"In the creation, God extended Himself to His creations and imbued them with the same living Will to create. You have not only been fully created, but have also been created perfect.  There is no emptiness in you.  Because of your likeness to your Creator you are creative.  No child of God can lose this ability because it is inherent in what he is, but he can use it inappropriately by projecting." (Text, pg 17)

J (or Jesus) says that this projection occurs when a Soul believes that some emptiness or lack exists in him.  Then, he thinks that this lack can be filled with his own ideas instead of truth.  This process of separation is described in four steps.  From ACIM Text, page 17: 

1. You believe that what God created can be changed by your own mind.

2. You believe that what is perfect can be rendered imperfect or lacking.

3. You believe that you can distort the creations of God, including yourself.

4. You believe that you can create yourself, and that the direction of your own creation is up to you.

"These related distortions represent a picture of what actually occurred in the separation, or the "the detour into fear." None of this existed before the separation, nor does it actually exist now." (Text, page 17)

In the pre-separation condition, nothing was needed.  For some reason, our minds imagined the impossible and believed it.  Page 586 of the Text describes this as a "tiny mad idea".  Instead of laughing at the absurd idea, we decided to hold onto it.  With this belief, we experienced fear and guilt for the first time.  God's immortal, all-powerful children experienced the mother of all panic attacks!  To deal with the utter terror, God's children dreamed up a very convincing virtual universe of form (space and time) to hide from God.  Now looking to itself to fill the void, the ego, or the part of the mind that clings to the separation, spins serial adventures in its bodies.  It still feels terror but projects it onto others, including God, in an attempt to feel some relief, or lighten its own burden.  It projects sickness to reinforce its belief in bodies and to punish itself for its "sins".  It believes that by punishing itself through sickness and death that it will delay God from attacking.  It seeks outside itself for salvation to fill the emptiness.  It feels guilty and honestly thinks that his Creator became so upset with him that he tossed him out of heaven.  In actuality, God didn't throw us out of heaven.  Instead, we imagined that he did!  "As the Bible says, a deep sleep fell upon Adam, and nowhere is there reference to his waking up". (Text, pg 18)

Our all loving, perfect Creator noticed that his children stopped communicating with him.  The Text, page 103, says:

"Would God teach you that you had made a split mind, when He knows your mind only as whole? What God does know is that His communication channels are not open to Him, so that He cannot impart His joy and know that His children are wholly joyous. Giving His joy is an ongoing process, not in time but in eternity. God's extending outward, though not His completeness, is blocked when the Sonship does not communicate with Him as one. So He thought, "My children sleep and must be awakened."

Like the father in the Prodigal Son parable, God is eagerly waiting his children to return home.  He doesn't care what they think they've done.  At the same time, he won't violate our free will and remove our fear from us.  In reality, He knows that we remain as He created us - perfect and whole and safe within His mind.  God's answer to awaken his children is the Holy Spirit.  This is His voice and it exists inside each of us.  As we seek inside our minds for the answer, the Holy Spirit is there to gently guide us.  We couldn't remove the Holy Spirit even if we tried, and, in fact, we have been trying to do just that!  J promises that eventually all of God's children will awaken from the dream.  The tools of forgiveness and the miracle are needed for this to occur.  The more we use these devices, the more peace we will feel and the sooner we will reclaim our true Identity.  We will finally remember who we really are.  The dream of death and devastation, like our nightly dreams, will quickly be forgotten and laughed away as the nothingness they were.  From God's viewpoint, this tiny mad idea of separation was over the instant it seemed to be.

Chapter 1, page 1 of the Course begins with the "Principles of Miracles" where 50 principles, or points, are provided.  Below, I have listed some of them with some discussion:

Point 1: "There is no order of difficulty in miracles.  One is not "harder" or "bigger" than another.  They are all the same. All expressions of love are maximal."

To us in the world, this statement seems almost ridiculous.  Everything in our experience here varies in complexity and difficulty.  However, the Course tells us repeatedly that there is no order of difficulty in miracles because the power of God is present in every miracle we offer. 

"Nor will the power of all His Love be absent from any miracle you offer to His Son. How, then, can there be any order of difficulty among them?" (Text, pg 296)

Point 3: "Miracles occur naturally as expressions of love.  The real miracle is the love that inspires them.  In this sense, everything that comes from love is a miracle."

Point 5: "Miracles are habits, and should be involuntary. They should not be under conscious control."  J, or the Holy Spirit, will direct us as he sees appropriate according to his perfect Knowledge.  We must ask him to guide us where to go, who to talk to, and what to say.  We must have faith in a process that we are incapable of understanding.  However, as we experience the joy of the miracle, our faith will be justified.  With this positive feedback, we will then trust our sure Guide even more!  (See Workbook, What Is A Miracle?, pg 473) 

Point 6: "Miracles are natural. When they do not occur something has gone wrong."  Also, J says on page 169 that "Miracles are merely the sign of your willingness to follow the Holy Spirit's plan of salvation."

Point 8: "Miracles are healing because they supply a lack; they are performed by those who temporarily have more for those who temporarily have less."

Point 11: "Prayer is the medium of miracles. It is a means of communication of the created with the Creator. Through prayer love is received, and through miracles love is expressed." 

Point 16: "Miracles are teaching devices for demonstrating it is as blessed to give as to receive. They simultaneously increase the strength of the giver and supply strength to the receiver." 

Point 18: "A miracle is a service. It is the maximal service you can render to another. It is a way of loving your neighbor as yourself. You recognize your own and your neighbor's worth simultaneously."

Point 21: "Miracles are natural signs of forgiveness. Through miracles you accept God's forgiveness by extending it to others." 

Point 24: "Miracles enable you to heal the sick and raise the dead because you made sickness and death yourself, and can therefore abolish both. You are a miracle, capable of creating in the likeness of your Creator. Everything else is your own nightmare, and does not exist. Only the creations of light are real." (emphasis mine) 

Point 27: "A miracle is a universal blessing from God through me to all my brothers. It is the privilege of the forgiven to forgive."

Point 33: "Miracles honor you because you are loveable. They dispel illusions about yourself and perceive the light in you. They thus atone for your errors by freeing you from your nightmares. By releasing your mind from the imprisonment of your illusions, they restore your sanity."

Point 35: "Miracles are expression of love, but they may not always have observable effects."  Sometimes the ego gets upset when it doesn't perceive some immediate appreciation for a miracle/service rendered, and it wants to "take the miracle back."  J emphasizes many times in ACIM that when you give a miracle, you give it to yourself, your brother, and to God.  "As you give so shall you receive" is a fundamental principle discussed in the Course. "Be tempted not to snatch away the gift of faith you offered to your brother. You will succeed only in frightening yourself. The gift is given forever, for God Himself received it. You cannot take it back. You have accepted God." (Text, pg 379)

Point 37: "A miracle is a correction introduced into false thinking by me. It acts as a catalyst, breaking up erroneous perception and reorganizing it properly. This places you under the Atonement principle, where perception is healed. Until this has occurred, knowledge of the Divine Order is impossible."

Point 39: "The miracle dissolves error because the Holy Spirit identifies error as false or unreal. This is the same as saying that by perceiving light, darkness automatically disappears." The miracle is the machanism for healing the mind from the false dream of separation.  From Page 596 of the Text: "

Point 45: "A miracle is never lost. It may touch many people you have not even met, and produce undreamed of changes in situations of which you are not even aware."  A miracle is like dropping a pebble in a pond.  The ripples extend in all directions and bounce around long after the pebble has broken the surface.  Also, remember, each miracle comes from the HS who truly knows everything about all the souls and all the parameters of the dream.  As a result, it is optimized to be effective in ways we can not begin to imagine.

Point 47: "The miracle is a learning device that lessens the need for time. It establishes an out-of-pattern time interval not under the usual laws of time. In this sense it is timeless."  Time, like space, is an illusion of the ego's making.  The ego made it to experience separation.  With each forgiven grievance and miracle extended, our minds are more healed.  As a result, the amount of time remaining in the dream is decreased, sometimes in significant amounts. "The miracle substitutes for learning that might have taken thousands of years." (Text, pg 8)