The Fifty Miracle Principles
of A Course in Miracles
by Kenneth Wapnick
Principle 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 is no longer useful in facilitating learning.
Basically, this principle is talking about the fundamental goal of the Course, which is to help us spend every hour of our day, all the days of our lives, continually seeing things as the Holy Spirit has us see them. This means to continue to see everything that occurs in our lives as a lesson that He would have us learn -- that every single thing that occurs is a learning opportunity if we avail ourselves of that learning. Thus, everything that confronts us should be seen as an opportunity of choosing either the ego's grievance or the Holy Spirit's miracle.
Q: There are times during the day when my ego screams so loud that I do not remember to turn to the Holy Spirit. If I began my day with a blanket statement: "Holy Spirit, please be with me all day," would that happen?
A: I doubt it. If you do that and then do not think of Him at any other point, that is magic. What A Course in Miracles would say is that you should start your day that way and think of Him all the rest of the day, too. Otherwise, you are going to hope that going on automatic pilot will take care of everything. In one sense that is true, if you really go on automatic pilot. But I think that that requires a tremendous amount of discipline, and if we had that kind of discipline, then we would not need a workbook. In the beginning of Chapter 30 is a section called "Rules for Decision" (text, p. 581; T-30.1) which actually is a very simple way of telling us how we should begin. It says exactly what you are saying, but then it elaborates on what you should do when you forget. I think that we should start our day like that, but then we should continually reinforce it. Otherwise, it is very, very easy to fall back onto the ego.
Q: I find one of the reasons why I cannot always remember to ask to see it through the vision of the Holy Spirit is that there is a part of me, in spite of all my conscious decisions, that still wants to see it my way. Now, that is not a conscious part of me. It is always a shock when I discover it is there. What do you do about the unconscious?
A: When you do become aware of it, you do not feel guilty about it, and what you try to do is become more and more sensitive to when that unconscious part manifests itself. That is what happens when you work with this material a while. It may seem as if your life is getting worse or you are becoming more unhappy. What is really happening is that you are becoming more sensitive to things in yourself that otherwise you would not have known about. What you try to do is just be aware of when you are projecting. It is a lot of hard work, and it is not easy. It requires a vigilance.
The third lesson of the Holy Spirit in Chapter 6, "Be Vigilant Only for God and His Kingdom" (text, p. 100; T-6.V.C), really means be vigilant against the ego; and it does require a lot of hard work. This really is mind training, always to be thinking of the other way of looking at something. There is a line in the text that drives everyone crazy because everyone recognizes what it means. It says, "Do you prefer that you be right or happy?" (text, p. 673; T-29.VII.1:9).
Q: Just on the same topic, there is a section in the Course that deals with a set of questions, and the last one answers the three before it; it asks the
question ...A: "And do I want to see what I denied because it is the truth?" (text, p. 432; T-2l.VII.5.14) All this is really part of that last obstacle to peace, the fear of God (text, p. 391; T-19.IV.D), because the ego is always teaching us that the truth, if we were really to look at it, would destroy us. The truth of us is so awful and so devastating, because we are such wretched people, that if we really looked at it, God would strike us dead. What has to happen is that we chip away at the thought system which teaches us that and realize the truth is not that we are this terrible person, but that we are this holy person who is God's Son. That takes a lot of work because the other thought system is so much a part of us.
The section called "The Fear to Look Within" (text, p. 423; T-21.IV) first describes what the ego tells us we would see if we looked within: a hopelessly sinful person. Then it says, but what if you looked within and you saw that there was no sin? That is the real fear; but it is the ego's fear. That is why we prefer to look at things our way rather than God's way. If the world is an hallucination and we made it all up, and, furthermore, this world was made as an attack on God, as the Course teaches (workbook, p. 408; W-pll.3.2:1), then it means that this world is a great symbol of our sin against God. If it is not there, then the whole thing is made up; it is just all silly stuff. This is when the ego gets terrified. That the whole world of sin is nothing but just a silly mistake is the one thing the ego will never let us look at. That is why, when the Course repeatedly says there is no sin, the ego does not like that at all. The entire ego thought system is predicated on sin. That is what makes this world real, which means it denies the reality of God's Will.
"The purpose of time is to enable you to learn how to use time constructively." That is what I said earlier: The purpose of time is to teach us that there is no time. It is, thus, a teaching device and a means to an end, which is the way A Course in Miracles looks at everything in this world. Nothing in the world is an end in itself -- nothing is real in itself -- it is merely a teaching device. But do not deny the world or the body; that is not what the Course teaches. Rather, we should look at them differently. Everything that occurs, to the extent that it pushes our buttons or upsets us in any way, becomes an opportunity for us to learn our lessons. This not only includes things in our personal world, but in the larger world as well -- things like famine, the Holocaust, the crucifixion. We do not deny them or their occurrence within the world of illusion, but we do change the way we look at them: from victims and victimizers, to all people -- including ourselves -- calling out for the love we do not believe we deserve.
This whole world is a classroom: our individual lives are individual classes that we take within this University. This whole path then becomes like a curriculum that we have to learn, and our individual experiences become specific classes that we take to undo the guilt that we have made specific. That is the purpose of the world, the purpose of time.
"Time will cease when it is no longer useful in facilitating learning." When we have fulfilled the purpose of time, when every last separated child of God returns to his or her right mind -- that is what A Course in Miracles calls the Second Coming, which is the awakening of the Son from his bad dream. This makes way for the Last Judgment, which is the final sorting out of truth from illusion. That is when the entire world disappears, as the Course says, back into the nothingness from which it came (manual, p. 81; C-4.4:5).