Sean Reagan

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.

A miracle is a universal blessing from God through me to all my brothers. It is the privilege of the forgiven to forgive (T-1.I.27:1-2).

Miracles extend through Jesus to all the world, which makes clear the interconnectedness of all life without consideration of the limits imposed by space and time. Jesus blesses us now; Christs to come bless us now. And we are the means by which the miracle is extends, throughout time and space, ultimately transcending both. Without us there are no miracles, and without miracles there is no blessing to be shared.

We are in this together and together we are one.

The principle makes clear that forgiveness – which, because it is informed by miracles, creates miracles – is a gift from God to us. As we remember our nature in and as Creation, we naturally extend that remembance to our brothers and sisters. We remember the cause for peace together, and we become happy together. Forgiveness is fundamentally a shared experience. It is an illusion of unity that undoes the need for any other illusion.

“Privilege” is an interesting word in this context. It comes from the Latin for privacy and law, essentially suggesting that our personal transformation from fear-based thinking to love – which is the deeply intimate and restorative experience of joining with the Holy Spirit where and as we are now – sets in us a resonsibility for sharing. It confirms that healing, in order be healing, must be shared. It is a privilege to know this, and the privilege inspires us to share it.

Note that this is the first moment in A Course in Miracles where Jesus assumes the first person (though, for what it is worth, it is not the first time Jesus used the first person in early drafts of the material). The effect of this lexical choice is nontrivial. Relationship with Jesus is essential to our program of salvation. It is in that relationship that our right relationship to Creation and, by extension, to God, is established and clarified.

The miracle is a sign that the mind has chosen to be led by me in Christ’s service. The abundance of Christ is the natural result of choosing to follow Him. All shallow roots must be uprooted, because they are not deep enough to sustain you (T-1.V.6:1-3).

One way or the other, as students of the course, we are required to come to terms with the personal and confidential tone the course takes as the direct sharing of the historical Jesus. Believe it or don’t believe it – contextualize it any way you want – but don’t avoid it.

We have a function in salvation: we are called to love in a loveless place, to accept the Atonement for our own selves, and to become responsible for the end of projection. Collectively, these actions bring forth healing. The blessing is given to all, but we receive it one by one. It is by facing Jesus directly that we realize the personal application A Course in Miracles intends for its students. We realize the form it takes in our lives, and we commit to that form with devotion and hope.

A Course in Miracles meets us where we are, but it is incumbent on us to meet the course as well, and to go with it as far as the Holy Spirit invites us to go. This is not merely “paying salvation forward” or even “back.” Rather, it is the living embodiment of healing in our lives in the world. Application, not theory, is the way that we remember God.

Miracles represent freedom from fear. “Atoning” means “undoing.” The undoing of fear is an essential part of the Atonement value of miracles (T-1.I.26.1-3).

The shift in perception that the miracle creates in our mind is always a shift away from fear and towards love. The actual move may be only incidental or appear insignificant. It doesn’t matter. As the first principle of miracles makes clear, “all expressions of love are maximal” (T-1.I.1:4).

Fear and love both appear to us as potential responses in the world. What A Course in Miracles does is invite us to remember that only one of them is actually a real option; the other is an illusion. Therefore, what a miracle does us undo our belief in the unreal, in order to demonstrate that love, not fear in its myriad forms, is our true inheritance (T-in.1:7).

It is in this sense that the Atonement is fundamentally an “undoing.” It changes our mind. It is the active process of correction, which undoes illusion in the present, in order to reveal what was always true, and cannot be otherwise. Atonement clarifies our thinking so that we can know the love of God without the detour into fear manifesting as body-in-world. Without miracles – which are the activity of Atonement – our understanding and practice of Atonement would devolve in rules for behavior, rather than rules for decision.

Decisions are continuous. You do not always know when you are making them. But with a little practice with the ones you recognize, a set begins to form which will see you through the rest. It is not wise to let yourself become preoccupied with every step you take (T-30.I.1:1-4).

This means that in any given situation which feels unmanageable to us – be it a conflict with a family member, an addiction in the body, or an existential crisis in the mind – as ACIM students we are less concerned with updating our behavioral posture in the world, and more interested in undoing the conditions in our mind which led to the error (and its effects) in the first place. By all means go to a twelve-step meeting or take an aspirin. But don’t mistake those actions for healing the sickness of separation; they merely redress some of the symptoms.

Thus, often, our “practice” of A Course in Miracles involves sitting quietly and giving attention to what is, without judgment, without imposing any qualification or condition upon it (which impositions are always attempts to bring past and future into the present in order to minimize its healing effects). When we are still like this, we are able to give attention to the Holy Spirit and allow Him to work in our lives. Childhood memories, workplace drama, family behavioral pattners . . . the Holy Spirit disentangles all of them from what we think we are, thus allowing what we truly are to come forth in the manner of a light.

The dark journey is not the way of God’s Son. Walk in light and do not see the dark companions, for they are not fit companions for the Son of God, who was created of light and in light. The Great Light always surrounds you and shines out from you (T-11.III.4:5-7).

This divine psychotherapy with the Holy Spirit as our therapist is always ongoing, and it is always healing. Sometimes we call this “miracle-minded thinking” or “right-minded thinking.” What we call it doesn’t matter, so long as we are doing it.

Miracles are both causes and effects of miracle-minded thinking, which is always about getting out of our own way in order to allow the Holy Spirit to heal us by restoring to our awareness what we are in Truth, which is beyond the need for healing, because it cannot be other that perfectly whole. This is natural but not easy because we have trained ourselves away from what is natural. Separation takes effort.

This remembrance occurs in time and by degrees. Yet as it gathers strength in us, we learn to trust it. We lean into it. And the further we lean, the more it holds and sustains us, thus enabling even more trust and healing. In this way, Atonement saves us by pointing out that we do not need – and never did need – saving.