Sean Reagan

Miracles are examples of right thinking, aligning your perceptions with truth as God created it (T-1.I.36:1).

Thinking can be given to the Holy Spirit or to the ego. Ego uses it to make and extend conflict, ever reinforcing the grounds for division and competition. The Holy Spirit uses it to emphasize unity and peace.

“Right” thinking is thinking that is guided by the Holy Spirit. It takes the world we perceive – the world brought forth by the body – and uses it to demonstrate that nothing real can be threatened and nothing unreal exists.

Ego-based thinking is rooted in fear, judgement and separation. Spirit-based thinking is founded on love, forgiveness and oneness. It is easy to dismiss these as mere abstractions, but they have psychological and behavioral correlates. The one we choose guides our behavior, shapes our relationships, and – through the principle of recursion – shapes our ongoing experience of both self and other.

On this view, a miracle is the shift in our thinking away from fear and towards love. It arises from the decision to listen to the Holy Spirit rather than the ego. In concrete and context-specific ways, when we are aligned with love, we perceive our brothers and sisters as both loving and worthy of love. Regardless of their actions, individually or collectively, we know we are one with them.

The miracle always emphasizes interconnectedness and innocence. And the emphasis always yields nontrivial transformations of behavior – not because that is the site of healing, but because of the underlying belief system upon which we are relying to guide our perception.

We can either perceive a world that is fragmented and violent – one in which only survival matters, and survival is always up to us – or we can perceive a world which God created, in which Love awaits our shared remembrance, and all things become symbols not of separation but the end of separation. The ego does not want us to remember our Creator, much less our place in Creation.

Aligning our perceptions with “truth as God created it” means embracing – and extending – our inherent nature as expressions of God’s Love.

The world itself is beyond change, being merely a momentary perception. In the final sense, this is the true cause for peace. But in the interim, miracles transform our experience of the world, allowing us to perceive a home in which there is no cause for fear, guilt and separation.

Remembering what we are in truth means having our function t heal restored to our awareness. We reclaim our inheritance in Creation – not through fear but Love.

Miracles arise from a miraculous state of mind, or a state of miracle-readiness (T-1.I.43:1).

The question is always what do we want? And how do we know we want it?

It is easy to say we want miracles, but it is hard to clear our mind of the conditioning of the brain, its distractions, biases and confusion. The Course teaches us how to undo that which obstructs Love, but the necessary precedent is our willingness that it be done. Are we ready?

That is the question posed by this principle. Are we ready? But also, how do we know? Most of us will say we are ready. Most of us want to want miracles. But to really want them is to be clear what they will undo – the personal, the private, the privileged – and that is not so easy. Miracles are not about what we get, but what we give up, in order to learn how create the way God creates.

How do we know we are not lying to ourselves?

When we practice A Course in Miracles, in time, we learn that we do not know what we do not know. We realize there are depths to life that we are not yet aware of, and it humbles us. It makes us realize that the utility of our thinking is always conditional; it’s always prone to error, which means it’s always in need of correction.

And this is not a crime against God or nature but it is an opportunity to ask if there is not another way, one that does not seek to know all but rather to live peacefully and resonantly with not-knowing. This is the question the saints and the mystics resolve, not by finding an answer but by living lovingly without the answer.

There is nothing we can do to generate the miraculous state of mind. All we can do is see that we do not presently have it, or that we have it but are unsure if we truly have it, and then see what happens. We see that our will is not perfectly aligned with God, and with Love, and so we ask for help. We become open. “Not my will Lord but yours be done.”

To say that and mean it is a great grace, and a lot of healing is accordingly engendered. It creates a state of conscious awareness – of intentionality – characterized by kindness, gentleness, mercy, curiosity and a willingness to see beyond the surface appearances to the divine truth of our shared unity and interconnectedness.

When we live this way, we are ready to see as the Holy Spirit sees, and not the way the ego sees. We can readily gaze past the fear-based illusion of separation, and see instead the love that underlies Creation and is Creation. We are no longer alone, because everything is given.

We all have this capacity; it is inherent in us because of what we are. As we explore it – as we become willing to let go of anything that obstructs it, even a little – we begin to experience shifts in perception, moving us from fear to love, and into the bountiful peace and happiness that is Love’s gift and effect.

A major contribution of miracles is their strength in releasing you from your false sense of isolation, deprivation and lack (T-1.I.42:1).

The human experience includes loneliness and frustration. We often feel deprived of love or companionship. Hardships abound – people go without food, are subjected to violence, suffer and die. We all know this; we all see this. If it is not our experience today, it might be tomorrow.

We live with uncertainty, and we fear what might happen to us and those we love, and in our fear we make a world in which fear is reasonable. We are, as the Course makes clear over and over, doing this to ourselves.

Miracles teach us that this understanding of ourselves and the world is upside-down. It’s a way of seeing that reflects confusion rather than clarity; it is a distortion of reality rather than a revelation of reality. By gently shifting us from fear-based to love-based modes of thinking, miracles enable us to know reality as God creates it. We don’t have to accept poor translations or painful alternatives

Miracles correct the error that we are incomplete. They undo the belief that God creates unequally. And they heal the mind that seeks to meet its own needs through competition and conflict rather than through communication, coordination and cooperation.

These are actual felt experiences in our lives – they are moments when we rise about petty grievances, or decline to indulge argument, or ask ourselves sincerely if there is another way to look at a situation that feels troubled or broken. We live them out in ways that make us happy and allow us to share our happiness without a lot of drama or conditioning.

Miracle-minded thinking often shows us that we are not alone but in relationship. We are not isolated but connected, joined at levels that bring forth life rather than death, and joy rather than sorrow. We are not problems in need of fixing, but perfect creations of a loving Creator who need only realize their perfection. Love holds everything.

We tend to want bright light experiences. There’s a reason ascended master literature sells the way it does. It reflects our desire for something grand and special. Which is not a crime against God or nature! But miracles are not like that.

Imagine that the world is hard to see. It is cloudy and dark; everything is blurred. You bump into things a lot; you miss opportunities to meld. This is a lonely and painful way to live.

The miracle gently points out that the lens we are using is the problem – the world is not as it appears and so our reaction to it is not real either. And when we accept this, then we can accept a new lens. That is what ACIM does for us – it offers us the Holy Spirit’s translation of our life in the world rather than ego’s.

This is why the miracle is more like switching our a pair of broken glasses for a pair that works. It’s like updating our prescription from one that doesn’t work to one that does. And when we can see clearly, then our response to the world also clarifies. Miracles are ordinary; you work them every day. What the Course does, is allow us to do this more intentionally, and more inclusively.

The move from fear to love corrects our misconception of reality by undoing the effects of fear. In the context of separation, it is given us to remember wholeness and to share the effects of that remembrance with all our brothers and sisters, and all of life.

It’s closer to a party than a therapy session, and closer to a therapy session than surgery, and closer to surgery than suffering. Love holds everything; the miracle has no other lesson to teach us.

Wholeness is the perceptual content of miracles. They thus correct, or atone for, the faulty perception of lack (T-1.I.41:1-2).

One of the hallmarks of separation is a sense of lack, and a corresponding sense of scarcity. There always seems to be something missing – some person or thing, some feeling or idea – that would complete us. We are seekers who do not realize that WHAT we seek is given and present.

Corresponding to – and reinforcing – this experience of lack is a sense of scarcity. What is missing is rare – there’s not enough to go around – and so we have to find it now. When we think this way, we enter into competition with our brothers and sisters. They are seen as threats to our safety and well-being.

This is an obvious error crying out for correction.

The miracle demonstrates wholeness, which is the end of lack and the undoing of scarcity. What is whole is not missing anything, and what is not missing anything cannot be concerned about ideas like scarcity and abundance. God provides, and provides perfectly. We are complete. We have no problems.

But our completion must include a remembrance – and a deep abiding acceptance – of the wholeness and perfection of the other as well. God does not create unequally. If we perceive a reality in which inequality seems justified or logical, then we are perceiving from a state of confusion. Fear-based thinking can only beget separation and its attendant harm.

Love is the other way and, for some of us, A Course in Miracles is the path on which we remember this and bring it into application.

Thus, miracles remind us of wholeness. This reminder might be a glimpse of that unity, it might be a coherent idea about unity, or it might be a dialogue in which we are restored to unity. Either way, a shift in perception occurs – our old thinking is updated and healed, and our will is brought gently into alignment with Creation, in which nothing is missing, and so nothing need be sought or hoarded or hidden away.

When we perceive ourselves as lacking, we can remember this is an error. Errors can be corrected. We can ask the Holy Spirit to restore to awareness that incompletion and fragmentation are ego-driven illusions that serve the cause of conflict rather than peace. We can be open to changing our mind. We can let our living reflect a new belief system, premised on our inherent wholeness which is our relationship with all of existence.

It’s helpful to note the way that miracles “correct” or “atone” for faulty perception. We are not punished; there is reprimand. It is a simple question of adjusting our thinking so that it naturally accords with reality as God created it. It’s more like polishing our glasses so that we can see better than anything else.

Miracles are simple and clear, but their effects have long range and impact. Our shared willingness to see ourselves and others as God knows us allows us to to experience our inherent wholeness, itself a mark of the kinship of all beings. What else would we want when everything is given?