Corresponding Text Section
Principle of Miracles 49
The miracle makes no distinction among types or variations of misperception. It is a means for correcting perception that is effective quite apart from either the degree or the direction of the error. This is its true transcendence of judgment.
Commentary
Miracles superconsciously controlled by Divine Essence are selective only in that they are directed toward those who can truly benefit from them for their awakening in each unique miracle situation. Since this makes it inevitable that these recipients will extend their increased awakening to others, the Circle of Atonement is strengthened. But superconscious control of miracles by Divine Essence takes no account at all of the magnitude of the miracle itself, that is, of the error or misperception it corrects, because the concept of size exists only in a plane that is itself unreal. Since the miracle aims at restoring Reality, it would hardly be useful if it were bound by the “laws” of the error it aims to correct. Only separated ones enter into that kind of conceptual confusion, which is an example of a kind of “foolish consistency” that a person’s own false beliefs can engender. Certainly the planes of time and space seem consistent, but it would be foolish to believe that they are.
Both the Power (given by the Divine) and the Strength (expressed by the individual) of a person’s creative will must be appreciated before the real meaning of the wrong use of denial can be understood, and its practice abolished. The wrong use of denial – denying that the split mind and its result, the separation, have occurred – is not mere negation, it is active miscreation. While miscreations are necessarily believed in by their own makers, they do not exist at all at the level of true creation. Because of this, the wrong use of denial makes inaccessible to the one practicing it both the Power and Strength of their creative will. If the separation is denied, then its Remedy, the Atonement, must also be denied. And it is in the Atonement that the Power and Strength of the creative will outside of Heaven is found.
Remember always that you never suffer anything because of anything that anyone else does. This is the beginning of undoing the false use of denial, by placing responsibility for separation where it is in truth, thus both acknowledging the split mind and allowing it to be led to healing. Access to the Power and Strength of your creative will can only be found in this healing.
Remember also that you who truly want Peace can find it only by complete forgiveness. This is the beginning of establishing the right use of denial—the denial that mistakes, even that of the separation, can have any effect at all on Reality. If error cannot be real then only illusions or what is unreal can be forgiven. Only complete forgiveness can completely dispel the world of illusions, and then Reality is embraced again in the mind, and only the Presence of Reality brings Peace.
You haven’t truly, or wholly, wanted Peace until now in your sojourn in time and space, so there was no point in knowing how to achieve It. This is an example of the “need to know” principle established by the Plan of Atonement. What you wholly desire you will invest everything to gain or achieve, and if this desire is in accord with the Divine’s Will, then your true creative will will assure your success. If your need for Peace is your greatest desire and highest priority, then your need to know how to achieve Peace will be one with your desire, and must be fulfilled. This Course has come in response to just this need to know.
No kind of learning is acquired by anyone unless they want it, or believe in some way that they need it. Those familiar with psychology don’t need a lesson on the hierarchy of needs as such, but, like everyone else, they do need to understand their own belief in needs and the order of importance or magnitude they have assigned to them.
The concept of “lack” does not exist in the Divine’s perfect Creation, but it is very apparent in the constructions or miscreations of this world. This concept is, in fact, the essential difference between the true creative will and miscreation. A need implies lack, by definition, and needs indicate a lack of true creative will. This is because when the creative will is active there is no sense of lack and therefore no needs. The Power and Strength of the creative will mean perfect Abundance and Fulfillment, and in Their Presence the ideas of lack and needs are inconceivable. This is Reality, and herein is Peace found.
Feeling a lack and translating it into a need involves the awareness, conscious or unconscious, that you would be better off in a state which is somehow different from the one you are in. Until the separation nothing was lacking. This meant that the Children of the Divine had no needs at all. If they had not deprived themselves, they never would have experienced lack or needs. After the separation, needs became the most powerful source of motivation for human action. All behavior is essentially motivated by needs, but behavior itself is not a Divine Attribute.
The body is the mechanism for behavior. It is self-evident that no one would bother even to get up from their bed and go from one place to another if they did not think that they would somehow be “better off” in doing so. Believing that they could be better off is the reason that human beings have the mechanism for behavior – the body – at their disposal. The biblical saying, “By their fruit (or deeds) you shall know them,” provides this key to motivation, namely that behavior reflects what a person believes their needs to be, which reflects who or what they think they are.
In this world, human beings always act according to the particular hierarchy of needs they establish for themselves—what they believe they would be better off having instead of what they now have, and what they believe they would be better off avoiding to keep what they now have. Yet the measure of “better off” only compares what the ego has established as its list of needs, with the body at the center of the circle, without asking what the needs are truly for. And only this question can lead out of this circle to the creative will.
Separation from the Divine is the only lack anyone ever really needs to correct. The separation would never have occurred if the separated ones had not distorted their relationship with Truth, and thus perceived themselves as lacking. The concept of any sort of needs hierarchy arose because, having made this fundamental error, the separated ones had already fragmented themselves into levels with different needs. As a person integrates they become integrated, or one, and their needs become one accordingly. Only the fragmented can be confused about this.
Internal integration within the self will not suffice to correct the lack fallacy, but it will correct the need fallacy by eliminating the needs hierarchy through integration into one need—the need for Union, which is the need for Peace. Unified need produces unified action or behavior, because it produces lack of ambivalence. The concept of a needs hierarchy, a consequence of the original separation error, requires correction at its own level before the error of levels itself, or lack, can be corrected. Human beings cannot operate or behave effectively while they do so at split levels of perception, awareness, or dimension (recall the previous discussion on “level confusion”). But as long as they still do so, correction must be introduced from the “bottom” (or subconscious, where the split mind as well as the Memory of Reality reside) upward to the superconscious, from the belief in the body to the Certainty of the mind, and from the past and future to the holy instant of now. This is because human beings currently operate in space and time, where “up” and “down,” “in” and “out,” and “before” and “after” are meaningful terms.
Ultimately the concept of space is as meaningless as that of time. The concept is really simply one miscreation and misperception—the space-time belief, or physical world. The physical world exists from Spirit’s Perspective only because you can use it to correct your unbelief, which placed you in it originally. As long as human beings knew that they did not need anything, the space-time belief didn’t exist and was therefore unnecessary, or not needed. As long as the wrong use of denial continues to deny you access to your creative will, that is, until your Certainty of wholly desiring Peace is complete, the need to know in its unlimited form cannot safely be under your control, so it is temporarily much better off under mine.
People can never control the effects of fear themselves, because they mis-projected the fear outside of themselves and they believe in what they mis-projected. In attitude, then, though not in content, they resemble their own Creator, who has perfect faith in Its Creation because It created It through true Projection, or Extension. All creative activity, including making or miscreating, rests on faith, because faith in the creation or miscreation brings it into existence. This is why it is possible for a person to believe what is not true for anyone else. It is true for them because it was made by them. Only the creative activity of the true will is free of the possibility of falseness, or illusion.
Every aspect of fear proceeds from upside-down perception, i.e., level confusion. The truly creative devote their efforts to correcting this. The neurotic devote their efforts to an attempt to compromise between truth and illusion. The psychotic try to escape their madness by establishing the truth of their own illusions. It is most difficult to free the latter by ordinary means, only because their minds are more set and therefore more stable in their denial of Truth. Because the miracle makes no distinction among types or variations of misperception, Divine Essence can correct all expressions of fear with equal ease.
