The Fifty Miracle Principles
of A Course in Miracles
by Kenneth Wapnick
Principle 6
Miracles are natural. When they do not occur something has gone wrong.
The Course teaches us that the most natural thing in this world is to be at peace and one with God, because that peace comes from the Holy Spirit within us. The unnatural things in this world are those that defend against that naturalness: feelings of anger, conflict, depression, loss, guilt, anxiety, etc. All these are not natural, because they do not come from who we really are. In this world, feelings of peace, joy, and being one with people do reflect who we really are and, therefore, they are natural.
In other words, when miracles do not occur, and here we can think of a miracle as the extension of the Holy Spirit within our minds, something has gone wrong because we have put something in the way. That is all the ego is: an obstruction that keeps from us the awareness of who we really are.
Q: I was having a problem before with your comment that no one is holier, and I think what you just said made sense. With some people you just experience a presence, a wholesomeness, in that they are one with themselves or God and, therefore, I guess that is what I would call a holy person.
A: What that means is that they have fewer impediments to their holiness than other people do. In this world, that is true. Later on in this chapter, which we are not going to cover today, Jesus speaks of himself and says that he is no different from anyone else (text, p. 5; T-1.II.3:5-6). He is not any holier or less holy than anyone else. The only difference is that he got through his ego faster than the rest of us. In the world of time, he is different from us because he has no ego. In the world of eternity, however, he is the same as we are. That is why he .says that to experience him in awe is a mistake, because he defines awe as something that is justified only when you are in the presence of someone who is greater than you. The only Person with Whom that is justified, then, is God, because God is our Creator. We should not be in awe of Jesus, because he is our equal. He is just a little bit smarter than we are, that is all. Therefore, we should ask him for help.
Q: To take that a little further, in everything that we see and apprehend in other people, that we think is holy, are we seeing our own holiness?
A: Yes, but you have to be very careful. Very often when we see how this person is really holy, what we are very subtly doing is putting ourselves down. We are saying this person is holier than I am. Almost always that is what we are doing. That is the mistake. That is why, from the point of view of the Course, the mistake that made Jesus greater than anybody else occurred. It was not a way of making Jesus greater; it was a way of making ourselves smaller, saying that he is the only Son of God. It was a way of saying he is perfect and pure, which really was a way of expressing the fact that people felt so impure. It was not so much a statement about Jesus, it was a statement about what was in ourselves. We felt so guilty and sinful we had to make him different. And the whole point of his teaching is that we are not different; we are all the same. We are all Christ.
The only difference with Jesus is that he was the first one who recognized who he really was, that he was Christ, and that he helps everyone else recognize that they are also Christ. An example of what the Course would call "spiritual specialness" is our making certain people better or more holy or more spiritual than others. Very subtly what that does is put ourselves down, which means that we reinforce the belief that we are separate. The same thing is true when we think we are more spiritual than someone else -- opposite sides of the same coin.