A Trio of Obvious Miracles

Pope Leo XIV, the first pope from the United States, recently declared that a miracle happened in Rhode Island. The official decree signed on June 20 said that a baby born in 2007 was inexplicably healed after a doctor prayed to a 19th-century Spanish priest, Father Salvador Valera Parra. It’s worth noting that the Catholic church is one of the few official institutions that considers it important to publicly declare and describe the occurrence of miracles.

But now what do we mean by the term miracle? Well, we often hear about the miracles of science. There the term refers to something unexpected and astonishing.  In a religious context, as in the case cited by Pope Leo, a miracle is something super-natural, outside the customary natural order, and caused by God. But there is another way to use the miracle word. More in tune with parapsychology, I grant the astonishing character of the miraculous, and the rarity. But in the parapsychological definition, the term refers to phenomena that are extraphysical; cannot be physically explained. But what is causing these deviations from physical reality?  We don’t know for sure, but there are grounds for assuming a type of mental agency, similar to, but far greater than our personal minds. The different religions interpret their encounters with this transcendent factor.  So we have many perspectives on our spiritual evolution.  Apart from the diseased psychopaths that poison life everywhere on Earth, the true and deep potential of human consciousness points to a transcendent future.

Now I need to explain the weird title of this post. It seems to me that the entire structure of reality is punctuated by three miracles, and in the sense we assigned to the word. Astronomers have inferred from the fact that the universe is expanding a point of origin about 13.7 years ago. Einstein and others believed in a steady-state universe, but the evidence points to a universe that exploded into existence at a point in time, and nobody knows how that happened.  So the universe itself is the first miracle.

Fast forward to the appearance of life on our planet.  True, modern scientific biology has advanced wonderfully but nobody knows how life emerged from dead matter.  So life is our second miracle. Of course, we generally don’t kneel in awe at the miraculous sunrise or shudder with wonder as we wolf a burger down our gullet. We are in fact swamped by what in fact are obvious miracles, the whole of nature and life in its wild multiplicity. But thanks to habit and routine our imagination of the marvelous is deadened. 

But now to our third miracle. What could be more obvious that to wake up in the morning from dreamless sleep? And yet, you at once become miraculously aware of your thinking, wanting, sensing, fearing, loving—suddenly you open to a universe of experience. And there is your third obvious miracle—your consciousness, a mystery to physical explanation.

So there is our trio of obvious miracles: the creation of the universe; dead matter coming to life; and living beings, agents of creative consciousness.  The intriguing fact is that the miracle of consciousness is just a beginning.  A door is opened to a new universe of possibilities. There are people especially endowed or somehow inclined to find out where the door of our consciousness leads.  These are the shamans, the yogis, the saints, the artists, the mediums, or the person who has an experience that knocks her or him out of their customary life orbit and on to new orbits of adventure and exploration.  There is a paradox worth mentioning, dramatically illustrated by the near-death experience.  The paradox is that when you are pushed to the edge, your normal mechanisms of escape and survival shattered, that a hidden gate may suddenly open and beckon you toward enlightenment. You have to fall apart before you are reconstructed. The saints, the yogis, the shamans deploy their methods of opening the gates of o higher consciousness.

One thing is clear from digging into the evidence for the unexplained phenomena we call miracles.  When you add up all the expansions of human ability, mental and physical, a distinctly more evolved image of the future human emerges.  How these transformations take place I try to clarify in my book, Smile of the Universe: Miracles in an Age of Disbelief.  (Available on Amazon or at Anomalist Books.) An image of a more evolved future human emerges. Ideal health seems quite within the range of the possible, along with new powers of transportation and communication and heightened access to the beauty and enjoyment of the natural world.  Perhaps most promising is the vision of a psychically more evolved humankind.   

Above all, we need to call attention to the miracle of consciousness. It took 13.7 billion years to get to us.  Our life and our consciousness are mysteries that point to unknown powers of human transformation. The powers are within us, which is part of the obvious nature of the miracle paradox. The trick is how to make the connection, how to tune in, how to start a conversation with the powers hidden inside us.