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The Law of Miracles

by Annalisa and Giampiero Cara

Works of a God separated from His creation who, at the most, uses man as a mere instrument of His power? Not just this anymore. In the new age, "miracles", i.e. phenomena beyond what most people consider the "laws of the world", turn out to be the possible results of extending our perception, usually too limited in our ordinary view of reality.

On a desert Island lived three old hermits. They were so simple and naive that the only prayer they addressed to God every day was, "We are three, You are three, have mercy on us."

When the local bishop was told of their unacceptable prayer, he went to their island to explain to them that their supplication wasn't dignified enough and to convince them to learn the "real" prayers. Humble and pious, the three hermits readily consented and the bishop set out again on his boat, satisfied.

While he was sailing back, he noticed that a radiant light was following the boat. As the light came closer, the bishop recognized the three hermits who, holding hands, run on the water shouting: "We forgot the prayers you have taught us and we followed you to ask you to repeat them." Then the astonished bishop shook his head and said: "It doesn't matter, dear ones. You can continue with your old prayer."

This delightful story, narrated by the great Russian writer Lev Tolstoy, makes us ponder on the true nature of miracles. Does the fact that miracles occurred when the three hermits prayed in their own way mean that God prefers spontaneous religiousness to the canonized one? And above all, who was actually performing the miracles? Was it God? Or maybe the three hermits themselves, thinking it was God? In other words, who has the power to perform miracles? God? Man? Both? Is it the same thing?

Padre Pio and the "stigmatized"

Before trying to answer these questions, drawing on eastern and western religious traditions, let's see what we mean by "miracle". According to the dictionary, it is "an extraordinary event manifesting outside the common laws of nature." If it doesn't obey the "common" laws of nature, this doesn't mean that it cannot obey other laws. Are these laws divine, inaccessible to human beings?

In the West, according to Christianity in its various forms, the answer is affirmative: "miracles" are gifts (or rewards) that God gives, now and then, to people who have faith in him. Therefore, man can only receive miracles. If it looks like he's performing them, actually he is just a passive instrument in the hands of God.

That, since ancient times, has been the case of the many Christian saints who could work wonders. Just think about the hundreds of "stigmatized" people, for example. The Catholic Church considers them God-chosen ones and has sanctified about sixty of them. The first one, in the 13th century, was Saint Francis from Assisi, but now there are hundreds of them all around the world.

Stigmata are considered "miraculous" because they're in sharp contrast with the "common" natural laws. They're lacerations of the tissues that have no apparent cause; they don't become infected and don't prevent stigmatized people from moving normally; they cicatrize recurrently, following the religious calendar, and often, after some time, they disappear mysteriously, leaving no trace. And, as if that were not enough, they're always accompanied by "miraculous" phenomena as clairvoyance, prophecy, levitation and the like.

A most famous stigmatized was Padre Pio from Pietralcina (a small town in the South of Italy), who has been recently beatified by the same catholic Church that opposed him when he was alive. His life is really studded with miracles. To begin with, in 1918, when he was 31, he received the stigmata while he was praying. His wounds remained open and bleeding for exactly fifty years, like Jesus had foretold him in a vision. Then they mysteriously disappeared two days before his death in 1968.

He could also be in two different places simultaneously. Maybe the most celebrated "bilocation" episode took place before the eyes of Raffaele Cadorna, an Italian general during World War I. He felt responsible for the Italian army's defeat in Caporetto and was about to commit suicide when suddenly Padre Pio in the flesh appeared in his room. Knowing what the general wanted to do, the monk dissuaded him, saying vehemently, "You won't do a foolish thing like that. If you did it, you'd go to hell." The strange thing was that, at the same moment, Padre Pio was in a different and faraway place, in front of many people.

Padre Pio could also heal people, even from a distance, and predict future events. One episode shows both those abilities in action. Karol Wojtyla, who would become Pope John Paul II but who was only the bishop of Krakow then, wrote a letter to Padre Pio asking him to pray for a friend of his, who had a throat cancer. "Angelino", Padre Pio said to another monk, "you can't say no to this person, because one day he will be very important..." A few days later, another letter came from Krakow. It was from Wojtyla again, but this time he wanted to thank Padre Pio because his friend had taken other medical tests, which showed that the cancer had disappeared.

The Nature of Faith

Of course, these and many other miracles (like several phenomena of levitation, when the monk rose into the air in front of thousands of pilgrims) earned Padre Pio the devotion of a multitude of believers. Nevertheless, he got angry when someone gave him credit for the miracles he performed, because he considered himself a mere instrument in the hands of God.

But was he really? Are all the people who work miracles just passive instruments of a power beyond their reach? If it is so, then why did Jesus Christ, whom is considered by the Catholic Church the only son of God, say to people who "received" his miracles, "Your faith saved you"?

What does that mean? It depends on what we mean by "faith". According to most churches, faith is trust in and loyalty to God, but also observance of a religion's traditional doctrines. Yet, in common language, faith means trust, confidence, and not necessarily in an external authority.

In the gospels (Mark 11.23), Jesus himself says: "Truly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, 'Be taken up and cast into the sea', and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will come to pass, it will be done for him." He doesn't say to ask an external God to move the mountain, he just says to believe that such a thing can happen, nothing more. To believe in your heart, and not because someone else says so.

Therefore, these words by Jesus express a truly revolutionary idea: anybody can perform miracles, if he really believes he can. At first, this idea can seem absurd to people raised in a traditional Christian environment. But it isn't, at least according to other religious traditions we'll talk about later.

Anyway, Jesus could perform miracles. Most Christian churches explain this by saying that he was God. Yet other religions maintain that he was a man. A remarkable man, of course, an enlightened one, a prophet, but still human. If that is so, then men can work miracles (Jesus himself said, in John 14:12, "Truly, truly I say to you, he who believes in me will also do the works I do; and greater works than these will he do"), and the fact that "man was made in God's own image and likeness" means that man is not different from God. Therefore, he has similar powers.

Sathia Sai Baba, the Rishis and the "Man-God"

This conclusion would appear blasphemous to most western people. An Indian sage, on the other hand, would find it correct. For him, the question wether it's man or God responsible for miracles doesn't even exist, because, according to most eastern religions, God is not outside but inside ourselves. In fact, we are God.

That's what another "miracle-worker" says. An eastern one this time: Swami Sathia Sai Baba, famous for his ability to materialize "sacred ashes" (vibhuti) and jewels, as well as for his healing power. "Both you and I are God", he says. "The only difference is that I know it and you don't."

But what does it mean exactly? Why are we unaware of our being God? And how can we become aware of it?

To understand this, we must go back to the origins of eastern religious philosophy, which is rooted in the tradition of Indian Rishis (clairvoyants). They're the authors of the Rig Veda (or revealed truth), Hinduism's most ancient religious text.

Anticipating the discoveries of Albert Einstein and modern physics, the rishis maintained that everything in the universe is part of a single, infinite force field and that men, as particular concentrations of this field, shape it through their perception of it. And since the senses through which we perceive the world are extensions of the brain, everything, according to the rishis, begins in our mind that, using a contemporary metaphor, projects the world as if it were a movie.

Deepak Chopra and the Power of Mind

This vision is absurd for people who believe in an objective reality that exists on its own, no matter who perceives it. But now leading-edge scientists do not share this interpretation of reality anymore. One of them is the Indian endocrinologist Deepak Chopra, a best selling New Age author, who recognized the scientific value of ancient rishis' vision.

In his fascinating book Unconditional Life, Chopra says that scientists defend "objective reality" because they can see and touch it, it can be measured and obeys mathematical laws. Yet, according to the rishis, a body or an object is not any more real then its image projected onto a movie screen, for example. If it seems more real, it is because of the power of persuasion of what, since ancient times, Hindus call Maya. In Sanskrit, this word means also "magic", and it suggests the idea that what we consider reality is actually just a superimposed layer of "special effects".

And what is reality, then? Probably it is the reality quantum physics has discovered. According to this innovative branch of science, whose revolutionary conclusions have not yet been assimilated by western thought, "material" things we see and touch appear to be made of solid matter subdividable in molecules and atoms, when in fact every atom is 99,9999% empty space, and the subatomic particles that move in it at the speed of light are just beams of vibrant energy. But this empty space is actually full of information and permeated by an invisible intelligence, which is in everything that exists.

This infinitely creative intelligence is the same which gives birth to our thoughts. That's why our thoughts are creative: what we see is what we think is reality. Therefore, the reality we see is shaped by the limitations we have imposed on our perception, maybe because infinite freedom of choice scares us (this can be the meaning of the "fall" of humankind, symbolically expressed in the Adam and Eve myth), and is only one of countless possible realities. To change it, we have to change our perception.

If this idea seems crazy is because we feel trapped in an "external" reality (projected by our so-called collective unconscious) that we can't even scratch, no matter how hard we try, unless we are in the dream-state.

When we dream, Chopra says, we can fly because to defy gravity in dreams is only a matter of changing the structure of brain waves. Everything that happens in a dream, no matter how strange it is, is created by ourselves. Yet the same thing applies to the waking-state, with only a difference. When we consciously think we want to fly, maybe nothing happens. We don't seem to have the same power as in a dream. We say to ourselves that we cannot control certain laws of nature, like gravity. Yet the rishis would say that we cannot control them because we choose not to.

What keeps us on the ground is not the fact that gravity is a law, but the fact that we have chosen that law among countless others. In other words, for every "natural" law that keeps our feet on the ground there is another one, still sleeping in the field of our infinite possibilities of choice, which would allow us to fly.

Meditation and Transcendence

Being able to consciously reach this freedom of choice means to obtain what in Hinduism is called siddhi ("power" in Sanskrit), i.e. the ability to control nature, which is characteristic of miracle-workers.

The rishis say: "Purnam adah, purnam idah", which means "This is full, that is full". "This" is the reality we see manifested around us; "that" is the invisible world of transcendence, the world of Energy, of Being, of infinite possibilities. Both worlds are full, i.e. infinite, and if we don't like the natural laws that trap us in this dimension, we can choose other laws. It's not necessary to defy the whole set of laws which creates the reality we see; we can "awaken" another inside ourselves.

In other words, when you reach a "transcendent" or "enlightened" state, the "normal" dimension of reality can coexist with the "miraculous" one. That's why, for example, Jesus could use water both in its "normal" dimension, to be baptized in the river Jordan, and in its "miraculous" one, to walk over it. Jesus could choose how he wanted water to be on specific occasions. This is a miracle.

In this sense, as the rishis said, "nature is perfect": because it contains all possibilities. All you've got to know is how to choose...

But how can we move from a state of ordinary consciousness to the dimension in which everything is possible, even miracles? According to the rishis, a key to transcendence is meditation. The constant practice of meditation, prescribed by virtually every religion in the world, allows as to enter a fourth state of consciousness (turya), which goes beyond the three "normal" ones (waking, sleeping and dreaming), where the boundaries created by the intellect disappear, and you feel at peace with yourself and one with All that Is. Anybody, according to the rishis, can reach this "fourth state", if he really wants to.

The New Gospel

Besides quantum physics, there's been an interesting convergence of eastern and western thought also in the field of religion, outside mainstream christianity, in what New Age thinkers call the New Gospel: A Course in Miracles. In this long and inspiring book - written by the American psychologist Helen Schucman under dictation by an entity who presented itself as Jesus Christ - there is no "external" world. What we see "out there" is just the projection of what's inside ourselves.

Since everything in the universe is One, if we perceive ourselves as separated from others, from the world and from God, this erroneous perception is the result of our fear. Fear of what? Fear of living in a hostile and cold universe, among people who are different from us and don't really love us, at the mercy of chance or of a severe God (like the one in the Old Testament), ready to punish us if we do something wrong.

All these fears are mere illusions, created by a mind that has lost contact with the ultimate reality of things, which is Love as union with all that exists ("yoga", as they say in the East). The Course wants to awaken in us this ability to love, freeing it from fear.

Correcting Perception with Faith

What have miracles got to do with that? According to the Course, since we perceive the world in a wrong way, miracles are just corrections of our misperception and misthinking. They aim at awakening us to true reality. They make us understand that the world is not really ruled by the rigid laws that we have created, and that now we think exist outside ourselves.

That's why the first of the fifty "miracle principles" stated at the beginning of the Course says that there are not miracles more difficult than others: they're all corrections of the only error possible, that of believing to be separated from All that Is.

In that sense, like the rishi said, miracles are the result of a shift in perception that allows us to enter a dimension in which everything is possible.

But how can we enter such a dimension if we can't see, and even less perform, miracles? Faith is crucial, especially at the beginning. For miracles to happen, first we have to believe that they can happen, even before we see one. Like Jesus said to St. Thomas when he put his finger on his wounds after the resurrection: "Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe."

Copyright © 1999 Annalisa & Giampiero Cara