ACIM Mentor

              As another year is about to start, I know many begin the Workbook of A Course in Miracles over again. But remember:   “The training period is one year.” (W-in.2)   While I suggest students read the Workbook if they are so moved, I remind them they do not have to do the lessons over again. Because as the Workbook says about the last five lessons (underline is mine):   “Let us turn to Him Who leads the way and makes our footsteps sure. To Him we leave these lessons, as to Him we give our lives henceforth .” (T-fl.in.1)   It can be uncomfortable to leave behind structure you can see in the form of words in a book and turn to an unstructured relationship with immaterial Spirit. But moving from identifying with the material world to immaterial Spirit is the very journey you are on! So, after a mind-training period of one year, in which you learn of Spirit from a book, you are asked to take a leap of faith. If you are concerned that it is you that you canno

  The sign of Christmas is a star, a light in darkness. See it not outside yourself, but shining in the Heaven within, and accept it as the sign the time of Christ has come.   A Course in Miracles (T-15.XI.2)

“If you haven't covered this subject already, could you please write about the difference between the practical holy relationship and the mystical holy relationship?”— MK   I have indeed written about the difference between the mystical and the practical holy relationship many times, pretty much any time I’ve discussed the holy relationship. (See 4 volumes of The ACIM Mentor Articles as well as any of these articles you may have missed at www.acimmentor.blogspot.com ). But I will clarify them again here. Before I do so, I want to make it clear that the term holy relationship is from A Course in Miracles and the designation of mystical and practical relating to the holy relationship is my own and is based on my own experience. A mystical holy relationship is the result of spiritual Vision , which comes spontaneously, or is what some might call a “gift of grace.” Vision cannot be made or conjured and it is of Christ . ( Christ is the label given to What of God one can be

          The expression of consciousness known as Liz shifted from ego to Spirit consciousness over four years ago. And one thing that has come along is a kind of “recovered memory” of a time as a child of around seven when she had some sort of Christ experience which was met by fierce ego resistance. The memory of this experience has spontaneously surfaced and unfolded over the past few years, revealing many unconscious responses and implications for Liz’s life. One aspect of the experience was Liz felt at the time that Light and dark were fighting over her. She felt this rather impersonally, as though she was not involved, but could only be the object of this battle, small as she was compared to these forces. Liz didn’t remember any of it, it was denied, repressed, she went on, and then at twenty A Course in Miracles came into her awareness, she had mystical experiences and hovered for a time on the edge of Spirit-consciousness, then this passed, and she went on in ego-consciousn

 (Th e “I” in this article is consciousness, not Christ).   As some of you know, I am in a mystical holy relationship with an Australian woman named Hannah. I am asked about this relationship now and then, so I thought I would give an update. But first, since many of you may not have read my memoir or may be new to this newsletter/blog, I want to explain a few things to catch you up. First, I have experienced the holy relationship in two ways, mystical and practical. These are my terms and not from A Course in Miracles . Most students of the Course eventually make it a practice to bring Spirit into their relationships, and this results in what I call the practical holy relationship. A mystical holy relationship, however, involves spiritual Vision , which is a perception (consciousness, awareness) of Christ beyond consciousness. This is not something you can choose or make happen. If it is to happen for you, it will. Of course, anyone in a mystical holy relationship will natu

            Recently, I went through an intense review of Liz’s former life. Over the course of a few weeks I visited, not events, but rather Liz’s experience of herself at certain times of her life. For example, I’d suddenly recall what Liz felt like sitting in her fourth-grade classroom. The memory would come up strong, I would sit with it, and it would sort of “burn off” and pass. If you read my memoir , then you may recall that toward the end of the book I mentioned being visited by strong memories of a time I called The Loop Time because of Liz’s involvement around the age of seven with a family that lived in a cul-de-sac, or loop, near her home. I became aware that she had an experience of Christ at that time. After this recent life review, I was again visited by even stronger memories of The Loop Time, with a further expansion of its unconscious effects on Liz. For example, she felt both singled out by God because she knew she was having an experience that was not common to ot

             It can be hard to describe the nuances of how one’s mind works, but I’m going to try here in case this can be of help to someone else. I’ve long been familiar with recognizing a triggered ego. This goes way back to when I was first a student of A Course in Miracles almost 40 years ago. I will describe something that will be familiar to many of you: I would be at peace at home while studying and meditating, but as soon as I walked out the door, I would lose my peace. I wanted to blame the world, but it was obvious something had triggered ego in me. Of course, over a long span of time, I learned, through various stages, to bring peace with me as I interacted with the world, and I was triggered less. But there was something else going on with ego that I only discovered recently. It began in my twenties, after I had become a student of A Course in Miracles , and after my first foray into Spirit-consciousness, the “honeymoon” of the Period of Undoing. After the peak of tha

            Consciousness is meant to be the “alternate reality” to Reality, or God. Ego is the belief in consciousness that consciousness and what happens in consciousness is reality. Ken Wapnick pointed out that measure of a student of A Course in Miracles’ advancement in their awareness of Truth is not that their minds are never in ego but in how quickly their minds recover from being in ego. How quickly does the realization “Oh, wait, this isn’t real” (or some similar idea) arise in your mind and concern with or a triggered response to something occurring in the person’s life, on the world stage, or in your mind dissolve? Can your mind simply be with a response, positive or negative, and allow it to fully and sometimes intensely manifest without judgment, and watch it pass as it returns to the Herenow, untouched by the experience? Some of you are with a more advanced consciousness than you know. You mistakenly measure its progress by ego’s presence rather than by its transcend

         “Can you tell me what your process is for joining and what your perception of joining is? I know that the false self cannot join so who is the one who joins and how can we do it? Also, you mention in your memoir about communing with God. How does that happen and what is the difference between that and joining?” —MK   Joining is not the most apt but rather the most convenient word, because you are correct that joining , which implies more than one, does not really occur when I “join in Christ” with others. They turn inward to Christ as I turn inward to Christ, both of us going to the same Place, as Christ is the same, and all that is real, in each mind. So, we acknowledge Unity rather than join as we each turn away from the fragmented illusion and consciously rest in the Onlyness of Christ. The idea is that as we do this together, we strengthen this awareness in each other. I offer this as a service alone ( www.acimmentor.com ) as well as at the end of or during mentorin

             The experience of ego comes with a strong sense of identity . “ This is me ,” it says of consciousness. Really, what it is saying of consciousness is, “ This is real .” As consciousness is an illusion, ego is a delusion, or the idea that the illusion is real. As the shift in consciousness approached this mind, it often came to it that rather than the question “What am I?” the better question is “What is real?” because the former question is answered in the latter question. Only what is real could be said to be an identity . The shift in consciousness was Christ, God’s Extension to consciousness, revealed as the only “I”. The dawning of Christ’s Reality in this mind’s conscious awareness pushed ego aside to become the sideshow it is. It winds down, perhaps to become dormant someday. When this mind began to have experiences that showed the “I” was not the experiencer (consciousness), it was confused to also see the “I” never actually identified with the experiencer. Ce

  “…why does Atonement, which occurred in an instant, have to (or appear to have to) play out over time?” –DM   God, being All, must contain the idea of Its Own opposite. But being All, God cannot have an opposite. So, as soon as the idea of not-God arises it is simultaneously undone by God’s All-encompassing nature. The idea of not-God is impossible. Its seeming occurrence (consciousness) is an illusion. As God is Timeless (Eternal), the idea of not-God contains time, so what was over in an instant seems in the illusion to take time to work out. This expression of an instant unfolding over time is the Atonement, or the correction of the perception (consciousness) of separation from God. The Atonement does not have to happen. It is an illusion; it only seems to happen.   Time is the illusion on which the rest of the illusion rests. This is why A Course in Miracles emphasizes the holy instant as an essential practice. In the holy instant you step out of the illusion of time

            Clients and readers will say, “So-and-so teacher says we are all here to play.” Or, “So-and-so teacher says we are all meant to be happy.” Or, “So-and-so teacher says we are all here to love one another.” What those teachers describe is true of the real world, but not of ego’s false world. I do not know if they are in the real world when they say this and are speaking for themselves or if they have glimpsed the real world and think it is what the false world is supposed to become. But you cannot apply what is true for the real world to ego’s false world. And you cannot make the false world into the real world. They are two completely different states of consciousness and experiences of existence. It is true that if you touch the real world, it will have an effect on you and your perception of the false world in a lovely way, what A Course in Miracles calls a miracle. But that is only a temporary effect in the false world. The world is the unfolding Atonement, or the c

  I very briefly considered becoming a contemplative when I was young and just starting out on my spiritual path. My path has been A Course in Miracles from the start, and as that is not the way of the Course , I was very shortly led away from it. But for a very long time I still felt drawn to a life of contemplation of God because I had experienced God directly and wanted to know God…more. But somewhere along the way this desire dissolved. And it did so because I discovered it was not necessary to spend my life sinking deeply into my mind to find God. I now know what I would have discovered was my mind (consciousness) but that did not mean I would have found God. In fact, it could have been a way to avoid God as God is right here, right now. I never had to reach for God. Reaching for God can sometimes mean reaching past God, like when reaching for the mayo in the refrigerator and missing it because it’s right up front and you are looking for it beyond it. Some clients and reader

             The title of this article is from the section “I Need Do Nothing” in A Course in Miracles (T-18.VII.1) That title is itself often misused in a classic ego pout, “Well, if ‘I need do nothing’, why am I doing anything at all!” In fact, that section is about the realization you have in a holy instant: You are whole and complete in God now. You do not have to do anything to make yourself so. You do not need time to realize this. As that section points out (I suggest reading it again if you have not in a while), you do not have to spend years fighting against your experience of the body or in meditation. Those means work because of their goal. (It’s all an expression, after all.) But the Holy Spirit, the holy instant, and its expression, the holy relationship, are the Course’s means to inner peace. And they save time. The Course is not for contemplatives who go off to live apart from the world and spend their days in meditation. It is meant to be used right where you are

             Last week I had what felt like a breakthrough. It had to do with the fear of God arising from an incident in this person’s childhood. Following this, I saw many representations of the fear of God throughout Liz’s former life. That occurred one evening. The following morning, it all collapsed and disintegrated. It made no sense. How could an effect be a cause? What happened when Liz was a child was an expression of the fear of God. The cause could not be in the expression but had to be there before the expression. Liz’s former life depicted the idea of opposition to God, nothing in it caused that opposition. But that was not the end of the undoing. Because then I saw that none of that happened. They are only ideas in my mind now . There is no past; there is no time. So, I saw, not in theory, but practically, that the story of time is that single instant of the idea of not-God arising and simultaneously being undone. And that instant is now. The feeling of breakthroug

           “…I have read your comments on ACIM as compared to other teachers or students of other nondual teachings and I… feel that there is a difference and wonder if the ‘result’ is different? As in, real world and/or a total enlightenment versus maybe partial? I know a lot of ACIM students are moving towards other paths.           I think you have said that ACIM points to an awakening to spirit and others something different. If you could say more to your understanding of comparisons between ACIM and other nondual focus I would greatly appreciate it. As I see differences and similarities and frankly it confuses me though I do know that only ego could possibly be confused and ask these questions...” – KL     Actually, listening to ego may be the cause of your confusion, but it is only a thought system you may or may not use, it does not think for itself. You (a mind) however, may be confused because you listen to it and it obscures Truth. So, it makes sense that you would ha

  The idea that you can merely observe your mind and experiences was first suggested in the A Course in Miracles community by Ken Wapnick and has become popular as students branch out and study other nondual teachings. So, let me address some confusion about these ideas. This suggestion is often put forth as observing , watching , or witnessing your thoughts and feelings to get some distance from them. But I hear things from students like, “I don’t want to watch these thoughts. They’re terrible!” Or, “What am I watching for? What’s supposed to happen?” The word witnessing especially has connotations of watching for a purpose. But what these words mean is that you can learn to let your thoughts and feelings be, without engaging with them, resisting them, or judging them. You are not asked to watch them for any reason, but when you let something be, all you end up doing is watching it. In other words, watching is an effect of not engaging with, judging, or resisting thoughts and

           I cannot give the real world to you. I cannot help you attain it because it is not attained. But I will tell you this: Nothing you are concerned about in the false world, even in your spiritual life, is in the real world. There is no need to find the correct spiritual approach or for getting concepts right. In fact, there is no parsing the experience into concepts. There is no concern with care of the body or how the body is used or ideas like idols or special relationships. There is no guilt here. There is no dividing things into Truth and illusion because those are understood, manifestly apparent. Everything is accepted as it is. Sometimes I am in the real world and negative, judgmental thoughts go through my mind and they are dissolved. So, there is no need to purify to prepare yourself for the real world. It does the purifying. Therefore, there is no reason to aim for purity in the false world. It will not bring you the real world and the real world does not require it

  (In the article sent yesterday I mistakenly attributed to the experiencer what is correctly attributable to this mind, which is Spirit. This attests to the confusion that ensues after a shift, anyway! I regret any confusion this may have caused you . I made the same mistake in other recent articles, too, but more so here, so I send it revised…)   Where have I been? My recent discovery that I am not only not experiences but not the experiencer either is not new. As Spirit was emerging in the illusion but before I shifted to It, I practiced and taught, “Don’t squash the human! Let her thoughts and feelings be, without judging them.” This “I” had already shifted from the experiencer to Spirit. I knew the experiencer (person, human) was in my awareness but was not me. So, where did I go? Before the shift, I was 85% with Spirit but aware of a “black box” in the corner of this mind yet to be undone. I understood this to be what stood in the way of the realization of Spirit (me) in t