Miller, Carolyn –
About Carolyn Miller – From Her Website:
“
Experimental Psychology from the University of South Florida, with specialization in the neurophysiology of motivation and emotion. She began studying A Course in Miracles, and working individually with enlightened Siddha Yoga teacher Carmela Corallo, Ph.D. in 1982. Dr. Miller became a licensed Psychologist in California in 1984. She taught psychology at the graduate level for 20 years, supervising dozens of theses and dissertations. A psychologist in individual practice, she has presented and published numerous professional papers, as well as several popular books based upon the principles of A Course in Miracles.
In 1978, Carolyn Miller earned a doctorate in Carolyn married fellow psychologist and Foundation co-founder Arnold S. Weiss, Ph.D. in 1990 and worked together with him teaching A Course in Miracles until his death in 2014. Her new book Conversations with Jesus Concerning Awakening clarifies the process of achieving enlightenment (salvation) through Carolyn’s personal stories.”
Creating Miracles: Understanding the Experience of Divine Intervention
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Creating miracles : understanding the experience of divine intervention (OpenLibrary.org)
Empirical Support for a Widely Accepted Method of Creating Miracles presented by Carolyn Miller to the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness conference at UC Berkeley in 1995.
Audio Archives
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Mashup Video:
Music featured includes:
- Tortoise (Remastered) – Higher Intelligence Agency
- Six Pack – Tortoise
- One And Only – PFM
- TNT – Tortoise
Transcript:
Announcer: … communicating with us, huh? A little scary. All right, our next speaker is Carolyn Miller, who will be giving a paper entitled, “Empirical Support for a Widely Accepted Method of Creating Miracles.” Carolyn? [To the audience…] It’s nice to welcome people with a little applause.
(audience applauding)
Carolyn Miller: I’m Carolyn. Hello. Let me begin by saying that I am a psychologist, an experimental, as well as a clinical psychologist rather than an anthropologist. So if my terminology is unfamiliar in some ways, that’s why. Am I not being heard? Can this be held or? Okay, is this better? Okay, thanks. If it drops down again, make a noise.
Okay, for years now, I have been collecting a particular kind of story, a particular kind of narrow escape. I’ve gone through this kind of narrow escape myself and I seem to be inundated by the stories of other people who’ve gone through the same thing. And little by little, I began to realize that there was something unusual about this. And to suspect that what I was seeing in these narrow escapes was examples of actual miracles. Now these escapes occur in any context of danger, usually I’m talking about accidents, assaults and illnesses where there’s some serious physical threat to which the person is exposed. And what I find is that the people who describe these experiences go into a very unusual altered state of consciousness just before the situation does a 180 degree turn and turns out harmlessly.
Okay, so you’re going along in an assault, an accident, an illness. It looks like serious injury or death is probably inevitable. And instead of responding to that realization with fear, instead of responding with anger, for instance, in the case of an assault where someone is going to take your life. These people go into a very detached and peaceful state of mind where they describe, again and again, having an overwhelming sense that somehow everything is going to be alright. Now they don’t mean by that, they think they’re going to survive. They know they’re probably going to die, but at the same time, they have a great sense of inner calm and a sense that everything is going to be alright. There’s often a sense of time expanding and people will describe long trains of thoughts that they go through and what must objectively have been an instant. The time it takes a car to spin out of control. You know the time was short, the thought process is very long. And it’s also characterized by enormous compassion, compassion for oneself and a sense of forgiveness for others. And this sense of forgiveness includes even the people who are about to kill you. And I wanted to maybe introduce this by reading you a short excerpt from the account of a woman who was assaulted by Arab terrorists. I think it’ll give you a feel for the state of consciousness I’m talking about.
(audience laughing)
Her name is Deborah. She’s a Beverly Hills housewife. She is a Jewish woman and apparently one aspect of the motivation for this attack was that she and her husband are wealthy Jews. And she came home to her house one afternoon, walked inside and was tackled by two men in ski masks who dragged her off, tied her up in the bedroom. They first tried to get her to open the safe. And when they found that she didn’t know the combination to the safe, they told her that they would wait for her husband to come home and force him to open the safe with the threat that they would kill her if he didn’t. And then they would kill both of them. So this is not looking too good. So at this point, she’s tied up on the bed. One of the terrorists is holding an automatic weapon to her head and the other one is ransacking their home. And she says, “It was as though I was out of my body and I know I must have been in some sort of altered state. You know how when you have your nails done, you can’t go to the bathroom for a while because it would mess them up.”
(audience laughing)
I couldn’t make this stuff up, folks.
(audience laughing)
“Well, I was just returning from a manicure. And when I came home that day, I was racing for the bathroom. Maybe if I hadn’t been in such a hurry I would have noticed that something was wrong sooner. Anyway, they threw me on the bed on my stomach and tied my hands to my feet behind my back. I know I was in an altered state because it was three hours later before I got free and I don’t remember the slightest discomfort either from the ropes or my bladder.”
Debra found her mind poised in a place of perfect inner peace. Despite the tape over her mouth, she eventually worked open a small gap through which she could talk and she began to converse with the man holding her at gunpoint. Debra’s a friendly outgoing person, but it was bizarre hearing her account of a very ordinary chat in such extraordinary circumstances. Debra got her assailant talking about his hometown in Lebanon and his family. As the afternoon wore on, he spoke to her very openly about missing his son, about jobs he’d held in the United States and about terrorist activities he had taken part in, including the murder of witnesses like herself. He detailed his grievances against the Jews and Debra found herself deeply moved by the suffering he and his people had experienced. In her altered state, Debra felt a compassion for this man and his partner which she finds hard to explain. They seemed to her to be precious souls and her heart ached for the pain that had driven them to lives of violence. She found herself encouraging and comforting the one who held the gun to her head and she was unaware of any fear although she did not doubt that he would kill her. In the course of the long afternoon, the other terrorists finished searching the house and decided to rape Debra. However, his partner with whom she had developed a relationship would not permit it. The two argued heatedly for a long time. After three hours, Debra’s husband arrived and the men forced him to open the safe and then tied him up in the bed next to her. “Do you love your wife,” the man with whom she had been speaking unexpectedly demanded of her husband? “Yes,” he replied, “tell her so now” the terrorist ordered. As her husband said, “I love you, Debra,” both of them were convinced that these would be the last words they would ever hear on earth. But then the men stole silently away. They moved so quietly that neither she nor her husband heard them go, but Debra said that she could feel them withdraw as though she were lovingly connected to them in some way. When the two finally got free and called the police, the authorities were astonished that Debra had not been raped and that both had not been murdered. The police readily identified their assailants as the ones who had committed other similar crimes and they had never before left a witness alive. Further, it seemed strange that they would have confided personal information to Debra unless they fully expected that she would not live to repeat it.
Okay, this is one example of the kind of phenomena I’m talking about. Now, I think you’ll probably agree with me that it was at least surprising the way the thing turned out, given the way it started out. But where do I get off saying it might have been a miracle? My argument that situations like this might reflect divine intervention revolves around the altered state of consciousness. Again and again, I see people going into situations where you wouldn’t give a nickel for their lives. They go into this unusual, detached, loving, compassionate, peaceful place and then things take a turn for the better. Now, this is the anthropology of consciousness conference and so I think that you’re a group that’s probably unusually sophisticated in the matter of how people in cultures around the world talk about miracles and how miracles are performed. And so I won’t go deeply into that aspect except to remind you that in religions and shamanic traditions around the world, people say that you go into an altered state of consciousness. You transcend your ego in meditation, basically. And from that state of consciousness, you can access help from benevolent helpers and other dimensions you can access the guidance that you need. And you can also use your own mental processes to create the outcome that you desire. So what I was finding was that these were ordinary people who, quite by accident, seemed to do exactly the thing you’re supposed to do if you want a miracle. And then something arguably miraculous happened to them. I want to give you some other examples.
Well, let me say before I do that, say a little bit about what miracles are. Miracles are defined as instances where a supernatural power interferes with the natural world. That’s the idea of divine intervention. Usually when we talk about miracles, we’re thinking of things that would be clearly impossible to have happen without divine intervention. If the Red Sea parts for the ancient Hebrews, if somebody walks on water or raises a dead person, there’s no perfectly ordinary explanation that we can offer for that. If it happened at all, it must have involved supernatural involvement. The problem with researching things like that is getting anyone to believe that those things really did happen. If you weren’t there, if you didn’t experience it yourself, it’s always going to be much easier to say, well, I think they were mistaken in thinking that’s what really happened, or they’re probably just seeking publicity or something.
So the kind of miracles, the approach I’m taking, is to focus on miracles that are improbable, but not impossible. They’re things that surprise you by the way they turn out, but you don’t have any trouble saying, oh, something like that, absolutely couldn’t happen. OK, I’ll give you another example. Sometimes all a person seems to need to do to create a miracle is to go into this altered state of consciousness and just rest there in a peaceful state.
This is the story of Karen and Mike told to me by Karen, and they had, at this point, just driven off a road over a cliff. They’d just driven over a cliff in the Rocky Mountains in the dark. OK, and this is Karen’s report of what it felt like sailing over that cliff and what was going on in her mind. She said, “time seemed to expand,” and many thoughts drifted lazily through Karen’s head. “Well,” she thought ironically, “I guess this is why they tell you to wear seatbelts.” Karen realized that neither Sheen or Mike was wearing one, but this was quickly followed by the thought that it couldn’t possibly matter with a fall of this magnitude. Despite that logic told her that she and Mike were about to die, she was absolutely confident that everything would turn out fine, strangely enough, it did. The car splashed down in the middle of a beaver pond, just deep enough to break its fall. Once the waves subsided, Karen and Mike discovered that the water came to just below the windows. As cold trickles began to leak through the door, the two climbed onto the roof where they huddled together laughing and singing songs to pass the time. Soon a motorist noticed their skid marks going over the edge and stopped to see what had happened. The two hailed him boisterously as he peered down into the darkness, and then he went for help. Before long, the car was towed out of the pond. It was undamaged and started up without difficulty. The local people who gathered at the scene of the accident were doubly amazed. First, it was hard for them to believe that Karen and Mike had come through such a spectacular fall without so much as a scratch. But there was a further source of wonder. Although they passed the spot daily, no one had ever seen a beaver pond there before.
Now this next little excerpt will also give you this idea that sometimes there’s nothing you need to do beyond going into that peaceful altered state. And that seems to take care of everything.
This is the story of Rita, who was a teenage driver, was driving home from work on a crowded rush hour highway, and her car spun out of control on a wet bridge. And she said, “you know you’d expect to be really scared in a situation like that. But I wasn’t scared at all. I felt completely calm. I thought, well, I’m going to die now.” The car was swerving and spinning, and there were four lanes of speeding cars on one side and the concrete median on the other. “I decided to let go of the wheel and close my eyes because I figured that what was going to happen next wouldn’t be pretty, and there wasn’t a thing in the world I could do about it. I just thought, oh, well, and waited to see what would happen. The next thing I knew, the car had come to a stop. I opened my eyes, and there I was looking into astonished faces as cars passed me. Somehow my car wound up facing the wrong way on the right hand shoulder. I had spun across four lanes of speeding rush hour traffic without hitting or being hit by anybody. Can you beat that? I just sat there for a few minutes, scarcely able to believe my luck. I know I said a prayer of thanks to God, and all the time people kept zipping past with their jaws sagging and their eyes big, wondering, how the heck did she get there? It just blew their minds, and they looked so funny I had to laugh. Finally, I started the car up and crawled very slowly the wrong way down the shoulder back to the on-ramp where I got off. I drove the rest of the way home on surface streets. I can still hardly believe that I came out of something like that without so much as a scratch. And I’ve never gotten over the fact that I wasn’t the least bit scared while it was happening.”
A message. Okay. [reacting to the announcer’s alert of her remaining time]
Okay. There are other cases where it seems to be important that the endangered person does something. It’s like, after going into that state, they are guided to say or do something, and what they say or do makes the difference. And this next story will exemplify that.
This is a story about a man named Dennis who was working as a clown entertaining in a fair. So the shortest way to the midway took Dennis through a large concrete parking structure. As he clomped ponderously through the dark, echoing building in his gigantic clown shoes, he had the misfortune to attract the attention of a gang that had been hanging out down there. “What say we kick that honky motherfucker’s ass,” one of the young gang bangers proposed? This suggestion was taken up enthusiastically by others. Some twenty hostile youths began to close in on Dennis from his left. Nervously casting his eyes to the right, Dennis discovered that a gang of teenage girls was bearing down on him from that direction. “I say we get into that honky’s diaper,” proposed one of the girls, flipping open a switchblade knife with a salacious grin. And the others, many of them similarly armed, joined in with blood curdling threats of a sexual nature. Dennis was completely, <uh> [reacting to the announcer’s alert of her running out of time] Dennis was completely surrounded. All that remained were a few seconds while the two gangs vied with each other about which would do the honors. “I could see that there was no way out,” Dennis reports, “but I didn’t panic. Actually my first reaction was anger. I decided to take a few of them down with me. But then I realized that violence wasn’t the answer and I decided to call upon the Holy Spirit instead. Inwardly I said, ‘Help me please.’ The next thing I knew I was behaving in a way I would never have thought of in a million years. It wasn’t as if I planned it or anything. I just suddenly went into action and what I did surprised me as much as anyone else. Acting in character as a baby clown, I threw my arms wide like an infant asking for a hug. With a big grin I toddled merrily up to the leader of the male gang and reached out to embrace him burbling, ‘Dada, googoo, dada.’ The guy looked stunned and backed away saying, ‘Man you must be fucking crazy.’ And everybody got real quiet and drew back as if I had the plague. I swear the crowd just parted like the Red Sea. Remaining in character as a baby clown, I toddled off toward the midway and no one made the slightest attempt to interfere with me. I guess they thought I was really crazy or retarded or something. One way or another they no longer saw me as someone it would be fun to hurt. I just whispered, ‘Thank you father,’ under my breath and toddled out of that parking structure as fast as I could.”
Well I see that my time is growing short. So let me just pull this together a little bit. I’ve written a book about these experiences and trying to explain exactly how miracles occur in a way that will allow people to learn how to do them themselves. The book is called Creating Miracles: Understanding the Experience of Divine Intervention. Now I also have a nice handout for you that summarizes the steps that you go through in accessing a miracle, but it’s in the trunk of the car at this very moment. So probably this afternoon I will try and hand those around. Let me do… do I have a moment for any questions? I have one minute. Yes.
Audience Member: One thing that interests me is the difference between looking at this from a theistic model and a non-theistic model. And I know at least two stories of people who were released by serial killers. And then I have my own story which is a lot lighter where I went into an altered state of consciousness and started seeing blood and having fear reactions and all of a sudden in my mind I said, “I don’t accept this movie.” All of a sudden I was back in reality looking at the person and immediately opened my mouth and said something. And it’s sort of interesting to me because it’s like I didn’t ask for divine intervention. It was sort of like it was, “I don’t accept this movie” and yet still I don’t know where the experience came from.
Carolyn Miller: See… that… read the/my book because that will explain it. No really because and I’d love to talk to you further about these experiences because this is exactly what happens.
People can have miracles without even believing in God or believing in anything outside themselves. And what you do is you choose against what’s happening out there. You choose against the interpretation of reality that’s being foisted on you. You say I want to see this differently and then you tune in to what a non religious person would just think of as their intuition and acting on whatever your intuition tells you to do even if it’s something crazy like saying “dada googoo” has the effect of changing the energy in the situation. So I would love to hear about these other cases too.
Audience Member: <inaudible> One of the models that I think is interesting for this … <inaudible> to model is chib [sic?] practice in Buddhism.
Carolyn Miller: Okay.
[Applause]
Announcer: Okay, Carolyn’s book is coming out in May. Once again, Creating Miracles. She’s a friend of mine.
[Chime]
[Audio from another SAC 1995 lecture begins briefly…]