We once said that the Holy Spirit is the ANSWER. He is the Answer to
everything, because He knows what the answer to everything IS. The ego
does not know what a real question is, although it asks an endless
number. Yet YOU can learn this as you learn to question the value of the
ego, and thus establish your ability to evaluate its questions. When the
ego tempts you to sickness, do not ask the Holy Spirit to heal the body,
for this would merely be to accept the ego’s belief that the BODY is the
proper aim for healing. Ask, rather, that the Holy Spirit teach you the
right PERCEPTION of the body, for perception alone can be distorted.
ONLY perception can be sick, because only perception can be WRONG.

Wrong perception is DISTORTED willing, which wants things
to be as they are not. The REALITY of everything is totally harmless,
because total harmlessness is the CONDITION of its reality. It is also
the condition of your AWARENESS of its reality. You do not have to seek
reality. It will seek YOU and find you, when you meet its conditions.
Its conditions are part of what it IS. And this part only is up to you.
The rest is of Itself. You need do so little, because it is so powerful
that your little part will bring the whole TO you. Accept, then, your
little part, and LET the whole be yours.

Wholeness heals because it is of the mind. ALL forms of sickness,
even unto death, are physical expressions of the FEAR OF
AWAKENING. They are attempts to reinforce UNCONSCIOUSNESS out of fear of
CONSCIOUSNESS. This is a pathetic way of trying NOT to know by rendering
the faculties for knowing ineffectual. “REST in peace” is a blessing for
the living, not the dead, because rest comes from WAKING, not from
sleeping. Sleep is withdrawing; waking is joining. Dreams are ILLUSIONS
of joining, taking on the ego’s distortions about what joining means if
you are sleeping under its guidance. Yet the Holy Spirit, too, has use
for sleep, and can use dreams on behalf of WAKING, if you will let Him.

How you wake is the sign of how you have used sleep. To whom did you give
it? Under which teacher did you place it? Whenever you wake
dispiritedly, it was NOT of the Holy Spirit. ONLY when you awaken
joyously have you utilized sleep according to the Holy Spirit’s purpose.
You can indeed be “drugged by sleep,” but this is always because you
have MISUSED it on behalf of sickness. Sleep is no more a form of death
than death is a form of unconsciousness. UNCONSCIOUSNESS IS IMPOSSIBLE.
You can rest in peace only BECAUSE you are awake.

Healing is release from the fear of waking and the substitution of the
will to wake. The WILL TO WAKE is the will to love, since ALL healing
involves replacing fear with love. The Holy Spirit cannot distinguish
among degrees of error, for if He taught that one form of sickness is
more serious than another, He would be teaching that one error can be
MORE REAL than another. His function is to distinguish ONLY between the
false and the true, REPLACING the false with the true.

The ego, which always WEAKENS the will, wants to SEPARATE the body from
the mind. This is an attempt to DESTROY it, yet the ego actually
believes that it is PROTECTING it. This is because the ego believes that
MIND IS DANGEROUS, and that to MAKE MINDLESS is to heal. But to make
mindless is impossible, since it would mean to make nothing out of what
God created. The ego DESPISES weakness, even though it makes every
effort to INDUCE it. The ego WANTS only what it hates. To the ego this
is perfectly sensible. Believing in the power of attack, the ego WANTS
attack.

You have surely begun to realize that this is a very practical course,
which means EXACTLY what it says. So does the Bible, if it is properly
understood. There has been a marked tendency on the part of many of the
Bible’s followers, and also its translators, to be entirely literal
about fear and ITS effects, but NOT about love and ITS results. Thus,
“hellfire” means “burning,” but raising the dead becomes allegorical.
Actually, it is PARTICULARLY the references to the outcomes of love
which SHOULD be taken literally because the Bible is ABOUT love, being
about God.

The Bible enjoins you to be perfect, to heal ALL errors, to take no
thought of the body AS SEPARATE, and to accomplish all things in my
name. This is not my name alone, for ours is a shared identification.
The Name of God’s Son is one, and you are enjoined to do the works of
love because we SHARE this oneness. Our minds are whole BECAUSE they are
one. If you are sick you are withdrawing from me. Yet you cannot withdraw
from me alone. You can only withdraw from yourself AND me.

I would not ask you to do the things you cannot do, and it is impossible
that I could do things you cannot do. Given this, and given this QUITE
literally, there can be nothing which prevents you from doing EXACTLY
what I ask, and everything which argues FOR your doing it. I give you no
limits because God lays none upon you. When you limit YOURSELF we are NOT
of one mind, and that IS sickness. Yet sickness is not of the body, but
of the MIND. ALL forms of dysfunction are merely signs that the mind has
split, and does not accept a unified purpose.

The unification of PURPOSE, then, is the Holy Spirit’s ONLY way of
healing. This is because it is the only level at which healing
means anything. The re-establishing of meaning in a chaotic thought
system IS the only way to heal it. We have said that your task is only
to meet the conditions FOR meaning, since meaning itself is of God. Yet
your RETURN to meaning is essential to HIS because your meaning is PART
of His. Your healing, then, is part of HIS health since it is part of His
Wholeness. He cannot LOSE this, but YOU can not KNOW it. Yet it is still
His Will for you, and His Will MUST stand forever and in all things.