There are 50 Miracle Principles right at the beginning of book, A Course in Miracles, so we're going to focus on principles from section 21-30.
Before we dive into that, I want to share that the last several weeks have been an amazing time for me with my clients. I'm beginning to hear feedback from clients like never before about miracle breakthroughs - just one thing after another! Testimonies such as, “I had a friend who was terminally ill, and they got a recent checkup and they're not terminal anymore,” or, “I was waiting for some money to come through, and I was just pounding my head, and then miraculously, the money came through!”
I don’t mean to “brag,” because I always say humbly that I am, in the natural sense, as dumb as a doorknob. I don't know anything from anything, really, compared to what can be learned from the teachings, which make all the difference. I'm just a messenger. As a result of the messages I transmit, there’s this avalanche of miracles being experienced by the people I work with, and it's the most exciting thing to know that what we're doing here is amplifying that process where people can come out of suffering, pain, struggles, and nightmares. I would love to someday begin to invite people to share if they're having miracle breakthroughs related to what we share, or unrelated from some other part of their lives where they get inspiration - perhaps even inviting them to speak on the podcast if they are not too shy.
But now let’s get into the Miracle Principles. So we are going to start with a miracle Principle 21 as we shift over to the topic for today’s article. It says, “Miracles are natural signs of forgiveness. Through miracles you accept God's forgiveness by extending it to others.” That is pretty straightforward in that the whole practice is to experience a sense of divine cleansing of all the things, the many things that cause us fear, guilt, and anger. Of the abundance of the love that we are experiencing from higher power, God, spirit, or however you want to name it, that we are then able to extend that to other people who are holding on to blocks, to their spiritual power. This is sort of the loop, the virtual circle. So that's the first principle that we'll look at.
Principle 24 says, “Miracles enable you to heal the sick and raise the dead because you made sickness and death yourself and can therefore abolish them both. You are a miracle capable of creating the likeness of your creator. Everything else is your own nightmare and does not exist. Only the creations of light are real.” There's a lot to unpack here, but on a very simple level, I want to highlight that this is one of the places in A Course of Miracles where you get the word, “nightmare,” which is also one that I use in the title of my book, Nightmares to Miracles. I wasn't deliberately borrowing this word from A Course in Miracles when I came up with the title of the theme in my book that I thought was fitting, but it's nice to see that there is definite overlap and confirmation of this idea here, that as human beings, individually and collectively, we're all kind of in a “sleep state." Therefore, the things that we experience - sickness, warfare, tragedies of all kinds, environmental conflicts, just everything that we experience - while very palpably real within our lived everyday realities, is described as, of course, as a “nightmare,” or something we can wake up from.
In the first sentence, it says, “Even with things like healing the sick and raising the dead, we can abolish sickness and death because these are things that we brought into existence in sort of the wrong minded part of ourselves.” That's very powerful to hear, that declared without getting into the intricacies of resurrection from the dead and healing radical sicknesses and why everybody isn't doing it, if it's such an available thing (that’s a whole big other conversation) but just the idea that we're on a channel that we turn to that creates these nightmares, whatever they are, and we can switch that channel. That's the basic message there.
The next one is Principle 25, which says, “Miracles are part of an interlocking chain of forgiveness, which, when completed, is the atonement. Atonement works all the time and in all the dimensions of time.” So I highlighted this principle because we spent a whole year on the concept of atonement in ACIM and could easily spend five, if not ten years on this concept, just going deeper and deeper into it. But simply put, here my interest is in making a quick distinction about atonement: on the one hand, atonement is described elsewhere in ACIM as a device, a technological device that God created to help absolve us from all of our mistakes and errors, and then it says the sole responsibility of the miracle workers is to accept atonement for themselves. So we're constantly in the process of accepting atonement, which relieves us or releases us from our accumulated mistakes and trials and tribulations related to all of that, as I mentioned with the first principle. Finally, out of that sense of abundance, we're able to extend this to other people and help them to tap into atonement and release themselves as well.
There's this releasing quality of atonement and here it's saying something which seems very different, that miracles are part of an interlocking chain of forgiveness. All of us collectively in a state of complete forgiveness for everything that's also known as atonement. I find that to be a very cool nuance to this idea of atonement.
Ultimately, ACIM is trying to correct a bunch of misunderstandings about atonement. As human beings, we think that something has to be sacrificed, and very often we think in terms of a blood sacrifice. An animal has to be killed, a person has to be killed, somebody has to be punished to make up for a crime, a misdemeanor, a sin. However, this atonement approach has nothing to do with any of that. It's purely based on the love of God, which is like a type of “spiritual bleach,” which just cleans out whatever the problem is. The love is so powerful that it cleans out everything and restores it to his original christened state; no sacrifice of any kind needed.
The final principle today, is Principle 29. “Now miracles praise God through you. They praise him by honoring God's creations, affirming their perfection. They heal because they deny body identification and affirm spirit identification.” Whenever we see these ideas presented in ACIM, it is not demonizing the body. It's just saying that it's an artifact of the dream state we live in, and it's a bit of a trick intended to make us think that although everything feels so real and palpable to us, we are actually learning to wake up from this trick and to see that spirit identification is where true power lies and that's where miracles come from. A fish, for instance, if it had human cognition and thought, would say that of course water is the only thing that exists. It wouldn't know of the bigger world that's out there, and we're in a similar dilemma. We only know the world that our bodies tend to tell us about. So we're overly identified with the limits that the body puts on things. Spirit is so much bigger and beyond that and that so much of what we're learning here is how to not get tricked into identifying with the body and its limitations as the be all and end all because there's so much.
Now shifting over to the book, Nightmares to Miracles, which is about miracle mindsets for CEOs, executives and entrepreneurs (though anyone can benefit from the book) to transform adversity into success in Health, Wealth, Love and Enlightenment. We're applying the mindset focus to transform adversity into success and then in Health, Wealth, Love and Enlightenment. Previously we looked at the “Three Keys to Miracle Success,” and there are also the “Four Doors to Miracle Success.” So chapter two of this book is all about a method of process or protocol for getting a robust engagement with each of these areas in our lives.
So following the three keys, if you want to focus on health, for instance, there are all sorts of practical things you could study about exercise and nutrition and weight reduction, and there's just a lot of knowledge that we've accumulated and it's all available. The goal may sound like: I want to shed 20 pounds, gain more muscle, do more cardio, go into remission from cancer. Whatever the goal is, state it very clearly, and that's the practical key at work with health. And then in the blueprint key, one wants to list as many different pain points as one is aware of in one's own life, as well as in one's family, anything one knows about negative or adverse health circumstances, diabetes, cancer, heart problems Then what one is doing there is one is doing the cleaning process. We'll talk more about cleaning which is deleting negative programming. The whole of ACIM is about deleting negative programming, or blocks to love. So then in the final goal with the health door, we then focus on the inner genius. What are specific spiritual forms of guidance that we're receptive to that will help us achieve the goals that we have in wellness and undo the negative programming that we're carrying?
So then one can do the same thing with one's wealth goals. Perhaps you want to retire with $5 million in the bank, or $10 million in the bank or in investments, or you want to grow your business to a seven figure business, whatever it is one wants to do. What's the goal in the blueprint key? What's in the way? Doing a thorough inventory about one's experiences with regard to wealth and then cleaning that programming out and then surrendering to higher power to for even deeper specific guidance, sort of like GPS navigational guidance about what to do in the wealth area to achieve one's goals. Then you can do the same thing in love and the same thing in enlightenment.
Love really has to do with romantic relationships for most people, but the circle is much bigger than that. It's one's nuclear family, friendship circles, neighborhood, city, country, even the whole world. It can include plants, animals, pets, etc.
Enlightenment is life with purpose and peace, as a sort of generic way of talking about it. Even more specifically, it’s about this very intentional process of bringing more light into the individual human soul and using that to wake up from the sleep state and darkness that we're in, at least the nightmares.
So those are the four doors, but the final topic for today is that there's this concept of what I call “the malicious ego.” This is a very, very destructive part of every human being's mind. Next month, we'll talk more deliberately about the model of the psyche I've come up with over the years to account for this, but the malicious ego is very destructive, like a bully that doesn't let go of its hold of our minds without a fight. Just like a bully, it will attempt to torture us, drag out the torture, and then eventually kill us in some way, shape or form through an addiction, some sort of chemical dependency, homicide, suicide, just all kinds of things going on with it.
I'm distinguishing the malicious ego from Freud's ego or Carl Jung's ego, where the ego has an important and beneficial function with regard to our defensive apparatus and the subconscious dynamics and so on. I want to highlight that ACIM is very clear that the ego is malicious. This concept of the ego has more interesting and challenging aspects in the context of working with high powered CEOs and leaders as well as other people. It can seem difficult for one to believe that there's a part of the human mind that is bullying us into doing the self destructive things, but it’s true that its tactics are addictive and have a serious stronghold with the intention to keep seducing us to stay stuck to them.
So with the whole introduction of The Three Keys and The Four Doors, The Malicious Ego is a very important piece, because otherwise it just seems like we're on some benevolent, rational journey to let bad things go and to embrace good things. It's a bit more of a fight than that because of the internal bullying.
As a call-to-action in summation of this article, I encourage you to take inventory of where you are in each of the Four Doors. How are you with your health? How are you with your wealth, your love and your enlightenment journeys? The answers from your inventory list may surprise you.
