ACIM Mentor

             The article two weeks ago was about dealing with fear. An episode of over-the-top fear was passing here and there was a sense that this was more of ego’s conditioning falling away and truth would emerge further from behind it. And this is what happened. This is the pattern that has been observed here for the past few years. Before ego fell away ( The Break ), the pattern was truth would briefly rise to conscious awareness as an insight or an answer or a shift toward peace and this was followed by what Liz here called ego backlash . This would feel like an “ego attack”, meaning darkness, lack, guilt, and fear in their various forms would seem to take over Liz’s mind. Liz learned to deal with this by simply allowing it and letting it pass. Over time, as Liz’s awareness of truth grew, these episodes were shorter and less intense. But they were sure to follow any experience of truth, no matter how brief or mild. Ego seemed powerful, maybe n...

        “How can one differentiate between an egoic experience of what seems to be Truth or Love or Peace and an authentic awareness of Truth? All I can sense is that authentic Love feels so ‘other’, and cannot be described…but if something is ‘experienced’ at all, is this, by definition an egoic interpretation?” – MG   You may have heard that all experiences are illusions. This is ultimately true. The absolute—the absolute truth —is not an experience . There are no words for what it is. All experiences occur in and are registered by consciousness, which is ultimately an illusion, too. But consciousness is all we are dealing with here. And in terms of consciousness, there is pure consciousness, or the truth of consciousness, and there is ego, or illusion appearing in consciousness. So not all experiences are ego. Some are pure consciousness, or the truth of consciousness. What it seems you are trying to sort out here is ego’s versions of love and peace ...

            Last week’s article was about finding that heaven is not an extra-ordinary state but is the everyday ordinary consciousness you are used to. I get asked if now that I see this, do I experience heaven all the time? No, I do not, because ego is still falling away. But I sense heaven here, and have moments and episodes of it. In fact, lately I’ve been dealing with bouts of over-the-top fear when certain things “go wrong” or appear that they may. What changed after The Break, or shift in consciousness, was the covers were pulled from ego, from fear. What I once would’ve felt as a niggle of irritation or discomfort because of something practical I had to deal with I now know was the fear I feel fully now. Fear used to be (mostly) denied or masked or distracted from. I suspect some of Liz’s physical issues are due to years of the fullness of fear being repressed. Fear had to go somewhere, it had to be expressed in some way, and that ended up in the ...

               “Heaven is here. There is nowhere else. Heaven is now. There is no other time.” (M-24.6:4-7)   Lately, there have been articles written here that speak of the ordinariness of truth—pure consciousness—and how it is always here. You may hear or read this in other places, too. Certainly, the everpresence of truth was something that Liz here had often heard and came to experience. But applying the word ordinary to truth was something she came across only relatively recently. So, what was expected was that when ego fell away and truth was fully revealed, it would be remarkable. She expected that the veil of ego covered something different from her usual experience so when it was gone, something different would be exposed. This expectation was largely due to overblown mystical experiences, which Liz thought revealed what A Course in Miracles calls the real world and were indeed out of the ordinary and remarkable. But those tu...

Last week I wrote about truth, or pure consciousness , rising to conscious awareness. I mentioned how the Christian labels (God, Christ, Holy Spirit) used in A Course in Miracles , though never used here (this conscious awareness) in the traditional Christian way ( Christ never meant Jesus , for example) have fallen away as special words are found unnecessary for something so delightfully ordinary and simply present. There has been a long journey here with the word “consciousness”, accepted, rejected, and accepted again, this time because it has been found to be distinctly apt. The word consciousness in the context of spiritual experience and aspiration seemed to have developed in Eastern religious philosophy rather than in the West. While Liz here recognized the truth of nonduality teachings, she was never moved to pursue them. There was an attempt here sometimes to translate what was said about consciousness in those teachings into the Christian symbols of God, Christ, and Holy ...

             When the shift in consciousness (The Break) happened here in 2018, anything that could be called “I” or “me” (ego) fell away. The Holy Spirit as constant companion was gone as well, because there was no longer anything here to connect with the Holy Spirit. However, it was not totally lost. What once was called the Holy Spirit no longer felt beside but surrounding . It had become the context—the space, the field, the “world”—in which everything was occurring. This was one of many experiences at the time that was baffling, largely because it did not fit expectations. But experiences that I could not understand for a few years are now coming together. (The experience of that time can be found in a memoir ). The presence of ego in consciousness seems to block part of consciousness from itself, what we experience as conscious awareness —what is immediately in our awareness. This blocking seems to make an unconscious. So, truth , which is pur...