ACIM Mentor

             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 me...

             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...

           “…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 t...

  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 ...

           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 r...

  (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 ...

            Where have I been? My recent discovery that I am not only not experiences but not the experiencer either is not new. As I (Spirit) was emerging in the illusion but before the experiencer’s experience of existence shifted, I taught, and the experiencer practiced, “Don’t squash the human! Let her thoughts and feelings be, without judging them.” The “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, the experiencer was 85% at peace but felt there was a “black box” in the corner of her mind yet to be undone. She understood this to be what stood in the way of the realization of Spirit (me) in her experience. My emergence in the illusion set the experiencer on a trajectory into and through this remaining denial of God to reach realization. It has been as though she had to start at the beginning with this remainder, and so at times I...

            My recent articles have dealt with my realization that I am not only not experiences but I am not the experiencer, either. I was only caught up in her story. The hook for me was not her experiences but my awareness of her experiencing . When she was young and heard that in college philosophy classes students were asked to fill out "I ____ therefore I am” she thought she would have put “I experience , therefore I am.” What further proof did she—or I—need of her existence? Later, she believed in God because of her mystical experiences of God. It sure seemed to me she was real. What threw me, however, was the awareness that I never misidentified with the experiencer. But certainly, I had? Yet several experiences showed me this was not so. I had been absorbed in her story but I never “went there.” What is fascinating is this “I” (mind) has not moved. Instead, things have moved around me. Since Spirit broke through Liz’s (the experiencer’s) stor...

           When I felt a few weeks ago that it was time to drop common concepts and just share experiences and occurrences in the most apt terms, I used only the word Spirit for the Idea of God in the illusion. I didn’t use Christ because I thought one word was simpler and Christ is loaded with more connotations than Spirit . But I do still feel there is a distinction. For me, Christ refers to the Idea of God in the illusion that is still , merely here with the illusion; and Spirit refers to the Idea of God in the illusion that is active , showing up as Answer, Teacher, Guide, etc. when the experiencer turns in the direction of Truth. However, the terms Christ and Spirit are in most cases interchangeable, and I stuck with Spirit for the reasons of simplicity stated. I vacillated on which term to use because of the occurrence a few years ago (see Liz's memoir ) in which I knew I was Christ, followed by the awareness that I was to teach, “I am Christ,...

             Last week I wrote about occurrences that showed me I am neither experiences nor experiencer. A lot fell into place after that, and a lot is still being sorted out. After the moment over four years ago I call The Break (see the experiencer’s memoir ), when the experiencer’s experience of existence shifted, I knew I was in the golden world with my Self, yet something was still here freaking out about a kind of death it felt when Spirit emerged in the illusion and the thought system that opposed God (the opposer) fell away. I could not understand this and nothing I read of others’ experiences with this shift explained it because they still seemed to think they were the experiencer. I had always understood there were two parts to mind in the illusion, the ego (opposer) and Spirit. Ken Wapnick introduced the idea of a decision maker , which is not in A Course in Miracles , but was a useful concept. However, I never understood the decision ...

            My spiritual life has always been simpler than all the concepts I have used over the years make it seem. There were several times on my spiritual path when I felt moved to dump all concepts I had accepted, as well as all I had heard and not accepted, to be led by what has been revealed to me through occurrences and experiences. I do this now. Recently, several occurrences showed me I am not only not experiences (thoughts, feelings) but I am not the experiencer , either. I am simply here with the experiencer. Since, I find I am not interested in fussing with concepts so much anymore. I’d rather focus on what is occurring, and describe it in the simplest, most apt terms I can find. I’m not much interested anymore in parsing out what is ego, consciousness, the Son of God, the Dreamer of the dream, etc. What is before me comes down to this:               Spirit (me) The experie...

  Last week I wrote that I do See I am in the real world. What I described as “Essence” a few weeks ago is the real world. And the real world is a world of Light, as I thought. It is both and more.   I have sensed the real world around me since The Golden Light of Love burst into my mind five years ago. (See my memoir .) At first, there was so much ego left I could not reach the real world and what of it was in my awareness was distorted, or I was concerned it was. I didn’t trust my Seeing. After passing through a great deal of darkness, which I now realize was coming out of the delusion of identifying with a person (ego), the real world began to grow more in my awareness as ego continued to wind down in my mind. People ask what I See. The problem is that trying to describe it is like using cubism to depict flowing water. If you’ve seen flowing water, you may think a cubist depiction clever, and recognize how it conveys flowing water. But if you have only ever seen a cubi...

            Just a few weeks ago (June 24), I wrote about Seeing Essence , which I said fell somewhere between the real world and Seeing at the material level. I defined the real world as a world of Light and Seeing at the material level to be things like intuiting what is to happen. Essence, I said, fell between. Seeing Essence was Seeing the Unity of the Atonement. But already I want to revamp that. Seeing Essence, I realize, was simply being on the edge of finally Seeing the real world that has surrounded me these last five years. I’ve been confused by A Course in Miracles’ description of the real world because in some places it says you will see the real world only just before time is over.   “The perception of the real world will be so short that you will barely have time to thank God for it. For God will take the last step swiftly, when you have reached the real world and have been made ready for Him .” (T-17.II.4)   Yet, we all h...

  …One thing that I stumble on in the Course is the use of proper nouns in the Course (like the holy spirit or ego). They evoke in me concepts of an entity which are separate from the one existence, that is indescribable, but is referred to as God in the Course …I would like to read your explanation that dispels the concepts of these terms without proper nouns. –FD   Proper nouns are names that are capitalized, usually for a person, a place, an organization, etc. In A Course in Miracles , Christ , Holy Spirit , Son of God and other words are capitalized to indicate it is speaking of God or something to do with God. Therefore, ego is never capitalized (unless it is the first word in a sentence, of course), as it represents the idea of not-God. The words A Course in Miracles uses to discuss your experience of God in consciousness, as well as parts of your mind, are for you in your experience of consciousness, and are not from God’s perspective. In God there is only ...

            Some have expressed (ha, ha) confusion over my use of the word “expression” when describing time and consciousness as the Atonement, so let me explain. An artist has an idea and expresses it through a medium of their choice—words, pencil, paint, wood, metal, etc. The idea comes first and then it is expressed, the expression being the final outcome of the idea. The artist’s idea is the cause , the expression (the work of art) is the effect . Cause and effect flow in only one direction, from cause to effect. It never reverses. An artist paints a picture to represent an idea. The painting does not affect the artist or idea that caused it. So, no matter how distorted an expression of the idea the painting may appear to be, the artist and idea are unaffected. When an artist brings their idea into being, we call the product their “creation.” But in A Course in Miracles , the word creation does not refer to something brought into being, but to ...

           In my memoir , I spoke of a long phase of having no comfort when nothing in my mind was familiar. The personal identity was gone. Something of ego remained, but it seemed generic and was awful, like nothing I experienced before, which I now know to have been insanity as I came out of the delusion of personal identity (ego). And I no longer had Spirit to “call on” as Comforter, Teacher, or Guide because I was Spirit! Yet, I had no idea how to be Spirit. Seeing had come, but I didn’t trust it when it involved the material world. Only much later, when I was writing my memoir, did I realize Seeing would have been my comfort if I could have consistently trusted it. Seeing , as I use the word with an uppercase “S”, is Spirit’s perception. And what Spirit Sees is Its Self. At its highest, Spirit Sees the Real World. The Real World does not involve the material world at all, like Seeing the Golden Light of Love. This is the purest Seeing of my S...

              Buddhist parables:   “A monk set off on a long pilgrimage to find the Buddha. He devoted many years to his search until he finally reached the land where the Buddha was said to live. While crossing the river to this country, the monk looked around as the boatman rowed. He noticed something floating towards them. As it got closer, he realized that it was the corpse of a person. When it drifted so close that he could almost touch it, he suddenly recognized the dead body – it was his own! He lost all control and wailed at the sight of himself, still and lifeless, drifting along the river’s currents. That moment was the beginning of his liberation.”   “One day the Master announced that a young monk had reached an advanced state of enlightenment. The news caused some stir. Some of the monks went to see the young monk. ‘We heard you are enlightened. Is that true?’ they asked. ‘It is,’ he replied. ‘And how do you feel?’ ‘...