The Twenty-Fourth Principle of A Course in Miracles

Miracles enable you to heal the sick and raise the dead because you made sickness and death yourself, and can therefore abolish both. You are a miracle, capable of creating in the likeness of your Creator. Everything else is your own nightmare, and does not exist. Only the creations of light are real (T-1.I.24:1-4).

Claims that miracles will enable us to heal the sick and raise the dead are dramatic. On this view, miracles are neither shallow nor new age wishful thinking – both common charges against A Course in Miracles. They are, rather, deeply and authentically Christian. They call us to open our minds to Christ, as Jesus did, and from that openness, call Lazarus out of the tomb.

Some people say, “wait – are you actually saying you’ve like actually literally raised the dead? Or that I am going to be able to do that on account of studying ACIM?”

I understand these concerns. But they don’t really scan when we consider one of the primary teachings of A Course in Miracles: we aren’t bodies. Therefore, death is not real. There is nothing to raise.

The insight into this – and the integration of the insight into our living – is what matters.

In other words, “raise the dead” reflects the understanding that our suffering – all of which comes to down to our identification with bodies – is a thing we are doing to ourselves (e.g., T-27.VIII.10:1), which means it is a thing that is happening at the level of the mind. The physical world is like a screen or canvas at which the ego endlessly flings mud but which the Holy Spirit lovingly bathes in light, until it is wholly translated into light.

What we are in truth is a miracle, capable of creating as God creates – which is to say, only in love. Whatever we make that is not love is simply a bad dream which disappears easily upon waking, never to be remembered. What haunts you now will not exist when you are awake.

Therefore, we can look at our lives in the world – see the challenges, the failures, the successes, the good stories and the bad, the hopes and dreams, all of it – and realize we don’t have to feel guilty. We don’t have to fix anything. We are free to be as happy as God created us happy.

In the context of this principle, “light” is a metaphor. It refers to that which is created in the mind – that which is brought forth in the mind – when the mind remembers it is God. It is held by God, it reflects God back to God, all it knows is God.

When the mind knows this, then its creations are full of love. In worldly terms, they are extensions of interior peace and understanding which naturally restore stillness and harmony to that which remains anxious and unsettled.

When we make contact with our mind in this way, we understand that all it truly can create is Love, and that all healing is an effect of Love, forever reflecting Love back to Itself. “Only the creations of light are real” is therefore a solace, a prayer we utter to remember – when we are scared or angry, defensive or aggressive – that all of this is a bad dream, soon to be over, remembered no more, and thus without effect of any kind.

The real drama is not the resurrection of the dead, but the remembrance of what we are in truth, which cannot die. When we remember this, we are no longer subject to the body’s adventures and misadventures, and we thus demonstrate to others that they too can be liberated unto a sustainable peace and happiness unrelated to the body’s coming and going.

That is what it means to heal and be healed. That is what it means to live.