Surround search terms with " " double quotes for exact matches e,g, "drops of healing rain"

The line about miracles not being spectacles comes from miracle principle #10 or #11 depending on where you look.

The full context is this:

"10. The use of miracles as spectacles to INDUCE belief is wrong; or, better, is a misunderstanding of their purpose. They are really used FOR and BY believers."

or

"10. A miracle is a reversal of the physical order because it brings more love to the giver and the receiver.

(A miracle is misunderstood when it is regarded as a spectacle.)

11. The use of miracles as a spectacle to induce belief is wrong. They are really used for and by believers."

So really Jesus is talking about the fact that receipt of a miracle requires belief to be present in the person who is receiving the miracle. Jesus is teaching about how the recipient has to want and be ready to accept a miracle without fear, otherwise they cannot be healed. "The fearful are not healed and cannot heal".

So if we are using a miracle to try to "cause" someone to believe, this isn't really going to work and the miracle isn't going to work, because the person has to believe in some way in the first place, already. Without a willingness to receive and accept it, the giver can't give it.

This is really the only way in which Jesus cautioned against spectacles. The focus isn't even on the miracles being spectacular. Whole topic of the miracle principle is talking about how both giver and receiver have to have belief, and so trying to make the miracle "produce" belief by like "putting on a show", misunderstands what miracles ARE and how they work. Which means that IT IS NOT POSSIBLE to use miracles as spectacles. They DO NOT WORK when the person doesn't believe already ie has a willingness to claim the miracle for themselves.

It has nothing whatsoever to do with telling you not to perform miracles, or for your miracles to not be spectacular, or for them to be hemmed in by size or scale or intensity or effects, or to be limited in any way, or for one to be more difficult or to fit into the hierarchy of illusions in a different way.

He is merely telling us that the way miracles WORK entails cooperation, not coercion. And that is all.

He also comments "A miracle is misunderstood when it is regarded as a spectacle." - in other words, it is only when a miracle is REGARDED AS a spectacle, that it is being MISUNDERSTOOD. Which means, referring to miracles AS SPECTACLES IS A MISUNDERSTANDING. It does not mean miracles aren't spectacular or big or literally moving mountains, it means they are being INTERPRETED incorrectly. This interpretation is once-removed from the miracle itself, and it is the interpretation of "spectacle" that is BLIND to the fact that both parties must have been consenting.

Go tell Moses to stop parting the red sea. He wasn't doing it to show off.

What the world is, is really only the tiny instant of its current state right now. Not what it was before, and not what it will be. There is a tiny thin slice of 'time' in which everything is always changing and transforming, and in which the only stuff that exists is actually there.

Whatever state the world is in right now, that's all that exists of the world. The future doesn't really exist yet, the past is already gone. There isn't really any time, no past and no future. Time is really an avoidance of the present and an avoidance of reality.

So all we have of the world is whatever is "left over" right now this single instant, the current objects, the things in their current positions, the current conditions of stuff, arranged in whatever way they are arranged right now.

As changes occur this same one moment right there now shifts and morphs before your eyes, becoming slightly different than it was just before, but only the stuff that still remains NOW is what is here.

There is no recording of past states, other than through fictional memory, and there is no predicted future. As soon as something changes, how it was before is totally irrelevant. It is only in the configuration that it is in NOW. It is not its past or it future states, just the current one.

As far as the physical world is concerned, there is no past or future at all, just a single slice of time in which everything appears to come and go, right now, here and now, in the present.

The now-moment of time, is symbolic of the foreverness of eternity. It is not the same as it but being in the present moment of time puts you very close to the eternal. By being only in the present you effectively aren't going anywhere, even if the appearance of forms keep shifting and changing.

The world is like a pool of water which is mixing and flowing around but it's still the same one pool of water. Just moving and animating within the present tiny slice of time.

To be in the present there can't be a sense of knowing what is about happen, because everything has to be met immediately as though it is completely new, otherwise you're projecting past learning onto the present.

There can be a lot of resistance to just being totally present, which is fear, and is ego, in which the mind is not really paying attention, it's projecting a wall of expectation and anticipation and the dullness of having "figured it out ahead of time", such that the mind is paying attention to what it thinks will happen rather than to what is.

This is the importance of the "I do not know", because this leaves the mind open to receiving an present-moment awareness of what is happening, rather than being lost in concepts and thoughts and beliefs about what "might be".

God can only be found in the present because God IS PRESENCE, which is an eternal property of here-and-now and always-and-forever. God's absoluteness means he is fully and totally present everywhere, as in in-person and fully attentive to it. So you can't be aware of God when you're living in the past.

Living in the past really means you're caught up in a kind of dream about things which aren't even here anymore, and which have changed into something else, such as old grievances and losses and pains and so on. And it's just as bad to live in the future, where you are imagining what might happen and trying to predict and control it. Sin locks you into the past just as guilt sucks you into the future in anticipation of punishments to come.

We really in truth only can exist in the present. Where else could you possible BE present, or really exist? You are here now with God forever. The "real world" also only exists in the present and can only be experienced by being present.

"This instant is the only time there is."

"(Edgar) Cayce's mind was imprisoned to some extent by an error against which you have been cautioned several times. He looked to the past for an EXPLANATION of the present, but he never succeeded in separating the past FROM the present. When he said "mind is the builder," he did not realize that it is only what it is building NOW that really creates the future. The past, in itself, does not have the ability to do this. Whenever we move from one instant to the next, the previous one no longer exists."

"The mind's preoccupation with the past is the cause of the total misconception about time from which your seeing suffers. Your mind cannot grasp the present, which is the only time there is. It therefore cannot understand time, and cannot, in fact, understand anything."

"The present now remains the only time."

"The only aspect of time which is really eternal is NOW. That is what we REALLY mean when we say that now is the only time. The literal nature of this statement does not mean anything to the ego. It interprets it, at best, to mean "don't worry about the future." This is NOT what it really means at all."

"What time but now can truth be recognized? The present is the only time there is. And so today, this instant, now, we come to look upon what is forever there; not in our sight but in the eyes of Christ. He looks past time and sees eternity as represented there."

"And I will not use my own past learning as the light to guide me now."

"It IS a joke to think that time can come to circumvent eternity, which MEANS there is no time."

A Course in Miracles - Urtext material - reproduced with permission from the Foundation for Inner Peace (acim.org), and the Foundation for A Course in Miracles (facim.org).
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