The Element of Being Open to Miracles and Its Hope for Becoming Physically, Emotionally and Intellectually Unstuck

Principles of Miracles

1. There is no order of difficulty in miracles. One is not "harder" or "bigger" than another. They are all the same. All expressions of love are maximal.

2. Miracles as such do not matter. The only thing that matters is their source, which is far beyond evaluation.

3. Miracles occur naturally as expressions of love. The real miracle is the love that inspires them. In this sense everything that comes from love is a miracle.

So begins the book “A Course in Miracles”, a book that has inspired countless people over the decades, including authors and life coaches such as Julia Cameron, Gabrielle Bernstein and Iyanla Vanzant.  The book has a fascinating history.

The story goes like this….

The year is 1958.

William Thetford, a Phd in psychology joins Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons as a psychology professor, during which time, he also serves as Director of Clinical Psychology at the Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital.

Shortly after, he hires a research associate and associate professor by the name of Helen Schucman.

Helen Schucman is great at her work, but she and William Thetford do not get along.

Frequent arguments and disagreements characterize their working relationship.

One day, after one of their heated arguments, Thetford is completely fed up and delivers an impassioned speech to Helen.  He says it is totally crazy they butt heads about everything, cannot see eye to eye, and can't work agreeably with each other. At the end of the speech, he declares “There has to be another way”.

His speech, far from upsetting Helen Schucman, strikes a deep chord in her.  She is especially struck by the words, “There has to be another way”.

Helen has a series of visions and dreams thereafter.

Then on October 21, 1965, a voice (which she takes to be the voice of Jesus) says to her, “This is a Course in Miracles. Take notes.”

Startled, Helen gets out a pencil, and begins to take down what the voice is saying, in shorthand.

The first words said by the voice are “This is a Course in Miracles.  Take notes.” This is followed by Principles of Miracles.

The next day, Helen reluctantly tells Thetford about the voice and the notes.

He encourages her to continue taking notes, and even offers to type them up for her.

Over several years, Helen experiences the voice every night, and continues to take notes.  She dictates the notes to Thetford, who types them up.

By the time the voice stops, the manuscript is 600 pages long, and 7 years have passed.

They make photocopies of the manuscript, and give one of the copies to Father Benedict Groeschel, a Roman Catholic priest, who studied under Thetford, and is also known to Helen.

Father Benedict Groeschel gives the manuscript to a friend Kenneth Wapnick, who has led a fascinating and miraculous life himself. Like Helen, Kenneth has experienced several dreams and epiphanies; one of them results in him becoming a Roman Catholic, though he was raised in the Jewish tradition.

The night Kenneth meets Helen, he tosses and turns, and sleepless in bed, he remembers a dream he had the year before. In the dream, he is among a group of people, much younger than himself, when suddenly, a very wise middle-aged woman lawyer enters the room, takes him aside, and asks him 3 questions. One of the questions is “If you could change any of your childhood experiences, what would you change?” Kenneth gives the answer - which proves to be the correct one - he would not change anything, since all was the way it should be, and the past no longer matters. Kenneth wakes up, and half-awake, half-asleep, it dawns on him, the woman in the dream is Helen.

Wapnick has 2 more uncanny dreams - both featuring a book - at which time, he decides he should delay no longer in reading Helen's manuscript.

  

Wapnick planned to spend his life as a monk in Israel, but after these three dreams, he writes a letter to Helen informing her will be visiting the US briefly, and plans to read her book during his visit.

Reading A Course in Miracles completely changes his plans.

He recognizes Helen’s book as the perfect blend of psychology and spirituality, and decides his mission is to stay in America to help Helen edit and publish the book, and to make it his life’s work to spread the book's message of forgiveness.

So he and Helen start work on editing the book.

Soon after it is published, they start the organization, Foundation for a Course in Miracles, to help people transform their lives through adopting A Course in Miracles. 

Thetford, too, dedicates the rest of his life to spreading the word of A Course in Miracles.  And when he retires, he decides to meditate on the message of a Course in Miracles in his own life.

If Schucman, Thetford and Wapnick experienced all the miracles they did, it was because they were open to miracles.

It is very important to be open to miracles in our life.

Not all things come through thinking, and reflection and planning, and willpower.

Many unexpected things happen as a result of grace.

When I was 27, I became a vegetarian literally overnight.

I remember that day, because I met up with friends, and we talked about going on a hunting trip.

I did not know, I was to experience a complete change of heart that very night.

It was waiting for me in a little known Lewis Carroll story called Sylvie and Bruno.

I had borrowed the book Alice in Wonderland from my friend Anita, because I wanted to re-read it as an adult, and see if I took anything new from it.

In the book Anita lent me, there was another short story by Caroll, “Sylvie and Bruno”, at the end of the book.

“Hmm….” I said, “I wonder what this is about.”

I found myself reading the story of a man who converses with two fairies in his garden called Sylvie and Bruno.

At one part of the story, Sylvie and Bruno see a dead hare.  Sylvie wants to know how the hare died.  The man explains to her it was killed by hunters.

Weeping, she wants to know, why do human beings hunt?

To which the man sorrowfully answers, “Just to prove they have good aim.”

The vanity and senselessness of hunting struck me right there and then, and I found tears streaming down my face.  I determined to become a vegetarian, as soon as possible, and the very next day, I started eliminating meat from my diet.

I became a gradual vegetarian over the next 3 years.

What is this, if not a miracle?

We have to be open to miracles.

Throughout history, well-known figures achieved breakthroughs in their life, because they were open to miracles.

Have you read about St. Augustine?

If you have, you will know he was a typical young man, indulging in wine, women and song. His mother, who was a devout Christian, implored him to mend his ways, but her words fell on deaf ears.

Then one day, when Augustine was visiting his mother, he heard a childlike voice say, “Take up and read.”  This was a turning point for him. 

Augustine took it as a divine command to open his Bible and read the first thing his eyes laid on.

Augustine read from Paul's Epistle to the Romans – the “Transformation of Believers” section, consisting of chapters 12 through 15 – in which Paul outlines how the Gospel transforms believers and their behavior. …“Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh to fulfill the lusts thereof.”

He was a converted man from that day.

Have you read about Diogenes the Cynic?

As my post, The Man in the Bath-tub tells you, he and his father were engaged in debasing currency, and when they were banished from Sinope for their crime, Diogenes visited the Delphi Oracles to find out what the future held for him.

The Oracle at Delphi instructed him to adulterate the political and cultural traditions of the day.  So Diogenes moved to Athens, and dedicated the rest of his life to doing that; to debunking all that was false in Athenian society.

Have you read about the apple falling on Newton's head?

Surely that is a miracle.

Have you read about Archimedes in the bath?

Surely that is a miracle.

In my own life, there have been several miraculous moments.

Such as when the words came unbidden for my famous Fiesta campaign. 

I remember that day very well.

We were in the general manager’s office; he was looking at all our ideas, and shaking his head; “these ideas are all too strong, or too weak,” he said. Clearly, we needed to strike the golden mean, and nothing we had produced made the cut.  All of a sudden, seated in front of him, the first three lines of an idea came to my mind.  The lines were, “It was Monday.  I found myself far away and aloof. It was time to turn on the cold hauteur.”  I felt an internal gasp of excitement, because I knew there and then, that I had found the golden mean, and I couldn't wait to get back to my desk and work on it. Fifteen minutes later, I had completed all 5 ads, and 100% sure of myself, I said, “I've got it” to the other 2 copywriters and ran out of the room. Right enough, I was greeted by “By George, she’s got it” reactions from everyone - the account executive, the general manager, and eventually, the client himself.

I consider it a miracle to this day.

What about me deciding to do the Xactly admin course?

That was a miracle too.

It came out of a conversation with my sister Rosie.  She had gone to an EDD career coaching presentation, and she was telling me about all the ideas the career coach had given them.

One of the ideas, she said, was to list on one’s resume, any courses we planned to take, even if we were still in the application process.

This made a light bulb go over my head.  My resume would be so much stronger with Xactly or Callidus on it. What if I signed up to do Xactly or Callidus training? Maybe it was something I should look into?

A month later I was doing the Xactly training. And a month after that, the Xactly trainer put me in touch with an Implementations company that wanted me to be on their team.

It was nothing short of a miracle.

How I got into Intermittent Fasting is also a miracle.

I was due to go for a fasting glucose blood test.  My manager said, “Oh whenever I have to do the FBG test, I eat much less the day before, so I get a good reading.”

Curious about what she said, I typed the following words into the Google search box, “Does fasting the day before a fasting blood glucose test improve one’s readings?” And I stumbled upon Intermittent Fasting.

If there's something common to all the miracles I've listed, it is the importance of the “other.” There is another person, or persons, always involved; For Diogenes, the Oracles Delphi was the other, for St. Augustine, the childlike voice was the other, for my Fiesta campaign idea, the GM of MAA was the other, when I did the Xactly Admin course, my sister Rosie was the other, when I became a vegetarian, Lewis Caroll was the other.

We have to be open to the “other”.

Once we become open to the other, we can have all kinds of miraculous experiences; visual, auditory, telepathic.

Since learning to meditate, as I narrate in my post, Connected Minds, I have had several telepathic experiences.

Being open to miracles doesn't mean we will be saved from death, disease, or loss, though sometimes people are miraculously saved from death, disease and loss.

Being open to miracles means we are open to being saved from ourselves, through miraculous occurrences; being saved from our wantonness, being saved from our weak wills, being saved from our inability to resist temptations, being saved from our stubbornness, being saved from the wrong path, being saved from false gods, being saved from our excessive individualism or self-centeredness, from greed, from pride, from arrogance, from fear, from anger, from being stuck.

Most of the things I consider miracles in my life are things which got me unstuck.

I didn't write for 14 years after I came to America, in spite of being an advertising copywriter in my previous career.

I was stuck.

By a miracle I became unstuck, and was able to start writing again through this blog.

It is a miracle I am able to continue, 6 years and 324 posts later.

Some of you may not know this about me, but I was stuck with an anger management problem most of my adult life.

It is a miracle I became unstuck.  The miracle happened as a result of my mother’s death. I decided to honor her memory by becoming more like her - she was a gentle, kind and soft soul.

Today is Mother’s Day – a fitting day to honor the memory of my mother, and also to tell you about another miracle - connected with my daughter.

Soon after my daughter Tanita started middle school, our relationship deteriorated.

I did not like the choices she made, and I started mistrusting her.

The more judgmental I became, and the more I mistrusted her, the more I found reason to mistrust her.  I curtailed her freedoms, gave her no money, and our relationship got worse and worse.

And then one day I woke up. And like William Thetford, I said to myself, “there has to be another way”.  I decided to become supportive and accepting and trusting of my daughter.

As soon as I became supportive, accepting and trusting of Tanita, I found her doing everything to earn my continued support and acceptance and trust.

 “But Minoo, didn't you take steps to mend the relationship with your daughter?”

“And Minoo, didn't you work on your anger management problem, as you narrate in your post, How Many Times a Day Do You Visit Ireland?”

“And, Minoo, didn't you have to keep working at your blog, to get to 324 posts?”

Yes, that is correct.

But it is a miracle I had the faith to believe I could achieve any of those things.

For a miracle to happen, we need to have faith in ourselves, and not ignore what we see, hear, read or experience, and we need to believe there are other possibilities.

The night after I read about A Course in Miracles, I woke up in the wee hours of the morning with the idea for this post. And I did not ignore it.  Instead, as soon as I got out of bed, I started typing it up.

Do not ignore the signs in your life which are telling you, you should do something.

Act on them.

What are the signs you have seen, heard, read, or experienced, and what are they telling you to do?

Clear your life of as much junk as you can....and make room, and then make more room, and then make even more room, and then make even more room, until you have a wide open space for a miracle to happen.

I will end with a few miracle quotes….

Deepak Chopra: “According to Vedanta, there are only two symptoms of enlightenment, just two indications that a transformation is taking place within you toward a higher consciousness. The first symptom is that you stop worrying. Things don't bother you anymore. You become light-hearted and full of joy. The second symptom is that you encounter more and more meaningful coincidences in your life, more and more synchronicities. And this accelerates to the point where you actually experience the miraculous”

Shannon Alder: “You will face your greatest opposition when you are closest to your biggest miracle.”

Francois Mauriac: “To love someone is to see a miracle invisible to others.”

Paul Coelho : “Break the glass, I thought to myself, because it is a symbolic gesture. Try to understand that within myself, things were breaking of much more importance than a glass, and I’m happy for that. Look to your own inner struggles and break this glass.

Our parents taught us to be careful with glasses and with our bodies. They taught us that the passions of childhood are impossible; we should not remove men from the priesthood, that people do not perform miracles and that no one goes on a journey without knowing where he wants to go.

Break this cup, please, I thought to myself, and release of all these damn misconceptions, the habit you have of only doing that which everyone agrees with.”

Anthony St. Maarten: “Never surrender your hopes and dreams to the fateful limitations others have placed on their own lives. The vision of your true destiny does not reside within the blinkered outlook of the naysayers and the doom prophets. Judge not by their words, but accept advice based on the evidence of actual results. Do not be surprised should you find a complete absence of anything mystical or miraculous in the manifested reality of those who are so eager to advise you. Friends and family who suffer the lack of abundance, joy, love, fulfillment and prosperity in their own lives really have no business imposing their self-limiting beliefs on your reality experience.”

Frederick Buechner: “A miracle is when the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. A miracle is when one plus one equals a thousand.”

Which of these miracle quotes resonates with you?

As always thanks for reading and have a great day and week….M…..a Pearl Seeker like you.  Thanks to Ajay and Rosie for their compliments on my last post. And thanks to the rest of you for your likes, pins, shares and tweets…..much appreciated! Happy Mother's Day to all mothers everywhere on this planet.

Related posts:

The Man in the Bath-tub

Connected Minds

The Path To Change

How Many Times a Day do You Visit Ireland?

Advice from People We Love to Hate

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