The miracles 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, when we realize both our separation from reality but also our natural capacity to bridge that gap, almost as if it had never existed. Our inclination to oneness is no joke; it can be recognized and nurtured. It can be, literally, 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 is what the miracle makes clear, over and over and over. What is holy does not exclude anything, what is sacred is not partial.
Thus, the “universal mark of God” is the perception of wholeness, and it manifests as remembering that the other – a human being, a black bear, a sunflower or a distant star – is our own self. The cosmos is forever gazing at itself in love. We share one function, and we 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 aventure in holiness, and whose work of love continues 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 as a distortion of reality. It seeks the truth beyond the 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 say. Our intellectual understanding often precedes application. But truly, living it is also easy, so long as we do not insist on the old prerogatives. We have to be humble and willing, at depths that are sometimes frightening and discomforting. What sustains the illusion of separation – religion, nationality, ethnicity, personality – must be surrendered. We cannot carry anything with us when we go to the well.
What makes us special and unique must be surrendered. Only then can we discover what is holy. Only then can we discover what is true for all of us, 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 what would separate us. We realize that what is true for one is true for all, and in this realization our shared divinity is brought from a spark to a flame to a divine conflagration.
Practically, this shakes out in service, nonviolence, and the ongoing commitment to transformation in 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 home.
