ACIM Mentor

            Last week’s article was about ego’s spiritual advancement. It says, “ If truth continues to grow in one’s conscious awareness, the effect can be mitigation of the worst of ego, self-centeredness, selfishness, pride, arrogance, guilt, and fear. This shows up as ego accepting it is part of something larger, considering others, compassion for others, ceasing taking itself so seriously, laughing at itself, taking responsibility for itself, admitting its faults, willingly making amends when possible, and forgiving”. These are things deemed in the world to be maturity and what many see as self-actualization or realization. The words to be emphasized here are “the effects can be”. Students often tell me about someone, perhaps a popular teacher of A Course in Miracles or another teaching, or a friend who is also on the path, or someone in a study group they attend, who they find to be a terrible person in many ways but who claims to be spiritually ...

            Invariably, after articles like the past two where the illusion of identity was discussed, a client or a reader will say something to me along the lines of, “I know there really is no identity but…” Or, “I know I’m not supposed to have an identity…” What is shared in articles like those are how things change, what is seen after nonduality experiences, not a judgment against or prescription for repressing your current experience. It seems many feel foolish for continuing to have an experience that they hear or read is no longer there for others and they opt to deny it or repress it in their experience. But keep in mind, only ego struggles against ego. Ego is not a wrong thing or a bad thing, nor is it foolish for it to be appearing in conscious awareness. That is just what is happening, a false idea running its course. To pure consciousness that is all it is, a mirage—nothing. Any meaning, purpose, or value, good or bad, seen in ego and/or its...

           When this mind was first a student of A Course in Miracles , ego was confused to find in the Clarification of Terms in the Manual for Teachers that ego was juxtaposed with the miracle (C-2). It had expected the opposite of ego to be an identity , which it would call the Holy Spirit or Christ, because it saw those as identities. It expected that something here would go from identifying as an ego to identifying as the Holy Spirit or Christ. So, it was baffled, in fact disconcerted, by the Course saying the opposite of ego was the miracle. Of course, yes, technically the Holy Spirit is a miracle, at least as the Course defines miracle, a shift in consciousness toward truth. But what this section of the Course makes clear is that the necessary shift comes not in identification but to perception , or really, which consciousness, ego or the Holy Spirit/Christ, occupies one’s conscious awareness (your immediate experience) and therefore how it se...

            As the shift in consciousness approached here, a thought that kept coming up was that the better question is not, “What am I?” but rather “What is real?” And since, what I’ve discovered is when we talk about the “I” or self what we mean is “what is experienced as real”. “I” is a designation that moves from identity to fact, depending on whether ego or truth (pure consciousness) occupies conscious awareness. I’m not talking about the “I” in our casual discourse—the “I” starting this sentence being an example of that. In English, anyway, it would be ridiculously awkward to have a conversation avoiding “I” and “me” and “my”. But when we express our spiritual or nonduality experiences, “I” becomes the designation of what is felt in conscious awareness to be real. For example, as the shift approached here, there were frequent experiences of “I am nonlocal.” This mind (conscious awareness) was everywhere rather than in a specific place. Clearly, the...

           In the past couple of years here in this conscious awareness spirituality has fallen away. It began with The Great Deflation when all spiritual symbols, ideas, and experiences went fooomp as all the bloated air went out of them. This includes ideas like God, Christ, Holy Spirit, divinity, holiness, etc. Mystical experiences, like oneness and episodes of spiritual light filling the mind, were recognized to have been puffed up by ego and granted inappropriate significance. The deflation brought relief that it wasn’t even known here was necessary or possible. What was left was simple, ordinary, lovely consciousness—truth—without puffery or bells or whistles. What this revealed was how ego takes information from truth, or the onlyness that is pure consciousness, coming to conscious awareness and turns it into something it can understand and that validates it. The experiences themselves signal the presence of truth, but the bloat is ego making more...

Recently, I watched a TV show in which a woman through some not-reincarnation-but-previous-life (it was not well done, still don’t quite know what occurred) came to be told by a shaman that she had suffered enough and now could be at peace. She found herself in what she called an “empty peace” that she did not value. She wanted to experience joy, so she knew she also had to accept despair, and she made that choice. Yes, these are the two experiences of existence available, peace and a gamut of feelings ranging from joy to despair. The peace available is not empty, however, except to ego, which values the gamut of feelings because that is its reality. There is one thing here, your conscious awareness (your immediate experience), that can hold these two experiences, but not in the same “place”. Peace is what consciousness, or truth, is, but this is blocked by ego, which sort of “carves out” conscious awareness from consciousness, seeming to individuate it. When ego is not in consciou...