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ACIM, Spirituality, and Nonduality

            Nonduality is not a spiritual path. It is an awareness and experience of one truth. This rises to conscious awareness of itself, so it cannot be attained. The insights garnered from the experience can be shared, but the experience cannot be taught. However, the awareness of one truth may result in ego going on a spiritual journey. Spirituality is what ego does with a dim awareness of truth. It takes the information that truth is beyond it and shapes it to its reality, resulting in duality: Ego and truth are true. This results in other perceived dualities, like good and bad and right and wrong. The end of its spiritual journey is not ego transforming but falling away. There has been among A Course in Miracles students from the start a debate about whether the Course is a nonduality teaching or not. The Course does point to nonduality. It states outright that there is only one truth and ego and its world are not real but are mirages. But most...
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Truth Reclaiming

            Imagine a significant plot of land. It has grass and trees and shrubs. There are animals and insects, bacteria and fungi living there. The wind blows, rain and snow falls, the sun beats down. Life thrives. And then, one day, someone comes and builds a house on the land. It’s really no big deal because nature, life, continues around it and it will, left to its own devices, take it over. But the builder comes to live in the house. They build a fence to keep animals out, they spray pesticides regularly to hold the insects at bay, they landscape the property inside the fence to keep nature away from taking over the house, and they maintain the building to withstand the wind, rain, snow, and sun. Still, sometimes animals and insects, rain and snow make their way into the house, the sun eats away at the fence and roof and siding of the house, and the grass and plants require persistent tending to hold them off. It is hard work to deny nature. Then...
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Ego and Oneness

             A Course in Miracles tells us that ego fears oneness. But ego is simply the experience of fear. The stories it has as to “why” it is afraid are, first, to project the source of fear away so that ego can deny it is fear, and second, to seem to be real. Elaborate stories make up ego’s world, filling what it feels is the “void” of consciousness. Ego is the idea in consciousness that is opposed to truth, or pure consciousness. Its denial of truth results in it denying what it is, too. But as truth rises toward conscious awareness, the contrast with ego illuminates all that ego is. Ego’s fear seems to increase but it is really just being exposed. So, it can seem that ego is “afraid of” truth (or anything else it points to), but that’s just a way for ego to project and explain away the exposed fear to itself. Last week’s articl e was about the various ways that oneness can show up in one’s perception, and it mentioned how ego cannot know tr...
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Various Ways Oneness is Perceived

              It turns out, the perception of oneness shows up in many ways. As truth rises to conscious awareness (your immediate awareness, your living experience), ego takes the information that comes with this and turns it into what it can understand. This is how we get our spiritualities and religions. Truth rising to conscious awareness is not happening for the world, it is not happening for ego, but ego tries to make it so and pieces the information it has into a narrative that makes sense for it. There is no doubt that the rising of truth affects the mind’s perceptions, no matter what ego does with it. Sometimes the veil of ego slips entirely and the purest oneness, the onlyness of truth , or pure consciousness, the space in which ego and its world appear, is seen in conscious awareness. This is considered a mystical experience because it is out of the norm. When this occurs, it is clear that conscious awareness is part of the onlyness o...
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Present to the Past and Future

             In keeping with recent articles on how A Course in Miracles students torture themselves, here’s another common mistake I encounter: “I know I’m not supposed to think about the past, but the other day I remembered this funny thing that happened…” or “I know I’m not supposed to think about the future, but I’m concerned I won’t have enough money to put my son through college…” The Course does not say you should never think about the past or future, but rather living there is not helpful. It asks you to see that the past and future are only ideas in your mind now . And it points out one of ego’s chief illusions that causes you so much pain is seeing the past in the present. For example, you have a strong response, positive or negative, to someone you just met, and this likely indicates they remind you of someone from the past. You are not seeing them, but your own projection from your own past. You feel you know something about them, but...
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ACIM Puritanism

              After last week’s article about A Course in Miracles and fundamentalism , I heard from some readers and clients about teachers who assert that you should not enjoy anything in the world, that you must give up all attachments, that all personal relationships, especially romantic ones, are special and should be avoided, you shouldn’t take medicine or supplements or treatments for the body, etc. Like fundamentalism, this kind of puritanism is also inevitable when a spiritual text is in the hands of ego. Did the first people to handle A Course in Miracles , Helen Shucman, Bill Theford, or Ken Wapnick, stop enjoying life, give up their relationships and all attachments, and stop using helpful treatments when they were ill or hurt? I mean, if anyone would, you’d think it would have been them because the Course came through Helen, it was for Bill, and Ken was right there as the second student and closely handled the material with Helen. But ...
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ACIM Fundamentalism

             Sometimes clients are surprised when I warn them against “ A Course in Miracles fundamentalism”. They say they never thought they would hear that word associated with the Course . But fundamentalism refers to an approach, not a specific religion or spirituality. We are used to the term being applied to the distorters of Islam that have taken over whole swathes of the world or to Christians who took over one of the major political parties in the US in the 1980s and are at this time trying to force their   distorted view of Christianity on the whole country. Anyone paying attention sees little daylight between Islamic and Christian fundamentalism not because they use the same symbols but because they use the same approach to same effect. Google defines fundamentalism as “a strict, literal adherence to sacred texts or traditional ideologies and a rejection of modern secular interpretations”. Fundamentalists interpret their sacred tex...
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