Lesson 136. Sickness is?a defense against the truth.
(1) No one can heal unless he understands what purpose sickness seems to serve.
For then he understands as well its purpose has no meaning. Being causeless and
without a meaningful intent of any kind, it cannot be at all. When this is seen,
healing is automatic. It dispels this meaningless illusion by the same approach
that carries all of them to truth, and merely leaves them there to disappear.
(2) Sickness is not an accident. Like all defenses, it is an insane device for
self-deception. And like all the rest, its purpose is to hide reality, attack
it, change it, render it inept, distort it, twist it, or reduce it to a little
pile of unassembled parts. The aim of all defenses is to keep the truth from
being whole. The parts are seen as if each one were whole within itself.
(3) Defenses are not unintentional, nor are they made without awareness. They
are secret, magic wands you wave when truth appears to threaten what you would
believe. They seem to be unconscious but because of the rapidity with which you
choose to use them. In that second, even less, in which the choice is made, you
recognize exactly what you would attempt to do, and then proceed to think that
it is done.
(4) Who but yourself evaluates a threat, decides escape is necessary, and sets
up a series of defenses to reduce the threat that has been judged as real? All
this cannot be done unconsciously. But afterwards, your plan requires that you
must forget you made it, so it seems to be external to your own intent; a
happening beyond your state of mind, an outcome with a real effect on you,
instead of one effected by yourself.
(5) It is this quick forgetting of the part you play in making your "reality"
that makes defenses seem to be beyond your own control. But what you have forgot
can be remembered, given willingness to reconsider the decision which is doubly
shielded by oblivion. Your not remembering is but the sign that this decision
still remains in force, as far as your desires are concerned. Mistake not this
for fact. Defenses must make facts unrecognizable. They aim at doing this, and
it is this they do.
(6) Every defense takes fragments of the whole, assembles them without regard to
all their true relationships, and thus constructs illusions of a whole that is
not there. It is this process that imposes threat, and not whatever outcome may
result. When parts are wrested from the whole and seen as separate and wholes
within themselves, they become symbols standing for attack upon the whole;
successful in effect, and never to be seen as whole again. And yet you have
forgotten that they stand but for your own decision of what should be real, to
take the place of what is real.
(7) Sickness is a decision. It is not a thing that happens to you, quite
unsought, which makes you weak and brings you suffering. It is a choice you
make, a plan you lay, when for an instant truth arises in your own deluded mind,
and all your world appears to totter and prepare to fall. Now are you sick, that
truth may go away and threaten your establishments no more.
(8) How do you think that sickness can succeed in shielding you from truth?
Because it proves the body is not separate from you, and so you must be separate
from the truth. You suffer pain because the body does, and in this pain are you
made one with it. Thus is your "true" identity preserved, and the strange,
haunting thought that you might be something beyond this little pile of dust
silenced and stilled. For see, this dust can make you suffer, twist your limbs
and stop your heart, commanding you to die and cease to be."
(9)"Thus is the body stronger than the truth, which asks you live, but cannot
overcome your choice to die. And so the body is more powerful than everlasting
life, Heaven more frail than hell, and God's design for the salvation of His Son
opposed by a decision stronger than His Will. His Son is dust, the Father
incomplete, and chaos sits in triumph on His throne.
(10) Such is your planning for your own defense. And you believe that Heaven
quails before such mad attacks as these, with God made blind by your illusions,
truth turned into lies, and all the universe made slave to laws which your
defenses would impose on it. Yet who believes illusions but the one who made
them up? Who else can see them and react to them as if they were the truth?
(11) God knows not of your plans to change His Will. The universe remains
unheeding of the laws by which you thought to govern it. And Heaven has not
bowed to hell, nor life to death. You can but choose to think you die, or suffer
sickness or distort the truth in any way. What is created is apart from all of
this. Defenses are plans to defeat what cannot be attacked. What is unalterable
cannot change. And what is wholly sinless cannot sin.
(12) Such is the simple truth. It does not make appeal to might nor triumph. It
does not command obedience, nor seek to prove how pitiful and futile your
attempts to plan defenses that would alter it. Truth merely wants to give you
happiness, for such its purpose is. Perhaps it sighs a little when you throw
away its gifts, and yet it knows, with perfect certainty, that what God wills
for you must be received.
(13) It is this fact that demonstrates that time is an illusion. For time lets
you think what God has given you is not the truth right now, as it must be. The
Thoughts of God are quite apart from time. For time is but another meaningless
defense you made against the truth. Yet what He wills is here, and you remain as
He created you.
(14) Truth has a power far beyond defense, for no illusions can remain where
truth has been allowed to enter. And it comes to any mind that would lay down
its arms, and cease to play with folly. It is found at any time; today, if you
will choose to practice giving welcome to the truth.
(15) This is our aim today. And we will give a quarter of an hour twice to ask
the truth to come to us and set us free. And truth will come, for it has never
been apart from us. It merely waits for just this invitation which we give
today. We introduce it with a healing prayer, to help us rise above
defensiveness, and let truth be as it has always been:
Sickness is a defense against the truth.
I will accept the truth of what I am,
and let my mind be wholly healed today.
(16) Healing will flash across your open mind, as peace and truth arise to take
the place of war and vain imaginings. There will be no dark corners sickness can
conceal, and keep defended from the light of truth. There will be no dim figures
from your dreams, nor their obscure and meaningless pursuits with double
purposes insanely sought, remaining in your mind. It will be healed of all the
sickly wishes that it tried to authorize the body to obey.
(17) Now is the body healed, because the source of sickness has been opened to
relief. And you will recognize you practiced well by this: The body should not
feel at all. If you have been successful, there will be no sense of feeling ill
or feeling well, of pain or pleasure. No response at all is in the mind to what
the body does. Its usefulness remains and nothing more.
(18) Perhaps you do not realize that this removes the limits you had placed upon
the body by the purposes you gave to it. As these are laid aside, the strength
the body has will always be enough to serve all truly useful purposes. The
body's health is fully guaranteed, because it is not limited by time, by weather
or fatigue, by food and drink, or any laws you made it serve before. You need do
nothing now to make it well, for sickness has become impossible.
(19) Yet this protection needs to be preserved by careful watching. If you let
your mind harbor attack thoughts, yield to judgment or make plans against
uncertainties to come, you have again misplaced yourself, and made a bodily
identity which will attack the body, for the mind is sick.
(20) Give instant remedy, should this occur, by not allowing your defensiveness
to hurt you longer. Do not be confused about what must be healed, but tell
yourself:
I have forgotten what I really am, for I mistook my body for myself.
Sickness is a defense against the truth. But I am not a body.
And my mind cannot attack. So I can not be sick.
~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~
The commentary on this lesson is an excerpt from Kenneth Wapnick's eight volume
series of
books, called: "Journey Through the Workbook of A Course in Miracles," which can
be purchased at the following site:??~ M. Street
~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~
Lesson 136. "Sickness is a defense against the truth."
*This is among the most important lessons in the workbook, not only for what it
says about sickness, but for its more general comments on how we defend against
the truth. To review briefly, the ego's plan affirms that sin and guilt are
real, a strategy to have us fear the mind so we will leave it, projecting our
sinful, guilty selves so they are perceived in someone else. Thus we see sin and
guilt in another's body -- attack -- or in our own -- sickness. However, whether
or not the guilt and pain are seen in your body or mine, I forget their source
in my mind, thus fulfilling the ego's goal of keeping us mindless, and therefore
unable to choose the truth.
Thus, while Jesus speaks specifically about sickness, especially in the second
part of the lesson, he could just as easily say that judgment is a defense
against the truth, as are anger, depression, anxiety, and specialness in any
form. The <content> of anything we feel is the problem here -- requiring our
attention and planning -- is the same. The <forms> may differ, but seeing
problems in the world directs our attention away from the mind -- the ego's
purpose for everything. In this way we never remember that the true problem is
within. That is why it is so tempting to see Jesus and the Holy Spirit doing
things for us in the world. Their doing so means there are real problems here,
demonstrating the reality of the world and making it easier to forget that the
mind is the only source of problems and their solution.*
(1:1) "No one can heal unless he understands what purpose sickness seems to
serve."
*This important theme is echoed in statements from the text and manual for
teachers:
"Sickness is a way of demonstrating that you can be hurt. It is a witness to
your frailty, your vulnerability, and your extreme need to depend on external
guidance. The ego uses this as its best argument for your need for its guidance.
(T.8.VIII.6.1-3)
"Healing involves an understanding of what the illusion of sickness is for.
Healing is impossible without this. ... Healing is accomplished the instant the
sufferer no longer sees any value in pain. Who would choose suffering unless he
thought it brought him something, and something of value to him? He must think
it is a small price to pay for something of greater worth. For sickness is an
election; a decision." (M.5.1.1-1.1:4).
Recall that in A Course in Miracles purpose is everything. When you understand
the purpose of something, you can do something about it. Thus it is important to
understand the ego's fundamental strategy and purpose: to keep us rooted in the
body so we forget we have a mind. True healing is impossible unless we realize
the "purpose sickness seems to serve." It is not that sickness has chosen us, or
has come unbidden. We have chosen it.*
(2:1-2) "Sickness is not an accident. Like all defenses, it is an insane device
for self-deception."
*Another term for <insane device> is <magic>, which is described in the Course
as the attempt to solve a problem that does not exist, and therefore is not
there. Sickness is "an insane device for self-deception" for it deceives us into
thinking there is a problem in the body, necessitating a solution -- yet another
form of magic -- that seeks to remedy the sick body:
"All material means that you accept as remedies for bodily ills are
restatements of magic principles." (T.2.IV.4.1).
Magic is self-deception because the problem is not the sick body, but the sick
mind. We would never realize this mind is also an illusion until we first
remember we have a mind. Sickness, then, is one of the ego's more persuasive
ways of keeping our attention rooted in the body; a specific form of the ego's
more general strategy of keeping us mindless.*
(2:3-5) "And like all the rest, its purpose is to hide reality, attack it,
change it, render it inept, distort it, twist it, or reduce it to a little pile
of unassembled parts. The aim of all defenses is to keep the truth from being
whole. The parts are seen as if each one were whole within itself."
*This can be understood on two levels. First, I believe there are separate parts
-- organs, biological systems, etc. -- within my body. In that vein, one of
frequently leveled criticisms against Western medicine is that it does not treat
the whole person or body, but only its parts -- a diseased liver, broken leg,
bad stomach, headache, etc. Second, I see <this> body as the problem. Whether or
not I see it holistically does not matter, for the body is still seen as
separate from another's, not to mention from a mind of which I am not even
aware.
The truth of the Son of God is that he is whole -- as spirit. In this world's
dream of fragmentation, it indeed appears as if we are separate: each of us a
universe unto itself. If I take care of myself, what happens to anyone else is
irrelevant for it has no effect on me -- in stark contrast to John Donne's
famous line: "No man is an island, entire of itself." Yet the ego would have us
believe that the Son of God has been shattered into fragments, thereby attacking
his Identity as unified spirit. Thus we think we are separate from each other,
and that the systems in each separate body act independently. Hence we say,
again, we have an upset stomach, sore throat, or an anxiety attack. In other
words, we think in terms of specific symptoms, exactly what the ego wants.
Separation is thus made real, with sickness a powerful means of reinforcing that
"reality," and therein lies its purpose.
Jesus now leaves the discussion of sickness, to which he will return, and
addresses defenses in general, describing how the ego fulfills its strategy of
keeping us mindless.*
(3:1-2) "Defenses are not unintentional, nor are they made without awareness.
They are secret, magic wands you wave when truth appears to threaten what you
would believe."
*Let us say you find yourself increasingly feeling Jesus' presence and believing
in what his course teaches. You practice it with greater frequency, as you
recognize that judgment no longer makes you happy, nor does doing things on your
own. However, asking Jesus for help brings you peace, as does the happy fact of
being wrong. Still there is a little voice whispering not so sweetly in your ear
that if you continue to identify with Jesus and his teachings you will be
annihilated, losing your individuality and specialness, and soon there will be
nothing left of you. Hearing that threatening message, we become afraid and push
Jesus away to return to our allies of guilt, fear, attack, and sickness,
believing we are safe once again. This dynamic of the ego's fearful retaliation
for our rejection of it is echoed in this already cited passage:
"When you unite with me you are uniting without the ego, because I have
renounced the ego in myself and therefore cannot unite with yours. Our union is
therefore the way to renounce the ego in you. The truth in both of us is beyond
the ego ... whenever fear intrudes anywhere along the road to peace, it is
because the ego has attempted to join the journey with us and cannot do so.
Sensing defeat and angered by it, the ego regards itself as rejected and becomes
retaliative."(T.8.V.4.1-3;5:5-6).
Such retaliation constitutes our defenses, with sickness being one of the ego's
favorite weapons.
These defenses seem to be something that just happen <to> us. However, as we
shall see presently, there was a split second when we were aware of the
threatening nature of Jesus' loving message. In that instant we quickly threw
him away. So overwhelmed with guilt because we once more separated from the Love
of God -- reminiscent of the original instant when we believed we threw love
away -- we cannot but deny our guilt and project if. Thus is the source of our
distress suddenly seen outside us -- the ego's secret magic wand having waved
again. What is perceived to be external can include people, circumstances, the
weather, or our own bodies. The form is immaterial -- all the ego cares about is
placing our attention on an external cause for our upset, reflecting another
successful defense against the truth.*
(3:3-4) "They seem to be unconscious but because of the rapidity with which you
choose to use them. In that second, even less, in which the choice is made, you
recognize exactly what you would attempt to do, and then proceed to think that
it is done."
*This is not only a statement of what we do and how the world was made, but how
our individual worlds are continually being made -- day in and day out. The
purpose of A Course in Miracles -- in the context of this passage -- can be
understood as helping us return to that instant we have repressed, so we may
choose again. Changing our minds is meaningless unless we go to the
decision-making moment when we said to God: "I do not want You. My individuality
and specialness are more important." We must return to that moment, yet it is
not in time, being the same moment now as it was then. Recall:
"Each day, and every minute in each day, and every instant that each minute
holds, you but relive the single instant when the time of terror took the place
of love." (T-26.V.13.1).
Progress in A Course in Miracles can be measured by how quickly we shrink the
gap between the <effect> -- our misery and pain -- and its original <cause> --
telling God His Love was not enough. Thus we do not want to take Jesus' hand and
walk out of the dream, but seek instead to bring him into it, so we may be happy
here. He asks us to realize what <we> are doing, not what is being done <to> us.
This is the meaning of the clause: "you recognize exactly what you would attempt
to do, and then proceed to think that it is done" -- pushing Jesus away to
preserve our specialness, but blaming another for it.*
(4:1) "Who but yourself evaluates a threat, decides escape is necessary, and
sets up a series of defenses to reduce the threat that has been judged as real?"
*The <you> is the decision maker, not the individual with which we identify. The
wrong-minded decision maker says if we choose Jesus we will need to escape from
the threat his love poses to or specialness. This line is a simplified version
of what Jesus discusses in "Self-Concept versus Self" (T-31.V.10-13), where he
asks us to consider what precedes the double image of ourselves as a sinner and
innocent victim -- the decision maker that is a shadow of the ontological
instant when we, as one Son, evaluated the Holy Spirit's Atonement as a threat,
rejecting it for the ego's promise of individuality. Here is an excerpt from
that passage, in the context of the part of our mind that chose these
self-concepts of sin and innocence:
"Yet who was it that did the choosing first? ... someone must have first
decided on the one to choose, and let the other go. ... Something must have gone
before these concepts of the self. And something must have done the learning
which gave rise to them." (T.31.V.12.6-7;13:2-3).
This something is the mind's decision maker.*
(4:2-3) "All this cannot be done unconsciously. But afterwards, your plan
requires that you must forget you made it, so it seems to be external to your
own intent; a happening beyond your state of mind, an outcome with a real effect
on you, instead of one effected by yourself."
*Our plan requires such forgetting, because if we remembered what we were doing,
we would realize the insanity inherent in attempting to escape from fear by a
defense that makes us even more fearful. Sickness is a magical, highly
maladaptive attempt to solve the problem of fear in the mind, born of our guilt.
If we remembered, we would clearly give up the defense as it is senseless to
begin with fear of annihilation in our minds from a vengeful God, and
voluntarily end up with annihilation because our bodes will inevitably die.
The ego thought system thus makes no sense, which is why the plan calls for us
to forget it, and why the Holy Spirit's plan calls for us to remember what we
have done. Taking Jesus' hand means that together with him we unveil the ego's
secret plan and see it for what it is. This is accomplished by our daily
practice of seeing ourselves choose these maladaptive, magical defenses. When we
recognize how they do not work, we will be motivated by the pain of our
judgments and sickness to let them go, thereby accepting the Atonement.*
(5:1) "It is this quick forgetting of the part you play in making your "reality"
that makes defenses seem to be beyond your own control."
*Our thinking is: "I am not the one who chose to be sick, something or someone
made me this way." It does not matter if we are talking about a viral disease,
or another's negative thoughts. The plan calls for me to believe I am the
<effect> and something else is the <cause>. Not realizing I set this up -- I am
secretly glad to be upset and sick, even if it means my death -- it means I am
off the hook. Remember this chilling line:
"Behold me, brother, at your hand I die". (T.27.I.4.6)*
(5:2) "But what you have forgot can be remembered, given willingness to
reconsider the decision which is doubly shielded by oblivion."
*When we have forgotten -- the ego's plan -- all seems hopeless. That is why
Jesus says that the plan is "fool-proof," yet because of the Holy Spirit's
presence in our minds, the plan is not "God-proof," (T-5.VI.10:6). All that is
required for us to choose the Holy Spirit's plan of undoing is to realize our
plan is not working. The motivation for learning this course is our pain and
unhappiness, understanding these come from our choice and nothing else. This
requires the "willingness to reconsider the decision," which is impossible if we
remain mindless and do no even know there is a decision to reconsider.
The bottom line, therefore, is that we must return to the mind where the
decision was made wrongly, and now can be undone. The <double shield of
oblivion>, to which I have already referred, is first, the mind's guilt that
prevents the decision maker's choosing the truth; and second, the world that
shields us from the guilt. The world acts as a shield because when I see my
guilt in you, I do not have to acknowledge it in myself. The guilt in my mind
likewise, shields me from the truth of Who I am. Moreover, guilt drives me away
from my mind so I can never reconsider the decision, because <guilt is a
decision> -- not an ontological reality -- to preserve my individual existence.
To recap, the first shield is the guilt that protects me from choosing God's
Love in my mind, and the second is the world and body that protect the guilt.*
(6:1) "Every defense takes fragments of the whole, assembles them without regard
to all their true relationships, and thus constructs illusions of a whole that
is not there."
*A defense makes up a nonexistent problem, which appears to be a self-sustaining
whole. In the context of this lesson, the problem of defense is sickness. The
ego teaches us that pain is localized in the body, an entity in and of itself.
Thus, the cause of dis-ease lies within the body. Again, we never realize that
the true problem rests in the mind's decision for the ego. The following passage
echoes this discussion in the context of our dreams of specialness:
"There is no dream of specialness, however hidden or disguised the form,
however lovely it may seem to be, however much it delicately offers the hope of
peace and the escape from pain, in which you suffer not your condemnation. In
dreams effect and cause are interchanged, for here the maker of the dream
believes that what he made is happening to him. He does not realize he picked a
thread from here, a scrap from there, and wove a picture out of nothing. For the
parts do not belong together, and the whole contributes nothing to the parts to
give them meaning." (T.24.V.2.)*.
(7:1-2) "Sickness is a decision. It is not a thing that happens to you, quite
unsought, which makes you weak and brings you suffering."
*This thought is repeated from the first part of the lesson, but here
specifically addresses sickness. Our world attests to the "fact" that things
happen <to> us; events beyond our control make us happy or sad, well or sick.
However, the world is but a smoke screen to conceal the mind's fundamental
decision to be an ego. That is the problem, and <recognizing> it is the
solution.*
(8:1-2) "How do you think that sickness can succeed in shielding you from truth?
Because it proves the body is not separate from you, and so you must be separate
from the truth."
*The underlying premise here is that the body is not the truth, because truth is
non-specific, whole and changeless, and eternal; the exact opposite of the
body's characteristics. Yet if I am identified with my body -- witnessed to by
my pain -- and the body is not the truth, I cannot be the truth either. That is
the ego's logical argument to keep us separate from it.*
(9:1-2) Thus is the body stronger than the truth, which asks you live, but
cannot overcome your choice to die. And so the body is more powerful than
everlasting life, Heaven more frail than hell, and God's design for the
salvation of His Son opposed by a decision stronger than His Will."
*Recall Wordsworth's wonderful line: "The world is too much with us." The world
certainly seems to represent a power well beyond God's. This power becomes proof
the ego has once again triumphed over Heaven. Look what we can do! We can make
life, and then cause it to cease. God cannot do this, for He creates only life,
not death. The fact that we can establishes us as lord of life <and> death. Thus
do we have the power over life, which ultimately gives us power over God.
Moreover, the frail body -- "this little pile of dust" -- seems to witness to
the reality of this insane thought of grandiose insanity.
God's design is the plan of the Atonement, but since God in truth does not have
a design or plan, this but reflects the fact that God's Will and ours are the
same. This unity of Will transcends all belief in separation, including the
belief we can attack God and get away with it.*
(10:1) "Such is your planning for your own defense."
*We see how beautifully this works as an ego strategy. As long as I am a body
and believe I am real, I not only do not have a mind or decision maker, but
there is nothing I can choose, even if I could, because there is no Holy Spirit
to remind me of my Self and Its Source. There is only this "glorious" body that
lives and dies, experiences pleasure and pain, and yearns for fulfillment of its
own specialness.*
(10:2-4) "And you believe that Heaven quails before such mad attacks as these,
with God made blind by your illusions, truth turned into lies, and all the
universe made slave to laws which your defenses would impose on it. Yet who
believes illusions but the one who made them up? Who else can see them and react
to them as if they were the truth?"
*We thus have this delusional and grandiose thought system in which we believe
we exist by having destroyed Heaven. However, when we awaken from the dream and
look back, we see its inherent silliness, for only a madman could believe
delusions are reality. Within the dream, however, it seems very real, for <we>
are the ones who believe in it, unlike the Holy Spirit, and God Who does not
even know about the dream.*
(11:1-3) "God knows not of your plans to change His Will. The universe remains
unheeding of the laws by which you thought to govern it. And Heaven has not
bowed to hell, nor life to death."
*This is another place in A Course in Miracles that clearly states that God
knows nothing about our insanity. This is a good thing, for if He did, it would
mean the ego were real and the impossible had been accomplished. The most
comforting thought of all is that God does not even know about us. To the ego,
of course, such a statement is infuriating and insulting. Yet it remains the one
truly salvific thought in the dream, reflecting the Atonement principle that the
separation never happened. Jesus thus presents us here with the opposite of the
ego's belief system he discussed in paragraph 9. Nothing has happened to change
reality. God remains God, and there is nothing else:
"... all He knows is One ... He knows of one creation, one reality, one
truth and but one Son. Nothing conflicts with oneness ... The truth is simple;
it is one, without an opposite ... What is everything leaves room for nothing
else." (T-26.III.1:2-4,8,12).*
(11:4) "You can but choose to think you die, or suffer sickness or distort the
truth in any way."
*We believe this, but belief does not make it real. Early in the text, Jesus
says we are free to deny our inheritance, but not to establish what it is
(T-3.VI.10:2). Thus we can believe the ego is our treasure, but that does not
make it true. Such insanity does not establish reality:
"You can violate God's laws in your imagination, but you cannot escape from
them. They were established for your protection and are as inviolate as your
safety." (T-10.in.1:5-6).
"You have not attacked God and you do love Him. Can you change your
reality? No one can will to destroy himself ... What you think you are can be
very hateful, and what this strange image makes you do can be very destructive.
Yet the destruction is no more real than the image, although those who make
idols do worship them. The idols are nothing, but their worshippers are the Sons
of God in sickness." " (T-10.III.1:1-3,6-8).*
(13:1) "It is this fact that demonstrates that time is an illusion."
*The fact is that what God wills for us must be received, for He wills that we
be part of Him, which means we <are> part of Him. We have already received God's
gifts of eternal life and love because we are not separate from Him.
Nonetheless, we separately seek to deny this reality, affirming the illusion
that the gifts we have established -- existence and specialness -- are true
indeed. Yet they cannot extinguish the light of truth -- <having> and <being>
are one, as are <giving> and <receiving>:
"In your own mind, though denied by the ego, is the declaration of your
release. God has given you everything. This one fact means the ego does not
exist, and this makes it profoundly afraid. In the ego's language, "to have" and
"to be" are different, but they are identical to the Holy Spirit. The Holy
Spirit knows that you both have everything and are everything. Any distinction
in this respect is meaningful only when the idea of "getting", which implies a
lack, has already been accepted. That is why we make no distinction between
having the Kingdom of God and being the Kingdom of God." (T-4:III.9).*
(14:1-2) "Truth has a power far beyond defense, for no illusions can remain
where truth has been allowed to enter. And it comes to any mind that would lay
down its arms, and cease to play with folly."
*Our responsibility is to lay down our arms, setting aside our defensive system
by the little willingness to go back to the place in the mind where we chose
against Jesus. Now we choose for him, and look through his loving eyes at
everything we had heretofore made real. He cannot bring truth to us. He <is>
truth. We bring our illusions to him, and look without judgment at the illusions
we made in the world and in our wrong minds. Looking with him, they disappear
because they were nothing. When illusions are brought to truth, its light shines
them away:
"Bringing the ego to God is but to bring error to truth, where it stands
corrected because it is the opposite of what it meets. It is undone because the
contradiction can no longer stand. How long can contradiction stand when its
impossible nature is clearly revealed? What disappears in light is not attacked.
It merely vanishes because it is not true." (T.14.IX.2.1-5)*
(15:1-3) "This is our aim today. And we will give a quarter of an hour twice to
ask the truth to come to us and set us free. And truth will come, for it has
never been apart from us."
*As we have discussed, it is not that truth comes to us; we come to it. We who
wandered away when we chose the ego's illusions, are the one's who must come
back, like the prodigal son in the gospel parable, as Jesus explains in this
passage from the text:
"Listen to the story of the prodigal son, and learn what God's treasure is
and yours: This son of a loving father left his home and thought he had
squandered everything for nothing of any value, although he had not understood
its worthlessness at the time. He was ashamed to return to his father, because
he thought he had hurt him. Yet when he came home the father welcomed him with
joy, because the son himself was his father's treasure. He wanted nothing else."
(T.8.VI.4.)
Such is the good news, not only the parable, but of A Course in Miracles: Truth
never left us, and we only believed we had left it. Its love has remained just
beyond our mind's wanderings into the dream of separation, patiently awaiting
our awakening to its reality.*
(15:4-5) "It merely waits for just this invitation which we give today. We
introduce it with a healing prayer, to help us rise above defensiveness, and let
truth be as it has always been ... "
*The defensiveness is not the ego's strategy to be in a body and be sick, but
our unwillingness to look at the strategy itself and say: "Perhaps I am wrong in
the way I experience and perceive this." Thus it is our little willingness to
admit we have been wrong and Jesus right that allows us to step beyond our
defensiveness and pray: *
(15:6-7) "Sickness is a defense against the truth.
I will accept the truth of what I am,
and let my mind be wholly healed today."
*We are not the ones who heal our minds. We choose to let our minds be healed by
the presence of the Atonement principle, which we now happily choose for
ourselves.*
(16:1) "Healing will flash across your open mind, as peace and truth arise to
take the place of war and vain imaginings."
*In order for healing to occur, I first must realize I have chosen "war and vain
imaginings" -- my daily life as a battleground -- so as not to remember the
truth beyond the battle. Only then can I know I am not a victim of the world or
its unseen forces, but of my mistaken decision to keep Christ's love separate
from my innate attraction to it. This is undone in the instant I choose to
remember I am one with His Will, which is my own as well:
"This is the re-establishment of your will. Look upon it, open-eyed, and you
will nevermore believe that you are at the mercy of things beyond you, forces
you cannot control, and thoughts that come to you against your will. It is your
will to look on this. No mad desire, no trivial impulse to forget again, no stab
of fear nor the cold sweat of seeming death can stand against your will. For
what attracts you from beyond the veil is also deep within you, unseparated from
it and completely one." (T-19.IV-D.7:3-7).*
(17) "Now is the body healed, because the source of sickness has been opened to
relief. And you will recognize you practiced well by this: The body should not
feel at all. If you have been successful, there will be no sense of feeling ill
or feeling well, of pain or pleasure. No response at all is in the mind to what
the body does. Its usefulness remains and nothing more."
*When Jesus says "Now is the body healed," the succeeding sentences make it
clear that he is not talking about bodily change. If you follow his guidance you
will be identified with your mind, and since the mind is outside time and space,
you are outside the body's dream. Thus:
"At no single instant does the body exist at all." (T.18.VII.3.1).
In the holy instant, the reference here, there is not body. Joined in Jesus'
love, we cannot be separate, and so there is no sin, guilt, or fear to defend
against the mind's decision maker, and no body to defend against the ego's
unholy trinity -- the aforementioned double shield.
When I experience Jesus' love and peace, my body does not feel anything -- not
good, not bad, not anything. I "feel" the Love of God that it is in the mind,
which has nothing to do with the body. Therefore, A Course in Miracles is not
about healing the body, which can never be sick. Standing with Jesus within the
holy instant, we perceive the body, correctly -- pain or discomfort reflecting
back to us the mind's decision to be an ego. Thus we learn it was our minds that
decided to be sick and unhappy. Before, all we knew was that our bodies hurt, or
were lonely, sad, or ecstatic. Everything was focused on them. Now, asking Jesus
for help means looking through his eyes instead of our own, realizing the body
is only the means by which we are reminded we have a mind that chose guilt
instead of love, individuality instead of oneness, the ego instead of the Holy
Spirit. That again, is the meaning of: "Now is the body healed."
One of the central meanings of forgiveness is the lifting of the projections I
placed upon you. There is nothing to forgive, because you have only done what I
wanted you to do, for I wanted my sin to rest on you:
"When you are angry, is it not because someone has failed to fill the
function you allotted him? And does not this become the "reason" your attack is
justified?" (T-29.IV. 4:1-2)
Thus it is not our relationship that is healed, but the mind. Likewise, in true
healing my projections of sin are lifted from your body, where I put them. As a
relationship is "healed" when I make the right choice. Healing then, like
forgiveness, is simply withdrawing the projections from another's body or our
own. The body, once again, becomes an instrument reminding us of the source of
real pain and joy: the mind. This principle is understood in Jesus' treatment of
healing in psychotherapy:
"This realization is the final goal of psychotherapy. How is it reached? The
therapist sees in the patient all that he has not forgiven in himself, and is
thus given another chance to look at it, open it to re-evaluation and forgive
it. When this occurs, he sees his sins as gone into a past that is no longer
here. Until he does this, he must think of evil as besetting him here and now.
The patient is his screen for the projection of his sins, enabling him to let
them go. Let him retain one spot of sin in what he looks upon, and his release
is partial and will not be sure." (P-2.VI.6.)
Healing then has nothing to do with the patient, nor the therapist's
interventions, but <only>with the removal of the therapist's projections from
the patient:
"It is in the instant that the therapist forgets to judge the patient that
healing occurs." (P-3.II.6:1)
This principle of healing is important to understand so as to avoid being caught
in the idea that the body has to feel better or change. That is what underlies
this very familiar passage:
"Seek not to change the world, but choose to change your mind about the
world." (T-21.in.1:7).
It is not the world that is the problem, but our <thinking of the world> -- the
projections of our sin and guilt. The same is true of physical illness, which is
our projected guilt onto the body. When we withdraw the projections, the guilt
dissolves and so does the sickness. In the next lesson sickness will be
identified with separation, the mind's insanity that has nothing to do with the
body.*
(18:1) "Perhaps you do not realize that this removes the limits you had placed
upon the body by the purposes you gave to it."
*This is what we have seen. The purpose we gave the body was to be a limited
self: a symbol of separation, sin, guilt, and attack. By removing that purpose
through the Holy Spirit, the body becomes well, since it was never sick. In A
Course in Miracles the positive consists of undoing the negative. The only true
positive is the Love of God, and its reflection -- forgiveness -- dissolves the
ego's guilt and hate. Therefore, being well or healed is only the undoing of the
mistaken belief we could be sick. Remember, healing has nothing to do with the
body, but only with removing guilt's projections from the mind.*
(19:1) "Yet this protection needs to be preserved by careful watching."
*That is another line that you should be underlined over and over. Careful
watching is not of the world or body, but of thoughts of separation. These are
the sickness; specifically the thought of guilt that results from choosing the
ego's individuality over the Holy Spirit's Oneness. Preserving the body's
protection by carefully watching the mind means not projecting. Thus we saw in
the early lessons Jesus emphasis on our developing the ability of mind
searching. We cannot change a thought of which we are not aware. Denial protects
thoughts from change; careful watching facilitates it.*
(19:2) "If you let your mind harbor attack thoughts, yield to judgment or make
plans against uncertainties to come, you have again misplaced yourself, and made
a bodily identity which will attack the body, for the mind is sick."
*We can see from the first part of this sentence that Jesus defines sickness by
attack thoughts, judgments, and plans to solve problems that do not exist. This
is a summary of Lessons 135 and 136. He says, as always that this lesson will
mean nothing unless you practice it day by day, moment by moment; watching your
mind for thoughts of judgment and specialness -- the thoughts of sickness. Your
body will be sickened by these thoughts, not necessarily in the <form> of not
feeling well, since there is no way of avoiding guilt when you attack. Needless
to say, this the why the ego directs us to do so. When you feel guilty, you will
no longer remember who you are as a child of Love, having misplaced yourself by
seeing your identity as an ego, not mention everyone else's.*
(20:1) "Give instant remedy, should this occur, by not allowing your
defensiveness to hurt you longer."
*This implies you cannot "give instant remedy" unless you know something has
gone wrong, which is why you must be keenly vigilant for your ego. If you truly
want to express your love for A Course in Miracles and it's teacher, ask his
help to monitor your mind for thoughts of attack and of judgment. The source of
all dis-ease.
The defensiveness Jesus refers to here is sickness: thoughts of attack,
judgments, and specialness. You must come to realize they not only hurt other
people, they hurt <you>.*
(20:2) "Do not be confused about what must be healed... "
*It is not the body that "must be healed." but the mind -- specifically its
mistaken decision.
(20:2-7) " ... but tell yourself:
I have forgotten what I really am, for I mistook my body for myself.
Sickness is a defense against the truth. But I am not a body.
And my mind cannot attack. So I can not be sick."
*Sickness is but a fragment of our imagination, literally a dream whose purpose
is to protect us from choosing against the ego and for the Holy Spirit, Who
teaches us to forget what we remembered -- the ego's false self of sin and the
body -- and remember what we had forgotten -- our innocent Identity as spirit.
As Jesus reminds us in the text:
"Learning is impossible without memory since it must be consistent to be
remembered. That is why the Holy Spirit's teaching is a lesson in remembering. I
said before that He teaches remembering and forgetting, but the forgetting is
only to make the remembering consistent. You forget in order to remember
better." (T.7.II.6.2)*
