The Fifty Miracle Principles
of A Course in Miracles®
by Kenneth Wapnick
Principle 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.
This is a very important principle. It says "Miracles are thoughts," so a miracle is a change from the ego's thought to the Holy Spirit's thought. Miracles are thoughts because everything is thought. Nothing has existence outside our minds. The miracle is the thought that corrects or undoes the ego's thought of separation.
This principle is another example of what I earlier referred to as Level One. The Course can be understood on two different levels: Level One and Level Two. Level One is the basic metaphysical foundation for the Course's thought system. Everything is either true or false; everything is either of God or of the ego and there is no in-between, no compromise. Level Two is that part of the Course's system that deals with this physical world, where the distinction is made between the ego's way of looking and the Holy Spirit's way of looking.
What is being talked about in this principle is Level One, that there are two kinds of thoughts: the ego thoughts, and basically it is those ego thoughts that made up this world, and the Holy Spirit's thoughts. This is the first time in this material that you find the distinction between the words "make" and "create." Spirit creates and the ego makes. Later on in the text, this is explained in more detail (text, pp. 39f, T-3.V.2,3). When the word "create" is used, it is only used to denote the activity of spirit, and that has nothing to do with, and no counterpart to, anything in this world. On this Level, which again is Level One, our thoughts can either be of the spirit, which means that they create, or they can be of the ego, which means that they make.
There are two kinds of making, what I call Level Two, which are really not what is being talked about here. One is the ego's wrong-minded making, which is that it not only made up the world, but then it made up a thought system and a way of being in this world that reinforces the separation. Or, we could have thoughts of the right-minded part of our split minds which come from the Holy Spirit, which undo the separation of the ego. Basically, all that we are talking about is that there are two ways of being in this world: one is the ego's, and one is the Holy Spirit's. Both of those ways are illusory, because they both operate within this framework. The crucial idea is that "miracles are thoughts," that they are corrective thoughts to take the place of the thoughts of the ego. We can also say that miracles reflect the principle of creation or extension of spirit in Heaven. Yet, they themselves are illusions because they come within the world of illusion and, thus, correct what never was.