ACIM Mentor/4 Habits for Inner Peace

Preface

God is Formless, Infinite Being. Only God is Real.

You are Eternally One with God.

Forgetting this has given rise to a world of lack, limitation, and pain in your mind.

Remembering this restores you to the natural Love, Peace, and Joy of your Limitless Being in God.

The only purpose that the world that you perceive has for you is to be forgiven your perception of separation from God.

           This is how you remember that you are One with God.

            This is the loving message of A Course in Miracles, a self-study course designed to help you undo all of your conscious and unconscious beliefs in separation from God so that you can return to an awareness of your Oneness with God. One of the Course’s stated purposes is to save you time on your return to God but the Course’s style - especially in the essential Text, which lays out the theological foundation for the rest of the Course - presents time-consuming challenges. If you have tried to read the Course and found it too dense and difficult you are not the only one. It is dense and difficult, even for experienced students. And if you are a student of the Course you may feel that it is taking you too long to get its whole message.

The challenges presented by the Course’s style provide no benefit to the reader. While some students use deciphering the Course as a means for undoing their own faulty thought system, it is time-consuming, it leads to an intellectual struggle where practice is what is truly transformative, and it is simply not practical for the average student. This is why I have translated the Text of the Course into plain language through its central loving message of your Oneness with God.

            I became a student of A Course in Miracles in 1984. My first sense was that on some level I had written it. It was familiar to me but without my knowing what it was going to say. I felt that the Course was related to my purpose in the world and that one day I would do something more with it than just study it. I didn’t know exactly how that would unfold so I forged ahead with studying with the Holy Spirit. Very soon I experienced Oneness through direct revelations with God and in the world through the miracle of the Holy relationship. My experiences of Oneness were not of the world and they bore no resemblance to any experience I had had in the world but they were far more familiar to me than anything in the world. Revelations taught me that only God is Real. The miracle of the Holy relationship made me aware that what I perceive is only in my mind and that it is my choice whether I experience separation or Oneness.

            After these experiences I felt – rightly or wrongly - that I was reading A Course in Miracles in a way that was different from other students. For one thing the Course was not just theory for me because I was experiencing everything that it said on a level within myself I previously did not know existed. And no other student that I knew at the time was talking about experiencing Oneness with God or with another in a Holy relationship. So no one was talking about the deep conflict experiencing Oneness brings to a mind that still values separation. I both needed my experiences validated – and feared that they would be validated. I felt that the experiences of Oneness I had were a total blessing, a source of pure Joy – and a curse. I knew that I had experienced Truth and I was grateful - and I was angry that the world that I loved was losing its value for me when I was only twenty years old and I hadn’t yet had a chance to pursue my dreams in it.

For many years I studied the Course only intellectually as a way to keep my experiences of Oneness at bay. I understood a little of the Course here and a little of it there but I couldn’t see how it all fit together. Then, after 15 years, I finally stopped resisting my experiences. As I read the Course through my openness to the Reality of my Oneness with God the Course’s coherency began to emerge for me. This new clarity felt like a gift given to me rather than something that I had attained. I read the Text again from the beginning and I “tested” this unified message as though it was the “key” to the Course’s “code”. This took me beyond the surface of the dense, difficult, and seemingly inconsistent words and into the Course’s whole context. The more I accepted what my experiences of Oneness had revealed to me - that only God is Real – the crisper and simpler the Course’s message became. I was finally experiencing what the Course says is another of its purposes: to help me sort out Truth from illusion.

With this consistent message of Oneness growing clearer in me I got a nudge from the Holy Spirit to start teaching it to other students of the Course. I began by leading a study group and after training as a life-coach I offered my services as a mentor to other students who want to save time and effort on their way to lasting Peace. I wrote blogs, a newsletter, and booklets to clarify the Course’s message but I found that students were still confused, frustrated, and bogged down by the Course’s language in their day-to-day study.

            In late 2007 I was prompted by the Holy Spirit to try putting the cohesive message I was reading in the Text into writing, paragraph by paragraph. I was surprised by this concept and I tested it by translating the first few paragraphs of Part 2 in the first chapter. I immediately felt a satisfaction that I had not had in all my other attempts to clarify the Course. This was bringing clarity right where it was needed – directly to the reading of the Text itself. As I got to work translating the Text with the Holy Spirit I realized that it was the culmination of my sense that the Course was my life’s work, of the lessons of my experiences of Oneness, and of the sudden and amazing clarity I had accepted after a decade and a half of study.

            This translation has value not only as a study aid for students of the original A Course in Miracles but as a spiritual teaching on its own. The loving message is the same in this translation as it is in the original but here it is easier to access. You may choose to read it without ever reading the original. For that reason what follows is a brief introduction to A Course in Miracles. However you use this book, I wish you peace on your return to God.

Liz Cronkhite

Las Vegas, Nevada, 2009