Wednesday, April 4, 2012

Principles of Miracles #1 - Unconditional love


What is a “miracle” as the term is used in A Course In Miracles? A Miracle is a shift in perception from the world of the ego to the world of the spirit. When one tunes into the world of miracles, a person is living in a different dimension. It is a dimension of love and peace.

The text of A Course In Miracles begins with a list of 50 principles of miracles. Each principle is a densely packed idea that is worthy of unpacking if one is to further develop a rich interior spiritual life. The ideas contained in these principles are intuited by most people because they have experienced these ideas at times in their lives often in fleeting experiences. Because of the liminal quality of these experiences people are rarely able to articulate what, at an intuitive level, they know.

An exploration of the meaning of each of these 50 principles is worth the effort as it deepens a person’s understanding of the spiritual dimension of life. Other traditions may describe these principles in different ways and with different vocabulary, but no matter how the principle is described , all descriptions point to a universal experience.
The first principle of Miracles reads “There is no order of difficulty in miracles. One is not ‘harder’ or ‘bigger’ than another. They are the same. All expressions of love are maximal.
Unconditional love is unconditional love. There are no conditions put on it. You love someone or something unconditionally just because you want to. The object of one’s love does not have to deserve your love. You cannot love someone or something unconditionally out of sense of responsibility or obligation or appreciation or gratitude. Those attitudes are not love they are “obligation” or “responsibility” or “obligation”  or “gratitude”. True love is unconditional.

And so to love unconditionally does not involve any order of difficulty, nor is such love bigger or smaller than any other. Unconditional love simply is just that unconditional love and as such unconditional love is always whole hearted and without reservation.
For most people loving unconditionally is a rare experience, and so is being loved unconditionally. For Unitarian Universalists unconditional love is a foundational belief of their faith. The idea first preached by Universalists that God loves us unconditional sent shock waves through the Calvinistic, puritanical world and still is unbelievable to many religious people of today. It takes a deep and abiding understanding and experience of God to shift one’s perception to the spiritual dimension where a life of miracles abide.

Living in the dimension of miracles requires a shift in perception, setting aside one’s ego, and forgiving oneself and others for the imagined attacks and hurts that one thinks one has suffered. Jesus lived in this dimension and He clearly stated that the way to the Kingdom is “to love as I have loved”. As He is being tortured and executed, He has the presence of mind to say, “Father forgive  them for they know not what they do.” How could a person say such a thing unless their spirit has been resurrected to quite a different place than our usual ego plane? Jesus was in a different dimension when He said this. His interior spiritual life was perfected to the point at which they could kill His body, but they could not kill His spirit. His spirit has lived on for 2,000 years and His example still inspires us today. Jesus taught us that God, Abba, His Daddy, loves us unconditionally and we should/could experience this if only we could set our drama, our egotistical cares, aside and tune in to the deeper, spiritual level. As the bumper sticker says, “You too can hear the angels sing, if you tune into the right frequency.

1 comment:

  1. Thank you for your articles on A Course In Miracles. I have begun to study the course and find your commentaries very helpful. I like your idea that there is no order to miracles as being unconditional love, because if love is truly unconditional there would be no levels or degrees, it would just be one thing. I look forward to your future articles.

    God is...............

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