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 unrecognisable.
They aim at doing this, and this they seem to do. Every defense 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 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?
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 defense you made against the truth. Yet what God
wills is here, and you remain as He created you.
Truth has a power far beyond defense, 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 defense 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 defense against the truth,
But I am not a body. And my mind
Cannot attack. So I can not be sick.”