky or uncomfortable or simply not at peace I thought I was “failing” on my path to reach God. This was of course a daily occurrence. I measured every tiny up or down as though my mood was the measure of my success on my path to God. And if I was depressed, conflicted, or unhappy – which was most of the time – I’d think that perhaps I was stalled, or worse, that I’d had a set-back. What I’ve learned along the way, though, is that what I am personally going through has nothing at all to do with the Holy Spirit in me. To think it does is the arrogance of the ego. The Holy Spirit works through me and in me regardless of all of the ego’s frantic distractions. I did my individual part years ago when I invited the Holy Spirit into my awareness so I’ve already “succeeded”, if you want to call it that. In time I learned that peace comes when I stop measuring and I trust. I trust that God is here despite what is appearing in front of the body’s eyes or the...

Acceptance has turned out to be the most surprisingly useful tool for me as I awaken to God. The first time I used it was when I felt lost and stuck and someone I turned to for advice and guidance told me I had a way to go before I would find relief from my conflict and pain. I had sensed that that was true, but I had been fighting it. To accept it I needed someone else to say what I knew. My conflict and pain did not vanish, but they were greatly mitigated by my accepting that I was where I was at the moment. It made me more determined than ever to continue to put one foot in front of the other to get Where I was going. I realized I wasn’t going to get to God by struggling, but by dealing right now with whatever obstacles I had to my awareness of God’s Presence. I’ve learned that acceptance is an aspect of forgiveness. When I accepted that ego (in me or others) cannot be fixed then I was able to let it go wherever and however it manifested. When I accepted that the world is inherently...