ACIM Mentor

            My first experience with grief over a life shift was when I graduated high school. I wasn’t a kid anymore. I wasn’t a student anymore. My whole community had been in school and it would be gone overnight. That was all I had known so far in my life! There was no going back. I would never be a kid again; I would never recreate a community like that again. If I was a student again it would be in a very different context. I didn’t feel the grief until graduation drew near. I didn’t know to expect it. No one talked to me about it, so I did not speak of it. I was embarrassed by emotions at that age anyway and I sensed it was a sign of weakness. (Poor kid!)             None of this meant I found adulthood undesirable. But I knew it would be very different and so I felt a loss. Following closely on this I came out to myself and entered into an even longer and darker grieving period. Again, it was not that I wanted to stay in the closet, but I was also not going to have the lif

“Please clarify what you said at the end of your (November 8) newsletter. I think I understand ‘Higher consciousness occurs as an effect of the awareness of Truth on the mind.’ But I don't understand ‘...it is no more significant to be aware of Truth than to not be aware of Truth.’ I thought being vigilant only for God and His Kingdom meant being aware of Truth.” – BT “Be vigilant only for God and His Kingdom” (T-6.V-C) is a lesson of the Holy Spirit in A Course in Miracles meant to teach you that you have a choice of thought system in your mind. In the mind training ACIM provides this would be a first step toward growing your awareness of Truth. But that is quite apart from the context of that article, Consiousness, Truth, and Forgiveness . In that article I discussed how Truth (God) is beyond all consciousness (awareness), even the highest consciousness of Truth. So while consciousness can be affected by Truth, consciousness never affects Truth. Truth is wholly unaffec

I realize some of my recent articles (like last week’s Consciousness, Truth, and Forgiveness ) are above a lot of readers’ heads and seem like a lot of theoretical hoo-haw, but please bear with me. These come out of my new experiences and insights so they lay the groundwork for what will come up ahead.             I want to explain more clearly what I wrote last week and discuss its significance.             One thing that was a source of confusion for me on this path was the two ways oneness can be experienced. One is something falling away where there are two or more leaving one. This, in fact, is how I’ve understood non-duality: An illusion of reality falls away and the only Reality (Truth) is left. The other way I’ve experienced oneness is where there seems to be two or more and I find they are one. This can come as a vision and experience where I see the unity of all things or where I feel one with one or more seeming “other”—person or thing.             The latter is my c

            What for me sets A Course in Miracles apart from other teachings is that it conveys that the Truth (God) is beyond our experiences of Truth. Our perception, awareness, consciousness—whatever you want to call our experience—of Truth is not Truth. It is only perception, awareness, consciousness, or an experience of Truth. The Holy Spirit, or Christ Consciousness, or what I call the Awareness of Truth, is as far as consciousness can rise, but It is never Truth.               I discovered this for myself through direct Revelation of Truth. Truth is beyond all experience (perceptions, awareness, consciousness) of Truth because It is beyond all experience. It is indescribable (and shattering) because nothing on “this side” of Truth resembles Truth, not even the Awareness of Truth (Spirit). The Awareness of Truth is only an effect of Truth on consciousness.             As a contemplative, Bernadette Roberts ( The Path to No-Self ) had no idea of this and discovered it f