This is the last segment on the Principles of Miracles from A Course in Miracles. The first two in this batch say, "Wholeness is the perceptual content of miracles. They thus correct or atone for the faulty perception of lack. A major contribution of miracles is their strength in releasing you from a faulty or false sense of isolation, deprivation and lack."
This is very comforting because we're being encouraged to understand that seeking miracles, thinking about miracles, being tapped into miracle mindset will bring us an enormous sense of comfort under any circumstances in which we're feeling a sense of scarcity, lack or deprivation. So that's a straightforward benefit to cultivating miracle mindsets.
The other day, I was reading something in the local press here that said cities in Florida are being more aggressive about foreclosure on people's properties, in some cases for things as trivial as not having mowed their lawns. If they're getting complaints regularly and the homeowner is not doing anything to fix it, it seems as though the city can seize one's property and sell it from out under them. Then there are much tougher cases in which people have had various "Catch 22"s and they can't get the money to fix the problem: such as fixing a faulty roof, meanwhile the faulty roof is preventing them from getting the loan they need to fix it. Just endless, circular things like this. People are losing properties that have been in their families for over 100 years. I was thinking about that and I see how that kind of a nightmare can descend on some somebody and just choke them out of their beloved property. The judge may say, "Sorry, you had enough chances. We're taking it from you. We're selling it for a fraction of what it's worth, and you've already paid the mortgage. Your family has already paid the mortgage." That just seems entirely unfair. But it's all about scarcity, deprivation, lack. I could see how one could really feel that. So what we're doing with the miracle mindset is making sure we're protected from those scary nightmarish places and then helping other people as well.
In Principle 41 where it says the word, "wholeness," that would be similar to or equivalent to the word "abundance" that sometimes is used in these contexts. Abundance in all dimensions of life. So even wellness, resilience, to have joy, to have happiness, to have fulfillment, all these different things, because all the dimensions of life are thriving and there aren't a pile of nightmares that one is constantly struggling with.
Then, as we've seen with many of these principles and in other parts of our study, the word "atonement" or "atoning," this comes up a lot. And what that simply encourages us to understand is that no matter what kinds of mistakes we've made personally, the love of God, higher power, inner Christ, inner Buddha, Allah, any of it, that love of our source fixes all of that. If we'll just tune in, there's no error we've committed that can't be set straight, so that we don't experience the limiting consequences of mistakes that we've made. So that's another aspect of the wholeness. And in ACIM, atonement, as I always emphasize, doesn't have any kind of sacrifice associated with it. It's just a free gift. There's nothing that had to die in order to pay for it or substitute for it. Again, I'm not making light of those traditions through the history of humanity's, religious evolution; I think that can be said, that they've been important for us to understand. But it's a real gift to be at a stage in the evolution of spiritual consciousness where we can say that it's a free gift. If you just pick it up and use it, you get all the benefits of a clean slate each time. And we talk a bit about Ho'oponopono as a kind of a Hawaiian variant on that cleaning process.
So the final note in this treatment of these principles for today comes from principles 47 and 48. It says, "The miracle is a learning device that lessens the need for time. It establishes an out of pattern time interval, not under the usual laws of time. In this sense, it is timeless. The miracle is the only device at your immediate disposal for controlling time. Only revelation, transcends. It has nothing to do with time at all."
So I like the language here. It's very technological. It says, "the miracle is the only device for controlling time that you have at your disposal." So if something looks like it's going to be a painfully long, miserable nightmare, if we get into miracle mindset and do the things that are connected to miracle mindset, we can shorten the amount of time and even actually reduce it completely so that we can wake up from the nightmare pretty quickly. This is a vert cool concept, reminding me of a Star Trek environment, as I like to say.
Now I'd like to pivot into a section of my book, Nightmares to Miracles, particularly chapter four which is about mind training. Now what exactly is "mind training?" This is a great concept, in a nutshell, tools that enable us to maintain our resilience and consistency around miracle mindsets. The opposite of mind training is mind wandering, in which we, for instance, with the illustrations that I gave about the foreclosure on homes, it would be very easy to get into the ego's nightmarish and threatening messages that you're going to lose your property, you don't have the money, lawyers are too expensive, the city's out to get you, and so on. It's just one thing after another that's all doom and gloom. And that's what the course refers to as mind wandering. It's the act of going into this fearful arena where scarcity, lack, deprivation, and all kinds of other horrible things are waiting for us. Mind training, however is the deliberate, almost minute by minute holding of a frame of mind or a mindset that plugs us into divine abundance.
From chapter three of my book which illustrates The Integrated Model of the Psyche, I'm trying to highlight here is that mind training is really about going vertically down from the most superficial parts of the psyche and what we see around us in the physical world, down through all these layers, down to this sort of the love of God. The practical area is all the things that we have to learn to accomplish your goals, whether it's to have a more enjoyable relationship with your kids or your spouse or to find a spouse or to let go of a spouse or to build a billion dollar business or whatever the goal is that the person wants to do. And then in the blueprint area I set up as a community teaching. There are two aspects of the psyche that we have to track. Firstly, is the accumulated pain over one's lifetime, starting with birth, and then how one was parented in the first days in school and all the traumatizing, little nicks and cuts that we've gone through, and that those are the source of the mind wandering or pain points. Secondly, we have a malicious ego that wants to stimulate more anxiety, fear, and guilt around those pain points. So I set those things up right at the beginning without even knowing much from the client other than what their goals are and what they're struggling with. So after that, then it becomes easier and easier to keep teaching ways in which to back away from just going into the dark dismal place and using the pattern interrupts.
So in chapter four of my book there is a list of mind training tools that are available at your disposal and I will briefly touch on a few of them:
Most people are familiar with affirmations. Saying things like, "I am safe. I am strong. I am whole. I am healed." In a more even specific way, these are Affirmations I will provide a client very quickly and say, you might want to start using these. Just repeat them a lot to yourself to calm yourself down. And a lot of them are rooted in ACIM, so they have much bigger teachings behind them.
Guided imagery, visualizations, or all kinds of audio programs are also great tools. There is a ton of content available on YouTube for this purpose. You can create your own Vision boards. You can utilize Hypnosis programs. These can be especially helpful with things where clients feel stuck in a way. For example, somebody wants to learn how to drive, but they're in their late 50s or early 60s. They've never driven, they're phobic, and are terribly worried that something bad is going to happen. Hypnosis programs help really amazingly and I discovered Hypnosis programs through my struggle with passing my German scholarly translation exam. I couldn't pass it my first years in the doctoral program and then I stumbled on a Hypnosis program to learn German and probably within six months, I had passed that exam.
Then you've got subliminals and triminals. I love putting those on my computer. They run in the background, unobtrusively. So as much time as I spend on the computer, I'm doing mind training using audio subliminals and triliminals video subliminals.
Then there's meditation and mindfulness. These are quite popular.
Then the book itself, A Course in Miracles, which is a huge rubric under which we do our work for miracle mindsets. I'm a big believer in this book and I believe it saved my life when I was in the hospital with congestive heart failure in 2014.
Another tool is Ho'oponopono which is a "cleaning" technique that I do almost in every first session, even if it's just a free complimentary call with a prospective client who might not become a client. Once I know their pain point that's blocking what they're trying to accomplish, or that they've wrestled with regard to their practical goals, I then do an exercise with them in which I say, I'm going to say, please delete my negative programming, and I want you to echo it with me. A
The next tool is brain entrainment. I'm convinced this is why disco is so popular and why nightclubs are so popular. It's about pulsing sound, light, and other energy that's being to the mind and gets us into a trance state in which we're able to enjoy altered states of consciousness for beneficial purposes.
Then there is virtual reality: all kinds of computer simulated VR gadgets and so on to help us learn things, transform, overcome other psychological issues and challenges. I see a lot of therapeutic potential to all of that.
Then finally, Nootropics, which are drugs and other sort of natural and chemical supplements. If anyone has ever seen the movie Limitless, it's a great movie about the potential for this whole area.
So those are some of the mind training tools that I highly recommend taking a look at, and again, these are practical everyday, often tangible, techniques for developing your miracle mindset and escaping any nightmare reality you may find yourself immersed in. For more information about this, the One Page Mind Trainer in my book contains links with resources for each mind training tool for you to practice and take advantage of.
