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When I began to read Creating Miracles I was surprised to realize it was written by a scientist. Whoever heard of a scientist setting out to prove supernatural intervention? I thought all scientists are convinced that miracles cannot be proven in the physical sense. Author Carolyn Miller knows that, too. Her analysis of miracles is not an exercise in proving they occur, but rather research in determining what criteria needs to be present in order for miracles to happen. Carolyn believes in miracles b-cause of first-hand experience. During a near-fatal car crash she felt herself detach and lose hope. Her car went out of control after a tire blew out on a slick mountain road. She can only describe her narrow escape as God directing her to turn out of her skid at precisely the right second. Carolyn tells this and numerous other miracle stories in her book. She talked with the people who experienced the miracles and found common threads which help us create miracles in our own lives.One of Carolyn's messages is that we must learn to recognize the difference between positive thinking and miracles. In this interview she explains the difference and helps us learn to surrender our desires to God so real miracles can occur in our lives.Carolyn is an articulate, warm, friendly professor and clinical psychotherapist who teaches statistics and research methods. Her foundation is the Course in Miracles and, with her husband, she is beginning to teach the course to psychotherapists as a new method of therapy. Jill: In Creating Miracles you report cases where people have been saved from tragic and near-death experiences. Can we create less dramatic miracles in our everyday life? Carolyn: Absolutely. The same procedure that allows divine intervention in an emergency is precisely what allows guidance and intervention everywhere in our lives if we would let it happen. As you can see from the miracles in the book, each person seems to detach and go into a meditative state, a place of great inner peace, great confidence and compassion. It is almost a carefree meditative state of mind where, even in their drastic situation, they are receptive to the "dance" that comes through to them, and they act on that guidance without question. What the mystical traditions everywhere are trying to tell us is if we would only walk around in that state during our daily activities, God will guide us. We would act in our own best interest in a way that our conscious mind is not capable of. Jill: Let's take a specific situation. Say I wanted to have a financial healing immediately, just like manna from heaven. I do all my prayer and meditation work, but the money comes slowly and it doesn't seem like a miracle. I would like a real miracle. Carolyn: There is something I did not make as clear in the book as I should have. It is the difference between positive thinking and miracles. Positive thinking is when you have decided on a miracle you want and you decide what it should look like. You are harnessing the power of your individual will to attain a goal your ego has decided would be good for you. That is a fine thing and it really does work. That's how things are created in our world, through precisely that process. What interferes with that process is all our unconscious motivations. Often unconscious motivations are what created the problem in the first place. They stress us at the conscious level, and we overlay positive thinking over the top to try to suppress the effect of whatever is going on in the unconscious that created the problem. There are two answers to your question. One is if the positive thinking is not working, psychotherapy of a certain kind might help. Psychotherapy unearths and brings into consciousness whatever it is that makes you feel you de-serve to have these kinds of problems. Often if you can get problems into consciousness where you can think about them, you can change the pattern on a deep level. But even that is different from miracles. Miracles are when you say, "I don't even know what should happen here. My ego says it would be better to have my bills paid, but the truth is I don't understand what is going on in this world." Some of the earlier exercises from the Course in Miracles say, "I don't understand anything, nothing is like it seems." The goals our ego chooses and thinks are worthy things for us to see may or may not have anything to do with our purpose in being here or the challenges we have to face and overcome. Miracle-mindedness is really detaching from all of those things and saying, "You know, I really don't know how my life should be. I don't know what should happen next. I don't know what incredible benefits might come to me through continuing to struggle through my problems. I just don't understand any of this. So I am going to simply bend my will to God. I am going to step back and let God step forward and trust whatever happens in my life next will be God's answer and will be the miracle. I may not understand until later why it was a miracle and how it served me and my eventual enlightenment." That is really the way to have miracles come about. People can often see this more clearly in retrospect. You can look back on a time in your life when something like getting a particular person to love you or getting a particular job seemed like the most important thing. Sometimes you don't get those things and it seems tragic, but at a later time you can look back with a better perspective and say, "Oh, thank goodness that didn't work." We are not in a position to know what good things are really coming to us. For instance, one of the great lessons of life, and maybe the only lesson of life, is the realization that this is all an illusion created in our minds. This is the task you are struggling with at this time. On one level you are struggling with it from the point of view that if it is all an illusion you should be able to change the illusion to one that you want. But even needing the illusion to be one way rather than another is a lesser state of consciousness than the kind of faith that says, "If God is with me and I am being led through the experiences in my life that are perfect for me, this experience must be perfect for me. There must be a wonderful lesson I can learn here or I wouldn't be in it. When I learn the lesson I won't need these circumstances anymore." The circumstances are not the point. Jill: Do the playfulness and letting go you describe in these miracles come naturally, or do you have to consciously decide to have that attitude? Carolyn: In just about every case, the people who reported the miracles had at some point followed some sort of spiritual path. Many had studied meditation. The more you work on meditation and prayer (some people use those terms interchangably), the more you work on lifting your consciousness above the battlefield, that response becomes available to you in an emergency. Does it happen spontaneously? Yes, it seemed to happen spontaneously for me and the people I talked to. These stories are surprising precisely because that is not what we expect to have happen in an emergency. We expect people to freeze in terror and anger. These confident responses seem to come naturally to someone who has trained themself to resort to that state of consciousness in an emergency. They certainly don't come naturally to everybody. This is the point of the book. We can learn what that state is. We can learn, through practice, to put our mind into that miracle-minded place so we have it available in emergencies and the rest of the time too. There is an additional benefit, too, because in meditation God can guide you. In Creating Miracles, I talk about meditating and learning to contact the inner voice of God so we can learn to say, "I must be doing something wrong. I don't know what it is. What should I be doing here?" When you get to the point where you can get the answer and hear your inner voice telling you precisely where you are making your mistake you will actually see that power work in your life. You will feel a lot more confident about this whole process. Jill: To get to the point where you hear those answers must be a real feeling of being close to God. Carolyn: The reason people can't hear is because they think they can't hear. We have this idea that we have to be some kind of saintly person before God will bother with us. There are often unconscious fears of God that make us put distance between us and God. What I try to show in the book is this is a far more simple process than people imagine because it is already present in our lives. God is always communicating to us. If we are blocking our access consciously, then God will communicate through syncronistic experiences or by having a person say just the right thing, or by having us pick up a book at the right time. But it is so much more comforting to just know you can turn within and ask the questions and get the answers. The truth is you really can. The book is de-signed to lead people through the process where they can try it out on their own. Jill: How important is the Course in Miracles in all this? Carolyn: I have been a student of the Course since the early 80s, and have been through it many times. It took me many, many readings to get it to the conscious level where I could actually start putting these concepts together and begin to teach it. It is infinitely profound. I want to train psychotherapists to do therapy this way because it is quite different from most therapies now available. It is important for people to know they have this available to them and to use it consciously. Jill: How did you get involved in miracles? Carolyn: I had always been interested in spirituality. I was raised in an Episcopalian, alcoholic, abusive home with lots of violence. By the age of seven I concluded God did not exist, or if he did I was not his favorite person. In Sunday school I was taught that if you were good God would take care of you. That was obviously not true. My mother was good and I couldn't see God was doing much for her. I became an atheist in my teenage years. I couldn't imagine how people could be so stupid as to think God could be real. Then I took LSD when I was 21 and saw God. I realized, "Oh, yes, I knew that." How could you not know the only thing going on in the universe? It was very profound. It started my journey to find out what God was all about. I studied many different religions, meditations, practices, and yoga. Then in the early '80s I met my spiritual teacher and simultaneously I learned about the Course in Miracles. I started reading the course and working with my teacher. I made a commitment to meditate 15 minutes each day. On one particular morning I had a hangover. I was tired and meditating was the last thing I wanted to do. My teacher had suggested I begin my meditations by visualizing her sitting across from me while I gazed into her eyes and scan her body to quiet my mind and cue me into the energy she uses in meditation. I began visualizing her hair, then her eyes, then her dress. I looked at her hands folded in her lap. They turned into a man's hands. I looked up at the face and it was Jesus. I thought, "Oh, Carolyn, you really don't want to meditate today." So I wiped him out and put my teacher back in the chair. I went through the same process and Jesus popped back in. I thought I was really getting carried away. I wiped Jesus out again. I tried a third time and he popped back in again. I said to myself, "This couldn't really be Jesus, could it?" And the minute I said it, energy blasted up my spine, tears poured down my face, and I was rocketed beyond time and space into another dimension where it was just Jesus and I looking at each other. I was never so scared in my life. It was the last thing I expected. My first reaction was terror. I remembered seeing a t-shirt in Hollywood that said, "Jesus is coming and boy is he pissed!" I wanted out of there. So I said to him, "You don't understand, I don't even believe in you." He just kept gazing at me with great love, and I said, "I am just a beginning meditator, I think you want to be with someone else." He just continued to gaze at me. I went through all kinds of fear and wondered why he wasn't responding, but I looked at him more carefully and realized he was responding with the most incredible flow of love I could ever experience. He was just listening to me and looking into my eyes with unspeakable love and compassion. As soon as I calmed down enough to notice his demeanor, out came a new storm of tears. I realized as he looked at me he knew everything about me. I was going over all the things in my life I was ashamed of and it was so obvious he didn't care anything about them. I never experienced love that way before. Jill: What do you think about Jesus now? Where does he fit in? Carolyn: I think he fits into everything. Jesus is my ultimate savior. That's not to say there are not other guides and teachers, but he is definitely my guide and teacher. He is our elder brother because he is the first one of us to move our consciousness all the way back to communion with God. He is dedicated to awaken the rest of us from these awful dreams we are having. Jill: Can you get in touch with Jesus now? Carolyn:Yes, I often talk to him about what is going on in my life. We are all communicating with Jesus or some other form of higher power all the time because we are all thinking with the mind of God. We can't not be in touch with our god. Jill: What does the academic world think about your spirituality? Carolyn: The academic world is made up of individuals who all have different thoughts about things. Many people think my spirituality is just crazy. They cannot believe I think of such things. It confuses them even more because I am not only a clinical psychologist, I am an experimental psychologist so I am the one in graduate schools who teaches the research methods and statistics. On one hand I have the reputation of being a good scientist and being knowledgeable. Some people have trouble putting it together. Jill: When reading Creating Miracles I had the feeling you were trying to put the miracle experiences into your scientific background. Carolyn: I was. It does fit. Science is the study of what really does happen in the world. Good scientists do not simply say, "Oh, that couldn't possibly happen." I think if people really want to learn about miracles they are going to have to try them out in their own lives. Science is always going back and forth about things anyway. There is always a controversy going on about theories. Even if we could get scientists to focus on miracles in a concentrated way there would still be controversy. We are never going to get to a point of certainty in that way. The best thing people can do is to start to experiment with the process in their own lives. In the book, I outline the steps people need to take to get miracles. Anyone can learn to do them. People can try them out for themselves. Again, it is important to know the difference between miracles and positive thinking because you may fix your heart on getting a certain thing that would be very bad for you to have. God will not help you do that. You may do it on your own, but God is not going to offer a miracle so you can destroy your life. Jill: So, what do you do with a desire, just put it out there and trust the outcome? Carolyn: Yes, I would go into meditation and say to God, "I know what I want and this is why I think it would be good for me to have it." Then say to yourself, "Not my will, but thine, oh Lord." And just trust God has heard you and is working in your life to bring about your true happiness. That is the key. We want all these things because we think they will make us happy. We often find out the things we think will make us happy don't. God knows what will make us truly happy. Jill: Should you even try to get your desires fulfilled or should you just keep turning your life over to God? Carolyn: Realizing that God is looking out for you is a more spiritual attitude to have. God is always working to bring your life into the best situation and he doesn't really need our coaching. As people trust God more and more they become comfortable relying on God's will and knowing that even if they don't know what will happen, everything will be fine. |
"I want to underscore the how-to aspect of Creating Miracles.
This explores the dynamics of how we permit miracles to occur.
Too many people think miracles are a hit or miss proposition.
You ask for them; maybe God sees fit to grant your wish, and
maybe he doesn't. It is important for people to realize there
is a step we have to take in order to permit divine intervention.
That is a step of truly detaching. We need to truly go into inner
peace and turn it over and be willing to accept any outcome God
finds appropriate. I think anyone can learn to do that. It is
my intention in the book to help people create miracles in their
own lives. The feedback I am getting is that people are doing
it and it is working." --Carolyn Miller