ACIM Mentor

  … my first reaction (ego) [to last week’s article] is that this concept (or truth rather) is very disempowering, and I’m finding it difficult to see the point of a suffering world.  Why would we choose to have an experience of separation from Love, unity, peace and joy? and choose a script that then keeps us locked out of The knowledge of Heaven?  It’s like we are emotional puppets who are tricked into thinking we have the power to pull our individual strings.  Yet there is nothing we can do to change the way the strings are being pulled…” – TR   God, being All, must contain the idea of Its Own opposite. But being All, God cannot have an opposite. So, the moment the idea of not-God arises it is undone. But not-God contains the idea of time (the opposite of Timelessness, or Eternity), so in time it seems the idea arose long ago and will be undone in some indefinite future (what A Course in Miracles calls the Atonement). But in God, the idea is over. In f...

 " If the script is already written, and the world is a projection of the false beliefs we hold in the mind, wouldn’t the script change as we are willing to allow our perception to change? Or is our perception already determined as well?, Is the decision to wake up from the dream already predetermined? If the only real choice we have is to choose the ego thought system or the Holy Spirit in each moment, wouldn’t that lead to very different scripts?” – TR   The material experience is an expression of the moment of the idea of not-God/the undoing of the idea of not-God—what A Course in Miracles calls the Atonement. (You can also call it time , ego-consciousness , existence, or illusion .). So, everything in your material experience— thoughts, feelings, choices, actions, etc.—is predetermined. Wherever your mind is in the process, whatever you think, feel, and do, expresses the Atonement perfectly. You cannot deviate from “the script.”   In the Atonement, it seems...

  “I’m having problems with understanding the concept of Self. The script is written. This is an illusion. Two definite facts. If the writer of the script is our Higher Self, who is the “I” who’s asleep and needs to be awakened? I’m confused.” - BS “The script is written” is a figurative way of saying everything that happens in the material universe is predetermined. No one really “writes” it; there is no intention behind it. It is a meaningless expression of a meaningless idea—the idea of not-God/the undoing of the idea of not-God. This unfolding story of time is what A Course in Miracles calls the Atonement . Your Self is God’s Extension, or Christ (Spirit, Son of God). You have never left God, but you seem to be unconscious (asleep) to your Self in God, so a part of your mind seems to be having a dream of time (consciousness, existence) and you seem to be living out a role in the Atonement. In the dream, as your mind seems split between Awake (Christ) and asleep (ego), ...

  “My study of ACIM seems to take me to the logical conclusion that most of what I do in my days is without significance. I mean the only true purpose is to wake up to reality, the world as I experience it is an illusion that is to be forgiven, but certainly not embraced. Yet in other places of the text I acquire the impression that there is a plan, a purpose for me. By ‘me’ I don’t refer to ego, rather to me as a spirit, an expression of God. Would you say the most correct understanding is to, as much as I am able, to focus on understanding what keeps me from waking up? All the rest to be minimized? That there is no other purpose or plan I would give attention to?” - RP   You are correct that what occurs in the material experience is without significance. The material unfolding is merely an effect, or expression, of what occurs in your mind. So, your material life is the least significant aspect of consciousness as it is pure effect and has no consequence.   ...

  Regarding your present perspective, how do you feel about the transliteration [sic] you did of ACIM — The Message of a Course in Miracles ? Has your view of any of it changed?” – RP My goal with the plain language translation was to bring A Course in Miracles’ message out from behind its loaded symbols and dense language. As my experiences since I shifted consciousness have only validated and further illuminated its message for me, I still feel I accomplished that. In fact, I sometimes marvel at what came through in the translation and my articles and books. This mind truly was an instrument of Spirit. >>>>>   If you have a question the answer to which you feel may be helpful to others, send it to Liz@acimmentor.com and I will answer it in this newsletter/blog.

  Hello, everyone, it has been a while! Over a year, actually. Fourteen months ago, I began this newsletter, The Christ in You , and said I felt it would probably be irregular…well, so it has been, but a bit more than I thought it would be!   If you wish to review the six newsletters/blogs I wrote last year, you can do so at www.acimmentor.blogspot.com. What they say is still valid and they will catch you up with where I am a bit.   As many of you know, I have been busy for a year and a half writing a memoir of my spiritual path from its start when I became a student of A Course in Miracles in 1984 up through my shift in consciousness in 2018 and beyond. It is near completion, and I will self-publish it in a few weeks, so stay tuned!   Here is the back-of-the-book blurb for A Memoir of Christ: A Student of A Course in Miracles Awakens :     A student and teacher of A Course in Miracles , a nondualistic path to inner peace, Liz Cronkhite ...

I assumed that the awakening process was the same for everyone and that any seeming differences could be put down to those who shared their experiences using the symbols of the path they had taken. I thought the steps were the same, but the description varied according to the tradition followed. But I have discovered that the path is not the way you take; the path is the way that takes you. So your path does not just determine how you are likely to describe your experiences. It indicates the experiences that you will have. Although the content is ultimately the same, it does not unfold the same for each of us. I don’t just mean that we don’t all go through the same stages in the same order. I mean we go through very different, if eventually similar, experiences, which are determined by the path unfolding through us. For example, Bernadette Roberts ( What is Self? ) was a Christian contemplative and made it very clear that she initially went through a process that was in line with...

A few weeks ago I wrote about my “ Grand Tour of Fear ” (May 8). I shared how since my shift in consciousness I have seemed to experience fear in all its forms and degrees. It has been an intense and often rough two years, but it has not been all about fear. I wrote that I would eventually share some of the good stuff that has happened as well, so here it is. So far, the hallmark of my experience has been my feeling of immortality. Immortality was not something I gave much thought to before and I had no idea I would one day experience it. Like so much of this new experience, it has seeped slowly into my awareness so that the way to characterize it has come long after I began to have the experience. First I felt a “ghost in the world”. This was before the moment I refer to as “The Break”, which I call the shift I experienced. After The Break I would say “a new life had come”, which seemed inadequate to describe my experience. Not long after that I became aware that I am Spirit and...

Avery Wan lived in a dark room, only she didn’t know it was a dark room. It was all she knew, so she thought it was what existence was. One day Avery noticed that there was something in the room that had always been there, but that she only now saw was not the same as the as-yet-unlabeled darkness. How could she not have noticed there were two where she thought there was one? No matter. Now she knew. She labeled what she was used to “darkness” and this newly-in-her-conscious-awareness presence “light”. Because it was new to her awareness, she was drawn to look at the light. She was happy to feel she knew something more about existence. The more she looked at the light, the more distinct it became from the darkness, and the more she was baffled that she hadn’t seen this before. It’s so obvious! What’s more, she found the light to be more appealing than the darkness. She suspected that the light had helped her tolerate the darkness all along. So she lived for a while happily awar...

Sometimes I hope there is some reason for the journey through fear I have taken these past two years since I rose in consciousness. I have seen fear up close and intimately; raw, unmasked, and unmodified. But then I see that it is just as insignificant as the experience of existence (ego) that is gone for me and when it is over I will not give it any thought. This is just the way this split mind comes to an end. Everything A Course in Miracles says about the ego I have visited, experientially , not as just a concept. I have been through the fear of death and I’ve been through death. (Not of the body, obviously, which is irrelevant.) A much worse experience was fear of nonexistence. Because, as the Course points out, at least death “proves” there had been a life. Nothing terrifies the ego more than the idea that it doesn’t exist. Because it doesn’t. And I’ve seen that, too. When I reached the furthest edge of fear of nonexistence I had only one place to go if I didn’t pull ba...

When I was first a student of A Course in Miracle s I noticed a pattern: Whenever I had a positive spiritual experience, anything from a significant insight all the way up to a higher miracle, I would then have a “backlash” from the ego. This showed up as fears, attacks on me, attacks on others, obsessing angrily on a social or political issue, etc. The initial backlash seemed to be in direct proportion to the strength of the spiritual experience. But, for a long while, even one simple insight could lead to weeks of backlash. Eventually I noticed the pattern and came to accept that the backlash would happen. Simply recognizing the pattern helped mitigate it. In time I learned to not resist at all, because that seemed to lengthen and strengthen it. This shortened the duration and intensity of the backlash considerably. When I started teaching and coaching Course students I discovered I was not alone. In fact, this pendulum swing is a universal experience—and one of the more unco...

Sorry to have inundated you with emails lately, but I find I am going in a new direction and I wanted to share a new service—joining in Christ (the part of each of us that is Part of God)—and offer a discount for mentoring/life-coaching during this unusual time when we hunker down during the COVID-19 pandemic. (I’ve also lowered my fee in general. Check out my new streamlined website, www.acimmentor.com.) And here I send you the first of a new newsletter/blog, The Christ in You . When I ended the ACIM Mentor Articles a few weeks ago I felt it difficult to continue teaching in a way that was meant to be “corrective”. By this I mean, looking out at a world I thought needed adjusting. I still found it natural to teach one-on-one in a mentoring/life-coaching session with the handful of clients who still remain, but I found writing articles to be a strain except where I shared my process. My point of view shifted with my shift in consciousness, about which most of you know if you read m...

  “Christ is the link that keeps you one with God, and guarantees that separation is no more than an illusion of despair, for hope forever will abide in Him. Your mind is part of His, and His of yours.” —A Course in Miracles (W-pII.6.2) “(Christ) is the Self we share, uniting us with one another, and with God as well.” —A Course in Miracles (W-pII.6.1) I live now in the awareness that I am Christ—and so are you. I wish to use the power of my awareness to strengthen your awareness of Christ in you.   So I offer joining sessions at $1 US per minute from 10 to 30 minutes. How this works: ·          Email me to set up a time for joining. Liz@acimmentor.com or 702-742-5305. ·          You call me on the phone or Skype or Facetime or another platform over the internet. ·          If you have something on your mind you wish t...

Dear Readers and Clients: At least through April I am offering  mentoring/life-coaching at reduced rates  for those who need a break during this unusual time. My usual fee is $50 US for a half-hour and $85 US for an hour.  Whether you are a regular, returning, or new client , if you cannot meet these fees at this time you can pay what you can afford . (For those in Australia and Canada I now bill through PayPal in your currency). If you have been considering mentoring/life-coaching from the perspective of  A Course in Miracles  but have not got around to it,  now is the time to take advantage of  your enforced free time and my offer of reduced fees! Also  consider more creative ways of meeting with me, as in with a friend or two  with whom you can divide my fee for an hour. We can study and/or discuss the  Course . We will meet on Skype or Facetime or some other platform that allows for more than two to meet. I am not actively ...

            Years ago I discovered something about the ego: What it told me to fear was what it secretly desired for me.             Is there some disaster you are projecting in your life now? Maybe you are afraid you will lose someone or something, like a job. Maybe you fear for a loved one who is in trouble or sick. Maybe you have financial concerns. Maybe your life and your loved ones are settled for now, yet you still catastrophize over something , perhaps your country’s direction or the planet as a whole. Whatever it is, the ego hopes the disaster you fear will come to pass. Fear is really a wish.             And nowhere is this more clear than with the idea of death. It is the ego’s ultimate goal for you.             I have faced this lately as I have come to experience my immortal...

A Course in Miracles teaches us that through the ego we project onto the present from our individual past in the hopes of healing past hurts. We hold against those in the present injuries we perceive others caused in the past and expect them to make up for what we think those others did to us in the past. For example, you felt your mother was emotionally distant so you find yourself drawn (usually unconsciously) to emotionally distant partners in the (again, unconscious) hope that they will give you what your mother didn’t. If they do, you feel it is a “match made in heaven”. If they do not, you resent them and replay your drama with your mother over and over. Why, you wonder, can you never get your needs met? Recently I discovered that I was projecting hurt from my first holy relationship onto Hannah, with whom I am presently in a holy relationship. This erupted in a horrific way, but cleared up something that had been very confusing and difficult for me in my relationship with...

            I have gone back to “God”. I am writing a memoir about my path up through, well, when I finish it! The title—as of now—is A Memoir of Christ: A Student of A Course in Miracles Awakens . I was not planning this. One day the prologue for the book came to me, I wrote it, and suddenly there was a preface, and I’ve gone from there. You can see the thread of it in the title. It was a surprise to me. Suddenly the whole of my former life was re-framed as Christ’s journey. And my new experience of existence is given new context. A year ago I had an experience on a walk where I was my Self, the one we all share. Jesus was there and I knew I was experiencing me as I am, Christ. If you know my story, you know I point to the start of my spiritual path as a moment when I was a teenager and suddenly knew that what Jesus was everyone was. In that moment a year ago I realized this in my experience. A few days later I knew I was going to go forward i...

When the ego had fallen away but I had not recognized this, I had an ongoing experience of detachment and something else, what I came to call the “ghost in the world” experience. I wrote at the time that I felt like Bruce Willis’s character in The Sixth Sense (spoiler alert!): Walking the world as though part of it, not realizing I was dead. Except, unlike his character, I knew I was not the same, although I could not describe how. A bit over a year and half ago I realized I am Spirit. A couple of months later I felt this again and after that it came over me now and then. I realized this was a more direct experience of the ghost in the world feeling. But there was something to the experience I couldn’t quite grasp. What did it mean to be Spirit? How do you go about being Spirit? The experience faded as I went about dealing with all the other incredible stuff occurring in my mind and life.             Then something crept quie...

            I get how religions are started. I have had many world-altering, world-shattering experiences in the past couple of years. They have all been profound. Some of them, the movement I’ve felt over and/or within me has been HUGE. But these have all been my experience. They affect no one else. I find I am not what I thought I was. I have taught this all along and I’ve found it is true! I find what is true for me is true for everyone, but they can’t see it, as much as I might tell them. I find myself in a new world and everyone’s here with me, but they don’t know it.             But the shifts I’ve experienced were profound and large because of how insignificant and small were what they shattered. A thought system of puniness fell away and my mind, which had adapted itself to littleness, has all sorts of structures in place that must come down to accept its reality, which is far more than ...

I was amused to find that Bernadette Roberts ( What is Self? ) took the same approach to her path that I took to mine: Wanting the Truth, we have both been willing to dump what we thought we already knew and valued if we found it was erroneous. And we both used the same test: We would let go of ideas and experiences we valued and if they hung around we’d know they were true. I let go of the Holy Spirit often at the beginning, only to find It was still here.             Another approach I often took to test my path was to dump all concepts and look only at my own direct experiences. What do they teach me? I trust experience, not words in a book or someone else’s experience. Those only resonate when they align with my experiences. I never wanted to fit my experiences into preset concepts, but rather allow concepts to arise from my experience. Having said that, sometimes it was not until I read another’s experience that I would ...