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.
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.
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.
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 your self.
It is this quick forgetting of the part you play in making your "reality"
which 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 this not for fact. Defenses must make facts unrecognizable. They aim at
doing this, and this they seem to do. Every defence takes fragments of the
whole, assembles them without regard to all their true relationships, and thus
constructs illusions of a whole which is not there. It is this process which 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.
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.
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.
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.
Such is your planning for your own defence. 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?
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.
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 which would alter it. It 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.
It is this fact which demonstrates that time is an illusion. For it 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
defence you made against the truth. Yet what God wills is here, and you remain
as He created you.
Truth has a power far beyond defence, for no illusions can remain where it 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. 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 the truth be as it has always been:
"Sickness is a defence against the truth. I will accept the truth of what I am, And let my mind be wholly healed today."
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.
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.
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.
Yet this protection needs to be preserved by careful watching. If you let your
mind harbor attack thoughts, yield to judgement 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. 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 defence against the truth, But I am not a body. And my mind Cannot attack. So I can not be sick."
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