Each day should be devoted to miracles. The purpose of time is to enable you to learn how to use time constructively. It is thus a teaching device and a means to an end. Time will cease when it is no longer useful in facilitating learning (T-1.I.15:1-4).
In A Course in Miracles (ACIM), the statement “each day should be devoted to miracles” should not be understood as necessarily advocating for disregarding clocks or calendars. Rather, it addresses our psychological relationship with time and how that relationship can be used constructively to facilitate the undoing of separation.
We might restate by saying that time exists in order to facilitate the acceptance of atonement for our selves.
A Course in Miracles suggests that time is a teaching device and a means to an end, rather than an end in and of itself. There’s nothing wrong with using time to schedule a vacation or to ensure that we can meet for coffee together. But its ultimate function is to facilitate spiritual learning that will transform us by showing us how to accept Love and thus undo fear and its effects.
Miracles are the means by which this shift in perception – from fear to love, from interpretation to knowledge – occurs. When we devote each day to miracles, we are consciously choosing to use time for the the Holy Spirit’s purpose of ending the separation and restoring our minds to Love and the extension of Forgiveness as our spiritual practice.
In practice, this means giving attenion to the condition of our mind on a daily – an hourly, even a minute-by-minute – basis. We want to align our thoughts with God’s Will – we want to think the way God thinks and we want to NOT think as God would not think.
When our minds are aligned this way, they produce effects in the world that are compassionate and gentle and guide all our brothers and sisters to ever-deepening experience of peace and happiness. This happens in the context of separation in order to undo – in time – separation.
This work is thus a “constructive” use of time, because it emphasizes letting go of ego-based perceptions in favor of a more loving and coherent view of the world and our place in it.
As our learning advances in this area, our relationship with time naturally shifts. Indeed, in time, the need for time as a teaching tool will be undone. In other words, when we full embrace our identity as Creations of God, creating like unto our Creator, then we will at last have transcending ego-based interpretations of time (essentially, a journey from birth to death with a lot of suffering in-between) in favor of the timelessness of Love.
Again, this is not about taking Saturday off or meeting for dinner at 7 p.m. rather than 6, or celebrating Christmas on December 25. That’s just the form time takes in the world.
Rather, our focus is on how we are using time. If we are using it to strengthen and nurture miracle-minded thinking, and if working miracles is our sole function in the context of time – then the form time takes will shift and we will become happier and less-stressed.
Time is a limit that needs not bind us. Miracles demonstrate how this is so.
