Thoughts on “What is a Miracle?” in the ACIM Workbook
(Full text of “What is a Miracle?” in the workbook)
A miracle is a correction of a misunderstanding, just as the Course explains. It is a correction in the way you view what to you seems like a disturbance in your life experience. A miracle is a reversal, it undoes the effect of a misunderstanding and allows you to receive reality as it is.
It reverses the chain of events that led to your being locked in the looped pattern of the images you were seeing in the world: continued focus on form, leading to attachment and identification with form, leading to feelings of unease because of the limitation this brings about, leading to feelings of unease becoming a building block for the mind, leading to the mind projecting the unease into an image in the world, leading to taking the image as the reason and justification for your feeling of unease, leading to the looped pattern.
The reversal happens on the inside, through the setting free of the disturbing image, through your forgiveness of it. The effect is peace of mind and may very well be observable on the outside. A miracle in outside circumstances is always the result of a change of mind.
You have intended to set the image free. And now the mind is free to do what it was created to do: using Source’s pure and perfect qualities as building blocks in order to extend them into creative extension of Purity and Perfection.
Don’t forget that miracles are the order of the day in Creation: perfection meeting perfection and leading to an intensifying awareness of Perfection (and Beauty, and Freedom, and so forth). This dynamic is called a miracle in the situation when prior to the experience of this dynamic the energy stream had been locked in a looped pattern. The opening up of the loop, the entering in of relief and Light, the stopping of offering feelings of unease as building blocks for the mind and changing them to feelings that are aligned with creative qualities such as Love, Joy and Beauty, and the subsequent extension by the mind of this new content resulting in new images, this is all the restoration or reversal that is called a miracle.
How do you invite it in? By letting go of any investment whatsoever in a disturbing image, wherever it may present itself in the world, in relationships, in the body. Even the slightest disturbance is an indication of a misunderstanding of who you are, it is an indication of a focus and attachment to something you are not. Tell yourself:
This is a confusing/disturbing/distressing/painful image. I don’t have to understand it or reason with it, I just need to know that it will self-repeat if I let it. I am now setting the image free, I am inviting the Holy Spirit in my mind and I am directing the focus of my mind to wholesome and pure building blocks that come to me from Source in order to align with them, such as Gentleness, Kindness, Patience, Peace, Beauty, Freedom, Joy, Love.
See also comments on ACIM Workbook lesson 159 “I give the miracles I have received.”