17 QUESTION: I would like to ask if you could explain the miracle of Therese von Neumann who has the stigmata that bleed every week; she has not eaten for years.

ANSWER: Well, I cannot possibly give you, in this short time, a technical explanation of how these things work, but there are many, many things possible in this world. What you call miracles are simply laws you do not understand, just as many people do not know the laws governing communication with the beyond, that a spirit can manifest through a medium.

There are many spiritual laws governing mastery over the physical body, and this person is not the only one who has done it. There are other examples where physical functions are completely controlled. When this happens, certain influences from the Spirit World can occur. Such phenomena belong in the same chapter.

QUESTION: Does it necessarily mean that such a person is spiritually very highly developed?

ANSWER: Usually, yes. Those people have a task to fulfill. They bring something that helps mankind to wake up. They produce what is called a miracle. Here I want to stress the point, although you all know it, that there is no such thing as a miracle in the sense the word is usually understood, unless you consider the whole universe a miracle, which it is, of course! But there are only laws, some of which you understand and many of which you do not understand. Humanity has fallen into the habit of calling events or phenomena that it does not understand “miracles”.

17 QUESTION: I would like to know if everything is a manifestation of man’s belief?

ANSWER: How exactly do you mean that, my dear?

QUESTION: I mean everything that we know on Earth, is it the result of what we believe it to be?

ANSWER: It is very difficult to answer this with a Yes or a No. I will try to put it this way: the Earth sphere or the material world has been created for you humans for a definite purpose, which I have mentioned many times. The main purpose is development. In the Earth sphere, development proceeds infinitely faster.

Your Earth sphere, with all that is contained therein – landscapes, mountains, seas, houses, any object – exists concretely and does not alter its shape according to people’s attitudes. In other words, you see this room the same way as a person of much higher development or someone of much lower development would.

The objects in this room remain the same for any human being with a normal sense of perception, while the spirit world is the out-picturing of the spirit’s ideas, attitudes, thoughts and mentality. There, everything is the result of thoughts, feelings and deeds. Therefore, spirits of the same development are always together in one sphere.

Other spirits, let us say lower ones, could not even see these landscapes or objects which the spirits see, and which are the products of their personalities. But on Earth, it is not that way, and there is a very good reason for that.

Yet, in another way, there is a particle of truth in what you have said, but not as far as the actual objects are concerned. It is much more in the sense of what people do with their lives. A person can guide and determine his or her own life to a very large degree, and in that way you are right.

Anyone who has sufficient faith will also automatically follow the divine laws. And anyone who is seriously trying to learn and keep the divine laws, will gain the faith that may still be lacking at the beginning of this Path. Here too, nobody can have faith by forcing it; it can only grow organically by self-development.

It will grow by living these laws, even though it may be difficult at the beginning. Then you guide your own life and produce all the conditions that you need to find God, while by not following the divine laws, you produce unfavorable conditions. In that respect, what you think is true. Do you understand the difference?

QUESTION: The reason I asked was that the Bible says, “By your faith you can move the unmovable.”

ANSWER: Oh yes, that is quite true. These are then the so-called miracles, the so-called supernatural happenings.

110 QUESTION: I read a story in a current magazine about miracles. This story said that a child broke a wooden Madonna and in kissing the upper half, tears started coming out of the eyes of the Madonna. This was repeated in the presence of different witnesses. Do you wish to comment on this?

ANSWER: It is what I have so often said: the power of the spirit. The power of the cosmic laws is at all times available, but it depends on certain combinations and sets of circumstances coming together that make it possible for such power to manifest.

On Earth, it manifests in isolated instances, because the combination of circumstances that are necessary rarely exists. But when it does happen, man calls it a miracle, merely because he does not understand the laws in operation. If you imagine the complicated mechanism necessary, the variety of conditions that have to be fulfilled, in order to make any of your everyday appliances work – radio, television, an airplane, a computer machine, and what have you – you will perhaps understand a little of how these so-called miracles work.

The power currents of the spirit are infinitely more forceful, their energy much stronger than the power and energy necessary to operate your technical equipment. The manifold and complicated combination of conditions and prerequisites in order to function is more intricately involved than anything you can imagine. The same cosmic power-currents operate, only they are converted into non-spiritual, automatic manifestations for your practical use. The ingenuity of the mind has created the conditions so that these powers can operate.

In principle, it is the same with so-called miracles, only it happens haphazardly, and by coincidence, as it were, because humans have not studied and found the laws governing these manifestations. Your electrical and technical equipment that is now so familiar would have been called the greatest of miracles only a hundred years ago, and even at a much lesser time than that, simply because their mode of operation was not understood.

Nowadays, you do not call them miracles. An individual steeped in this Earth-world, blind to the power of the spirit and the cosmic laws, never seeing or sensing their manifestation and existence, will either deny their existence, or will call it a miracle.

In that very expression, the intrinsic nature of the universe is misunderstood. As the consciousness increases and rises and widens and deepens, even though one may not understand the exact operation of the laws necessary to produce such phenomena, the knowledge already exists that an infinite variety of complicated conditions must be combined and fused to make such manifestations possible.

QUESTION: Has it to do with the spirit of the child in question?

ANSWER: This would only be one of the factors. It never could be one thing, nor even two or three or four. Even a much less complicated phenomenon in your Earth-world can possibly be dependent on a number of circumstances. It needs a conglomeration of many conditions. That is why it is so difficult and rare.

The purer the spiritual force, the more are all these various conditions combined. The less pure, the more do these conditions have to be supplied by added factors that convene. Whenever such a miracle occurs, it might be called a coincidence, due to the rarity of the combination of all these prerequisites meeting together. Of course, there is more to it than just coincidence, but it would seem that way to you.

QUESTION: How then was it possible that Jesus could perform many miracles, many times?

ANSWER: Just because of his purity of spirit, so much more pure, undiluted power was available. Exactly that is the reason.

136 QUESTION: For the longest time, I have had difficulties with meditation. Now that I have overcome some of them, the results have been nothing short of miraculous. I would like to ask what this miracle is.

ANSWER: The miracle is a law of life that you just discovered. The law is that whatever concept you hold must manifest in your life. The truth of life, the reality of life, is unlimited good. To the extent you can embrace this possibility, even in an attitude of honest questioning, to that extent this truth – in whatever area you conceive it – must unfold itself to you.

This unfolding of goodness appears miraculous to the person who has hitherto embraced only negative possibilities and therefore could not see beyond them. One’s concept and expectations of life are fences around the possibilities of experience and unfoldment.

When more possibilities are discovered, the fences recede accordingly. The greater the scope of the mind to grasp blissful, joyful experience, the more of it must come into being, because in reality it is all there, available in unimaginable abundance. The narrow fences are always a result of personal distortion.

You cannot experience more than what you conceive of the possibility of experience. If you believe that happiness is impossible, how can you experience happiness? This is as logical as any physical law. For instance, if you move your body from here to there, your body can be only at the spot you have moved it to, not at any different spot.

This is no more and no less miraculous than the laws of the mind. As far as you can move it, this is where you find yourself with it. If you find yourself in a dingy, narrow little room, you need not remain there. You cannot convince yourself of this fact unless you walk out of it and discover that there are a lot of nicer places outside this little room.

If you resist any attempt to help you out of it, on the grounds that maybe there is no other room or space for you, you cannot come out, regardless of how long you argue about it. You must make the actual move.

This is what you must do with your mind. When you discover that the room beyond actually exists, it will appear miraculous. Spiritually, mentally, emotionally, you so often remain in a dingy little hole, with no possibility to stretch, to unfold, to experience beauty. When you finally test it and discover the beautiful world outside the room, and see how safe and satisfying it is, you experience it as a miracle.

You then stretch and stretch your mind to more and more possibilities, to unfold and experience good, to give and receive good. That is the miracle of Creation, as natural as your moving from one place to another. As long as your limbs are healthy, that possibility is given to you. And if you have allowed your limbs to atrophy too long by unnecessary incarceration, through exercise and treatment, they will heal.

This is what you do with your psyche after it has lived too long in a climate of negativity, limitation and isolation because of your misguided fear of yourself. Once this limitation is given up, the miracle must come to each and every creature in the universe. It is as logical a law as any law you no longer find miraculous.

The reality of Creation is that there is unlimited freedom and possibility for experiencing the good. That possibility is given to everyone. The healing of the limbs of your psyche, to take advantage of that unlimited freedom and possibility, was the topic of the very lecture I just gave: giving up the frantic struggle to guard your inner secret chamber.

As long as you struggle to keep your secret, you cannot experience the wide-open possibilities of living and of your innermost being. I beg of you, do not close your eyes to the fact that you struggle against exposing the secret part of you. Understand that this struggle is a useless pain you inflict upon yourself, and that you can get rid of today, if you so desire!

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