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Meditation from the Holy Spirit: The Course Summarized in <500 Words

If the student sees ACIM as a path to enlightenment, the Course will feel like work.  There is no destination called “Enlightenment”.  

A student will find ACIM is easy when the student is ready to surrender.  A student will learn the Course is impossible when they are not.  ACIM teaches the student to acknowledge and accept that they are not ready.  And that this acknowledgement is not only okay but absolutely necessary to correct the error.


ACIM never demands any sacrifice from a student.  If a student perceives sacrifice, the student is in error and not ready to move forward.  The Holy Spirit tells us there is no sacrifice for the student who is ready.


This is the absolute key to everything: the student must recognize they make a choice every moment.  The student must own 100% of that choice and not only take, but celebrate, their ultimate responsibility choosing the world they created over reality.  Until the student is ready to release the world they made and accept reality, the Course will only frustrate and disappoint them.  To correct this error, the student must own their conscious decision to bathe in the blood and lust and hatred of their imagined world.  The student should welcome and relish the terror and fear and insecurity.  


Metaphorically, the student should eat, fuck, and murder their way through the world they created always guided by the question, “How do you feel?”.  That is how the world they created heals them.  As long as the student believes they are breaking a rule or betraying the Father and their True Self, they will seek out error and find its nectar sweet.  The student should not feel guilty about their love of the physical experience.  The self they made delights in their perceived rebellion from an “angry” Father. 


However, the student’s innocence as a child of God is guaranteed and until the student learns that nothing in this world will ever truly fulfill them and bring lasting peace and joy, the student is not ready to complete the Course.  Until then, the student is only trying to satisfy the self they made.  The student cannot fool their true Self, nor the Holy Spirit, nor the Father.


When the student finally tires of the world they made for the last time, then they are ready and the transition is easy.  At that point, it is effortless to finally throw down the sword of judgement and come back to the Course for the final time.  Then the student can understand and completely surrender the self and the world they created without hesitation.  Then they become as Christ and welcome both reality and Christ’s vision.  It may take a student two weeks or a thousand lifetimes to reach this point.  Time does not matter because Eternity and the Father awaits the Prodigal Child’s guaranteed return.

It’s Something about March…

Hey all,

I don’t know what it is about March but that is the month of the year that acts like a spiritual Christmas for me.  It doesn’t happen every March so perhaps the spiritual Santa skips my house occasionally. It is Spring and a time for renewal with an end to the darkness of winter.

In March 2011, I had my original dream on the evening of the Japanese tsunami as I resigned from my ego and accepted death.  I dedicated myself to writing. Over the course of the next two years I wrote the ideas and chapters on scraps of paper and dinner napkins whenever I felt that connection and inspiration.

In March 2013, I left my job and took a six month sabbatical.  We had moved back to the Bay Area from Denver.  I started the final editing on my first book and began writing the second book.  My spiritual quest was desperate and, like a drowning person, I was flailing my arms and hurting the people around me.  It was a midlife crisis without the new girlfriend or red sports car.

By March 2014, I had found A Course in Miracles.  Midway through 2013 my friend Joe told me about Marianne Williams.  He said her writing was very similar to my own and that she had written this book called A Course in Miracles.  I started listening to her on YouTube.  I quickly understood she didn’t write ACiM but she referenced it a LOT.

In March 2015, I bought A Course in Miracles

The Tree of Knowledge

I shared an understanding of the Bible from my own reading and how it was explained to me in church.  The fall of Adam and Eve was a difficult concept to wrap my brain around and in many ways, that very story became the wedge that drove me away from religion for many years.

I cannot count the number of times I read or heard the story of the Garden of Eden and it always caused something in the pit of my stomach to turn over.  From a very early time, I questioned everything.  Although I like my world to fit in simple, explainable little boxes that I could organize, meditate on, and follow the chain of consequences backward and forward through the experiences I watched in others and later saw in myself, the Old Testament was a tough sell for me.

Positioning a perfect  and perfectly supreme, all-knowing and all-powerful entity that was the beginning and ending of all existence wasn’t the hard part.  That pill I can swallow easily.  I can accept that our lives and our choices were test and testament to our own value.  The difficult part was how this perfect entity of love was described to have very human failings and emotions.  Anger.  Jealousy.

True Freedom

Once the ego is annihilated, true life begins.  You see the world through a different set of eyes.  No longer are you limited and contained within your mortal coil.  You realize that your life is a temporary state and nothing of value will last beyond your mortality.  All that matters is what you do.  Not for yourself, for that is the price of immortality.  It is what you can do for your neighbor.  For your fellow man, woman, or child.  Your good deeds will last in the memories forever.

Our ego would tell us we are defined by the clothes we wear  The car we drive.  Where we work or what school we attended.  How much money we make.  None of it matters.  When your time is up, none of it matters.  The ego quests for external validation, rather than validation from within.  It wants to be praised.  It wants to be loved.  It wants to be fed these temporal gifts in an unceasingly greater quantity.

We sacrifice our ethics.  Our very sense of right and wrong in this quest.  We make ourselves feel better by finding faults in others rather than helping those that want our help.  Each of us must make a decision.  We can worship ourselves and tie our identity to the material world or we can free ourselves of these bonds.

I have seen the God Machine.  I have dipped my toe in the river of the Holy Spirit.  I have felt the bliss of connecting with the Source.  God gives each of us the power to free ourselves of our ego.  In 1996, I received my class ring and the words inscribed on it are my personal mantra.  “You are, What you do, When it counts”.

Sin: Missing the Mark

As I was digging into Pseudo-Dionysius I went to Chicago for business.  I met with Cress who is a good friend from Denver and we chatted over lunch.  We shared stories and I told him some of my immediate impressions of Pseudo-Dionysius’ work.  As we discussed the Divine Pattern that each of us can choose to follow or choose to ignore in favor of our individual egos, he shared the analogy that many Christians have come to associate with the term ‘sin’.

For most of human beings, we don’t roll out of bed in the morning with a daily plan to wreak havoc and destroy others.

Use the Pause

I used to pray for blessings, wisdom, and protection.  It was like a spiritual Christmas list of self-improvement and my well intentioned desires for others.  As time passed, I realized that most of my prayers for myself were within my own power to resolve.  That the actual act of prayer or meditation was the moment when I was most humble.  When I gave up my own existence to something greater.  My thoughts are clear.  My heart and my mind are at peace.

When I asked God for help and wisdom, I was asking for “on the fly” help to my daily decision making.  Whether that was related to acting with generosity and love or catching myself protecting my ego.

What I was granted was the self-awareness to Pause.  To recognize true power is perfect defenselessness.  The choice NOT to respond.  Stillness.  Quiet.

Reserve your Advice Unless Asked

We all want to run around fixing other people.  We want them to be happy by our definition and expectation.  As we get older, we see our friends and family make the same mistakes over and over, repeating the same patterns of behavior again and again.  We hear them tell us their dreams and hopes yet when the rubber meets the road, they fail over and over with the same problems.  We celebrate when we see them escape a terrible relationship and then watch them as months go by and they dive right back into a similar relationship.  It is as if they are damned to repeat their mistakes and as good friends we want to help them…

You have the keys

St. Maccarius tells us that inside the human heart are all manner of things.  All the dragons and demons and wickedness and chains of the Abyss reside with the Angels, glory, and wonder of Heaven within the heart.

You have the keys.  The keys to your our future.  Your own destiny   You can live in fear.  You can live in this temporal world.  You vluntarily wear the bonds.  You lock the chains that hold your own soul and spirit down in the Abyss.  YOu choose this life.  You choose whether your existence give you the wings of heavenly angels or chains you to the demons of the Abyss.

Our societal programming is incredibly difficult to circumvent.  Deprogramming and extracting yourself from the system you have promoted and subscribed to your entire life would damage your reputation, the expectations others set on you, your family’s future.  All this is a fabrication of the ego.  The Ego weaves an incredibly seductive set of lies to entrap you in this existence.  Rather than serving others, you serve yourself.  You raise your children to be successful rather than decent human beings who serve one another.  Every action in life becomes a zero sum game where winning means getting something for yourself.  You find yourself defined by ultimately meaningless things.  You work to make money to pay bills to buy stuff to work harder to make more money to pay more bills.  Everything of true value is set aside in a quest for commercialized consumerism and temporary satisfaction.