How to become a miracle worker
If nothing and everything is a miracle, then you might as well aim to impress yourself
Your problem isn't that you can't work miracles, it's that you can't work the miracles you want to work and you’re unimpressed by the miracles you can.
According to the internet, a miracle is:
“a surprising and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws and is therefore considered to be the work of a divine agency.
If a miracle by its definition is something like, "the impossible made possible" then therein lies your problem.
Once made possible, an act ceases to be impossible. Make it possible enough times, and it becomes “explicable by natural or scientific laws,” so it ceases to be a miracle.
It's in our nature to want to do what we couldn't before. To want to believe that reality is completely subject to our will, if only we knew the right cheat codes or secret techniques, we could cause what we desire to instantaneously happen.
This is as true in magic, as it is in martial arts, as it is in religion.
But the truth is that “the secret” is simply working at your goal so hard and repeating it so many times that it seems easy. Every miracle takes work to master, even if only in the process of puzzling out how it works.
Even conventional miracles, the spiritual-religious variety that people most commonly consider to be “miracles,” are only possible after serious prayer, meditation, yoga, fasting, training, etc.
Even Jesus had to go into the desert for a time, not to mention the 32 years between his birth and his first canonical act: completely overturning of the ancient alcohol industry with instant party hooch.
Does this mean everything is just a trick? That there are no miracles?
Yes and no.
On the one hand, what the miracle worker performs is never miraculous to them. Everything took belief and action and practice. But to the one who sees that everything at this moment is happening regardless of whether it makes sense to us or not, who recognizes that “miracle” is just a projection of our desire for novelty, the world never ceases to amaze.
So without further ado, here’s the formula to performing miracles:
Know that nothing is a miracle.
Know that everything is a miracle.
Give, give, give.
1. Nothing is a miracle
Do you think Jesus thought of his miracles as miraculous? Or were they just things he could do? To Jesus, nothing he did was a miracle. The miracle for him would have been to get us to do them ourselves.
“Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do, because I am going to the Father.
A note on “belief”: religions will tell you over and over again that they don’t want you to trust them blindly. The problem is that if you keep asking questions, that does become what they want you to do once the priest, paster, or guru get tired of answering you. But there’s another way of “believing” which is a “willingness to entertain what I’m saying, to conceive it is possible.”
So, if you are willing to imagine how turning water into wine, healing the sick, feeding the hungry, etc., can be as possible as running the 4-minute mile, then you can do even greater things by following his example.
Much of what we do is like this. They would be miracles if we could do them and still not consider they were possible. But because we think we understand how they work, they become boring, so we don’t do them or only do them grudgingly.
After all, it's fine to instantly heal somebody, but if you practiced good preventative care for yourself and looked after your loved ones, then you could save yourself a trip to Nazareth. You could be healthy without resorting to esoteric healing tricks.
Instead, we convince ourselves that the miracle worker is the exception. Incredible physique? Exceptional genetics. Billionaire entrepreneur? Exceptional privilege. 100 years old and healthy? Exceptional diet/life secrets.
This kind of cynicism is why, despite being surrounded by wonders, we are bored.
2. Everything is a miracle
What's holding us back is our own inability to comprehend that what is being done all around us is awe-inspiring.
Not only the Bible, but the Tao Te Ching and other religious traditions preach the value of seeing the world through the eyes of a child. Everything was once a miracle to a newborn, and if you can approach the world as if everything still is one, you’ll be far more likely to pull off the miraculous than if you treated everything like a set of mundane materials subject to the laws of cause and effect.
Just about everything humans can do today was once inconceivable to the less-evolved life forms that were our distant ancestors.
I watched my daughter walk the other day, and realized the process was far from straightforward. We as a species could just as easily have never done it. The number of failed attempts, the bumps and bruises, the awkward gait and waddle of her hips… You would think she was insane.
And then, one day, she did it. Weeks later by the way she zoomed around, her never walking would be what’s inconceivable. Even though not-walking was the norm for all apes until the first one stood up and set their descendants on the path to becoming us.
A less personal example: Alan Watts had a bit about a plant being a symphony. You have the stem which moves smoothly through space, and then you have the leaves, which are like a separate expression that compliments the stem, and then perhaps you have hard thorns, or thin strand-like thistles or spiky needles or colorful flowers, or something you’ve never noticed before.
If you looked at all life this way, then you could be amazed by even the most mundane houseplant. For each one is playing its existence differently. Playing with sunlight and water sources and nutrients in its own unique way. Each a piece of music for the senses.
It's a miracle that anything exists. Doubly miraculous to be able to observe things just being themselves, natural expressions of whatever force animated them. We don’t have an explanation for why–if life could just as easily not exist–it does. Calling the downward force acting on all objects on this planet, “gravity,” observing and quantifying the exact units of measurement it exerts on everything in the universe doesn’t explain the wondrous tendency for things to fall. Newton could explain how things work, but nobody can truly explain why things do. The best we can do is call it the miracle of existence.
3. Give, give, give.
One other factor that is missing for so many of us isn’t that we are non-miracle believers but that we are non-miracle doers. A little gift, a kind word, a meaningful embrace, these are all in our power to give and, as cringe as it might sound, these are real blessings. They come easier to us than raising Lazarus did for Jesus.
Know what the most commonly posted page from all the Superman comics that have ever been published is? It’s not the Man of Steel punching villains into smithereens, or juggling planets, or melting guns with his eyes. It’s him giving a hug to somebody who desperately needed it.
Not satisfied because anybody can do that? Make a gift of the talents you have that others don’t. Paint. Write. Play music. Make people laugh. Turn your miserable experiences into great advice.
It may not seem like much to you, but you can change somebody’s entire universe with such seemingly meager abilities. Do them often enough, and such acts will change you.
Now go and amaze yourself.
This point cannot be stated enough, but the miracles are a matter of perspective. In order to make them happen, you first need to appreciate that a miraculous act is just something you haven’t yet figured out how to replicate. Then you have to shift your own outlook by recognizing the miraculous nature of reality itself. And finally, you need to do more for others, because they’re the ones who will truly appreciate your miracles for what they are.
Another thought provoking column, good job!