The Twenty-Eighth Principle of A Course in Miracles

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.