ACIM Mentor

            When I write articles like the past two where I emphasize the centrality of your awareness of your inner teacher (Holy Spirit) to your sense of inner peace, I hear from those who say they are not aware of their inner teacher. Everyone experiences their inner teacher at some point, but they may not identify it as such. So, let’s look at some obstacles to identifying your inner teacher.   The expectation that your inner teacher will stand out , be something dramatic, lofty, or special in some way. Your inner teacher is always in your mind, and its ordinariness may make it hard for you to pick it out from ego’s many, also familiar experiences. So, it sounds and feels like you, but a quiet, rational, detached you.   Your inner teacher is quiet , so easily lost in ego’s cacophony. However, this quiet can be how you distinguish it from ego—in time. Ego will try to be quiet to mimic it, but you will sort that out in time through othe...

           Years ago, I had a client who had been attending a weekly A Course in Miracles study group for years. In our first session I asked, as I do if it has not already come up, about his relationship with his inner teacher (Holy Spirit). He was surprised. He told me that many of the participants in his study group could quote the Course chapter and verse, but no one discussed their inner teacher. Whatever topic someone brought up, someone else would merely quote what the Course teaches on the topic. Now he understood why he felt stuck. Once I received an email from someone who described herself and her friends as highly educated, but they were struggling to understand certain aspects of the Course . Those were aspects that would only be understood through experience. So, I asked her about her spiritual experiences. “Oh,” she wrote back. “There’s supposed to be an experience ?” Indeed, there is.   “A universal theology is impossible, but a...

            A Course in Miracles is not dogmatic. It is not a doctrine to live by. It is not a prescription , but a suggestion , as it was for, and was written in in the context of, Helen Schucman and Bill Thetford’s relationship. No one must “get it right” or be a “good Course student”. In fact, there are times when it is most loving to yourself to put it aside. The real, lasting value of A Course in Miracles is it leads you to an awareness of, or validates an awareness you already have of, the teacher of truth (Holy Spirit) in your mind. If you get only this from it, it will have done its job in your life. If you do not have this, then the Course’s value will be limited and may not even be there for you. In fact, it might be harmful. Like anything else, the Course is a weapon in ego’s hands. The awareness of ego and how it works, the practices suggested in the Course , and the ontology and theology of the Course are not for everyone, and you do ...

            “Blissninny” was a term coined by Ken Wapnick to describe students of A Course in Miracles who claim everything is lovely, all is love, they see Christ in everyone, etc. without ever having gone through anything difficult to get there. He pointed out that if you are really working the Course as it is intended, it will be difficult. Ego facing itself is not a pleasant stroll in the park. If it seems to be, you are in denial; you are repressing. The way to avoid being a blissninny can be summed up in one phrase: Radical self-honesty . There is no value in denying what you really experience, unless your goal is to deceive yourself. And many do go through life like that, wearing a mask even with themselves. But that is exactly what the Course means to strip away, so why pick it up and pretend to practice it if you are not going to, well, practice it? Of course, appearing to practice it when you really don’t is a mask. Don’t confuse struggling...

          There is a great deal on social media in the A Course in Miracles community about this time of world turmoil, so let me make this clear: The “world” that you live in reflects your mind, yes. This “world”, however, is not the material world, but what your mind chooses to focus on in the material world and the meaning it projects onto what it chooses to focus on. Last week I wrote about selective seeing . Specifically, I wrote about ego selecting what to focus on to justify the fear it induces in you. But the mind, whether ego, neutral consciousness, or perceptions through the lens of truth, is always looking for itself and always finds itself. Ego always finds justifications for fear in the material world. Neutral consciousness merely observes what appears and sees no meaning in it. And truth, in its teaching capacity in ego-consciousness, will lead you to focus on love and unity in the material world, or if you’re more advanced, to   look past ...

            There is a lot going on in the US that has many afraid in this country as well as around the world, as it is affecting, or has the potential to affect, the rest of the world. If you have an advanced awareness of truth, then you can turn to it and know that, in truth, nothing real is occurring and all is eternally okay. You feel this. But most reading this are either almost wholly in ego or have a split mind and must still deal with ego, and fear is a real experience for you. Understand that ego is fear. It, not what is appearing in the world, is the source of fear. Ego projects fear away onto what is appearing in the world to hide that it is the source of fear. This is the meaning of “you are never afraid for the reason you think”. You are afraid because ego is in your mind, period, full stop. There is no other reason . It is not helpful to repress or deny fear (ego). If you do, it will erupt in inappropriate, unhealthy, and sometimes destr...

         “I am understanding that when ego falls away the self-concept or ‘host’ no longer values or feels connection to what seemingly gave it joy before. (?) For those of us not yet at that phase of the journey, could you give us a glimpse of what you do feel? Do you feel the Joy of the Divine? Simple inner peace? As hard as it is to be here in this transitory space at least there are the things (quite a lot of them) that I love. The sense I get from your newsletter is that those dissolve . But what are they replaced with? Some hope, please?” – BB   Wholeness is here instead. I do not know if that gives you hope or not, because it is ego that hopes, and enlightenment does not come to ego. What we call enlightenment occurs because ego is no longer here. So, for ego, enlightenment is a terrible occurrence.   “Enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or being happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away o...

           In the past few months, I’ve written about how ego felt like an entity or being that was here. I’ve shared how I’ve discovered that ego and Liz were not the same thing. I wrote a few weeks ago about ego as like something that was “inserted” here, something that was foreign and not a part of the fabric of what is. Here is an example that maybe conveys these experiences. Liz loves dogs. This has not changed. Sometimes it comes up when she sees dogs or hears about them, but that is all now. She has no desire to have a dog again, and she no longer has the mechanism—what I call ego —for attachment to a dog or attachment to loving dogs. In fact, without ego, there is no attachment to anything or anyone. Without ego, there is nothing to regret the absence of attachment. When ego was here, Liz’s love of dogs was a key feature of a sense of identity here, but without ego, Liz’s love of dogs is merely a neutral trait of Liz. Without ego, there is no lo...

          In my last few articles, I’ve tried to convey how close truth (love, liberation, wholeness) is, and how, without ego to bloat it into something special, it is wonderfully ordinary. I often tell my clients and readers not to look for a “burning bush” moment, that when you experience truth, it is often subtle and unrecognized. They have often experienced truth but not given it the correct label. These experiences aren’t dramatic but slip in among the myriad experiences of ego and are lost in that cacophony. Truth shows up as the “still, quiet voice”—not necessarily an actual voice , of course, but an inobtrusive experience that stands out in contrast with the rest. It is the quiet child on the playground, the one who doesn’t demand your attention, but who gets it for that reason. But then it is lost again in all the noise, often forgotten. Another way to put this is that truth is different from the usual ongoing experience of ego, but it is also famil...

            Six years ago, as I was getting into bed one night, I became aware that I was going to “receive a download”. I had not had an experience like that before. I didn’t know what it meant, I thought perhaps a new book would come to me. The next day, as I was out walking, suddenly only pure consciousness was here. Jesus was present as well, which I understood to be symbolic, a verification that what I was experiencing was what is called Christ . A few days later, on another walk, I became aware that I was to go forward teaching, “What Jesus was, I am. What I am, you are, too.” Ego was still so present at first there was a freak out. I put an end to the melodrama quickly, but ego was still disturbed by this idea, for obvious reasons. However, ego still had lofty ideas of what this meant and it was still playing itself out. For years I’d been using the term “Truth” for, well, truth. But now I found returning symbols I had not used in years, God , Ch...

             In Buddhism, when Buddha is quoted, it is not the man Siddhartha who is quoted. It is understood that Buddha is a universal consciousness that has been revealed through many teachers through the ages. This stands in stark contrast to how Christians feel that the same truth—pure consciousness—which they call Christ , revealed by the man Jesus, belongs only to that man. All the world’s religions began with someone experiencing pure consciousness. They expressed it in their own way and then ego took over with guilt and fear and bloat so their simple experience, if it can be found at all, is buried in each religion’s mysticism, which is sought only by a few. If you experienced pure consciousness in some form, in a moment, an episode, or maybe now in an ongoing way, you experienced the same truth that Siddhartha and Jesus and all the “master teachers” before and after experienced. Truth came to conscious awareness in you as in them. And as...

          Six years ago, when this consciousness shifted, I began to see ego as something inserted here in this consciousness, something foreign. I couldn’t quite grasp the bigger picture then and it eventually faded as other things came forward to be seen, experienced, processed. A few months ago, I became strongly aware of ego as an entity or being that lived here, asserting its reality through the person of Liz. I saw more clearly than I had yet that this consciousness and ego were not the same thing. Neither are ego and the person of Liz the same thing. Over the past year, I saw what fell away at the shift, which I call The Break , was what ego is before it takes any shape, the denial of truth ; the denial of pure consciousness. Through denial, ego seems to carve out a being from beingness, an experience of existence at odds with pure existence. Ego’s denial of truth also included denial of its denial, because after all, if you admit you are in denial, you...

             A recovered memory showed up a few years ago, as I was writing the memoir. It took a while to come to fruition, but it turned out to be just a memory of how around the time Liz was seven years old truth (pure consciousness) rose to conscious awareness. There was a brief lovely episode with love in conscious awareness. But ego was exposed, too, because when truth is in conscious awareness ego’s denial of truth becomes apparent. There was a moment when Liz felt that “good and evil” were “fighting over” her—a childish characterization, but it is interesting that at that time I felt I as I do now, merely a neutral consciousness that registers the presence of either ego or pure consciousness. In other words, it was an impersonal experience. There was no sense of choice, either then or now. Liz was merely the “territory” over which the denial of truth (ego) fought its battle against truth (pure consciousness).           ...

             I wrote the article below and then hesitated to send it. It’s nothing new, just a summary of what has been occurring in this mind. But it is dark and I am not out to scare anyone. I do feel, however, that an honest record is useful for those who may go through the same thing. There is also a lot of misunderstanding about the enlightenment process, and some have la-di-da expectations. La-di-da does happen, but after darkness passes through. On the other hand, there are those who think every difficulty they face is the enlightenment process! That is also not the case. Enlightenment is a distinct experience, not the cause of every difficulty one faces.            What I consider enlightenment is when pure consciousness breaks into conscious awareness to stay , causing ego to fall away in what is usually a distinct moment when it is clear that something is gone. For me, there was a long approach to that experienc...

             True love , the love that I wrote about the past two weeks, the love that is right here , the love that simply is what pure consciousness is, is obviously not personal love. Personal love is a form of attachment, basically for the survival of the human animal, no matter what ego does with it to replace pure love. It is not wrong or bad, it is frankly inevitable for a person. But it is not true love, which is also called cosmic , universal , unconditional , or transcendent love to distinguish it from personal love. The reason for the confusion is both experiences cause responses in the brain that make the body feel “good” in a certain way that we label love .             This love is less an emotional feeling than a perception, a way of seeing. Sometimes it inspires subtle nice feelings, occasionally it comes with powerful feelings of joy. Because these feelings are only an effect, it makes no sense to pursue...