The Fifty Miracle Principles
of A Course in Miracles
by Kenneth Wapnick
Principle 21
Miracles are natural signs of forgiveness. Through miracles you accept
God's forgiveness by extending it to others.
Here is the first statement in the Course on forgiveness. As I mentioned right at the beginning, God does not forgive. When A Course in Miracles talks about the forgiveness of God, it really is talking about the Love of God.
Q: I thought that miracles were forgiveness.
A: They are. That is why I have said it is all the same thing: "miracle," "forgiveness," "healing," "Atonement." They are just different words to describe the same process. You could actually give a whole list of words that all say the same kind of thing: "vision," "the real world," "the holy instant," "the holy relationship," "salvation ... .. redemption ... .. correction," "the face of Christ," "Christ's vision," "true perception." They are different words that reflect different aspects of the same basic process.
Basically, forgiveness, as the Course defines it elsewhere, is forgiving your brother for what he has not done. In other words, you realize that nothing has been done to you; it is all something that you did to yourself. What happens with miracles is that we shift from the ego's attack and hatred to the Holy Spirit's Love, which then becomes the extension of God's Love to us, and then through us to other people. This is what the Course means by forgiveness. It is an example of the passage I just quoted where Jesus says that we demonstrate that he did not die in vain by demonstrating that he lives in us, which means that we live according to the same principles of forgiveness that he demonstrated. And the more we do what he says, the more we will understand what he taught and the closer we will come to him. Similarly with the Course, the more we can practice its lessons of undoing guilt through forgiveness, the more we will be able to understand what the text is saying. And of course the more we can understand it, the easier it becomes to apply in our daily lives. It is a reciprocal process.