ACIM Mentor

            When students read in A Course in Miracles that the entire experience of the person and its world is an illusion, it leads to two common questions: “How can I possibly see my reality as an illusion?” and “Am I to deal with the whole experience as an illusion or only deal with the illusions within the experience?” That the personal experience is an illusion is an awareness that may come to you through mystical experiences or a slow dawning, but it is not something that you can make occur, so there is no point in trying. Practically speaking, you can deal only with the illusions that occur within the experience.   And this is what a teaching like the Course is for. It is a “better way” to be in the personal experience. The person and its experiences have no meaning. Without ego, the person is just a human animal living out its life. The person would have thoughts and feelings and take actions and they would all just pass by if ego was n...

              When I write or talk about truth and how it is peace and “the good” as I did the past two weeks, readers and clients ask why they aren’t experiencing it, why they are having this experience of inevitable pain, lack, and loss? I have explained this often through the ontology that came to me long ago and I will use it here again and elaborate. The absolute (truth), being all, must contain the idea of its own opposite. But as the absolute is all, it cannot have an opposite. So, the opposite-of-the-absolute can only be an idea that is undone by the allness of the absolute as soon as it arises. However, within that idea there is time (the opposite of timelessness) and in time it seems as though the idea of the opposite-of-a-truth arose long ago and will be undone in some indefinite future. This is what is unfolding in consciousness. Pure consciousness before anything arises in it is the truth and ego (“I”, self, identity) and its world...

            Last week, I wrote that you should trust the still, the quiet, and the gentle over dramatic mystical experiences of love and joy. Dramatic mystical experiences do represent truth rising to conscious awareness, but they do not mean anything in themselves. I shared how for ego, though, the drama was what it looked for. In fact, Liz here missed how significant it was when The Enlightened Mind showed up to stay because it didn’t come with any drama at all. It was just quietly and matter-of-factly here. Oh, she knew it was important, but not how important. It was only when reading back in her journal while writing her memoir that she saw that it had been life changing. When you hear or read teachers who have had nonduality experiences (the onlyness of truth) say of truth “it’s so simple” and “it’s right here and always has been”—yes! We miss it because we’re looking for something dramatically different. But the different is actually ego. It is ...

             When Liz here stumbled onto truth, it was while seeking peace. She was an anxious person, and it was not love or happiness she felt she was missing, but inner peace. Before I continue, let me define peace . Peace is an absence of conflict. Without conflict, what is present is wholeness and never-ending stillness . Notice peace is not defined as something new arising, but by the absence of something. Conflict therefore blocks the awareness of the presence of peace. Another way to say this is ego, which is the experience of conflict, blocks the peace inherently here. What Liz thought were her first mystical experiences, mind-blowing love and oneness and joy, occurred when she was twenty years old and had just started A Course in Miracles . Eventually, these and their aftermath, a kind of honeymoon, passed. Ego was upset about this, it threw a temper tantrum, it wanted those experiences back. But as Liz moved past this over the years, i...

          When Liz here was first a student of A Course in Miracles she was an anxious person and looking for a way out of fear. In fact, her introduction to it was Jerry Jampolsky’s Love is Letting Go of Fear , the title a quote from the Course and very appealing to her. She dove right into the Course , all three books at once. I don’t remember how long it took her to read the Text, but as she neared the end she kept waiting for it to “wrap things up” into a nice package that would summarize all she read into the formula that would reveal the way into enlightenment and therefore out of fear. But instead it ended on Choose Once Again . How disappointing! What had she missed? She was being told the way out, but it wasn’t enough for her. The Buddhists say, referring to ego, “Life is suffering.” But they also say, “Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.” The Course deals with the suffering aspect of ego, which is a choice. Painful things will happen. Suff...

            A couple of weeks ago I posted an article in which I referred to someone on the national stage as a narcissistic sociopath. The article was about projection, but some have taken issue with me labeling someone. (More on labels at the end of this article.)   They ask, aren’t we supposed to see Christ in everyone? Let me share the experience here with that idea. When Liz here was first a student of A Course in Miracles she had the spontaneous mystical experience of seeing the reflection of a self that was not Liz “in another” for a brief time. It was an experience of oneness. She understood this self to be universal, not limited to her, or to the other. She didn’t call this Christ at the time but knew this experience of oneness was what was meant by Christ . (It could also be called holiness or divinity or true self ). The experience faded but was never forgotten. Although she referred to it as seeing the universal self “in another”...