“There is no order of difficulty in miracles”
First, let me assure you that the mental health portions of this blog will come when it makes sense, not in diary-entry style blurbs here and there.
Let’s get started shall we?
If you or I were to say “All I want is a house in the mountains”, “a house on the water,” “this car or that car”, the way which our thought can influence our circumstance is such that we probably would get the house or the car, the job, the relationship. But it’s a principle in Buddhism and in other worldviews that “objects of this world can only bring temporary happiness at best.” You dictate that you want the house, you make that your goal, and it’s pretty likely that with determination, you’ll wind up in the house. How dis-eased and incomplete you would feel without it!
Maybe there’s a reason why you don’t have the house to begin with.
Magic and miracles.
Magic is using the powers of yourself and of the universe to accomplish what you want. A miracle is using yourself as a servant of love.
The universe is self-organizing and self-correcting. What I mean, is if you consider your situation and see that’s the hand you were dealt, there’s a definitive cause to it. There’s a reason. It doesn’t have to be your direct doing that caused it. We understand now this concept that all minds are joined like spokes on a wheel — separate when you look far from the source, but in fact, the same. Karl Jung speaks of the collective unconscious, a level of imagery we all share, another word for which is “archetypes.” The Course goes a step further and says, if you go far enough into the minds of everyone here you’ll find that it’s actually the same mind. We’d be like waves thinking we’re separate from other waves, ignoring the fact that we are of the same ocean, and the tide that influences us moves the rest of the ocean too. To think we are separate is literally insane.
We’re to a point where karma is collective. What happens to me doesn’t just happen to me, and what happens to you happens to me whether or not we ever cross paths in our lifetimes. In chaos theory, there’s this idea of the Butterfly Effect, where something as slight as a butterfly moving its wings can ultimately disrupt storms and shift weather patterns. Think of time travel in fiction where the slightest alteration to the past could result in catastrophic deviation. Or It’s a Wonderful Life where the entire town is unrecognizable without the presence of the main character.
So the universe is self-organizing. The Course refers to relationships as assignments. All the relationships — not just your partner, but your relatives, and strangers too. There is a reason that that is the situation. If you’re placed in a situation on the level of effect of lovelessness, the cause was lack of love, and the assignment is to Atone for your loveless thinking and to forgive them of theirs that got you there. If you’re placed in a situation on a level where the effect is love, you’re in a situation that was caused by love, and the assignment is to snowball it into that and your other relationships. You are to “pay it foward” — as they say — spread the abundance in the way that love would have you do it.
Did you follow that? Ok.
Ego functions at the level of effect. The reason why you or I find ourselves in the same relationships, person after person, town after town, is that we’re trying to change the outcome, not the cause. We hope and pray and try to change thinking this time it’ll be different. It’s no more than praying “Dear God please let me _”. Whatever it is. A more miraculous meditation might be, “God, my priority is peace. Please use me to bring peace about according to your will.”
Because God, Love, Spirit, functions on the level of cause. When we accept the Atonement, and we forgive ourselves and others for their loveless thinking, when we accept the Christ mind in them that is the same in us, we can change the cause because we’re changing our input.
If you’re upset that 2+5 does not equal six, there are a few choices to get to six. You can jam the calculator furiously until it breaks or you lose interest. You can change the 5 to a 4. Input equals output. Putting the wrong size nails in a nail gun will not make it function. The machine will either jam or the nails will fall out of place.
Of course maybe that’s not the right equation. And sometimes the lesson in a particular relationship is just to let them go. As Marianne writes in Return to Love, “If the train doesn’t stop at your station, it’s not your train.”
There’s a great quip in Postcards From the Edge, the first of Carrie Fisher’s autobiographical novels, where she says that maybe she’s met the right person, but she hadn’t had enough therapy to make herself bearable to him. Well if you’re too busy looking down at your phone, you might end up missing the train right in front of you. So, maybe the right assignment did come along and you blew it. Atoning for that — is its own new assignment.
Trying to change things on the level of effect would be magic. Changing on the level of cause is miraculous.
A simple little meditation Marianne Williamson frequently uses — one with which I begin every day, and speak to myself when I’m freaking out for one reason or another — is:
“Where would love have me go? What would love have me do? What would love have me say, and to whom?”
If this is the core focus, you are using the unfathomable power of love and of God to serve its greater function — to heal yourself and others of that separation.
The Course says that there are no neutral thoughts. “All thought creates form on some level.” This is why when you choose to be angry at someone, you feel attacked. When you release that anger, you may drop the sword you had pointed at them, but you also pull out the sword you had stuck in yourself. Carrie Fisher (and also Buddha) say that “Holding onto resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.” The priority is to forgive yourself of your thinking about the person or situation about which you are harboring thoughts of the ego mind. The Course in Miracles says “God will outwit your self hatred.” “Complexity,” the Course says, “is of the ego.”
“The primary responsiblity of the miracle worker is to seek the Atonement for himself,” (ACIM) means that as we release our own fear-based thinking, we free others from it too. Freeing others from it but not ourselves, pretty obviously would mean that we aren’t really over it. But it also means that it is not your job to monitor other people’s progress. You might point out, “Hey, he made a mistake.” “You know, that may have been pretty judgemental.” The Course says (and I love this), “Monitoring your brother’s path is not the vigilance God is asking of you.”
The universe is self-organizing — you are in that situation for a reason-but the universe is also self-correcting. There are two points to this. When the behavior of a species becomes maladaptive, the species either evolves or goes extinct. It is not the majority that adapts the mutated trait. But those with the ability end up passing the trait on, ensuring the survival of the species. So it is with our thinking. It also means that if there’s a lesson you aren’t exactly getting, you’ll continue to repeat it with clearer and clearer signs until you finally understand.
And to paraphrase Ms. Williamson, when in every aspect of your life you stand for what love can do, when every day “Love is the only goal” that you have, you will turn this loveless thinking 180* off its trajectory towards any number of assuredly self-annihilating outcomes, and when we do, we will find that we are operating on such a higher level of consciousness, that we are so powerful, that “it will not just be magic, it will be a miracle.”
“For love is the glory”
