The Thirty-Sixth Principle of A Course in Miracles

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.

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