Sean Reagan

The miracle acknowledges everyone as your brother and mine. It is a way of perceiving the universal mark of God (T-1.I.40:1-2).

Miracles occur in the context of separation in order to facilitate the undoing of separation. This can also be understood as scenes from a dream that facilitate awakening from the dream. They are baby steps on a journey from fear to love.

Miracles are moments of invitation in which we realize both our separation from reality but also our natural capacity to bridge that gap, as if it had never existed. Our inclination to oneness is inherent; it appears across the human experience, independent of era and culture. It can be recognized and nurtured. It can, literally, be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Critically, we neither remember nor enact this inclination alone. Oneness is a reflection of mutuality and inclusion; it is an effect of remembering our deep equality which we share with all life. This equality and its connection to oneness is what the miracle makes clear for us, over and over and over. What is holy does not exclude anything; what is sacred is not partial.

Knowledge never involves comparisons. That is its main difference from everything else the mind can grasp (T-4.II.11:12-13).

Thus, the “universal mark of God” is our shared perception of wholeness, regardless of the language we use, and it manifests as remembering that the other – a human being, a black bear, a sunflower or a quasar – is our own self. The cosmos forever gazes at itself in love. We share one function, and have a single shared interest. This is what Love is. The miracle cannot point to any other truth because there is no other truth.

Hence, we are called by our study and practice of A Course in Miracles into relationship. We are called to a state which acknowledges everyone as family, including Jesus, the elder brother who inaugurated this particular adventure in holiness, whose work we are called to extend in our living.

This state of being remains a state of separation, but it is given now to transition, to undoing. It does not accept the perception of separation as reality but rather knows it is a distortion of reality. It seeks what is true and unchangeable beyond the mutable lies of preference and the personal. It beholds a kinship that transcends the narrow limitation of the body and the world; it begets a service that reinforces that kinship, and opens the mind to relationship with God.

This is easy to talk about! And that is not necessarily a crisis. Intellectual understanding often precedes application. But truly, living it is also easy, so long as we do not insist on holding onto old prerogatives. We have to be humble and willing to change, at depths that are sometimes frightening and discomforting. Everything that sustains the illusion of separation – including religion, nationality, ethnicity and personality – must be surrendered. Our attachment to it must be undone. We cannot carry anything with us when we go to the well, when we finally enter the Cave of the Heart.

Empty your mind of everything it thinks is either true or false, or good or bad, of every thought it judges worthy, and all the ideas of which is is ashamed. Hold onto nothing. Do not bring with you one thought the past has taught, or one believe you ever learned before from anything. Forget this world, forget this course, and come with wholly empty hands unto your God (W-pI.189.7:2-5).

In other words, everything that makes us special and unique must be surrendered. Only then can we discover what is actually holy. Only then can we discover what is true for all of us, pointing unerringly at the unity that underlies the whole of existence.

Miracles are the mechanism of this surrender and the correlated discovery. When we move from fear to love, we naturally give attention only to what joins us, discarding as unreal that which would separate us. We realize that what is true for one is true for all, and in this realization our shared divinity is raised from a spark to a flame and from a flame to a divine conflagration.

Practically, this sugars out in service, nonviolence and our ongoing commitment to transformation into the image of Christ. We are called to meet all of life with equanimity and openness – to see not with the ego but with the Holy Spirit. Love, peace and understanding cease to be only words or merely concepts. They become a lived reality, pointing the way to the state of coherence and resonance that is our shared identity and home.

By recognizing spirit, miracles adjust the levels of perception and show them in proper alignment. This places spirit at the center, where it can communicate directly (T-1.I.30:1-2).

By affirming our identity as spirit and de-emphasizing our identification with the body, the miracle brings all levels of perception into alignment with Truth. This creates a sense of peace and order in us which naturally extends outward to all our brothers and sisters. We call this extension “communication.” It is the opposite of projection.

“Alignment” here does not refer to some straight line or hierarchy implicit in the cosmos but rather to a more general harmony, a coherence, where all is well and all things are in their rightful place and one knows this and their knowing is a form of participation. It is a form of being coherent, of creating coherently. Imagine a garden with the tomatoes here, the basil there and the sunflowers over yonder. Everything is in order according to what it is; there is no deviation anywhere.

Our bodies perceive the world – they bring the world forth – through varying senses such as sight or sound or smell. Emotions arise – anxiety, anger, guilt, anticipation. These are accompanied by physical symptoms – accelerated heart beat, sweaty palms, tension headaches. And we act from this state – saying yes, saying no, hiding this and revealing that. All these experiences are named and categorized by the intellect, which is yet another level of physical experience. In this way, every thought, every emotion, and every sensation reflects perception.

At the center of all this activity – the center where it still and quiet – resides Spirit. Spirit interprets all the data, discerning patterns on a rubric with two questions: is it love or is it a cry for love? And it knows – because of Who created it, and from Whom it cannot be separated – that love is always the correct response to both. Spirit directs us unfailingly accordingly.

“Center” here can be understood to refer to awareness or consciousness. It is the experience of the holy instant, in which past and future dissolve, taking with them all aspects of self and world that depend on time. At the center is the true self, the being in which the light of God shines and through which all experience is recognized and known. At the center is Christ.

When Christ is our center, then we know order, and perception of the divine order “on earth as it is in Heaven” becomes inevitable. We know that we are extensions of God in Creation, and that we share this identity with all of life. In this way, communication is enhanced, both with our brothers and sisters, and with the Holy Spirit and ultimately with God.

Learning of Christ is easy, for to perceive with Him involves no strain at all. His perceptions are your natural awareness, and it is only distortions you introduce that tire you. Let the Christ in you interpret for you, and do not try to limit what you see by narrow little beliefs that are unworthy of God’s Son (T-11.VI.3:7-9).

Miracles restore a sense of order to our living by placing us in direct contact with the Voice for God, Whose direction and guidance always lead to a state of happiness and peace, allowing us to become of greater service to one another, thus reinforcing order in our living. Miracles are both iterative and generative.

It is helpful to remember that perception is inherently flawed, because the ego always interprets in terms of the past, which can only serve its goal of sustained conflict. Yet the past, because it is gone, has no causative power. It is fundamentally illusory. Therefore, the ego’s interpretation is always wrong. If you start with an error, then you end with an error.

The miracle allows us to release this flawed approach to understanding perception, and to interpret it instead with the Holy Spirit, Who sees only opportunities to learn – yet again – that we are Love Itself and Love holds everything. This is all we need to know, and all we can know.

Miracles praise God through you. They praise Him by honoring His creations, affirming their perfection. They heal because they deny body-identification and affirm spirit-identification (T-1.I.29:1-3).

Yet the miracle does not merely transform us as individuals; it does not induce forms of healing that reinforce the experience of separation under a guise of healing. Their capacity for healing includes our brothers and sisters by definition. To leave anyone out would no longer be love (e.g. T-7.V.5:7). To be miraculous is to be -by definition – communal. It takes two to be one.

Inclusion is used here as a form of love. We honor our brothers and sisters – we respect them and love them – because they are God’s creations. It’s not because of what they do or don’t do, say or don’t say. It’s because of their Source, which we cannot see apart from them. The Source and its effects are one. Critically, our recognition of our brothers and sisters as Creations of God – which is their relationship with God – is simultaneously our recognition of our relationship with God.

In this way, miracles unite us directly with all our brothers and sisters (T-1.II.3:6), without exception or condition. A Course in Miracles is clear and unwavering: miracles are “a sign of love among equals” (T-1.II.3:4).

God’s creations are perfect because they exist in perfect communion with their Creator; we are not made in the image of the physical but of the spiritual. Perfection does not have a form. Miracles heal precisely because they correct the misperceptions of ego, the false belief that we are bodies, forms in any way, which belief is what separates us from our true nature (which is formless), and thus from Creation itself (which is formlessness).

Thus, the healing that miracles bring forth always includes a realized shift in identity away from the physical and towards the spiritual. We realize that we are not bodies, and that our brothers and sisters are not bodies either, which is what ensures our total equality and our total freedom.

By affirming our fundamentally spiritual nature, miracles remind us of our inherent wholeness, which is untouched by the fears, guilt and other limitations that are hallmark effects of separation, our experience of being bodies in a world.

Again, the miracle is a shift in identification away from that level of experience. It does not denigrate experiece; it does not oppose experience. Rather, it teaches us how to see beyond experience to what God creates endlessly perfectly. This shift in seeing benefits all our brothers and sisters because we are united in the correction of the mistaken belief that a mind can exist apart from its Creator. There is nothing left to separate.

Finally, it can be helpful to remember that miracles are forms of praise – they praise God and Creation by recognizing in all things only wholeness, and the light in which wholeness is made real for us. They praise God and Creation because they are the Source in which the cosmos and all life are brought forth and have their meaning.

Miracles are a way of earning release from fear. Revelation induces a state in which fear has already been abolished. Miracles are thus a means and revelation is an end (T-1.I.28:1-3).

Use of the word “earning” here is distracting – it implies contingency. If I do this, then God will do that. And God does not work that way. God does not bargain or set conditions.

Rather, it is helpful to think that miracles are the means by which release from fear is experienced in a context of separation. Fear is not real; yet our belief in separation causes it to seem very real indeed. The miracle penetrates our erroneous belief in separation and fear, and induces as much healing – as much love – as we are capable of accepting in that moment.

Bargaining and negotiation never enter into it. Quid pro quo never enters into it.

Still, miracles are a means to an end, where the end is a personal experience of revelation, which “reflects the original form of communication between God and His creations, involving the extremely personal sense of creation sometimes sought in physical relationships (T-1.II.1:2).

Revelation is temporary but, in that state, fear is completely abolished. In that state, there is total realization of oneness with God, which is our true identity. In bodies, revelation comes and goes. That to which it unerringly points does not.

In this sense, A Course in Miracles breaks with much of traditional Christianity. In ACIM, revelation is a direct experience of unity with God; it is not an exchange of information, resulting in updated scripture or other texts. It is more in the nature of a cosmic hug in which the belief system underlying dualism dissolves. We remember what we are in truth and so we are in truth. We remember God and our self simultaneously because they cannot be otherwise remembered.

Always, the focus in ACIM is on our personal interior transformation in the context of separation. We move from separated beings alone in the cosmos, pitted against fate and doomed to suffer and die, all the way to Christ, in which the knowledge that Love holds everything naturally brings about the end of doubt and fear. This transformation is reflected in our acceptance of Love over fear, which is the very experience the miracle induces. And our living changes – it softens, becomes gentler and kinder, more open and more welcoming – accordingly.

Transformation as induced by the study and practice of A Course in Miracles is not a matter of attainment. It’s not something we get, much less something we can sell. It doesn’t separate us from others; it joins us. There is nothing special about the one who experiences the miracle. And in revelation, there is no individual at all to subsequently claim some special insight or gift as a result of the revelation.

Indeed the focus of the miracle is in undoing any egoic inclination to specialness or uniqueness for any reason whatsoever. As the eighteenth principle of miracles makes clear, miracles establish our equality before and as God. There is no difference anywhere to be found, within or without.