This chapter focuses on the role of the miracle worker, emphasizing their responsibility to choose clarity and peace over fear. It explains how healing occurs when the miracle worker recognizes their connection to others and sees past illusions. The chapter highlights trust, responsibility, and a commitment to truth as essential for facilitating miracles that heal and restore balance.
The Function of the Miracle Worker: Understanding Fear of Release
Imagine someone holding onto a heavy backpack because they think dropping it will trap them, not free them. That’s the fear of release—confusing freedom with loss. Many believe that letting go of fear and illusions might somehow leave them vulnerable, but this misunderstanding comes from the belief that harm is tied to the body.
This fear stems from a deeper worry: that the mind can hurt itself. But here’s the truth—misperceptions and "miscreations" of the mind don’t actually have real power. Recognizing this is like shining a light on shadows; once you see they’re not real, they lose their grip.
True correction happens at the level of thought because the mind is the only part that creates. The body, as a neutral tool for learning, can’t create or make mistakes on its own. Thinking otherwise is a mix-up that leads to confusion.
The miracle worker’s job is to help the mind release its false creations by guiding it back to truth. This is the most meaningful way to use creative power: not to hold onto fear but to undo it, making space for clarity and healing.
Avoiding Misuse of the Mind
Imagine a powerful tool, like a chainsaw—it’s incredibly effective when used properly but dangerous if handled carelessly. The same goes for the mind: its power is immense, but misusing it can create confusion instead of clarity. This misuse, called "magic," is when the mind operates without understanding or purpose, leading to false solutions or miscreations.
Physical remedies, like medications, act as temporary "spells" to address symptoms, but they don’t address the mind’s role in healing. If fear prevents you from trusting your mind to heal, relying on physical remedies is safer for now. These external tools can’t be misinterpreted as your own creations, reducing the risk of further confusion.
Fear and egocentricity often go hand in hand, creating a barrier to understanding the real source of healing. Under these circumstances, attempting to perform miracles can lead to misunderstandings, as the mind might attribute the healing to the wrong cause or distort its purpose.
Until the sense of vulnerability fades and clarity returns, it’s better to focus on reducing fear. This ensures that when the time comes, the mind is prepared to use its power for true healing rather than miscreation.
Right-Mindedness in Action
Think of miracles as acts of balance—restoring clarity and peace to where confusion has taken hold. For this to work, the miracle worker must approach the situation with a steady, clear mind, even if only briefly. It’s like helping someone steady themselves on a tightrope; you need firm footing to offer real support.
Being "right-minded" means seeing the situation clearly without exaggerating or minimizing anyone’s role. There’s no need to put the miracle worker on a pedestal or dismiss the receiver’s ability to benefit from the miracle. Both play essential parts, and the miracle is there to restore the receiver’s mind to clarity and balance.
The good news is that miracles don’t have to wait for the receiver to achieve right-mindedness on their own. That’s the miracle’s purpose: to guide them back to a state of clarity. However, the miracle worker must first embody this state, even momentarily, to offer the support needed for the miracle to take effect. A clear mind paves the way for others to find their own clarity.
Trust and Fearlessness
Imagine a firefighter rushing to save someone while doubting their own training—it’s a distraction that could create unnecessary risks. Similarly, a miracle worker shouldn’t focus on whether they feel "ready." Overthinking their readiness can shake their confidence and disrupt their ability to facilitate healing. Instead, they should trust in the clarity and principles that guide the process, allowing fear to fade into the background.
Fear disrupts right-mindedness, flipping it upside down and leading to confusion. This fear often stems from refusing to fully accept healing and clarity (the Atonement) for yourself. Without this acceptance, it’s difficult to extend true healing to others.
Once you embrace clarity, you’ll understand that those in need of healing aren’t "broken" but simply unaware of their own capacity for right-mindedness. Healing, at its core, is about guiding others to this recognition: that clarity and balance are already within them, waiting to be realized. When you trust this process and let go of fear, your ability to assist others flows naturally.
Embracing Responsibility
Imagine being a lighthouse—your only job is to shine a steady light, guiding ships safely to shore. As a miracle worker, your sole responsibility is to accept clarity (the Atonement) for yourself. Once you do, your mind becomes a source of healing, like a beacon that naturally helps others find their way.
This process starts with recognizing that the mind is the only creative force, and errors occur only at this level. When you accept the Atonement, you deny the mind any ability to harm and restore its power to build, heal, and create constructively.
This shift doesn’t just benefit you—it helps undo confusion for others. By modeling the truth that their minds, too, are naturally constructive and cannot be harmed by their own missteps, you inspire them to see beyond their fears.
In doing so, you also help them stop overvaluing their "learning device"—the body—and remind them that the mind is the real learner. This restoration of focus aligns them with truth, showing that healing is a natural outcome of recognizing the mind’s creative potential.
The Body as a Learning Tool
Think of the body as a car and the mind as the driver. The car doesn’t make decisions or learn—it simply follows the driver’s instructions. If the driver starts thinking the car has a mind of its own, things quickly go off track. Similarly, when the body is falsely seen as independent, it becomes a distraction, blocking the learning and healing it’s meant to support.
The body isn’t capable of creating or learning. It’s too dense for illumination, but the mind can bring clarity and alignment to the body by recognizing its role as a tool, not a source. Spirit is already illuminated, and the mind bridges that light to the body.
When the mind stops overvaluing the body and instead focuses on truth, the body naturally aligns with this clarity. It becomes a cooperative tool, effortlessly following the mind’s lead, enabling learning and healing to flow unhindered. By looking beyond the body toward the light, the mind ensures that the body supports its purpose rather than obstructing it.
Turning to Spiritual Sight
Imagine turning on a light in a messy room. At first, seeing the clutter can feel overwhelming, but it’s only the beginning of tidying up. That’s how shifting from physical sight to spiritual sight can feel—uncomfortable at first, because you’re confronting what needs correction.
This discomfort comes from fearing what spiritual sight might reveal. However, spiritual sight doesn’t dwell on errors; it looks straight past them toward healing and correction through the Atonement. It’s like focusing on the solution rather than the problem.
The discomfort isn’t the end goal—it’s just a signal that change is needed. When you allow spiritual awareness to guide you, everything it perceives is directed toward correction and clarity, never fear. It’s a process of shining light on the altar (your inner truth) to see what needs clearing and then immediately working to restore balance and peace.
By recognizing that discomfort is part of growth, you can embrace it as a necessary step in releasing fear and aligning with healing. It’s not the final outcome, but rather the doorway to correction and clarity.
Facing the Fear of Healing
Imagine a person hesitating to clean a messy room because they don’t want to admit how cluttered it’s become. That’s what the fear of healing feels like—it stems from an unwillingness to fully accept that healing is needed.
Physical sight can’t correct this. It’s like looking at the surface of a pond and missing what’s beneath. When you rely solely on what the physical eye sees, your attempts to "fix" things are often misdirected. Real vision—the kind that leads to true healing—requires looking beyond appearances to the deeper cause of imbalance.
The fear comes from not wanting to face the altar, the core of your inner self, and seeing that it’s been clouded by error. But ignoring the problem doesn’t help—it only makes the situation more precarious. Acknowledging the need for healing is like shining a light in a dark room. It may feel uncomfortable at first, but it’s the only way to begin restoring balance and clarity.
Healing starts with courage: the willingness to look beyond the surface and recognize that the path to peace lies in confronting and clearing the blocks to clarity.
Healing as a Temporary Bridge
Think of healing as a bridge built after a flood to reconnect two separated sides of a river. Before the separation—the belief in time and space—there was no need for healing, just as a bridge isn’t needed when the river flows naturally. Healing became necessary only as a way to protect and restore balance in the world shaped by the separation.
Healing relies on charity, which is seeing the perfection in others even when you struggle to see it in yourself. It’s like recognizing the beauty of a flower even if you feel distant from that beauty within yourself. Charity, as we understand it now, is a smaller reflection of a much greater love that transcends time and space—a love so complete it goes beyond what we can currently grasp.
While we’re in this time-dependent world, charity plays a crucial role in cultivating right-mindedness. It’s a stepping stone, allowing us to align with truth and begin perceiving others through the lens of their inherent perfection. Healing, then, isn’t just about fixing—it’s about building connections and restoring the awareness of unity.
Restoring the Inner Altar
Picture your inner mind as a temple with an altar at its center—a place meant for peace and clarity. Over time, fear and separation have cluttered this sacred space, making it harder to access its true purpose. To heal, the Atonement must be placed at the center of the altar, where it can undo these miscreations and restore the mind to its natural wholeness.
Before the idea of separation, fear didn’t exist, and the mind was unshakable, like a sturdy fortress. Separation introduced vulnerability and fear, but these are illusions, distortions that can be cleared away. When the Atonement opens the altar to its full potential, it acts as the ultimate defense against all thoughts of separation.
By embracing the Atonement, you reclaim your inner strength and invulnerability. It’s like removing the clutter to reveal the altar’s original beauty—a reminder that wholeness and clarity have always been within you, waiting to be restored.
The Inevitability of Clarity
Imagine being on a long road trip where every possible detour still leads back to the same destination. That’s the journey of accepting the Atonement—it’s an inevitable decision, even if it feels delayed. Free will allows you to procrastinate and explore detours, but it can’t take you entirely off course because there are limits to how far misperceptions can go.
When the mind becomes trapped in misbeliefs, the discomfort builds until it’s unbearable. Like wearing shoes that are too tight, you might tolerate it for a while, but eventually, the pain forces you to stop and find a better option. This realization—that there must be a better way—becomes a turning point, guiding you back toward clarity.
As this awareness grows, spiritual vision begins to reawaken, reducing the importance placed on physical perception. The mind may feel conflicted, torn between these two ways of seeing, but this tension is only temporary. The outcome is inevitable: the mind will fully embrace clarity and truth, returning to a state of unity and peace.
Spiritual Vision and the Path to Healing
Think of spiritual vision like a magnifying glass that focuses only on solutions, not problems. Unlike physical sight, which often gets stuck on what’s wrong, spiritual vision ignores the clutter and goes straight to the core: the Atonement. It immediately sees that the inner altar has been clouded and directs its attention to clearing and protecting it.
This kind of vision doesn’t waste time with temporary fixes or distractions. It skips over errors and focuses solely on truth, guiding the mind to align with clarity and balance. By doing so, spiritual vision strengthens the mind’s ability to serve its true purpose, making it more determined to avoid delays that cause unnecessary discomfort.
As the mind becomes more aligned with this clarity, it grows increasingly sensitive to even small disruptions or distractions—things it might have once brushed off as minor. This heightened awareness helps it stay focused on truth, speeding up the process of healing and reducing the tolerance for anything that blocks peace. Spiritual vision, then, is like a compass, always pointing the mind back to its true north: clarity, healing, and unity.
Trust, Comfort, and the Gift of Atonement
Imagine being wrapped in a blanket of perfect comfort that comes from total trust—a trust that everything you need is already provided. This is what we are all entitled to, yet instead of embracing it, we often waste energy chasing temporary fixes that don’t bring real peace.
True comfort doesn’t require effort because the means are already in place. The Atonement is the ultimate gift to place on the inner altar, aligning perfectly with its inherent value. The altar was created flawless, deserving only perfection, and offering anything less creates imbalance.
There’s a deep interconnection between the Creator and the creations—like a symbiotic relationship. The creations depend on their source for peace and clarity, and the source depends on the creations to reflect its perfection. Fear disrupts this balance, leading to deception and cutting off access to the "daily bread" of peace and understanding, leaving the mind starved.
Healing the sense of separation involves seeing the world as an opportunity for unity, using experiences as a bridge to reconnect what seems divided. The Atonement ensures that this reconnection will happen, bringing us back to the natural state of peace, clarity, and mutual reliance.