The Fifty Miracle Principles
of A Course in Miracles
by Kenneth Wapnick
Principle 24
Miracles enable you to heal the sick and raise the dead because you made sickness and death yourself, and can therefore abolish both. You are a miracle, capable of creating in the likeness of your Creator. Everything else is your own nightmare, and does not exist.
Only the creations of light are real.
One of the signs that the Bible says people used, to know that Jesus was the Messiah, was that he healed the sick and raised the dead. But, obviously, the Bible does not teach that we made sickness and death ourselves. This is what we talked about earlier. The mind made up everything in this world. A Course in Miracles really means this in the all-inclusive cosmic sense of making up the entire physical universe. For our purposes here, it is saying that we made the body and the body's laws, which means we made the laws of sickness and we made the laws of death. Because we did that, we can change them.
The Holy Spirit does not heal the sick body because He did not make the body sick. What the Holy Spirit does is heal the guilt in our minds that made the body sick by helping us change our minds about the guilt we chose. This is a very important distinction to keep in mind, so you do not fall into the trap of asking the Holy Spirit's help for something in the material world. All that does, again, is make the world real, just as you should not ask the Holy Spirit for a parking space. That is a favorite one with people who work with the Course.
Q: But when you use your mind to project things like that, that is not necessarily calling on the Holy Spirit. That is using your mind.
A: There is a difference between the psychic and the spiritual. The psychic is something that we do with our minds; the spiritual is something we do with His mind. There is a big difference between the two. And we can get very impressed with the psychic things that we are all capable of. Finding parking spots may be one of them. But to attribute that to the Holy Spirit is a mistake, because He does not do things in the world; He does things in our minds. There is no world. To believe the Holy Spirit operates in the world is to make Him as insane as we are: seeing a problem where there is no problem. The problem is not that you need a parking space; the problem is your concern about needing the parking space.
You are telling Him that you need a parking spot. The better prayer would be to ask His help to relieve you of any concern that you find a parking spot. How do you know where you are supposed to park? Maybe you are supposed to park three blocks away from where you think you are supposed to park, because of reasons you do not know about. Maybe you are supposed to park three blocks away, because on your walk from where your car is parked to where you are supposed to go, you are going to meet someone you are supposed to meet, that you otherwise would never know about. In other words, it is a very subtle way of trying to control Him and tell Him what you need, and often we will ask His help in those things that we think we are saving time on, but maybe we would save time even more by making that three-block walk and having certain experiences which would enable us to save time on our Atonement path.
Q: I am getting a double message here. On one hand, I am hearing you say that it does not make any difference if you project a parking space or what you do as long as you do not attribute that to the Holy Spirit. But now you are saying the opposite, which is do not project parking spaces or any such thing -- they are all in the mind.
A: Right, I am saying both things. I am saying that the best thing is not to use magic at all, but most of us are not up to that all the time. The best thing would be to ask the Holy Spirit, "What should I do?" rather than to project the parking spot. What I am saying is that there is nothing wrong in doing that, except that I do not think it will save you the time that asking the Holy Spirit will, in terms of saving you time in working through your own guilt.
Later on, the Course talks about how the Holy Spirit perceives totally, which would be another way of saying He perceives the whole situation. We usually perceive a specific thing; a specific need at some point. I do not want to walk ten blocks or ten minutes or this or that. I want to get to this appointment on time; I do not want to be stuck in traffic. We just see it within a very narrow band in our experience. He sees it in a much larger plan, and that is why the more open we can be, the more quickly we can learn His lessons and be healed.
Q: When I first started using the Course I used to ask the Holy Spirit for a myriad of things, and now my feeling is His only function really is to teach me forgiveness. I do not even ask for things any more; I just keep asking Him to help me be less resistant about being a forgiving and loving person. That is really the only way I see the Holy Spirit's function. I do not think He is here to tell me where I should be and what I should do. I do not know if I am wrong or right, but...
A: That is the whole idea. What you pray for, if you find yourself in a specific situation that is giving you anxiety, is for help in not being anxious, rather than praying for help that the situation be resolved in the way that you need it to be.
Q: In light of what you said about sickness, I wonder how you get sick. What brings us back to being healthy again?
A: You get sick by projecting the guilt in your mind onto your body, and forgiveness brings you back to health. If you get a cold, then what you should do, after you take aspirins or cold pills or whatever else, is ask for help in forgiving whomever it is you have not forgiven. If no one comes to mind, just start wherever you are.
Q: But we know that because we are here listening to you. How about those who do not know that? How do they get well?
A: Either by changing their minds through forgiveness or by using some form of magic. Magic works; there is no question about that. But that is not going to relieve the underlying cause of the cold, or whatever the sickness is. Most people in the world go through solving problems on this level, one problem after another. As I said earlier, we are getting more and more sophisticated at solving our problems, which means the ego is becoming more and more sophisticated in making problems up. And it never ends. The only thing that ends the whole cycle is to forgive. That is why we are still fighting the same wars today that we were fighting centuries and millennia ago.
Q: So you are saying then to concentrate on the cause not the effect.
A: Right. The cause would always be some aspect of guilt.
"You are a miracle, capable of creating in the likeness of your Creator." Obviously, when it says you are a miracle, "miracle" is used in a much different context from how we are talking about it. We are capable of creating in the likeness of our Creator. That is what creation is. We extend our spiritual Self, as Christ, just as God extended His spiritual Self in creating us. Remember, creation is not possible in this world.
"Everything else is your own nightmare, and does not exist. Only the creations of light are real." That is a very clear statement of the Level One distinction between truth and illusion. Creating in the likeness of God, which is on the level of spirit, is the only truth; nothing else exists in this world. It seems to, but everything else is nothing but a bad dream. At the moment we separated from God, we fell asleep. Everything that followed from that, this whole carpet of time, this whole world of evolution, is nothing more than a bad dream.
Let me mention, because it does not come up in these principles, that the goal of Course in Miracles is not to awaken from the dream. The goal is to change the nightmare dream into a happy dream. In the happy dream, we are still living within this world of illusion, the world of separate bodies, but no longer projecting any guilt onto it. It is living in this world with what is called "true perception." That is what the Course terms "the real world": it is a world totally without sin in our minds. That is the goal of the Course. Then it says that God takes the last step Himself, and that is what finally awakens us from the dream entirely. But the focus of Course in Miracles is to help us live in this world, which is a world of the body, but without the projections of guilt.