ACIM Mentor

             This is how I thought it was: There is an “I” here that has two thought systems it can choose between, ego and Spirit. It vacillates between these two thought systems. This is what I have discovered is how it is: Consciousness here is like a neutral space that holds two “I”s, ego and Spirit. Consciousness does not have an “I” of its own. It does not have agency; it cannot make choices. It registers either ego experiencing ego or Spirit experiencing Spirit. In words, this may sound like a nuanced difference. After all, there is one thing here registering two different experiences. But experientially, it is a huge difference.   Relative to how they feel now, ego and Spirit felt muted before. Now, it is as though two entities or beings—I can’t think of better words to express the presence of these ideas that have taken form—occupy the space here called consciousness. And as each experiences only itself, it is as though there are two ...

             Since I’ve come to see that what unfolds in consciousness is an expression rather than for an outcome, I see everyone’s story as though it is a bloom in the garden of the Atonement. Whatever it is, is what it is supposed to be. There are no shoulds or shouldn’ts . Sometimes, clients will tell me what they really value over what they think they should value. What they value are “worldly” things like career, relationships, sex, family, money, and various experiential experiences. What they feel they should value is God above these. But the Atonement (consciousness) has two parts, the expression of the idea of not-God (ego) and the expression of the idea of God (Spirit). Ego is not wrong or bad, it is a false experience. Ultimately, so is Spirit because everything in consciousness is not real. Spirit is different from ego in that it reflects Truth, but it is no more real than ego. What is appearing in consciousness is not supposed to b...

             God, being All, must contain the idea of Its Own opposite. But being All, God cannot have an opposite. So, the idea of not-God is undone even as it arises. But within the idea of not-God is time, the opposite of Timelessness. And in time, it seems that the idea of not-God arose long ago and will be undone in some indefinite future. Consciousness is the space in God’s Mind where these ideas take form and are depicted. As it depicts an idea simultaneously undone, what unfolds in time/consciousness is predetermined. The story of your person expresses the Atonement, or the undoing of the idea of not-God. It is part of the whole of the Atonement and cannot be separated out. There is no individual soul or spirit on a journey, just one consciousness depicting the Atonement through various ideas that take form, nonmaterial and material. So, your person is a singular expression of consciousness, part of the whole of consciousness, and is not ...

          The first time I had an inkling that everything that happens in consciousness (the experience of being a person in a world) was predetermined was over twenty years ago, after a study group I led. The Secret was big then and there was a lot of talk about how one could manifest what they wanted simply by wanting it enough. I had feelings of incongruity about this idea, but I had not yet sorted it out for myself. An attendee came up to me and said that anything she wanted manifested within a few days. As I walked away from this conversation, I had the thought, “What if she wasn’t manifesting but her desire for something indicated it was about to show up?” In other words, her wanting wasn’t making something happen, she was simply in tune with what was to happen. I noted two things in my life when it came to desire and something showing up. One was that if it was not going to show up, trying to make it do so was a struggle. It felt like swimming upstream...

              A Course in Miracles teaches that consciousness—this experience of being a person in a world—is the Atonement , or the depiction of the correction of the idea of separation from God. This means that there are two parts to consciousness/the Atonement—the false idea, represented by ego, and its correction, represented by Spirit. Therefore, everything that unfolds in consciousness is the Atonement, whether ego or Spirit. But this does not mean that everything that unfolds in consciousness is Spirit . As consciousness depicts a moment that has already occurred—the idea of not-God arising and simultaneously being undone by God’s All-encompassing nature—how it unfolds is already predetermined, or, as the Course puts it, “the script is written.” In that sense, whatever occurs, even ego, is a perfect movement of the Atonement . But only the movement of Spirit is the movement of Spirit . As one develops their awareness of Spirit and advance...

            When I was a new student of A Course in Miracles in 1984, I soon had my first direct revelation of God (Reality). I cannot describe what this was like because It was not in consciousness (this experience as people in a world), and It was wholly unlike consciousness, not just quantitatively, but qualitatively. Nothing in consciousness is anything like God at all. I can share that God is a Wholeness so complete, even the idea of lack is not There. The idea of a world is not There. God’s Glory is indescribable—again, not just in magnitude, but in Its characteristics. It is laughable to think that anything in consciousness, with its characteristic forms of perceptions and ideas and experiences and a material universe, could have anything to do with God or have any effect on God. So, I saw the forgiveness the Course offers, the awareness that nothing in consciousness is real, nothing in consciousness has any effect on God at all. As consciousne...

         All meaning and significance granted to the person’s life, even spiritual meaning and significance, is ego, period. Spirit merely coexists with a person acting in a world and makes no judgment on this, nor does it grant it meaning and significance because It knows this is not real. It is totally possible for the person to operate in the world without ego because ego is not the source of the person and does not live the person. The person is a neutral expression of consciousness. What ego does is tell a story about the person and their actions, and that story is to validate itself, to make ego seem to be an alternate reality to Reality (God). It doesn’t seem like the story is about ego, but rather about what is appearing, because ego projects the story to hide itself behind what is appearing. An analogy: You are sitting in a garden and there are birds and insects flying and buzzing around and the wind is blowing about the trees and bushes. You are simp...

             God is within you. And this is where you look to find God’s Love. If you look to the world for proof of God’s Love, God will seem to be inconsistent at best and absent at worst. God is within you. And this is where you look to find God’s Love. You will not find God when things go your way, because otherwise where is God when inevitably things do not go your way? Has God abandoned you? Is God punishing you? Is God testing you? Or are you missing how this bad fortune is good for you? You will twist your mind into a pretzel trying to prove to yourself how things going wrong for you is somehow God’s Love. God is within you. And this is where you look to find God’s Love. God is not in synchronicity (coincidences). Because when you don’t see synchronicity, has God abandoned you? Or are you somehow failing to see the synchronicity? You will find yourself falling short more often than not. God is within you. And this is where you look to fi...

  “Our Course group…(is) stumped as to what it says in Chapter 12-3:4…We understand, as Ken says, if someone asks you to jump off the Brooklyn bridge you don’t do that. What if someone is obviously taking advantage of you? Allowing them to is not helpful to them or to you. Examples would be most helpful!” – SB   You refer to T-12.III.4:   “Recognize what does not matter , and if your brothers ask you for something ‘outrageous,’ do it because it does not matter. Refuse, and your opposition establishes that it does matter to you. It is only you, therefore, who have made the request outrageous, and every request of a brother is for you. Why would you insist in denying him? For to do so is to deny yourself and impoverish both. He is asking for salvation, as you are. Poverty is of the ego, and never of God. No ‘outrageous’ requests can be made of one who recognizes what is valuable and wants to accept nothing else.”   A Course in Miracles was first for Helen Sch...

  “…Was hoping you will consider sharing in the blog your mind’s experiences when right minded and extending love with particular emphasis on how the world of form can seem ‘quite lovely’ since it’s seen with holy vision (cleansed perception).” - RW   The real world , as A Course in Miracles uses the term, is not the material world, but a formless world of perception that extends in consciousness. As such, it is not possible to describe what is “seen” as a perceptual experience rather than a material form. It is an experience of wholeness and love and lighthearted joy. It reveals the material world, and ego’s projections of meaning onto it, to be false. But as the material world is a neutral appearance in consciousness, the perception of the real world extends to it as well, blanketing it with loveliness, much as when you fall in love or have happy news everything in the world suddenly seems lovely. Only, this is a much more intense experience. It is understood in the expe...

            I am often asked if it is possible to be in the world (in consciousness) without ego. It’s a trick question from ego, which can only conceive of its own world (or consciousness). You cannot be in ego’s world without ego, of course. But there is no ego in Spirit’s world (or consciousness), what is called in A Course in Miracles the real world or true perception . But I think what is often truly being asked is if consciousness, expressed as the appearance of a person, goes on without ego. And as you can see from the above paragraph, the answer is yes. However, the answer may come down to how ego is defined. For some, ego and the person mean the same thing. But my experience has shown me to apply these labels to different things. For me, the term person refers to a body and personality, a neutral expression of consciousness. And ego is the asserted experience that ego and consciousness, represented by the person, are the same and are real...

            “…I've read about painters, dancers, actors, etc., using their talents to discover something higher.  Is any activity, especially art, simply a way to experience Our Source and advance our spiritual progress?  I suspect many of us who read your blog enjoy and/or practice an art form…I know you have also published fiction.” – RL   Nothing in consciousness causes an experience of God. But any activity, including art, can be shared with God’s Spirit (the Holy Spirit) in consciousness and can therefore be used as a means to grow your awareness of Spirit. And an experience of God’s Spirit may inspire creativity. For example, the two works of fiction ( find here ) I published came through in the months preceding the shift in consciousness here from ego- to Spirit-consciousness. It was a time I call The Golden because the golden Light of Christ had come into my mind. This led to a burst of creativity, and although the experience wa...

            What I see now I cannot adequately express. When I tell others that consciousness (the world) is wholly unlike God (Truth), they often point to wars and lack and personal conflicts. But it’s much more than that. The whole experience of consciousness is completely unlike God. All forms, all thoughts, all feelings…well, everything . Even Spirit is only the Idea of God in consciousness. Although It comes from beyond consciousness, It is shaped to consciousness to function in it. The contrast between consciousness and God is so stark that it’s easy to see how someone who already believed sin and guilt were real would come away from a mystical experience of God feeling those beliefs reinforced. Not because sin and guilt are real, but because the contrast between God and what they are used to is startling that when ego says, “This is so unlike God what could it be but sin?” it seems reasonable. The only way out of the interpretation of consciousn...

           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...

            One of the first things consciousness here noticed when the center shifted from ego to Spirit was the sense of personal learning and the growth that comes from that were gone. In what were once learning situations, it felt it was merely discovering information. Consciousness does not have an “I” of its own. And Spirit does not learn. So, as ego withdrew from the center of consciousness, information was revealed (like the correct orientation of ego, consciousness, and Spirit to each other), but there was no longer a false “I” to feel it was “learning something” that led to personal, growth, development, or evolution. However, consciousness here defaults to framing experiences in personal terms. It was distorted by ego to think this way. And in fact, its language, which reveals how it thought, was constructed by and for ego, making it awkward to communicate without the personal perspective. In writing, this is not too difficult. Consciousness he...

              Last week, I wrote again about two approaches to nonduality . One is that consciousness is God. And the other is God is beyond consciousness. I pointed out it can be difficult to discern which approach a certain teacher takes because sometimes they have not sorted it out for themselves. They may confuse consciousness with the Presence of Spirit in consciousness. I will explain why here. Consciousness represents duality in two ways. It seems to be a part of God sort of “carved out” for the idea of not-God to play out. So, it seems there are two realities, God and consciousness. And within itself, consciousness is split between the idea of not-God (ego) and the idea of God (Spirit), because God is All and cannot be wholly absent anywhere, not even in a false construction of reality. Ego is an idea in consciousness that denies the Onlyness of God through the assertion that consciousness is reality, either the only reality or a reality be...

            There is confusion out there in nonduality communities about consciousness (also called awareness or perception ) as there are conflicting teachings about whether consciousness is God or if God is beyond consciousness. I’ve written about this often, but as I keep running into this confusion, I revisit it here. First, I will define consciousness experientially rather than theoretically. Thoughts, ideas, feelings (both emotional and physical), energies, and the entire material universe are appearances and experiences that express consciousness. To some degree, everyone is aware of an individuated consciousness, or mind . For some more focused on experiences, the mind may seem incidental. But for others, the mind is more important. They may grow their awareness of mind more and more, through study,   meditation, and contemplation. Eventually, they may even become aware that their seemingly individual mind is not in a body (an appearance)...