 A Course in Miracles Introduction 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 can 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. Chapter 1 The Meaning of Miracles Principles of Miracles 1. There is no order of difficulty in 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 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 that 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. 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 reverses 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 a misunderstanding of their purpose. 11. Prayer is the medium of miracles. It is a means of communication of the created with the Creator. Through prayer, love is received and through miracles love is expressed. 12. Miracles are thoughts. Thoughts can represent the lower or bodily level of experience or the higher or spiritual level of experience. One makes the physical and the other creates the spiritual. 13. Miracles are both beginnings and endings and so they 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 you to learn how to use time constructively. It is thus a teaching device and a means to an end. Time will cease when it has no longer useful in facilitating learning. 16. Miracles are teaching devices for demonstrating it is as blessed to give as to receive. They simultaneously increase the strength of the giver and supply strength to the receiver. 17. Miracles transcend the body. They are sudden shifts into invisibility away from the bodily level. That is why they heal. 18. A miracle is a service. It is the maximal service you can render to another. It is a way of loving your neighbor as yourself. You recognize your own and your neighbor's worth simultaneously. 19. Miracles make minds one in God. They depend on cooperation because the Sonship is the sum of all that God created. Miracles therefore reflect 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. 21. Miracles are natural signs of forgiveness. Through miracles you accept God's forgiveness by extending it to others. 22. Miracles are associated with fear only because of the belief that darkness can hide. You believe that what your physical eyes cannot see does not exist. This leads to a denial of spiritual sight. 23. Miracles rearrange perception and place all levels in true perspective. This is healing because sickness comes from confusing the levels. 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. 25. 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. 26. Miracles represent freedom from fear. Atoning means undoing. The undoing of fear is an essential part of the atonement value of miracles. 27. A miracle is a universal blessing from God through me to all my brothers. It is the privilege of the forgiven to forgive. 28. Miracles are a way of earning release from fear. Revolution induces a state in which fear has already been abolished. Miracles are thus a means and revelation is an end. 29. Miracles praise God through you. They praise him by honoring his creations, affirming their perfection. They heal because they deny body identification and affirm spirit identification. 30. By recognizing spirit, miracles adjust the levels of perception and show them in proper alignment. This place is spirit at the center where it can communicate directly. 31. Miracles should inspire gratitude, not all. You should thank God for what you really are. The children of God are holy and the miracle honors their holiness which can be hidden but never lost. 32. I inspire all miracles which are really intercessions. They intercede for your holiness and make your perceptions holy. By placing you beyond the physical laws they raise you into the sphere of celestial order. In this order you are perfect. 33. Miracles honor you because you are lovable. They dispel illusions about yourself and perceive the light in you. They thus atone for your errors by freeing you from your nightmares. By releasing your mind from the imprisonment of your illusions they restore your sanity. 34. Miracles restore the mind to its fullness. By atoning for lack they establish perfect protection. The spirit's strength leaves no room for intrusions. 35. Miracles are expressions of love but they may not always have observable effects. 36. Miracles are examples of right thinking aligning your perceptions with truth as God created it. 37. A miracle is a correction introduced into false thinking by me. It acts as a catalyst breaking up erroneous perception and reorganizing it properly. This places you under the Atonement principle where perception is healed. Until this has occurred knowledge of the divine order is impossible. 38. The Holy Spirit is the mechanism of miracles. He recognizes both God's creations and your illusions. He separates the true from the false by his ability to perceive totally rather than selectively. 39. The miracle dissolves error because the Holy Spirit identifies error as false or unreal. This is the same as saying that by perceiving light darkness automatically disappears. 40. The miracle acknowledges everyone as your brother and mine. It is a way of perceiving the universal mark of God. 41. Wholeness is the perceptual content of miracles. They thus correct or atone for the faulty perception of lack. 42. A major contribution of miracles is their strength in releasing you from your false sense of isolation, deprivation, and lack. 43. Miracles arise from a miraculous state of mind or a state of miracle readiness. 44. The miracle is an expression of an inner awareness of Christ and the acceptance of his atonement. 45. A miracle is never lost. It may touch many people you have not even met and produce undreamed of changes in situations of which you are not even aware. 46. The Holy Spirit is the highest communication medium. Miracles do not involve this type of communication because they are temporary communication device. When you return to your original form of communication with God by direct revelation, the need for miracles is over. 47. 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. 48. The miracle is the only device at your immediate disposal for controlling time. Only revelation transcends it, having nothing to do with time at all. 49. The miracle makes no distinction among degrees of misperception. It is a device for perception correction, effective quite apart from either the degree or the direction of the error. This is its true indiscriminateness. 50. The miracle compares what you have made with creation, accepting what is in the chord with it as true, and rejecting what is out of the chord as false.