A Course in Miracles (as channeled by Jesus)
CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION TO MIRACLES
This is a course in miracles. It is a required course. Only
the time you take it is voluntary. Free will does not mean
that you can establish the curriculum. It means only that you
may elect what you want to take at a given time.
The course does not aim at teaching the meaning of love,
for that is beyond what can be taught. It does aim, however,
at removing the blocks to the awareness of love’s Presence,
Which is your natural inheritance. The opposite of love is
fear, but what is all-encompassing can have no opposite.
This course can therefore be summed up very simply in this
way:
Nothing real can be threatened
Nothing unreal exists.
Herein lies the Peace of God.
Principles of Miracles
1. There is no order of difficulty among miracles. One is
not ” harder” or ” bigger” than another. They are all the
same. All expressions of love are maximal.
2. Miracles as such do not matter. The only thing that
matters is their Source, Which is far beyond human evaluation.
3. Miracles occur naturally as expressions of love. The
real miracle is the love that inspires them. In this sense,
everything that comes from love is a miracle.
4. All miracles mean life, and God is the Giver of life.
His Voice will direct you very specifically. You will be told
all you need to know.
5. Miracles are habits and should be involuntary. They
should not be under conscious control. Consciously selected
miracles can be misguided.
6. Miracles are natural. When they do NOT occur something
has gone wrong.
7. Miracles are everyone’s right, but purification is
necessary first.
8. Miracles are healing because they supply a lack in that
they are performed by those who temporarily have more for
those who temporarily have less.
9. Miracles are a kind of exchange. Like all expressions of
love, which are ALWAYS miraculous in the true sense, the
exchange transcends the physical laws. They bring MORE love both
to the giver AND the receiver.
10. The use of miracles as spectacles to INDUCE belief is
wrong; or, better, is a misunderstanding of their purpose.
They are really used FOR and BY believers.
11. Prayer is the medium of miracles. Prayer is the natural
communication of the created with the Creator. Through prayer
love is received, and through miracles love is expressed.
12. Miracles are thoughts that are put into real world action. Thoughts can represent lower-order or higher-order reality. This is the basic distinction
between intellectualizing and thinking. One makes the physical
and the other creates the spiritual, and we believe in what we
make or create.
13. Miracles are both beginnings and endings. They thus
alter the temporal order. They are always affirmations of
rebirth, which seem to go back, but really go forward. They
undo the past in the present, and thus release the future.
14. Miracles bear witness to truth. They are convincing
because they arise from conviction. Without conviction they
deteriorate into magic, which is mindless, and therefore
destructive; or rather, the uncreative use of mind.
15. Each day should be devoted to miracles. The purpose of
time is to enable man to learn to use it constructively. Time
is thus a teaching device, and a means to an end. It will
cease when it is no longer useful in facilitating learning.
16. Miracles are teaching devices for demonstrating that it
is more blessed to give than to receive. They simultaneously
increase the strength of the giver and supply strength to the
receiver.
17. Miracles are the transcendence of the body. They are
sudden shifts into invisibility, away from a sense of lower-order
reality. That is why they heal.
18. A miracle is a service. It is the maximal service one
individual can render another. It is a way of loving your
neighbor as yourself. The doer recognizes his own and his
neighbor’s inestimable worth simultaneously.
19. Miracles make minds one in God. They depend on
cooperation, because the Sonship is the sum of all the Souls
God created. Miracles therefore rest on the laws of eternity,
not of time.
20. Miracles reawaken the awareness that the Spirit, not
the body, is the altar of truth. This is the recognition that
leads to the healing power of the miracle.