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The Alchemy of Practicing ACIM

             Your spiritual path is an expression, but you probably experience it as for something—you want a different experience. You want peace. And a new experience comes not from ideas, but from practice that invites and extends the new experience. There are a lot of ideas in A Course in Miracles that are startling, maybe frightening, and often seem impossible when you first learn them. How can the world you see not be real? How could you ever come to understand that you are not a body? How can you see the real world when ego’s world is right before your eyes? The alchemy of practice is that it transforms ideas into experience. For example, I did not come to understand that I am mind by going around saying, “I am not a body” or even “I am mind.” The awareness that I am mind seeped in over time as I watched my mind, as I watched how my thoughts and judgments made the world I saw. I realized one day that I had shifted and now understood I am a mind. I did not come to see the
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Confusion Caused By the Early Stage of Enlightenment

     “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” 1 Corinthians 13:12 KJV   What I did not know to expect when enlightenment occurs is the years-long overlap of Spirit and ego in consciousness while ego slowly falls away. This means there is a long stage in which the mind having the experience does not fully understand what is occurring. This early stage of enlightenment is much like the much earlier stage of spiritual awareness that I call dawning , when one first becomes aware of the real world in consciousness or Reality (God) beyond consciousness through a mystical experience or experiences. You see amazing things, but not clearly. The difference is, after the dawning experience, your experience of existence goes on as usual, as ego is still the center of your consciousness, although you feel changed. And enlightenment means a very different experience of existence, as it is now Spirit. Spirit
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Coming to the Simple Awareness

             As I’ve shared before, in my earlier Oneness experiences, I would feel I was one with whatever I was looking at or thinking about—person, place or thing. But as time went on and these experiences were less shocking, they lasted longer, and I experienced them more clearly. I discovered that I am not One with whatever I see or is on my mind, but Oneness is here… and there is something appearing before the body’s eyes or in the mind’s memory. This experience of Oneness is Spirit’s Wholeness , reflecting the Onlyness of God (Reality) beyond consciousness. It reveals that consciousness and the myriad forms appearing in consciousness are illusions that have no effect on Reality (God) at all.   “…There is no world! This is the central thought the course attempts to teach…Some see it suddenly on point of death, and rise to teach it. Others find it in experience that is not of this world, which shows them that the world does not exist because what they behold must be the tru
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Spirituality as the Light in the Darkness

            Consciousness arose to play out the idea of the opposite of God (Reality), or not-God. But as God is All and cannot have an opposite, consciousness also contains the Idea of God, or God’s Spirit , canceling out not-God. So, as it unfolds over time, consciousness is the correction of the perception of a reality opposed to God, or what A Course in Miracles calls the Atonement . Consciousness has three parts: Conscious awareness, the subconscious, and the unconscious. Until Spirit rises to conscious awareness, It is in the unconscious or subconscious. The Atonement, then, is the process of the Idea of God (Spirit) rising to conscious awareness, in individuals, and in consciousness as a whole. (Bear in mind, this play of the idea of not-God and the Idea of God that is consciousness/time/the Atonement, is merely symbolic and has no effect on God whatsoever.) As Spirit rises toward conscious awareness to manifest the Atonement, this shows up as someone being drawn toward s
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Overcoming the Righteous Guilt Phase

             A Course in Miracles tells us that when we learn that we are projecting guilt outward, ego’s response is to see the guilt within, not undo it. This shows up as what I call the righteous guilt phase where students become hyper-responsible for everything occurring in their person’s life, sometimes to the extent of taking responsibility for other people’s behavior or denying that others are also contributing to problems in their relationships with them. This feels good to ego because, first, you still see guilt as real; second, it feels righteous to take responsibility for it; third, problems don’t get resolved, so ego gets to continue spinning on them. Many spend years in this phase, taking responsibility for everything occurring, and not addressing problems in their relationships, feeling this is the “spiritually correct” thing to do. Upsets are not caused by what is occurring in the material world but by your projection of meaning onto occurrences, making them seem re
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If You Are Disappointed in ACIM

             It is not uncommon for me to hear from clients and readers that they are disappointed in A Course in Miracles after a while. They are not getting from it something that they expected. Yet, they still feel compelled to read it and try to practice it. Sometimes, they’ve left it, only to come back, frustrated that they can’t let it go but they can’t get it to work for them, either. If this is happening to you, you have set up a goal for studying and practicing the Course that is not in line with how the Atonement is being expressed through you (your “path”). Your attraction to the Course , despite your discomfort with it, indicates that it is a part of your expression of the Atonement. So, what you need to look at is how your expectations do not line up with your unique expression of the Atonement. Most students begin the Course pretty much the same way, sticking to its theory and suggested practice, often for many years. Some do the Workbook later rather than sooner,
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Ask: What are your thoughts on free will?

         “In the past decade free will has come under quite a bit of scrutiny as to it being an illusion. Several books have been written regarding this, and of course, the science of the mind is nowhere close to being complete. I have been looking for references in ACIM about this subject. It speaks of course about the world and its illusionary nature as well as the self.  It reminds us that the world was over long ago. It does speak of willingness quite a bit. What are your thoughts on free will?” —ESA   My experience of the concept of free will as it is usually understood—that a person determines their own thoughts, feelings, and actions—is that it is impossible because I now see what unfolds in time and consciousness as a symbolic depiction of the idea of not-God arising in God (Reality) and simultaneously being undone by God’s all-encompassing nature. So, what unfolds in time is an expression of the Atonement, it is not bringing about the Atonement. This is my understanding o
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