The Fifty Miracle Principles of A Course in Miracles
by Kenneth Wapnick
 

Principle 10

The use of miracles as spectacles to induce belief is a misunderstanding of their purpose.

Here, too, the word "miracle" is used in the popular sense of people doing miracles. I think we could translate that in terms of doing things for other people so that we would look good, or it could also be understood as people who have what we refer to as psychic ability who in a sense show off. That lets the world know that they are better than other people, or they have some gift that other people do not have, that they are holier, wiser, better, etc. All that is happening, then, is that we are using our abilities or gifts to serve the ego's purpose rather than the Holy Spirit's.

Q: In the case of a visible, physical healing, an act of genuine love rather than another ego expression, is the form in which it expresses or manifests itself still not the miracle?

A: Right. The miracle is the joining in your own mind. You can say it is the effect of the miracle, but the miracle is only something that happens in the mind, because that is the only place that there is a problem. The miracle is the decision to join with the Holy Spirit and thereby join with that other per- son. What happens after that you could call the effect of the miracle.

This is a very important distinction. Otherwise, there is a danger of becoming too invested in the externals -- the seeming effects of the miracle. And then, when they do not happen, we feel something has gone wrong, and even more important, that we have gone wrong: we are failures. This is a real trap that healers in the world can fall into. They develop special relationships with those they are trying to heal; they become dependent on them for their own sense of self-worth. This is why, for example, psychiatrists are said to have the highest suicide rate of any professional group. If their patients do not get better, as they would judge "better"-- and people have a way of not doing what we would like them to do -- then they have failed. After a while, the burden of this "failure" becomes too heavy and the only way out is suicide.