ACIM Mentor

           " …Perhaps you could share some bright sides of being spirit…I am acim student and looking forward for ‘joy and peace’ that abide in me. Reading some of your texts I hear a lot of struggling happening. I understand this is your true experience. Are you joy, love, peace?” – MS   Yes, now I do experience a happy lightheartedness after a long dark period where no Light was to be found, only sensed as a Context around me that I could not access. If you read my memoir ( A Memoir of Christ: A Student of A Course in Miracles Awakens , here.), the most important part to me was the very last entry in the Afterword, where I described an experience that I have come to call the Cosmic Chuckle . This was a crack of Light in the darkness. I had never experienced anything like it before. It came from a depth I had never accessed. I was thinking about the darkness I’d come through and the thought and feeling that came to me, with a deep chuckle and lifting of weight and darknes

            It is not a contradiction to say that what arises in consciousness is a meaningless appearance and to call it the Atonement, or correction of the perception of separation from God. Recognizing appearances as the Atonement simply acknowledges they are not random. They have a shape. What appears in consciousness expresses an idea. But that idea is meaningless because separation from God is not possible, so its correction is not necessary. The final expression of a plant is its flowering. The blooms arrive and fall away. And so it is in consciousness with thoughts, feelings, and actions rising to conscious awareness only to fall away. And just as a plant has a shape, so does consciousness. That is the Atonement. The idea of not-God blooms and is corrected by the Idea of God (Spirit) and falls away again and again. Nothing in a garden blooms in isolation. Each blossom that arises is the result of genetics and environment. Water, nutrients, wind, rain, sun, shade, the genera

            I wrote last week about the real world arriving in my conscious awareness as the realization of the Atonement, or correction of the perception of separation from God. Readers and clients ask if I am in the real world all the time. No, but if not every day, most days I experience it at some point. It is never far away. It was not like this from the beginning of the shift in consciousness from ego-consciousness to Spirit-consciousness. (See A Memoir of Christ: A Student of A Course in Miracles Awakens here. ) Almost eight years ago, I began to feel I was in a different dimension, or different experience of existence. I described it at the time as feeling like a “ghost in the world.” I was Elsewhere while still perceiving the world. The world was not my home anymore. Then, almost four years ago, I experienced what I call The Break , which was when my identification with the person (ego) fell away. From then on, I felt in a new Context even though I could not fully see it

“The full awareness of the Atonement, then, is the recognition that the separation never occurred .” (T-6.II.10)   The real world pictures Heaven's innocence. (W-159.3)   Everything in consciousness expresses the Atonement, or correction of the perception of separation from God. Ego is the false idea corrected. Spirit is the Correction. Where the awareness of Spirit is the correction that manifests the Atonement in ego-consciousness, Spirit-consciousness is the realization of the Atonement in consciousness. Spirit sees nothing to correct as It sees the real world, or the reflection of God’s Reality in consciousness. The shift in consciousness from ego to Spirit brings about a reorientation in one’s relationship to the personal experience. The Two Pictures (T-17.IV) in A Course in Miracles illustrates this beautifully.  The specific context of this section is relationships, but it can be generalized to all of one’s experience of consciousness. Where in ego-consciousnes